Bruce Barton, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama
Old Questions and New: The First National Native Playwrights Summit

In the fall of 2003, Native Earth Performing Arts of Toronto was awarded a modest grant from the Canada Council to fund the first National Native Playwrights Summit. Yvette Nolan, playwright and Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, asked if I would help her imagine the meeting’s objectives and design—to, as she put it, “dramaturg” her ideas and aspirations for the event. While flattered, I was also, of course, intimidated. The task of organizing this landmark event moved well beyond the logistical challenges that accompany most national gatherings. Far more complicated and taxing would be the task of devising a summit structure that would accurately and effectively respond to a vital, emerging, and significantly diverse community of writers (and, as it worked out, actors, directors, artistic directors, and administrators). Certainly, the only intelligent option open to me was to keep the precarious and presumptuous nature of my involvement well out in the open. In line with her status within the Aboriginal theatre network and her personal integrity, Nolan was less daunted—but only somewhat so. Sensitive to the strength of contradictory perspectives and passions within a community of shared issues and interests, Nolan was seeking to devise a meeting in which persistent, recurring questions could be asked with focus and clarity, and in which new, more effective and progressive queries could be framed. Focusing on key issues of Native Drama, Native Performance, and the idea(s) of Community, the resulting framework yielded both predictable impasses and surprising, gratifying steps forward. This paper will, with inevitable brevity, outline the evolution of the summit, from inception through realization, and consider some of the key developments to emerge in relation to Aboriginal identity, opportunity, and strategy.