Jerry Wasserman, UBC
“God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: Native People, the Church, and the Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays

Just around the time that revelations of massive abuses at Canadian residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damage done to First Nations people and culture by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill’s Sisters, produced within a few months of one another in 1989, were the first plays, to my knowledge, to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no specific reference to the residential school experience. Yet it seems to me unequivocally a “residential school play.” Sisters looks specifically at one Catholic residential school but focuses on the experience of the white nuns rather than the Native children. My paper looks at both plays in light of residential school histories and speculates about the plays’ theatrical forms and their silences. Why is Sisters marked by the theatrical absence of the school’s Native victims? Why does Dry Lips omit any explicit reference to residential schools—a subject about which Highway speaks and writes passionately in interviews and, a few years later, in his autobiographical novel Kiss of the Fur Queen? To answer these questions I look closely at the two plays and at a series of debates in 1988-89 which swirled around the issues of Native people going public about their residential school experiences and non-Native writers appropriating Native voices and stories.