Thomson Highway's The Rez Sisters Works Cited Not Included The play The Rez Sisters is written by one of Canada's most celebrated playwrights, Tomson Highway. Highway was born in 1951 in northwestern Manitoba. He went on to study at the University of Manitoba and graduated from the University of Western Ontario, with honors in Music and English. Native Literature is inspired by 'contemporary social problems facing native Canadians today; alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, wife battering, family violence, the racism of the justice system, loneliness, rejection, youth awareness, as well as modern-day environmental issues.';(P. 172 Native Literature in Canada.) Highway once said, 'We grew up with myths. They're the core of our identity as people.';(P. 172 Native Literature in Canada.) I am going to focus on the image and identity of Native people as seen through the play The Rez Sisters. Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society. 'The Rez Sisters won the Dora Mavor Moore award for the best play in 1986-87 and later went on to earn extravagant praise at the Edinburgh Festival.'; (P. 172 Native Literature in Canada.) The play is full of comedy, trag... ... middle of paper ... ...rs, '?was one of the most toughing exuberant, cleverly crafted and utterly entrancing plays?';(Cover The Rez Sisters.) Tomson Highway did a great job at giving the reader an idea of what reserve life is about. He gave us the opportunity to experience the hardships of native people and some insight to how they form their identity. After reading this wonderfully written play I do believe that our culture plays a very important role in how we as people form our identity and determines where we feel we belong. Nanabush had a great deal to do with the women keeping their current identities and since of belonging. I feel that if we believe in a spirit and surrender or lives to them they will take care of us just as Nanabush did in this play. We all need to belong somewhere and feel comfort in our lives. We as human beings need to open our eyes and see we can all belong together and live in one society without dropping our culture but before this can happen we need to end racism and stereotyping. These are the two main factors that push people, more commonly native people, into the loss of belonging the loss of their culture and the loss of the core of their identity.
Tomson Highway is a playwright of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kaspukasing. The play is based on the real life of Highway as he was born as a full-blood Cree, lived in a Native community that takes place in Wasaychigan Hill, and registered as a member of the Barren Lands First Nation (“Biography”). Native people have their own culture and beliefs; unique language and mythology. Most of his plays use Cree and Ojib language and show the issue of the women power in the community. As the period changes, the Canadian government tries to implement a new system to ensure that native people can cope and adapt with the world that keeps changing. The government tries to assimilate Christianity and Western culture by forcing the kids to go to the residential schools. They are not allowed to speak their own language, Cree, and stay with their parents so that they have less time spend on having a normal family life. As one of the ways to preserve Native cultures and beliefs, Highway uses the play as a medium to express their hardship in facing social challenges by the government. Tomson Highway explain the uniqueness of Cree language, the value of women in Native community and how the government’s strategy on modernizing Native people leads to the destruction of Native cultures.
Thomson Highway’s, “The Rez Sisters”, is a play written about a group of sisters living on a reserve in Wasayachigan Hill, in Manitoulin Island, Ontario. During the course of the play, Thomson provides an exploration of ambitions, dreams and reality.
The play deals with the issues faced by young people growing up through the eyes of two children, Tilly and Ben. About to begin year eight and head off to boarding school, these two twins are full of anxieties, hopes, and fears about the future. They have built their own imaginary world, where they spend most of the time imagining what will happen. The play is very relatable to anyone who has been concerned about transition, and who has an imagination. But it fails to keep its audience engaged. Though it is aimed at teenagers, and manages to deal very weel with the issues it discusses, it does not do enough to hold its audience. It is not a slapstick comedy, like most productions aimed at young people. Neither does it seek to hold its audience emotionally. So it’s not a tragedy. Or a comedy. Or a tragicomedy. So what is it? It’s a literary
I will compare the sisters background briefly to show their temperament before coming to Canada. I will discuss how choices made shaped both the sisters initial success and failure to Upper Canada. Finally, I will compare the differences in the sisters attitudes and how it is reflected in both their books.
Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search for cultural identity within a smaller community, others are trying to find their place in the majority culture. (Bucher and Hinton, 2010)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles Junior’s journey to discovery of self. As with many developing teens, he finds himself spanning multiple identities and trying to figure out where he belongs. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other” (p.118). On the reservation, he was shunned for leaving to go to a white school. At Reardon, the only other Indian was the school mascot, leaving Junior to question his decision to attend school he felt he didn’t deserve. Teens grappling with bicultural identities can relate to Junior’s questions of belonging. Not only is Junior dealing with the struggle between white vs. Indian identities, but with smaller peer group identities as well. In Wellpinit, Junior is th...
The play concerns a two-week travel to India by two rich middle-aged women, who seem to be empty and frivolous. They both have indifferent and painful memories of the deaths of their sons. Although being friends for many years, it is only in this trip that they get to know each other (and also themselves) by experiencing the humanity of India.
In her work, Razack argues that the factors of colonialism, gendered racial violence, and spatialized justice contributed to the minimization the personal and legal responsibility of Kummerfield and Ternowetsky for violently ending Pamela George’s death (125). Throughout her essay Razack presents various social dichotomies (man vs woman, white vs Indigenous, and rich vs poor) stacked against Pamela and favored the two accused men who murdered her. Razack’s essay complements Clements’ play in many ways, through detailed technical approach to allow her readers to see the reasons why it is important to know the human qualities of a woman who has been discriminated in life and in death. Razack also helps Clements’ purpose to highlight how society and the legal system collectively minimizes and dismisses the violence done to a woman because of her ancestral lineage, choice of occupation, and her imposed societal position society. With the existence of Razack’s essay, it helps support Clements’ purpose for writing her play in honor of the women murdered by
Spirituality is universal to human beings in the sense that each individual searches for a meaning to their life by taking a look at the bigger picture. The Cree author, Tomson Highway, displays the importance of Aboriginal spirituality in his play, The Rez Sisters. In particular, an Aboriginal sacred figure, called Nanabush (Gadacz), attempts to restore lost morality to a reserve known as Wasychigan Hill. Similarly, a Canadian author, Joseph Boyden, introduces a bringer of Christian spirituality named Christophe “Crow”, to a tribe of Huron, in his novel called The Orenda. In The Rez Sisters, Nanabush focuses to return Aboriginal culture to
The women in The Rez Sisters are highly influenced by materialism and White society beliefs. This influence is apparent when one looks at the goals of the sisters, which are acculturated and reflect the attitudes of White society rather than Native society. In Act 1, the women’s aspirations are perverted and extremely acquisitive. Annie wants to “buy a huge record player, the biggest one in the whole world”, Marie-Adele wants to “buy [herself] an island...the most beautiful island in the world” with a “real neat picket fence, real high, long and very, very, very white”, Philomena wants a “toilet... big and wide and very white”, Pelijia wants to “build [herself] a nice paved road”, and Veronique wants to “go shopping for a brand- new stove...the biggest stove on the reserve” so that she can “be the best cook... go to Paris... write a cookbook...become rich and famous” (Highway 5, 35-37). Elements of the American dream like the white picket fence and gross wealth are integral in the women’s speeches, as is the colour white. These short term goals represent an assimilation with White society and are
Identity n. the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, the characteristics determining who or what a thing is. We all have a set of characteristics we define ourselves by, be they cultural, social, religious, or physical. I am a blonde, blue eyed, formerly catholic, bisexual, American female of European descent. To take one of these things away would be to lose a fraction of my self conception, even if some of the items on my list are contradictory or outdated. In her essay, Two Ways to Belong in America, Bharati Mukherjee contrasts her sense of identity with her sister's. Bharati defines herself by where she is presently. In contrast, Mira has attached her identity to where she is from, India. Bharati writes of her sister, "She is here
In The Rez Sisters by Cree playwright Tomson Highway, the family road trip promotes each woman’s understanding of their relationships by creating an environment for personal growth and discovery. The road trip, with the help of Nanabush, helps reconnect the sisters and strengthen their bond so they are prepared for Marie-Adele's death. The inter-family conflicts show how the sisters encourage each other to be better people, survive the struggles of living on the rez, and support each other through hard times. The sisters' fights are usually underlined with their desires to make each other into better people. The sisters are connected by their pursuit of a better life, causing them to push each other towards their goals.
In “Molly Has Her Say,” Margaret Bruchac uses a twenty-something female character who is a graduate student. Molly Marie meets the requirement for the play to deliver the desired message which is the social intercourse between the Natives and the Euro-Americans. Masterfully, Bruchac incorporates dialect to be part of the play. While reading or narrating the story behind the drama, Molly speaks, but does not talk in standard American English. A technique that differs from other plays in this anthology, such as “The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance.” This is important since the playwright wants to differentiate her players, a Native American, from the audience, mainly non-native American.
The Rez Sisters is a Native play written by Tomson Highway. Highway has written this play about seven sisters on a reserve trying to win the bingo to better their lives. The Rez Sisters see the biggest bingo in the world as a way to fulfill both their needs and wants, even though it is all the way in Toronto. Although Marie-Adele and Annie Cook both wanted to win the biggest bingo, their reasons for wanting to win was only to conclude their happiness. In the end they both found a different type of fulfillment they needed was not winning the bingo.
In the play, “The Rez Sisters” by Tomson Highway there are seven closely related Cree women who live on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve. Highway writes his play with lighthearted humor. Yet, Highway’s play has a serious meaning that pushes boundaries and gives the audience an insight into what life is like living on a reserve. Mainly, throughout the play there is a strong message of finding the women’s identity, and empowerment within the women.
Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley is a Southern playwright that has created a newer approach to realism to show that misfortune in feminist theatre is not a reproduction of life but a reevaluation of it. By portraying the love between the sisters in the play, the author illustrates the existence of a female awareness to find and form yourself as a woman.