by Stuart Derdeyn

Canada’s Indian Residential School System is one of the country’s most painful legacies.

After Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially apologized for government’s role in the affair on June 2, 2008, First Nations artists are bringing this hidden history into the light.

Kevin Lorings’ 2009 Governor General Award-winning play Where the Blood Mixes was one of the first theatrical works centering on the residential-school experience. Now award-winning Ontario playwright Drew Hayden Taylor presents God and the Indian.

The Curve Lake First Nations author of such shows as Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth and Girl Who Loved Her Horses is renowned for his side-splitting sense of humour. His latest work ventures into very different territory.

“In an ironic sense, Drew has found humour even here, although probably not as obviously as he does in his other work,” says director Renae Morrisseau. “But there is a world view we hold in our communities to laugh about the human condition and finding healing in that.

“That has always been an intention in his work and is all the more important with the subject matter.”

Pan-handling in front of a Tim Hortons, a Cree woman named Jonny (played by Tantoo Cardinal) sees Anglican Assistant Bishop George King (Michael Kopsa) who she recognizes from her childhood spent at a residential school. She follows him and confronts him as the two are transported back four decades to their mutual experiences at St. David’s School. Through their dialogue comes both illumination and the obvious need for questions of resolution around guilt, healing and moving forward.

“The conversation we have in the Canadian public now that this is a historic fact and the government and religious institutions responses to over the past 150 years are so different,” Morrisseau says.

“But in the past 20 years, we have come to the point where artists are starting to look at residential-school experience and take that dark history, those formulations of forgiveness, all of those sensibilities of compassion and ideals of a good future and tell the story.”

Well known for her theatre, music, TV and film, Morrisseau thinks that God and the Indian allows for the entire public to become engaged in these difficult issues.

As curriculum is developed to teach First Nations history in schools, a body of creative work around that can only contribute to social justice and moving forward.

God and the Indian sees Tantoo Cardinal play Jonny, a Cree woman who recognizes Bishop George King, played by Michael Kopsa, from her experience at a residential school. Photo: Emily Cooper

By combining two characters which to some degree embody such a huge number of distinct issues, Hayden Taylor has created something that serves as a metaphor for contemporary Canadian society.

“That there are these artists such as Drew Hayden Taylor or Juno Award-winning musician Murray Porter who put out an album about the residential school experience and the missing native women looking at this history is timely,” Morrisseau says. “Because the survivors are fewer in number as years go by and a reconciliation — and the boundaries we place upon it — needs to be reached. It’s very complex.”

For her part, she’s humbled by the experience of directing God and the Indian.

God and the Indian runs through April 20, 2013 at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver.

This article first appeared for The Province on April 8, 2013.