Author Tags: Indigenous


Articles: 2 Articles for this author

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Winner of the Dora Award for Outstanding New Play, Drew Hayden Taylor's Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (Talon $14.95), is a sequel to Someday, a 1991 production that introduced the phenemenon called the "scoop up" wherein Native kids are taken away for adoption, often with tragic results.
Formerly named Grace, an adoptee renamed Janice is asked by her birth sister to return to Otter Lake Reserve soon after their mother's funeral. "I knew her for one hour, that was all," protests Grace/Janice. But unwelcome sister stubbornly persuades Grace to face the "invisible enemy of circumstance" -- structural racism -- when she is caught between her urban Toronto lifestyle and Native values.
"I felt Janice wasn't as sympathetic in Someday as she could have been," says Hayden Taylor, an Ojibway who wrote the first draft of Only Drunks during a four-and-half-day writing spree. "It was time for Janice to have her day and face her demons."
The play had a sold-out run in Vancouver and toured successfully throughout B.C. in the spring. As well, Taylor's Toronto at Dreamer's Rock was recently produced at Vancouver's Waterfront Theatre; a collection of his fiction will appear from Talonbooks in the fall.
Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth and Stolen from our Embrace both feature cover art by George Littlechild.
0-88922-384-X

[BCBW 1998]

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"I'm the product of a White father I never knew,"; says Drew Hayden Taylor in Funny, You Don't Look Like One (Theytus $12.95), "and an Ojibway woman who evidently couldn't run fast enough.";
Visually white but raised on the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario, Taylor has become one of Canada's leading Native dramatists and a winner of the Dora Award for outstanding new play in 1995. His collection of 'observations from a Blue eyed Ojibway' recount his frequently complex responses to racism, including an uneventful encounter with W.P. Kinsella.

[BCBW 1997]