Violence against Indigenous Women and Dramatic Subversion
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linkage that eventually resulted in a relationship of conquest, possession and exploitation. In particular, “the project of colonial sexual violence established the ideology1 that Native bodies are inherently violable and by extension, that Native lands are also violable” (Smith 2005: 12).
Post-Colonial Drama: Misrepresentations of Indigenous Women Jo-Ann Episkenew (2009: 147–48) aptly notes that theatre is a “particularly attractive genre for Indigenous people looking for a creative outlet for their stories” because, in part, theatrical productions are not the creation of solitary individuals and a common value among the many Indigenous cultures is the value of community. Some Indigenous writers take this argument even further, suggesting that contemporary Indigenous theatre is not an adaption of the Western theatre tradition, but is based upon traditional Indigenous performance culture. Cree dramatist Floyd Favel Starr claims that the concept of “Native Performance Culture” could be described as developing practices of our ancestors, which came about as an intuition born out of personal, cultural and universal need (Starr 1997: 83). Native Performance Culture is instrumentally designed to interrupt the colonial fragmenting processes. Unlike Western performance, contemporary Indigenous theatre can be traced to the history and terrain of this country. Like Episkenew, Drew Hayden Taylor (1997: 140) acknowledges theatre as the “predominant expressive vehicle for Canada’s Native people,” arguing, in a similar vein to Starr and Manossa, that “theatre is just a logical extension of storytelling.” Performance was certainly a part of Indigenous cultural interchange long before European contact, yet, so far as critical reception is concerned, Indigenous theatre did not enter the North American mainstream until the late 1980s (Knowles 2009a: v). Before European colonization, North American Indigenous Peoples partook in elaborate performances — often religious in nature — incorporating props, masks and smoke effects. In Canada, many of these traditional performances were illegal under the federal Indian Act of the late nineteenth century. It was not until 1951 that the Act was revised to allow these ceremonial dramas to recommence (see Spradley 1972). However, critical discussion of performance across cultures has been relatively late coming to Canada. This is largely due to the fact that the official policy of multiculturalism, adopted in 1971 and entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in
