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Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
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Author: Tomson Highway Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 93 Pub. Date: 2005 ISBN-10: 0889225257 ISBN-13: 9780889225251 Cast Size: 4 female
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About the Play:
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
is a full-length serio-comic drama by Tomson Highway. It
is August 1910, and the Canadian Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, is
paying a visit to the Thompson River Valley. At the confluence of two
great rivers, two great cultures collide in this vivid and
thought-provoking piece; while four women prepare for Laurier's
arrival, their world and ways begin to disappear. Ernestine
Shuswap Gets Her Trout is both
full of humour and at the same time intensely dramatic.
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
is about four first nations women who spend a busy day preparing to
host Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The year is 1910.
Although nearly a century has passed since the establishment of the
first European beachhead, Fort Kamloops, the Indigenous people of the
Thompson River Valley, still live much as they had done for thousands
of years. Based on a deposition signed by fourteen Chiefs of
the Thomson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by
Canadian Prime Minister, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a
ritualized retelling of how the Indigenous Peoples of British
Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands,
and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and
without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most
compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the
history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow
each other like the cyclical seasons they represent. Ernestine
speaks affectionately of her husband Joe who has promised her a big
Rainbow trout out of the now off-limits river. Isabel, with her "hot
Shuswap capillaries," gloats over the cow she now has in her
garden because her neighbour's field has run out of water and feed.
Young Delilah Rose, struggling to hem white tablecloths for the
banquet, talks about her husband and the child she is carrying.
Young, widowed Annabelle is sharp-tongued but has a wry wit. Written
in the spirit of Shuswap, in "Trickster language," the
women argue, joke, rant and grieve together, the hysterically comic
spilling over into the unutterably tragic and back again.
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
premiered in 2004 at Sagebrush Theatre by Western Canada Theatre
Comapny in Kamloops, British Columbia. Since then it has played several
other Canadian and American cities and has been performed
in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.
Cast: 4 female
What
people say:
"Ernestine
Shuswap Gets Her Trout flits between history and
mythology, fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, and various notions
of exploitation and justice in a way that few Canadian productions
dare to. It slips almost instantaneously from moments of unbridled
joy to unutterable tragedy and back again… Reading Ernestine
becomes almost as nuanced, unpredictable, and exciting as seeing it
on stage could be. Although the play tells a historically and
culturally specific tale, Highway accomplishes again what he achieved
in The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips
Oughta Move to Kapuskasing in that, while his characters
certainly do not eschew their backgrounds, neither do they confine
themselves to their national distinctions. This is perhaps why
Highway (a Manitoba Cree), along with Drew Hayden Taylor,
remains, and seems poised to remain, the theatrical poster-boy for
the writ-large Native community in Canada." — Canadian
Ethnic Studies
"Tomson
Highway is a clever trickster. His plays let you laugh,
and laugh, and laugh. And all the while he is orchestrating a
tragedy, on a scale made all the grander by its camouflage in those
innocent, often adolescent chuckles." — Hour
(Montréal)
"Ernestine
Shuswap tosses aside convention and history books to
lead people to a largely neglected emotional plain. Here they can
arrive at a better understanding of the plight and the passions of
the original people of this land." — Kamloops
Daily News
"The
play is both laugh-out-loud funny and a precarious high-wire act….
A flawless production….." — The Globe and Mail
"A
tale of mythic proportions…." — Kamloops This
Week
About the Playwright:
Tomson
Highway is a Cree playwright, composer and classical pianist. He
is considered one of Canada's foremost First Nations voices, and is
best known for his award-winning "rez" cycle of plays: The
Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and
Rose. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Music and a Bachelor's
degree in English from the University of Western Ontario. He ran
Canada's premiere Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing
Arts, for many years and impacted a generation of professional
playwrights and actors. Born in northern Manitoba to a family of
nomadic caribou hunters, he speaks Cree, Dene, English, and French.
He has won four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Chalmers Award, and a Wang
Festival Award. The first Aboriginal writer to be inducted into the
Order of Canada, and named one of the 100 most important people in
Canadian history by Macleans in 2000, he has shaped the development
of Aboriginal theatre in both Canada and around the world.
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