Collaborative playwrights dig into difficult history

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This article was published 25/09/2024 (752 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Darrell is an early bird and I’m a nighthawk,” says playwright Dale Lakevold, delineating the most obvious difference between himself and longtime writing partner Darrell Racine.

Since their first collaboration in 1997, Minnedosa’s Lakevold and Brandon’s Racine have honed their collaborative process to accommodate the peculiarities of their independent sleep schedules and separate geographies, choosing to convene in Racine’s living room for five-hour sessions.

“I become incapable closer to six,” says Racine, an assistant professor of native studies at Brandon University, where he first met Lakevold, an assistant professor in English and creative writing.

The nighthawk and the early bird typically spend about three weeks discussing their prospective work while supping on Racine’s home cooking. Lakevold takes notes on a yellow legal pad perched on his lap atop a wooden cutting board — a fitting precursor to his edits, made each night before being applied during the next day of the creative jam session.

Nocturnal thoughts that refuse to lie gently figure deeply in Racine and Lakevold’s latest work.

Opening at the Rachel Browne Theatre today, (Sept. 25), Owl Calling is centred on one family’s experience navigating the independent assessment process, or IAP, established as a method of resolution to claims of serious physical, sexual or emotional abuse suffered at Indian residential schools.

When the process was conceived, it was expected to resolve about 12,500 claims, according to the Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat. By the time the application deadline — Sept. 19, 2012 — came around, more than 38,000 claim applications were submitted.

Ultimately, the secretariat reported, 100 per cent of the claims received were resolved.

Racine, a Métis man whose grandmother sparingly shared horrific stories from her own time at the Guy Hill School on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, recognized through conversations with colleagues and relatives at the time of the assessment that even the resolution led to problems.

“It became apparent the individuals who went through it were retraumatized by having to go through the process, and when we started looking at that process, it became very apparent it was a legal model with compensation based on western medical interpretations,” he says.

“There was an assumption, I think, early on in Indigenous and First Nations communities, that the process would assist in healing. It didn’t seem robust enough to actually assist through the entirety of the healing process. And very well, there could have been a few that it did assist, and it did work out, but it mostly seemed a retraumatization, and the aftercare was not significant enough in order to assist those individuals.”

Ultimately, Racine believes “the process in itself let down Indigenous people and allowed the federal government to say, ‘OK, we’ve dealt with it,’ as if that trauma would be lifted and everybody would forgive. And that’s just not the way that it works.”

Racine and Lakevold’s collaborations, including their first play, Misty Lake, were inspired by contemporary attempts to comprehend similar stories.

That play, inspired by Racine’s interviews with a residential school survivor named Elizabeth Samuel, followed a young Métis journalist from Winnipeg who travelled to a northern Dene reserve to speak with a survivor named Mary.

It premièred in 1997, one year after the Gordon Reserve school — the last of its kind in Canada — was closed and demolished.

As a playwright, Racine says he drew early inspiration from Manitoba writer Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, which introduced him to the idea that “if you’re going to talk about trauma, you’d better also talk about humour.”

Lakevold was inspired by August Strindberg’s concept of “making visible the inner mythic world” as it interacts with the characters’ universe.

In Owl Calling, one family tries its best to do a little bit of both, exploring its internalized trauma as it collides with the external requirements of day-to-day life, including the pressure to “move on.”

Even before it was staged, Owl Calling received acclaim.

Under its original title, IAP, it won the best full-length play award in Theatre BC’s Canadian National Playwriting Competition. The pair won the same award for 2005’s Stretching Hide, which was subsequently produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba.

Owl Calling is produced by Minnedosa-based Root Sky Theatre Company, with a cast featuring a mix of rising and established talent, including recent National Theatre School of Canada graduate Calla Adubofour-Poku, a newly minted Manitoban originally from unceded Stz’uminus territory; Winnipeg artist and drama therapist Leah Borchert; and Braiden Houle, an Anishinaabe and Dakota actor who’s performed with Manitoba Theatre for Young People and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

Three stars of RMTC’s production of Roseanna Deerchild’s The Secret to Good Tea feature in Owl Calling: Jeremy Proulx, James Dallas Smith and Tracey Nepinak, who appeared in the first production of Misty Lake in 1997.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com