SHERRILL GRACE
This essay compares the representation of Inuit people and culture in five plays by non-Inuit, southern playwrights and three plays by Inuit in an effort to trace the construction of identity and the gaze in the context of writing for the theatre. Considered in chronological sequence, these eight plays demonstrate some of the important shifts in representation and ideological investment that occurred between 1967 and 1986.
Cet article compare la représentation du peuple inuit et de leur culture dans cinq pièces écrites par des auteurs non-Inuits du sud et trois par des Inuits, dans un effort de retrouver la création de l'identité et du regard dans le contexte de l'écriture théâtrale. Examinées chronologiquement, ces huit oeuvres presentent quelques-uns des mouvements importants, dans le cadre de la représentation et de l'ideologie, qui se sont déroulés entre 1967 et 1986.
Speaking of watching "native theatre," Alan Filewod has remarked that "all any colonizing gaze can do, is see the difference" between self and other, where self is the white, southern euro-Canadian colonizer and other is the colonized native (Filewod 25). This remark comes from his thoughtful essay about plays by First Nations and Inuit playwrights and theatre groups called "Averting the Colonizing Gaze," and in this essay he wrestles with the seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of this self/other binary in examples of native theatre. Starting with Filewod's discussion of the "colonizing gaze" in the theatre, I want to examine how this gaze operates in a set of plays that depict the Inuit, to explore any changes that may have occurred in these representations over time, and, finally, to ponder some of the questions raised by these representations of the Inuit.
The plays I consider are Leonard Peterson's The Great Hunger (1967); Herschel Hardin's Esker Mike & his Wife, Agiluk (1973); Henry Beissel's Inuk and the Sun (1973); Robertson Davies's Question Time (1975); Le Théâtre de la Marmaille's Umiak (1982), written by Francois Camirand et al.; Minnie Aodla Freeman's Survival in the South (1971); and Tunooniq Theatre's Changes and In Search of a Friend (1986).
But I must stress the fact that, unlike Filewod, who was talking about watching performances, I am talking about reading published texts or scripts. The distinction is significant: to publish a play text is to put it in the public domain, to legitimize it, grant it a cultural authority and longevity that a production cannot give it, whereas watching a performance or, better still, several performances of the play, provides an unparalleled opportunity for personal engagement with the problematics and immediacy of the watching role, which is Filewod's chief concern. For my purposes, it is important to acknowledge that reading published texts, complete with their specific apparatuses of practical and cultural legitimation, shifts discussion to the level of meta-gaze, but, at the same time, that the act of reading is no less neutral than the act of watching because texts are always representations.As is clear from my list, I have two groups of plays here: one by non-Inuit and one by Inuit. I have also listed them in chronological order, although composition and first production dates do not always coincide with publication. By establishing these two groups of plays and by considering them in this order, I can highlight the changes that have occurred in assumptions about the other and the reasons for deciding to represent the other in plays. Moreover, this grouping and order also illustrate a shift in who gets to be the other, who gets to be the self. Because few of these plays are familiar, I begin with a brief summary of each before commenting upon what I see as some of the key aspects of them as a group.
Although written in 1958 and first produced in 1960, The Great Hunger was not published until Canada's Centennial year. In addition to the text of the play, the book includes production photographs, reproductions of historical drawings, a detailed historical introduction by Peterson, footnotes on "Eskimo" words, explanatory notes, "Eskimo" poems, and excerpts from the work of several famous explorers and ethnographers such as Gontran de Poncins, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Knud Rasmussen, and Franz Boas, and a list of works for further reading. (1) The play, then, is carefully situated, legitimated, and authenticated. The story it tells, which is based upon a story borrowed from de Poncins's Kabloona, is one of murder and revenge in an Arctic community where an Inuk Shaman knows that one of the hunters has murdered his wife's former husband and that the son, who has just reached manhood by killing his first polar bear, must now avenge that murder, despite the fact he has only known this hunter as a kind father. When another Inuk, who has been converted to Christianity, arrives in the community, he argues with the Shaman that the past must be forgiven and vengeance eschewed, but the traditional ways prevail. The play ends with the fight between the man and his (step)son, who dies. Although the man has survived in this harsh land, he is crushed by his victory, and the play ends with his tragic question:
Kudlu, defiantly. O you spirits, why did you not come at me? Why did you send this boy and make me fight myself? More of my soul is there than here. I fought too well. And survived. But what is that now, surviving, this fragment of my soul? (112)
Peterson has constructed a three-act tragedy out of the tale and has tried to make his play "Eskimo"-centred and authentic. In this endeavour, he has followed the example of de Poncins, who constructs himself as an all-observing Kabloonak and claims to present the Eskimos as they really are (see note 1). In order to move from prose memoir to stage play, Peterson dispenses with the white observer/narrator; therefore, there is no Kabloona in the play and there is no cultural encounter as such. Instead, white culture is only suggested through an old Inuk who brings guns and Jesus Christ to the community, and everything about the play is a euro-Canadian representation in which Peterson's own views are fairly clear. Christianity may be useless to these people, but their traditional ways are equally pointless. Peterson's "Eskimos" are, for the most part, presented with great sympathy and attention to detail (Kudlu is no childlike, smiling, two-dimensional "Nanook"), but they are nonetheless primitive curiosities used to depict a classical, even oedipal, tragedy. (2) Given when the play was written and published, and Peterson's reliance upon the narratives of Arctic explorers and ethnographers to develop the life of these characters, especially through supposedly authenticating details, it should not be surprising that the play reads like ethnographic nostalgia for a vanishing way of life that whites are powerless to save. (3)
Esker Mike & his Wife, Agiluk begins where The Great Hunger ends--with the presentation of destructive cultural encounter presented through Swiftean satire. The play is set in the 60s on the Mackenzie Delta at Aklavik and the titular hero, Esker Mike, is a white scrounger who traps muskrat when he can, lives off welfare, dispatches his children to the Catholic or Anglican missions, and drinks as much as possible. Agiluk, his Inuvialuit wife, is tired of bearing children for the white missions and refuses to sleep with Esker Mike until he can earn enough money to feed the family at home. After scenes in which Hardin takes deadly aim at the Church, the federal government, the RCMP, and local exploitation of the North, the play rushes towards its shocking and tragic close: Agiluk, unable to prevail against the men, reverts to her cultural roots and kills the children who cannot be fed, rather than give them up to the missions. Her tragedy is two-fold in that she changes nothing by her act--Esker Mike concludes the play by looking for another woman--and she furthers the elimination of her own race.
Unlike the Peterson play, Hardin's is a political satire that attacks white hypocrisy, corruption, and ruthless exploitation of the North and its indigenous people. The phenomena portrayed in the play are drawn from social realities that have resulted directly from cultural encounter, and the winners in this encounter are the whites. Although Hardin includes a shaman-like figure in Toomik, as well as a few other Inuit characters, he is not aiming for a full representation of Inuit culture. Agiluk is barely sketched and her motivation is based in social protest rather than psychology; she is, in a sense, a vehicle for the playwright to voice his critique of the colonizer, and even in her ultimate act of self-determination she remains trapped by the masculinist colonizing project, defined by her race and sexuality, and judged guilty by a foreign justice system. Read at the end of the 1990s, almost 30 years after its conception and historical moment, the play's message seems both assimilationist and sexist: assimilationist because Mike remains alive and eager to control native women's procreative energy, and sexist because Agiluk's only agency is procreative and her only choice to kill and be killed.
Beissel's Inuk and the Sun provides a refreshing and markedly different approach to a non-Inuk representation of the Inuit. Instead of tragic authenticity or political satire, this play offers a mythic treatment of a rite of passage from childhood to manhood represented in terms of Inuit culture. The plot is simple--a young man (an Inuk) kills his first bear and searches for his dead father in the sea realm under the ice. He stubbornly believes he will find his father and the sun and bring both back to the land to live happily ever after. His maturity is reached when he answers Sedna's riddles and comes to accept the fact that the sun will only accompany him for part of the year and that his dead father can never return. (4) Like the seasons, life and death are inextricable and necessary, and Inuk will only be a man when he understands and accepts life and death, light and dark.
But if the plot is simple, the language and style of the play are not. In its first production, the play was performed by Bunraku-style marionettes manipulated by visible puppeteers, hence its style creates the mythically related spheres of physical and spiritual reality, and its highly poetic language and songs complement and sustain its symbolic meaning. While Beissel is certainly drawing upon Inuit mythology throughout, he is also evoking familiar western myths of heroic quests, and he is not interested in depicting political realities or daily life, or in suggesting that Inuit culture is primitive and disappearing. On the contrary, Beissel believes that Inuit myth is equal in power to other myths, that, in a Canadian play, Inuit mythology is appropriate for telling universal symbolic stories, and that the Inuit have much to teach non-Inuit about spiritual values and "our place in nature" (Beissel 55). Of all the playwrights I am considering, Beissel is also the most critically aware of the dangers of appropriation and, thus, the most articulate about his intentions in a story he describes as "my own fiction":
Canada's First People have much to teach us [about life and death and our place in nature]. It was for this reason, and because the North is a challenge that demands of humans the utmost in courage, endurance and wisdom, that I chose an Inuit setting, Inuit characters and their mythology, to tell a story which is my own fiction. (55)
Question Time pushes the symbolic use of the North and the Inuit still further to create an allegory of Canadian identity in which an Inuit Shaman, who is also an Edinburgh-trained medical doctor, advises and guides a Canadian Prime Minister (one Peter Macadam) on how to behave after his plane has crashed in Les Montagnes de glace somewhere in the remotest Arctic. It turns out that this Arctic terra incognita is, in fact, the Prime Minister's soulscape. For in true Robertson Davies fashion, this is a Jungian play and the Prime Minister has a feminine soul. However, if he is to survive the crash, he will have to learn who he really is, what the Arctic signifies (his "personal Arctic," 8), and why the North is important. What is more, he will have to accept and honour that identity. Being something of an arrogant, colonizing fool, Macadam resists all the visions and voices that Dr Angatkok (a Shaman is an angakok) conjures up for him, even when he finds himself in the ultimate House of Commons "question time" of his life.
In Davies's hands, the Inuit become the true Canadians because only they can survive in the Arctic and only they can guide us to a discovery of our truly northern souls and identity: Canada-as-North. This play presents the Inuit as symbols of true wisdom and secure identity in an allegory about personal and national identity. Despite these superior qualities, the Inuk Shaman is not Davies's hero; if one can speak of heroes in a play that mocks the media, the national symbol--a beaver--the official opposition and our political leaders, that man is, finally, Peter Macadam. Davies's point is to teach non-Inuit how to be good Canadians; Dr Angatkok is little more than a clever device, an unusual means to a patriotic end.
If my playwrights thus far cannot be accused of going north in order to write about it, the same cannot be said of Marmaille's Umiak, a collective collaborative play written for the Inuit about the Inuit after the troupe had spent time touring northern Quebec communities. This play shares certain stylistic and performance features with Inuk and the Sun in that it calls for masks, puppets, songs, and the use of myth. However, the resemblance stops there because this play was written to be performed by the Inuit in their own communities and the audience must collaborate with the actors to perform the play. In other words, Marmaille has altered its very mode of composition and production in an effort to create something relevant to the Inuit.
The story is utterly simple and involves a starving family's search for food. The hunter is successful and the group builds an umiak (a large skin boat, not to be confused with a kayak) in order to escape the ice flow on which they are trapped. When the boat is transformed into a great bird, the hunters pay no attention and carry on about their business, but this transformation precedes the successful hunt. Once again, the focus is entirely on the Inuit, and white influence or interference is ignored. Of all the pieces by non-Inuit I have considered, this simple play comes closest to reproducing the style of Inuit story-telling, which is, as we shall see, fundamental to their idea of "theatre" or "performance." Whether it succeeds or not, in Filewod's terms of decolonizing the gaze, is another matter, for the fact of white creation is unavoidable. On the one hand, this play does disrupt the very notions of how a story about, or using, Inuit can be told in the theatre by privileging story-telling; while on the other hand, the story they tell in the play is a long way from the socially purposeful stories in the Tunooniq plays.
Freeman's short play and the Tunooniq plays work to return the gaze, while at the same time they serve the interests of their creators and their communities. Survival in the South is the earliest example I know of a play written by an Inuk; it recounts the story of Freeman's arrival in Ottawa to work as a translator, the extreme cultural shock she experiences, and her gradual adjustment to this alien urban existence with the Kabloona. (5) The "other" in this play are the Whites--her roommate, boss, a hairdresser, people on the busy streets, and southern culture, which strikes Freeman as ignorant, insensitive, and frightening, however well-meaning individuals try to be. Through the dialogue and the "narrator's" comments, we (the homogenized non-Inuit reader/spectator constructed by Freeman) can see the experience from Minnie's perspective and judge it as she does; as a result, a world that is familiar to us is immediately made strange.
Changes and In Search of a Friend share the story-telling style with Survival in the South, but they are more complex theatre pieces drawing heavily upon Inuit traditions of dance, drumming, and song, and dealing with important social issues facing Inuit living in their own communities. Changes portrays the conflict that arises between a traditional life style, governed by the Shaman and traditional values, and the introduction of trade for material goods and Christian values represented by a corrupt, white trader set on cheating the Inuit and making them drunk, and a priest who competes with and defeats the Shaman. Like Peterson's The Great Hunger, with which it could be fruitfully compared, Changes depicts a harsh arctic landscape and the Inuit struggle for food and survival, but it presents their world as they see it. Significantly, the sense of loss and danger that most concerns them is not a result of the harsh environment, but of white interference in their lives. It is neither traditional values nor the fight for survival that threatens them at the end, but the impact of white goods, alcohol, and Christianity.
Search uses Inuit myth to explore the dangers of substance abuse or, more generally, the social problems stemming from modern life. Once again, this is highly physical theatre in which language and dialogue play a supporting role. The set comprises four screens, each one of which represents a stage in the main character's loss of consciousness or identity and the will to survive. The lighting and eerie sound effects mimic the look and sound of the Northern Lights, which in Inuit mythology are closely associated with the spirit realm of the dead or unborn. (6) Puju, the young man in danger of succumbing to the evil, tempting spirits, is saved at the end by the intervention of a loyal friend and an Old Man (or Shaman figure) who insist that Puju look at his soul. As soon as he does this, he is able to begin the journey back to his true self. The play ends with songs, drumming, and a celebration of life that unites cast and audience.
For this play, it is the contrast with Beissel's Inuk and the Sun that is most telling. Both plays grow out of, and draw deeply upon, Inuit mythology; both involve symbolic journeys to a land of death (under the sea or in the Northern Lights); and both end in a return to community. But the reader's gaze, like the playwright's intention, is focussed in opposite directions: for Beissel, that gaze is on the Inuit as an example of universals determined by western culture; for the Tunooniq group, that collaborative gaze is turned on the concerns of Inuit society in today's world, on the here and now of contemporary existence. Where readers and audience are invited to share Beissel's vision of a northern mythology that reconciles opposites through a universalizing tale about the Inuit, with Tunooniq non-Inuit are allowed to see a living Inuit culture use its own myths and traditional wisdom to heal itself.
It seems to me that at least the following key points can be made about these plays. If we map them over time, and if we preserve, to some degree, a sense of their historical context, we can see that the representations of the Inuit have changed. First, the Inuit have taken over this representational activity and, in the process, they are "returning the gaze," othering us, and, even more importantly, using theatre for their own purposes. (7) Moreover, non-Inuit playwrights are refraining from such representations (although Beissel insists that he can and should keep his play alive--an opera has recently been completed using Inuk as its libretto--and he has updated some of his references). (8)
Non-Inuit playwrights have used their representations of the Inuit in many ways--as salvage ethnography conveyed with interest and sympathy (Peterson); as a moral mirror for critiquing white southern Canadian society (Hardin); and as somehow essential Canadians, and thus as symbols of national identity, because they are a truly northern people (Beissel and Davies). Finally, the semiotic and cultural differences in performance style, in purpose and theme, and in the construction of the audience provide a host of potentially fascinating comparisons among the plays and point to a number of other questions that could be explored: questions about publication--perhaps particularly in collections--about staging, and about where the plays are performed and before whom, and in the use of English and Inuktituk in the texts and on the stage. (9)
My contention is that these plays and their historical contexts are worth remembering not because they are all good plays (however that is judged), but because they have much to tell us about ourselves as Canadians and as readers of texts, and because they shed light on aspects of theatre history in Canada and on some of the contributions made by theatre (not just fiction, poetry, or non-fiction prose) to the "imagined community" of Canada (see Anderson). I also think that these texts would reward further detailed comparison, especially in production, and I have suggested two such comparative possibilities: The Great Hunger with Changes and Inuk and the Sun with In Search of a Friend. But comparisons need not stop with these four plays. It would be interesting to examine (in another, longer study) how these plays compare with operas about the Inuit (see Bottenberg, Henderson, and Somers) or with recent films (eg. Never Cry Wolf (1983); Map of the Human Heart (1993); and Kabloonak (1994), the feature film about Robert Flaherty's making of Nanook of the North in 1920-22). But this mention of film returns me, of course, to Filewod and the problem of the gaze.
What I find especially noteworthy about the trajectory of these plays is the way in which the objectifying gaze has shifted from that of the benevolent colonizer to the critical gaze of the colonized, who, by returning the reader's/audience's gaze, assert their own subjectivity and show us how to see ourselves as non-Inuit. (10) Strategic examples of this returning of the gaze are found in Survival in the South and in Changes, where the white trader has been played by an Inuk. The process, however, does not stop there because in all three Inuit plays, though particularly in In Search of a Friend, non-Inuit readers can, if they choose, read the Inuit as turning their backs upon what might interest non-Inuit in order to look into (not gaze at--see Kaplan xvi-xvii) their own subject(ivity); non-Inuit presence or attention is beside the point, extraneous.
Implicit in the shifting of the gaze that I trace through these plays are larger, highly complex questions about who should be allowed to tell a story and whether story-telling, in any genre, necessarily involves appropriation. To these questions I cannot pretend an answer. Within the limited range of this study, however, I am convinced that these plays have a lot to say, not only about the process of averting the gaze, but also about subverting it. They provide instructive and interesting examples of the variety of ways in which the Inuit can be represented in the theatre and, as a group, they demonstrate the distance travelled, over time, in representing Inuit stories on stage. Above all, they alert us to ways of looking at, reading about, and representing the self and/as the other. (11)
NOTES
1. The elaborate apparatus for this text is revealing. Peterson seems to have felt that his readers and
directors needed help, not in stage instructions or production notes, but in ethnographic information. The
effect, for me at least, is one of apologetics: you will understand my play, if I help you understand these
strange primitives about whom I am writing. A detailed examination of this apparatus is beyond my
present scope and purpose; however, a few comments should be made about the text in which Peterson
found his plot: Gontran de Poncins's Kabloona (see 121-27). Kabloona is an autobiographical account of a
white man's 18-month encounter with "Eskimo primitives" (de Poncins's terms passim) on King William
Island during 1938-39. These people are the Netsilik, and de Poncins was, in fact, their guest. His memoir
is not an account of cultural encounter so much as a complex weaving of ethnographic observation and
private reflection on the impact the Inuit world has upon his own psyche. What Filewod notes in his study
is everywhere apparent in de Poncins's book--what the watcher sees are the differences between self and
other, differences than remain incomprehensible to de Poncins. De Poncins recounts many Inuit stories
(relayed in translation at second or third hand) about Eskimo murders, murderers, and violence, and the
preponderance of these leaves the impression that murder and violence are intrinsic to primitive life, so it
may not be surprising that Peterson would choose such a story for his plot. However, all four of Peterson's
"Readings Related to Eskimo Life" deal with murder (128-35).
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2. Leonard Peterson was a prolific playwright for radio and television. He also wrote the libretto for Ruth
Henderson's 1983 Inuit music drama "Clear Sky and Thunder," which is based on a contest of Inuit throat
singing. The piece was commissioned by the Toronto's Children's Chorus through the Floyd Chalmers
Foundation, with its premiere in Toronto, October 1984. My reference here to "Nanook" is to Robert
Flaherty's documentary film Nanook of the North (1922). See Grace 1996.
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3. The ideology of assimilation has had a long history and profound influence in Canada, as is clear from
such disparate practices as banning the potlatch, establishing residential schools, writing poetic
representations of Indians as a vanishing race (for example, D.C. Scott), and, I would argue, producing a
play like The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. For an excellent study of this phenomenon, see the cultural biography of
Pauline Johnson by Strong-Boag and Gerson.
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4. The myth of Sedna is of central importance to traditional and contemporary Inuit culture across the
Arctic, although the name Sedna is chiefly used in the Baffin Island area of Nunavut. Sedna is the goddess
who lives at the bottom of the sea and controls all the sea mammals and fish; however, she will not release
the animals upon which the Inuit depend unless a Shaman travels to her abode and combs her long hair.
The story of how she came to live at the bottom of the sea and might need help combing her hair has
variations, but its basic outline involves a young woman whose father throws her into the sea and then cuts
off her fingers, joint by joint, when she tries to climb back into his boat. Each finger joint falls into the sea
and is transformed into one of the staple animals of Inuit culture: seals, walrus, whales, and so forth.
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5. Freeman has written at greater length about her experiences in her autobiography, Life Among the
Qallunaat (1978).
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6. As with the story of Sedna, myths and legends about the Northern Lights are common across the Arctic
and sub-Arctic. Again, there are variations, but in general the lights are associated with spirits (the dead or
unborn babies) who dance in the lights and have the power to come down to earth and affect humans. Two
plays in which the Northern Lights function as key symbols and thematic tropes are Sixty Below and Sled;
see Grace 1998.
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7. I have borrowed the phrase "returning the gaze" from Himani Bannerji. In her introduction to Returning
the Gaze, Bannerji describes non-white writing as re-presenting realities based upon embodied experiences
and agency, as rejecting totalizing, essentialist categories of identity--the Inuit or Eskimos would constitute
such a category--and as critiquing liberal concepts of "participation." She also cautions against over-theorizing critical discussion of this writing (xv-xix).
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8. Wolfgang Bottenberg's Inook is an adaptation of Beissel's play; completed in 1986, it has not yet had a
Canadian performance, but it was intended to be performed in Germany in 1999-2000. Among other minor
changes, Beissel changed the spelling of his hero's name from Inook to Inuk for the 1999 publication of the
play in Staging the North.
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9. While many factors might be considered in a detailed comparison of sets and productions, the Peterson
and Beissel plays received professional productions, using sophisticated concepts of design and staging. By
contrast, the Tunooniq plays were more simply presented, with a minimum of props, in a manner suitable
for almost any kind of venue. In addition, the Peterson and Beissel require spaces that mirror the symbolic
and thematic subjects of the plays and sets that are integral to the classical quality of the former and the
universalizing, mythic quality of the latter. Again, by contrast, in the Tunooniq plays (for a variety of
reasons, including economics) sets are secondary to the storytelling performance.
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10. In Looking for the Other, Ann Kaplan distinguishes between the "gaze" and the "look" and restricts
each term to specific uses. She also probes the capacity of the "look" to liberate both those who represent
and those who are represented in a film (see 298-300). Kaplan does not discuss plays or live theatre, and a
wholesale application of her theory and terms to the theatre would not, in my view, work because the
theatre is not controlled or restricted by the camera, which is always there in a film to construct what we see
and to direct our gaze.
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11. I would like to thank SSHRC for the funding that supported the research for this article and colleagues
whose work has been especially helpful: Eve D'Aeth and Lisa Chalykoff. I would also like to thank the
Centre des auteurs dramatiques for their assistance in locating scripts and Henry Beissel for his help with
production materials.
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