I suppose I should begin by saying that this week's book is actually a play, one I didn't know much about until recently and am still learning more about, and given that the issues I think it speaks to are also much greater than my understanding of them, I'd like to point out that there are a great host of things about which I simply don't know enough to speak with any authority to, and this is one of them. The standoff at Caledonia between Six Nations band members, OPP officers, Caledonia residents, and developers which came to a head a few months ago is not new news by any stretch of the imagination, but luckily I don't run on a 24-hour news cycle, so I can write about what I'm curious about and think should get a chance to be heard.

This is also a good chance to somewhat explain the concept behind this site. Last year, my friend asked me to come up with a way to sort of summarise things going on in our community and around the world for him; a sort of Newsnet Lite. I quickly discovered that I am exceedingly poor at doing just that. I can't summarise if my life depends on it, and as may be evident, I like to talk for a long time about things.

I am, however, pretty devoted to reading, and I was curious to see if I could find a way to tell him about what I was reading in light of things happening on this planet we call home. More often than not, though, what I'm reading is wrapped up in social and cultural and political contexts I don't have the whole picture about, so I end up doing a little bit of a background to place it squarely amidst the rushing currents of time and so on, etc. This is the process I have pried open here, and this is the process I am still going through with a play called The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, by Canadian playwright George Ryga.

When Rita Joe was first produced in 1967, Canadian theatre in Canadian theatres was, fittingly, slim; a successful, talked-about play dealing with aboriginals, well... I was born about two decades later, but it's still incredible to me. When the Vancouver Playhouse put Ryga's piece up on stage, they must have had some inkling of what a groundbreaking, and necessary, play it was. The story follows the journey of the eponymous young Rita Joe, a woman adrift in a city, caught between it and the reserve she comes from, and volleyed around from government program to social net to court again and again. It is not your average piece of theatre, even for a contemporary audience. And director George Bloomfield must have felt something of this when he cast Chief Dan George as Rita's father, in a part nearly written for him, the man captured so iconically in the image on the Talonbooks edition's cover.

I've only recently become familiar with Chief Dan George, but the role certainly demands a certain natural weight from the actor. Rita's father, David Joe, is a patient, if conflicted, man. His wisdom seems to come not from any need to trumpet hard-earned credentials or show signs of his greatness, but from a well of strength that lets him bear the loss of his daughter to other possibilities and a desire to rise above anger and disappointment. Rita's lover, Jaimie Paul, walks with him in one scene on the reserve (possibly a dream of Rita's), and shouts his frustration at the futures closing down before him:

The Globe and Mail's Murrary Campbell quite rightly pointed out in April that there is a question here, when critics of those protesting say that "the rule of law must prevail," of whose law we're talking about. When Six Nations members announced on February 28 that they would begin occupying the land Henco has sketched out for the Douglas Creek Estates development, a conflict was physically manifested between what Campbell calls "the law of the conquering race that apportions land and offers clear deeds of ownership... [and]the law of the natives who sanctify the land--the back of the great turtle--and do not believe it should be commercialized."

Two different stories, two different ways of life. What to do?

Ryga, a Ukrainian-Canadian writer from Northern Alberta, seems to say in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe that every attempt at benevolence from the... well, the white society, is destined to compound the oppression of Rita and others like her. Adrift in the city, called to summon character witnesses she cannot, she is condemned over and over and over in every act of "goodness" tried by her teachers, her priest, the workers at the soup kitchen... Even in its time it was criticised for being overly blunt and wide in its condemnation of what comes off as systematic oppression. But there is something that rings true in Rita's bitter query when her old school teacher's impressions of her behaviour as a child come back to haunt her: "One letter... one letter for a lifetime?"

When the UN Human Rights Council almost unanimously passed a declaration last month which called for an expansion of indigenous rights worldwide, only two countries refused to endorse the document, which has been in the works for decades; Canada and Russia. Australian network ABC News reported that,

Labels: aboriginal stuff, books