Robin Whittaker: Nuclear
Families
and Burning Re-Visions: TimeSpace Rehistoricizations in Marie Clements’
Burning
Vision
In Marie Clements’
"Canadian" play Burning Vision (2002), we witness the vision
of a Sahtœ Dene See-er in the late1880s foreseeing uranium mined by
Dene miners
in the Northwest Territories in the 1940s, then dropped on a people
that
"looked like us" — the inhabitants of Hiroshima. Clements’ Native
character Little Boy — standing in for the voice of the earth, the
voice of the
un-mined uranium, the re/claimed native voice speaking out from the
dark
against the all-too-familiar colonizing voice of Our Home and Native
Land — fears
discovery because the discoverers "lay claims on you, not knowing
you’ve
known yourself for thousands of years." (20 - 21) In
order to address issues of ethnic,
geographical and nationalist inclusion in the traditionally exclusive
histories
of the Japanese, Dene and white Canadian and American characters
represented in
Clements’ play, I argue that Burning Vision counters and
re-encounters
received histories in ways that deny the colonizer/aggressor’s
oppressive
strategies of mapping the space of the "undiscovered country," and of
grafting linear histories onto indigenous and targeted peoples. Viewed
in terms
of Ric Knowles’ timespace dramaturgy, Clements’ play remaps
post-Hiroshima