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.