From 1870 until 1996, over 150,000 indigenous people were forced into more than 130 residential schools throughout Canada. Around 80,000 survivors are alive today. Drew Hayden Taylor’s play, God and the Indian, a two-person play about a homeless residential school survivor named Johnny, arrives in Vancouver this week.
Johnny, played by Vancouver’s Lisa C. Ravensbergen, runs into a priest whom she believes is her past abuser and argues with the priest, who denies her accusations.
“I think her biggest obstacle is the priest's resistance to the validity and the truth of what her accusations are, as far as the play goes," said Ravensbergen. "I think in a larger way, systemically, the system as it's set up, that we all live in right now, is her greatest obstacle in that it doesn’t validate her very existence. She references herself a number of times that she’s a ghost and mentions that acknowledgement is vital to her journey that she’s in during the play.”
The play's Vancouver run coinciding with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report is no accident; there is hope that the play will continue to raise awareness of residential school abuse. However, Ravensbergen is not convinced that the final report will accomplish what it set out to do.
“What concerns me, is that mainstream society -- those of privilege, those who are administering that document, those who are not indigenous, they’ll mistake the word ‘reconciliation’ for assimilation, and so the cycle will continue…. I think that there’s a kind of obstinate ignorance on peoples’ parts to believe that that document is going to make substantial headway in a short period of time when we’re talking about generations and generations and generations of people that are survivors of what that document is trying to make up for.
"A document can’t make up for that loss. It has to happen in action, not just in sentiment, and to me part of that action is reexamining power in this country, and reexamining the distribution of freedom and lack of freedom and lack of civil rights and lack of civility towards indigenous people in this country.”
Over the last several decades, over 1,000 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered. When Prime Minister Harper was asked about launching an inquiry, he responded, “It isn’t high on our radar, to be honest.” Ravensbergen views this stance as nothing new.
“If nothing else, they are consistent.… They don’t want to see the light because to see the light means that they have to change. To change means you have to accept responsibility, and that’s the exact last thing that government -- especially Harper -- wants to do.”
Ravensbergen believes that wide spread change is necessary in order for the government to improve its relationship with indigenous people, and it starts from the top down. Instead of more reports and statements from the government, she said that there must be real action. One course of action is changing national public school curriculum and rewriting textbooks to reflect the full story of who perpetrated these policies, these laws and these abuses, why they perpetrated, and how they hid that.
Ravensbergen hopes that people will come see the play in order to hear new truths and find themselves in a new relationship to their previously held truth.
God and the Indian runs May 20-30 at the Firehall Arts Centre.