Congress takes the pulse of the Aboriginal arts community

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The Saskatchewan Arts Alliance hosted the 2004 Arts Congress in Saskatoon on May 7 and 8 with a variety of guests from the Native community, including Saskatchewan Minister of Culture, Youth and Recreation Joan Beatty and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor.

Beatty is new to the portfolio, becoming the minister in November 2003, so her involvement in a segment of the congress-entitled Conversations on Valuing of the Arts in the Community- gave her a chance to express her ideas and concerns about the cultural landscape and arts policy in the province. It also gave participants an opportunity to express their vision of the future of the arts environment, as well as to discuss their fears regarding the erosion of certain segments of the arts community. A particularly worrisome theme expressed was the continued decline in the numbers of professional artists being able to make a living while remaining in Saskatchewan.

Beatty is a member of the Peter Ballentyne Cree Nation. She worked as a reporter and producer for CBC and is an award-winning film-maker. Her family is made up of trappers and fishermen who live off the land, she said.

Saskatchewan is rich because of the province's arts community and the creativity of the people who live there, she said, and particularly, because of the Aboriginal community who view artistic expression as a way of life.

"When I was growing up, my job was to haul wood," she said. "We didn't have electricity for a long time, so to haul wood and get kindling ready for the next day. And part of that was collecting some birchbark ... but one of the things we used to do for the fun of it, because we didn't have a whole bunch of toys or TVs or Nintendos, was we would peel that birchbark and we would make all kinds of designs."

She said all kinds of beautiful designs-flowers and eagles and butterflies-would result from that activity and it wasn't until years later that she saw one of those creations for sale.

"As Aboriginal people," she said, "we don't realize that that creativity was a form of art."

The province has been operating on two parallel systems, she said, one for the mainstream and another for Aboriginal people. And the further north one goes in Saskatchewan, the more isolated the people become.

"And in some ways the isolation has protected us, in terms of our language for example, our way of life," she said. But there is a downside to that isolation. The rest of the province doesn't get to benefit from experiencing northern artistic expression, and northern artists are cut off from their ability to access information about grants and funding opportunities, or even the ability to network with other artists or artists' organizations.

Beatty said her understanding of her role as minister is to ensure that any arts funding from the government is equitably shared, and is not just given to specific portions of the population or cultural groups.

"We have to be more inclusive of everybody, in particularly the Aboriginal community, because of the very demographics. Ours is a rich culture and we have so much to share, but when you look at our community, we don't have a whole bunch of organizations and a lot of times we don't have that information that that money or grant exists."

The next day people attending the arts congress got a short course in Native theatre from Taylor, a writer set to publish his fourteenth book with more than 60 productions of his plays under his belt.

Taylor said he grew up thinking that theatre was about dead white people, a foreign animal that had nothing to do with his life as an Ojibway person. He didn't have very many Native artistic role models growing up in Curve Lake, Ont.

Then, Drew Hayden Taylor explained, came the slow recognition that theatre wasn't as alien a concept as he once thought. It was, he discovered, a natural progression to storytelling and genre-friendly to the Native experience.

Theatre, said Taylor, is dialoue, and because Native people spring from an oral culture there is an intrinsic knowledge of how people talk.

"The ability to tell a story is a universal concept. And what I, or what most Native playwrights, have done is gone from telling stories around the campfire to telling stories around the stage. And that is because all that goes into telling good stories is the creation of some interesting characters that have an interesting story that takes the audience on an interesting journey."

Contemporary Native theatre, said Taylor, began in Toronto on Nov. 22, 1986 at 8 p.m. with the production of the Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway.

"It opened the floodgates ... when an entire generation of Native people discovered they could tell their stories through theatre ... that theatre wasn't just Shakespeare. Theatre was people up there telling a good story."

During the following 18 years, Native theatre blossomed with most theatre companies in Canada, Native or non-Native, putting a Native play in their line-up every two to three years, "because we have reached the point where our stories are openly accepted, embraced and enjoyed."