“God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Wasserman, Jerry
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2004
• Subjects: History; Cultural Studies; First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcs.39.1.23; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/jcs.39.1.23

Just as revelations of massive abuse at residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damages done to First Nations by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Ought a Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill’s Sisters were the first plays to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no overt reference to the residential school experience. Sisters looks at a Catholic residential school but focusses on the white nuns rather than the Native children. In the context of residential school histories and literature, this essay examines the plays’ theatrical forms and silences with specific reference to trauma theory and a series of debates in 1988-1989 around the issues of Native peoples going public about their experiences of the schools and non-Native writers appropriating Native stories.