Don Burnstick helps heal old wounds with laughter

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Laughing at pain, poverty and oppression won't make them go away, but it will make those problems seem smaller and easier to handle. That seems to be the message that Don Burnstick brings with him when he speaks to young people.

You can see it working. At the end of a two-day youth conference at the Saskatoon Inn on Feb. 3, the hotel lobby was jammed with teenagers waiting for their rides back home. Burnstick was making his way to the parking lot after spending the two days as the undisputed star of the gathering.

The young people didn't make it easy for the 35-year-old Cree comic and inspirational speaker from the Alexander First Nation in Alberta. Everybody wanted a bit of his time.

The previous morning, the gymnasium-sized Canadian Room at the hotel was filled to capacity for "I am Alcohol," Burnstick's much-heralded one-man play about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.

The play begins in a graveyard where the death of a young person is mourned by an Elder who asks why so many young people have to die unnecessarily. Alcohol appears - Burnstick dressed all in black with the words 'I am alcohol' written across his back - to answer that question. For the next 45 minutes, this creature and his "friends" - drugs, peer pressure, suicide, sexual abuse, - celebrate their reign of terror in Native communities. Burnstick mixes sardonic humor with gut-wrenching images to capture his audience and take them on a gripping and memorable ride.

"I'm not a trained actor," he said later. "I just believe in the message."

The message is one that Burnstick has been all too much a part of during his life: Alcohol and drug abuse are used as masks for the pain and humiliation of people who have suffered deep psychological wounds, but all that alcohol and drugs do, in the long run, is make the problem worse.

The day of his Saskatoon performance was the 14th anniversary of the day he gave up drinking and smoking pot for good. On Feb. 2, 1985 he fought off a strong urge to take his own life and entered a treatment centre in Vancouver.

After years of self-destructive behavior - a time during which he candidly admitted he sold drugs as well as use them - Burnstick hit bottom with a crash. He visited the treatment centre, then left, contemplating suicide rather than face the ordeal or recovery. After a struggle he returned and took the cure.

He knows what he's talking about - he's been there - and the audience can feel it. But bitter experience alone does not necessarily a compelling speaker make. There's something else at work here. The talents and the energy of the performer are brought into focus by a unique point of view that Burnstick says he can't take credit for.

"How the play came up was, I was asked to go and talk to a group of young people from all over the United States - there was about 150 of them - and I had my flip-chart and my markers and I was all ready to go. But I wanted to do something different, so I went up into the mountain, put my sage down and prayed," he said. "I remember my grandmother's words. She said, 'Alcohol's a powerful spirit. When people drink, they go crazy!' So I was thinking when I was on that mountain: The spirit of alcohol, what would it look like if it came out of a bottle like a genie? What kind of personality would he have? And right away I thought of Freddie Kruger."

By blending a well-known icon of popular culture with an age-old message, Burnstick makes the connection with his young audience. By showing - in an entertaining and decidedly "cool" way - how the ravages of substance abuse play themselves out in families and communities, he grabs their attention and makes them watch and listen and remember.

His comedy routine, captured in a tape that will soon be widely circulated as a result of a recording contract with Winnipeg's Sunshine Records, is less intense but every bit as entertaining. The recording deal, offers to appear in movies, a chance to be a cast member in a proposed sitcom fo the new Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and other opportunities have been arriving with regularity in the last few months and Burnstick knows a crucial time in his life is coming.

"I got a call two days ago," he said, "My wife said, 'Don, call this guy. You're never going to believe this.' So I called him. He said, 'Yeah, I'm in business with this guy in Los Angeles. I gave him your tape. His brother-in-law is Jay Leno's producer. He said he'd like to bring you in to be a guest on Jay Leno's show."

Burnstick doesn't know if or when that's going to happen, but he's intrigued by what that could do for his career. Charlie Hill, a Native American comedian who has appeared on the Letterman show and the Tonight show, was on the same bill as Burnstick in Winnipeg recently and Hill later told an interviewer on the TV show Sharing Circle that Burnstick is a hot comedic prospect.

That's going to mean he'll have to make a choice between appearing at youth conferences and continuing with his anti-alcohol and drug message or spending more time on his showbiz career. With the potential to earn big money in movies, television appearances, and recording deals, it might seem an easy choice. But Burnstick seems to be troubled by the prospect of making that choice because he really likes speaking to young people.

"I know that some powerful things are going to happen. I can feel it," he said. "It's like there's this steam engine that's going and I don't want to try to steer it. I'm just going to let it take its own course. I've just got to make good choices. And I've got to remember where my base is. My base is with my people and I can never forget that."

It takes a lot of energy to perform his alcohol play and a lot of it is serious acting about serious subjects, but he seems to thrive on it. Working full-time in comedy might be harder for him.

"I've heard a lot of people say that comedy is the hardest thing to do. It is hard but I'm a natural at it. I used to always get in touble for being class clown," he said. "Now I get paid for it."

His routine, You Might be a Redskin . . . is a collection of jokes about poverty and life on the rez. It'll make you wince at times but you'll laugh. A lot of it comes from his early life.

"Being the youngest in my family it was a good survival tool: make 'em laugh. I have nine older brothers, five older sisters," he said, pausing, with a well-developed sense of comedic timing, for that second or so to set up the punchline.

"Yeah, we all fit in one car."