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Preview: Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian

TOMBS OF THE VANISHING INDIAN by Marie Clements, directed by Yvette Nolan, with Michelle St. John, Falen Johnson, Paula-Jean Prudat and Nicole Joy-­Fraser. Presented by Native Earth ­Performing Arts and red diva projects at Buddies in Bad Times (12 Alexander). Opens tonight (Thursday, March 10) and runs to March 27, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. Pwyc-$25. 416-975-8555. See listing


“None of us speaks our own language,” says Michelle St. John.

The two-time Gemini Award winner is talking about herself and her First Nations castmates in Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian. “We all have some words, but nobody can put a sentence together,” she says, smiling although the thought troubles her.

Marie Clements’s play sees St. John playing The Lone Woman, a part that has her speaking chiefly Gabrieliño. The near-extinct language of the Tongva may not be her own, but it’s a fitting theatrical surrogate for her own Eastern Algonquian dialect.

For St. John, speaking Gabrieliño onstage involves peeling back the layers of colonization.

“When you lose your language, you also lose your world view – your cosmology,” she says.

Tombs also reveals one of the most insidious policies in American history. Set primarily in the 1970s, the play includes a narrative about the eugenics-based practice of sterilizing native women, often without their knowledge – a program that ended only in 1981.

Sterilization was considered a means, says St. John, of easing poverty and overpopulation. “Horrifying, but it’s one of the many ways of making a people disappear.”

Despite its grave subject matter, Tombs explores cultural and sexual control with some cheek.

The actor also plays the mother of three estranged sisters whose parallel stories comprise Tombs’ main plot. Falen Johnson plays middle daughter Miranda, an aspiring actor who catches a break in Hollywood after being cast as a stock Indian princess type – a situation St. John is hip to, having moved to L.A. in the 90s for a time.

“Miranda’s experience of Hollywood is similar to mine, and mine was 20 years later than hers. Nearly every series had its ‘Indian episode,’ where they’d have the wise old chief, or a young ingenue for the lead male character to flirt with. That place,” she laughs, “was not for human beings!”

Although the theatre isn’t without its challenges, things aren’t as bad for native stage performers. This spring, St. John begins working with a cast of 49 other women (including Johnson) on Necessary Angel’s Tout Comme Elle as part of the Luminato Festival.

Still, the question of disappearing First Nations is unavoidable.

“Vanishing in Canada happened in many stages,” she says, “boarding school being the most protracted. Disease, war, starvation, relocation – full meal deal,” she adds with the tiniest ironic smile.

St. John believes that the way to break that deal is through speaking the so-called dead languages and making known the generations lost through sterilization.

“Invisibility can kill you,” she says, quoting Clements’s earlier play The Unnatural And Accidental Women.

“My hope is that whoever chooses to see Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian learns that we’ve not disappeared.”

stage@nowtoronto.com

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