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List of Indigenous plays for senior high school from Goodminds

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List of Indigenous plays for senior high school from Goodminds

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A resource guide for bringing Canadian Indigenous culture into the classroom.

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In June, we celebrate National Indigenous History Month to honour the history, heritage and diversity of Inuit, First Nations and Metis peoples in Canada. June 21st is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It's a traditional time for Indigenous Peoples, and is also recognized as National Indigenous Peoples Day.

In honour of these events, CBC Television is celebrating the diversity of Indigenous storytellers, artists, and actors on CBC Gem.

Canadian Indigenous storytellers have been bringing their experiences to the screen since the 1970's, beginning with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. In 1999, APTN launched as the first national network, the first Indigenous dramatic feature film, Backroads, was shown at Sundance in 2000, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, six Genie awards, and is still considered one of the best Canadian films of all time.

In the past decade or so there's been even more appetite for stories from Indigenous directors and scriptwriters.

CBC Gem proudly includes the work of Indigenous creators, who are behind the cameras and performing in front of them. These are 11 storytellers involved in CBC Gem TV shows or films that reflect their unique heritage and outstanding contributions.

Sage Paul has a lot to be proud of. An award-winning artist and designer, Paul is the artistic director and one of the founders of Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto, bringing in Indigenous artists from across Canada and the world for a festival of hand-made Indigenous fashion, live runway showcases, marketplace exhibitors, an art exhibition, hands-on workshops and panel series.

Paul has designed costumes for people like Kent Monkman and Darlene Naponse, and her art has been shown in the Art Gallery of Ontario's First Thursday and at Harbourfront Centre. Along with this, the Denesuline designer lends her talents to design amazing costumes for film and television, including Falls Around Her, Women Dress, and CBC's Utopia Falls.

For CBC's Utopia Falls, she designed three gowns for the character Petra, and wanted to be part of the show for "many reasons."

"In Utopia Falls, we're able to watch these young people discover what it is like to have culture, to bring colour into the world and be unique and individual to where we come from and where our ancestry comes from - that's so important to me," says Paul.

A big part that interested her in the job was the hip-hop culture and how she related that to her own personal life and the prominence of it in the Indigenous community.

"I hope people are able to watch the show and see the importance of culture, see the importance of land, and hopefully are able to really look beyond what is immediately in front of them and know what exists in real life."

18-year-old Joel Oulette is a newcomer to the film and television industry, but he is already showing promise. Oulette is set to star as Jared in the upcoming CBC television drama series Trickster, based on Haida author Eden Robinson's best-selling novel Son of a Trickster.

From Edmonton, Alberta, the Métis actor started working as an extra on projects when he was younger, and eventually started to do more speaking roles and going to film camps in order to follow in his big sister Shayla Stonechild 's footsteps.

"Whatever she does I just fall into the same wave that she goes into... and she helped me out along the way," says Oulette.

So for Oulette to land the leading role in a new series, it was a little overwhelming for him at first but eventually grew into it with ease.

"As time went on I got more comfortable with it, and with all the actors' feedback, them helping me through it all, it helped me out. By the end of it I was really comfortable doing it."

And if there's one thing he wants to show in this series, it's how "being native is cool."

"I feel like with this TV show it's going to have a lot of people more in tuned with how misjudged Native people are and how much they can look up to how they live."

Amongst this series, Oulette is set to appear in Monkey Beach alongside Adam Beach later this year along with the TV series Tribal.

Vance Banzo's love for entertainment began in high school. A member of Fishing Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan, but raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Vance says it was his high school drama class that got him interested in acting, then eventually doing standup comedy. For Vance, doing improv in drama class helped him with his self-esteem and confidence.

He then moved to Toronto to attend Humber College School of Comedy, meeting his best friend and fellow student Tim Blair. It was in Toronto's comedy scene where he met Guled Abdi and Franco Nguyen. They would soon become the comedy troupe Tallboyz II Men, who got their name via another comedian's suggestion because of their height.

Since 2016, the guys have gone on to be nothing but successful. They won Outstanding Comedy Short at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival in 2018, Best Newcomer at the 2017 Montreal Sketchfest and Best Comedy at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival.

Vance and the Tallboyz got the greenlight last year to star in their own half-hour comedy show on CBC with Kids in the Hall producer Bruce McCulloch, who said he was "blown away by how funny, fierce and modern they are," in a March 2019 press release.

Vance has also appeared in Indian Horse and The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw.

The Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi artist Tamara Podemski's work has spanned many media, including film, television, and Broadway. Born and raised in Toronto, Podemski is the middle sister of three, each of which are performers.

Though her parents are not artists or performers, they loved art and supported and encouraged Tamara and her sisters all the time, letting them create their own movie tickets at home and put on performances. But for Podemski, it was her grandmother who helped expose her to the arts in a big way.

After that, everything was a performance for her. It was a way for her to process emotions after her mother left and she was raised by her father, using dance and theatre to help her through that hardship in her life. It was also when she started going to school at the Claude Watson School of Performing Arts, where she studied theatre, dance and music for 10 years.

Tamara has a lot of projects and accomplishments under her belt, including performing as a member of the original Canadian cast of Rent and her biggest mark, Four Sheets to the Wind, which won her the Special Jury Prize for Acting at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

Her most recent projects include CBC's Coroner and HBO's Run.

Profiles written by Jasmine Kabatay

Jasmine Kabatay is an Anishinaabe freelance journalist from Seine River First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is based in Toronto and has written for the Toronto Star, VICE News, and CBC.

Artist: Ippiksaut Friesen

Ippiksaut Friesen is an Inuk from Nunavut. She is a graduate at Emily Carr University with a degree in multimedia with a major in animation. She is also an illustrator and puppeteer in various children's programming. She attended the Earthline Indigenous Tattoo School Residency program in 2017 where she was taught traditional stick n poke and skin stitch tattooing. Her main focus on tattooing is traditional/modern Inuit and Indigenous tattoos for Indigenous people.

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Indigenous storytellers making their mark in Canadian drama and comedy

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In June, we celebrate National Indigenous History Month to honour the history, heritage and diversity of Inuit, First Nations and Metis peoples in Canada. June 21st is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It's a traditional time for Indigenous Peoples, and is also recognized as National Indigenous Peoples Day.

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From March 9 to 11th 2015, the Menuentakuan troupe went to meet the students of Kiuna College in order to give theater and improvisation workshops. The goal was to invite the youth to participate in discussion circles and improvisation activities centered on the themes found in the play Muliats as it was being written.

From October 12 to 15th 2016 in Rimouski, Menuenkathuan will be present at the meeting of the Réseau des Organisateurs de Spectacles de l'Est du Québec (Network of Show Organizers of Eastern Quebec). The company plans to present Muliats, its first creation, to interested distributors for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons.

This November 22 to 29th, during Port-au-Prince's International Theater Festival Quatre Chemins, Menuentakuen Productions will participate in the Native meeting between Canada and Haiti. Muliats will also be presented on November 26 and 27 as part of the official program. It constitutes the first Canadian theater production (Native or non-Native) to be presented in Haiti in the history of Canada.

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From March 9 to 11th 2015, the Menuentakuan troupe went to meet the students of Kiuna College in order to give theater and improvisation workshops. The goal was to invite the youth to participate in discussion circles and improvisation activities centered on the themes found in the play Muliats as it was being written.

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Kwe, skenenkowa, welcome, Ondinnok is a Huron word meaning: 'a theatrical healing ritual that reveals the secret desire of the soul'. Our theatre aspires to recapture the imagination, the land of dreams, to repatriate memory and liberate the future. That's what it means to do - Ondinnok!

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In a Good Way - Guidelines for teaching Indigenous drama and dance.

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In a Good Way - Guidelines for teaching Indigenous drama and dance.

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DANCE . THEATRE . MUSIC . MEDIA .

A leading company of contemporary Indigenous performance in Canada and worldwide.

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Red Sky Performance is a leading company of contemporary Indigenous performance in Canada and worldwide.

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From publisher Strong Nations, a list of plays by Indigenous authors featuring Indigenous issues. Various age levels, but mostly suitable for upper secondary.

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Plays - Indigenous & First Nations Books - Strong Nations

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In the year 1649, the Iroquois are on the warpath, killing traitors and Christians at the mission of Sainte Marie. The shaman is worried about windigos and the Black Robe about the fires of hell. Worlds collide in a renowned First Nations playwright's epic, dark, funny, and healing vision of early Canada.

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An American resource, Teachers Pay Teachers also includes free resources, such as this list of scripts.

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Browse resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources.

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LGBTQ artists in a variety of fields.

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So much more than 'the only lesbian in Canada'

Five years before homosexuality was ostensibly decriminalized in Canada, when same-sex sexual activity was still punishable by a multi-year prison sentence, Jane Rule published Desert of the Heart. It was a landmark of lesbian literature that was groundbreaking for its portrayal of a lesbian romance that was - boldly and unprecedentedly - positive. Rule received an influx of fan mail from women across the globe who had never had the privilege of reading a book they believed truly captured their experience, and the novel, which follows a woman seeking a divorce in Nevada who falls for a younger casino worker, was adapted into the acclaimed 1985 movie Desert Hearts. "I became, for the media, the only lesbian in Canada," said Rule, who used the newfound attention to become an advocate for LGBT rights in Canada - regularly contributing a column, essays and reviews to The Body Politic, and living openly with her partner, Helen Sonthoff, for more than 45 years until Sonthoff's death in 2000. Throughout her career, Rule published several novels and short stories, as well as a volume of criticism entitled Lesbian Images, and was the subject of the 1995 documentary Fiction and Other Truths: A Film About Jane Rule.

Lynne Fernie, filmmaker and film festival programmer:

Brilliant conversation, a fabulous sense of humour, a love of scotch and her profound belief in human rights made Jane Rule a delight to know. She is one of the brightest stars in our Canadian firmament.

Playfully and radically queering the Canadian landscape

Half-Cree, two-spirit artist Kent Monkman, who is a member of the Fisher River band in northern Manitoba, often channels his subversive view of history through the trickster lens of his campy, gender-bending alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. And no one else could have celebrated Canada 150 quite like Monkman and Miss Chief. In his exhibit Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the artist depicts moments in Canadian history in a way that balances bite with humour, often placing Miss Chief directly into the scenes; the painting The Daddies, for instance, sees her nude atop a Hudson's Bay point blanket as the Fathers of Confederation look on in awe. The sublime images that grace Monkman's canvases draw on the sweeping vistas of George Catlin and Paul Kane - painters who commonly documented Indigenous life - while upsetting the binaries of colonial settler and colonized subject, straight and queer, fact and fantasy. The painter makes public appearances as Miss Chief from time to time, and his work has traveled the world, always offering a playful, radical and undeniably queer reimagination of the Canadian landscape.

Pushing Québécois theatre's boundaries since the 1960s

While Michel Tremblay's output draws directly from his upbringing in the then-working-class Plateau neighbourhood of Montreal, his hilarious and heartfelt plays have resonated with audiences across Canada. As an adolescent, Tremblay found himself a Québécois in a predominantly Anglo country and a gay teen in a largely intolerant society. The budding playwright began to write scripts as a way of probing that sexual and cultural identity, which led the way to his breakthrough work Les Belle-sœurs - a show about a clan of Montreal housewives who get together to paste trading stamps into booklets - in 1968. Another of Tremblay's standout (if later controversial) works is Hosanna, which portrays the complicated relationship between the titular character - described as a "cheap transvestite, touching and sad, exasperating in her self-exaltation" - and her biker boyfriend one Halloween night. Tremblay's plays are considered revolutionary for incorporating Quebec joual into mainstream theatre - and he did much the same thing with queer characters.

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CBC Arts presents Super Queeroes: Celebrating Canada's LGBTQ pioneers

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Five years before homosexuality was ostensibly decriminalized in Canada, when same-sex sexual activity was still punishable by a multi-year prison sentence, Jane Rule published Desert of the Heart. It was a landmark of lesbian literature that was groundbreaking for its portrayal of a lesbian romance that was - boldly and unprecedentedly - positive.

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Artist Mentorship Program

The Artist Mentorship Program is a 7-month training program offered to emerging theatre artists at the beginning of their careers. The mission is to provide Black and other emerging artists a unique opportunity to strengthen and deepen their skills preparing them for professional careers in the arts, while also enhancing their ability to articulate their artistic practice.

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Black Theatre Workshop | Canada's longest running Black theatre company

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Artist Mentorship Program The Artist Mentorship Program is a 7-month training program offered to emerging theatre artists at the beginning of their careers. The mission is to provide Black and other emerging artists a unique opportunity to strengthen and deepen their skills preparing them for professional careers in the arts, while also enhancing their ability to articulate their artistic practice.

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Boys, Girls and Other Mythological Creatures - Play

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Boys, Girls and Other Mythological Creatures - Play

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Deep in Simon’s basement, there is a secret world of imagination and adventure. When his new friend Abby comes over after school to work on a class assignment, Simon steers their work toward creating a play.

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Deep in Simon's basement, there is a secret world of imagination and adventure. When his new friend Abby comes over after school to work on a class assignment, Simon steers their work toward creating a play. However, Simon's older brother, Zach, is uneasy with their play-acting and dressing up...because, as he reveals to Abby, Simon wishes to be a girl.

As the three characters struggle through their conflicts, they improvise a fairy tale about a magic prince, an evil king, a brave young girl, and a fire-breathing dragon who's getting more real by the minute. Can Abigail save Princess Simone from the Tower of Light? Will Zach succeed in turning his brother back into being a boy once and for all? And will Simon overcome fear and finally become their true self? Boys, Girls, and Other Mythological Creatures is a thoughtful and hilarious new play about our ability to transform.

Male Cast: 2

Female Cast: 1

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Boys, Girls, and Other Mythological Creatures by Mark Crawford

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Deep in Simon's basement, there is a secret world of imagination and adventure. When his new friend Abby comes over after school to work on a class assignment, Simon steers their work toward creating a play.

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Rocko and Nakota: Tales from the Land - Play

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Rocko and Nakota: Tales from the Land - Play

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Meet Nakota. A young boy who is sick in a hospital and trying to write the greatest story ever. One day, Grandpa Rocko comes over for a visit. Next thing Nakota knows, he is whisked away into a world of stories that are right below his feet. Within the land.

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Meet Nakota. A young boy who is sick in a hospital and trying to write the greatest story ever. One day, Grandpa Rocko comes over for a visit. Next thing Nakota knows, he is whisked away into a world of stories that are right below his feet. Within the land. This show explores the interplay between stories of the present against the long forgotten stories of the past.

Produced by Theatre Prospero, Edmonton, AB, April/May 2019

Keywords: Storytelling, Healing, Mental Illness and Anxiety, Spiritual Strength, Indigenous, Storytelling, Solo Performance

Running Time: 45 minutes

Genre: Drama

Acts: 1

Male Cast: 2

Other Cast: 9

Maximum # of roles: 11

Minimum # of roles: 2

Suitable for School Productions: Students 10+

5 Stars
"First Nations Storytelling at its finest."
- CBC Winnipeg, Top Picks of the Fringe

4 Stars
"A riveting performance...warm, gentle, and beautifully performed."
- Winnipeg Free Press

* Ottawa Tonight: Top 10 Picks of the Fringe 2018*
* APT613: Top 6 Picks of the Fringe 2018*

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Rocko and Nakota: Tales From the Land by Josh Languedoc

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Meet Nakota. A young boy who is sick in a hospital and trying to write the greatest story ever. One day, Grandpa Rocko comes over for a visit. Next thing Nakota knows, he is whisked away into a world of stories that are right below his feet. Within the land.

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Iron Peggy, by award-winning, international Métis performer and playwright Marie Clements, was commissioned by the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and premiered at Vancouver’s Waterfront Theatre in 2019.

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Peg is struggling for survival at her boarding school. Three über-cool "it" girls take aim at Peg and make her life utterly miserable. When her beloved Grandmother dies she just wants to disappear. Then an unexpected gift arrives; inside it, Peg finds three cast-iron Canadian soldiers. In despair, she throws them against the floor. How can they help her? They are so small, and the girls' shadow is so big. But, miraculously, the toys come to life as Indigenous snipers from World War I, just in time to wage an epic battle against the girls. A powerful play that will appeal to audiences both young and old, Iron Peggy uses a creative and ever-surprising blend of voices and sceneries to tell this moving story. With 2018 marking the 100th-year anniversary of WWI , Iron Peggy is an excellent introduction to its history and a touching testimony that not only celebrates the First Nation participation in the war effort but also a young girl's personal victory.

Iron Peggy, by award-winning, international Métis performer and playwright Marie Clements, was commissioned by the Vancouver International Children's Festival and premiered at Vancouver's Waterfront Theatre in 2019. (Adapted from Vancouver International Children's Festival online presentation.)

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Peg is struggling for survival at her boarding school. Three über-cool "it" girls take aim at Peg and make her life utterly miserable. When her beloved Grandmother dies she just wants to disappear. Then an unexpected gift arrives; inside it, Peg finds three cast-iron Canadian soldiers.

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Renowned Métis author and screenwriter Maria Campbell explores themes of cultural identity, sexual assault and the familial impact of colonialism in The Red Dress, echoing the themes of ...

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A retelling of the Mi’kmaq legend of Medoonak by Les Krizsan

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This short film is a retelling of the Mi'kmaq legend of Medoonak, the reckless ruler of the winds and the seas who was persuaded to quieten his magical ...