England’s Cadbury Chocolate Company sent thousands of Parkin’s maps, printed with its name and logo, to schools throughout the Empire. Generations of Muskokans were schooled in classrooms where the large map, typically on a side wall, enabled alluring geography lessons and daydream fantasies. We subliminally learned that the British Empire and Cadbury were synonymous, which they effectively were because imperial and commercial exploitation entwined as one, the prime rationale for having colonies.
The map’s impressive transcontinental country of Canada had taken form as Queen Victoria signed treaties with Indigenous nations whose land it actually was. She was sovereign. So were the peoples of North America. The treaties were bi-lateral international agreements. A governor signed on behalf of the Imperial Crown, chiefs signed on behalf of their nations, sometimes using their mark, the result a binding contract. The documents were on parchment in English for English-speakers, and took form as wampum belts, a more traditional way to preserve meaning, for Indigenous parties. The “two row” wampum belt of the Iroquois Confederacy, for example, expresses not only details but the core principle of two parallel sovereigns on the same land.
In the resulting governance regime, Canadian courts have upheld treaty provisions, but, more often, governments have dishonoured obligations. With Canada slipping out of its colonial harness, the Crown’s duties and powers devolved to Canadian governments who did not envisage a relationship between sovereign peoples but, increasingly, saw Indigenous people as dependents requiring management.
Parliament’s 1875 Indian Act made native people wards of the state, controlled by Indian Agents. Decades of taking additional lands, removing children from their families, and imposing other forms of subjugation debilitated First Nation peoples and cultures. Yet with resilient force, Indigenous people have been recovering, taking charge, and asserting rights, even as “unfinished business” frames everything.
In the Kawartha Lakes to our east, James Whetung began restocking manoomin (wild rice) where it had once flourished before settlers arrived. Disgruntled cottagers created a bizarre confrontation. Whetung’s friend, accomplished author and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor of Curve Lake First Nation, wrote a captivating play about this all-Canadian culture clash in a Muskoka-like setting. The Tarragon Theatre’s Toronto production in 2018, and again this year, of the two-person drama deserved its rave reviews. On tour it’s played theatres from Montreal to Parry Sound, Collingwood to Orillia.
Taylor gives fresh understanding, in a humorous yet edgy critique of how Indigenous people and settlers co-habit the same land yet see it differently. And how, if ever speaking directly, they pretty much talk past one another anyway, by virtue of holding different values.
What Thompson Highway’s play “Drylips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing” did in 1989 to vividly portray Christianity’s impact on men of a reserve, Drew Taylor’s “Cottagers and Indians” does for today’s version of our enduring cultural divide, with a lighter yet sharp touch about contemporary “truth and reconciliation” issues.
An astute Muskoka theatre producer oughta to book it.
