Vancouver-based Secwepemc-Ktunaxa playwright, poet, and storyteller Vera Manuel died at Vancouver General Hospital on January 22 at the age of 61. She was the eldest daughter of Grand Chief George Manuel, the first president of the National Indian Brotherhood, and spiritual leader Marceline Manuel. She was also a healing workshop coordinator who managed Storyteller Theatre in Vancouver and the first recipient of National World Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award as coordinated by Vancouver's poetry event organizer Ariadne Sawyer. Manuel's works include The Strength of Indian Women, a play about residential-school life that was staged through-out North America and published in Two Plays about Residential Schools (along with a play by Larry Loyie). It concerns four elders preparing for a teenaged girl's coming-of-age feast. In the process, they share secrets of their incarceration in residential schools.

Manuel's family sent information to the media upon her death: "Her work was honoured with inclusion at the Native American Women Playwrights Program, housed at Maima University, in Oxford, Ohio. Her poetry has appeared in various publications, most recently in ROCKSALT: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry. She was given a Life-time Achievement Award by the World Poetry organization in Vancouver. The Aboriginal Writer's Collective will be arranging the publication of her work in the near future. She was most recently Poet-in-Resident with the Aboriginal Media Lab. She is survived by her loving dog U'tspo and four loving brothers; Arthur, Richard, George Jr., and Ara; her four loving sisters; Emaline, Doreen, Martha and Ida; and her numerous loving nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her mother, Marceline Paul; her father, George Manuel Sr.; and her brother Robert (Bobby) Manuel.";

The World Poetry Reading Series & The Aboriginal Writer's Collective presented a tribute to Vera Manuel at the Vancouver Public Library on June 21, 2010.

BOOKS:

Manuel, Vera & Larry Loyie. Two Plays About Residential School (Vancouver: Living Traditions, 1998)

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry
by Vera Manuel (author) and Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, Emalene A. Manuel (editors)  (University of Manitoba Press 2019)

[BCBW 2019 Alan Twigg]

REVIEW

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry
by Vera Manuel (author) and Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, Emalene A. Manuel (editors)

Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019
$24.95 / 9780887558368

Reviewed by Diana French

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Manuel is best known for her plays, including The Strength of Indian Women (1992) and Every Warrior’s Song. Now Manuel’s work has been gathered into Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry, from the University of Manitoba Press, edited by Michelle Coupal (University of Regina), Deanna Reder (Simon Fraser University), Joanne Arnott (UBC), and Vera Manuel’s sister Emalene Manuel – Ed.

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Between the mid 1880s and the mid 1990s, successive federal governments operated residential schools across Canada to educate Indigenous children. The plan was to abolish Indigenous culture and replace it with Canadian customs. The assimilation process included conversion to Christianity. The government contracted churches, many of them Roman Catholic, to manage the institutions. Although four generation of students went through the schools, assimilation failed in the long term and the impact of the process was different for each batch of students.

Author Vera Manuel was a powerful and prolific writer. Honouring the Strength of Indian Women is a collection of her plays, stories, poems, and essays. She used her literary talents not only to tell the traumatic stories of residential school survivors, but to develop programs to help the victims heal. Although she doesn’t ignore male students, the personal histories of the third generation of women students are at the heart of her work. That generation was particularly dysfunctional.

Vera (Kulilu Patki, Butterfly Woman) was born in 1949 and grew up on the Neskonlith Reserve in British Columbia’s interior. Her father, George Manuel (Secwépemc) was an activist and political leader well known in Canada and internationally. Her mother, Marceline Paul (Ktunaxa) was a drug and alcohol counsellor, cultural leader, and respected elder. Both parents attended residential school. George didn’t speak of his school days and Marceline didn’t share her story until Vera was an adult; but nonetheless  their experiences affected their family.


 

Vera attended public school, where she once was the only Indian student. She went on to study history, Indigenous culture, and writing at UBC and Langara College in Vancouver before going to live in Los Angeles with her sister Emalene. She started writing when she returned to Vancouver in the late 1980s, when she was in her late thirties.

Her first play, Song of the Circle, which focuses on abuse and healing, was written for a youth conference in 1989. That same year she began co-writing a training manual for a national organization for treaty directors; this was the beginning of her career as an author, educator, performer, healer, and activist. Along with her drama therapy programs she developed curricula, was often a keynote speaker at Canadian and international conferences, and worked with other activists in creating educational videos, CDs, and films.

Her well-known play, The Strength of Indian Women, first performed in Vancouver in 1992 and published in 1998, was subsequently performed widely in Canada and the U.S. It features four residential school victims telling their individual stories. Only one of Vera’s stories, “The Abyss,” was published, but her spellbinding poems appeared in anthologies and she was a featured poet with World Poetry. Many of her poems reflect personal issues, and together they earned her a World Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award. The largest collection of her poetry is in this book.

In writing about residential schools, Vera was ahead of her time. She died five years before Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) recommended that Indigenous history be included in kindergarten to Grade 12 student curriculum. Her writing, displayed here in its variety and power, certainly qualifies for school curricula.

Honouring The Strength Of Indian Women paints a vivid picture of some dark days in Canadian history. In addition to presenting Vera’s writing, editors Emalene Manuel, Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, and Joanne Arnott make their own contributions — Emalene in the introduction and the others in Afterword.

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Diana French has called the Cariboo Chilcotin her home since 1951, when she came to teach in a one-room school. She married Bob French, the son of a pioneer family, and they lived in different parts of the area before settling in Williams Lake in 1970. Along with raising five sons, Diana continued to teach, and later worked as a reporter then editor for the Williams Lake Tribune. She still writes a weekly column for that paper. She is the author of The Road Runs West: A Century Along the Bella Coola/ Chilcotin Road (Harbour Publishing) and co-authored, with Rick Blacklaws, Ranchland: British Columbia’s Cattle Country (Harbour Publishing). She lives in Williams Lake.