SOURCE: "Let Us Now Combine Mythologies: The Theatrical Art of Tomson Highway," in Border Crossings, Vol. 1, No. 4, December, 1992, pp. 22-7.

[In the interview below, Highway discusses his upbringing, Native literature, mythology, and the structure of his plays.]

[Enright]: You were born on a trap line 176 miles north of Lynn Lake in the upper reaches of Manitoba. What was that experience like?

[Highway]: Back in the early '50s it was very basic. There were 12 in my family and most of us were born in tents and we lived in tents almost year 'round. In the summer time we travelled by canoe and in the winter time we travelled by dog sled. We lived a very nomadic life; my father trapped in the winter and fished in the summer and hunted in between. It was an exquisite lifestyle.

A dozen children! Your family was almost its own tribe.

Yes. It was beautiful. I mean, we weren't in a state of constant ecstasy but we certainly weren't unhappy, either, even though it was very harsh in the winter. It's always been easy for me to go back to those days in my mind.

Doesn't Philomenia say in Rez Sisters that the place gets in your blood, you can't get rid of it and it can't get rid of you? Is that a reference to the way you feel about the North as well?

Yeah. I go back as often as I can, twice a year on average, once in the winter and once in the summer. I believe that a sense of place applies to everybody. Where you come from, where your roots are—all that is extremely strong. I don't think anybody really is able to get rid of it.

So even when you're not in the North, when you're working in Toronto, or attending a play in Edinburgh or Paris, there's a way in which it will constantly come back and renew you?

Yeah. I come back because of that and certainly having family up there makes it even more necessary to return. But I've frequently thought about going to live in Europe again. We live in the age of FAX machines and telephones, so you really can live anywhere on the face of the earth and still do what you do, or at least do what I do, and I have this fantasy of living in Paris.

Why would that be your fantasy?

For a number of reasons. I've been there many, many times over the years and I love the city, the language and the sense of anonymity the culture provides. I wouldn't go and live there forever, but a two- or three-year stretch would be nice. But I'd have to come back; I mean, I love this country too much. Part of the reason I'd want to live in a situation like that is to avoid the pressures. You do get a tremendous number of requests to speak here, to do this interview there, do this charity, do that benefit, sit on this committee or that board. After a while it gets to be too much. The demand on your time is extreme and privacy becomes a rare commodity.

Has that become a problem for you?

To a certain extent. I certainly do seem to get a lot of demands on my time. I haven't had a new play produced in four years because I just haven't had any time to write. The other reason I'd like to live in Paris comes out of my personal life. I'm proud of the fact that I'm considered to be among a group of artists whose statements are unequivocally direct and honest. But it's also earned me a certain degree of notoriety, not to mention a certain number of enemies, and after a few vicious attacks on your own person you can be hurt. I just don't have time to deal with that kind of hatred. So there's a certain part of me that wants to hide away.

Have the attacks come about because of the frankness with which you've presented aboriginal culture?

Well, it goes beyond aboriginal culture. The material I write is layered and certainly a very obvious layer is the aboriginal component. But I think I've studied enough Western and other art to have achieved a level of sophistication where I write beyond the specifics of my aboriginal background and get to the universal human condition. At this point in my career I'm really heavily into the whole gender issue, the male/female dichotomy, the sexual hierarchy, which is an area that knows no racial boundaries.

Partly because these things are layered constructions, they can be very easily misunderstood and a lot of people do misunderstand them. I've been called everything from a racist to a sexist and I've been accused of purposely promoting racism and sexism. It reached the point where I've been called the living reincarnation of Satan. I've come across situations where people I used to know will refuse to talk to me on the street. I've even had people who are very Christian, and supposedly very kind and loving, turn and walk away from me.

But surely you're not surprised? After all, you were raised in residential schools where the discrepancy between the practice and the preaching of Christianity must have been fairly apparent.

In a perverse sort of way I'm almost thrilled by the occurrences, because they represent tangible proof that the theory and the practice are two entirely different animals. Which is an opinion I've always held.

I want to pick up this notion of your sophistication coming out of the study of Western culture. The plays are highly canny in a theatrical way. I mean Pierre St. Pierre is a kind of Mr. Malaprop; he tells a character "not to contribute your elders," for "contradict." He plays with language and makes bizarre, unconscious mistakes. Now, you must be aware that there are characters going back to Shakespeare and the Restoration who abuse language in just that way. When you conceive of a play and its characters, do you deliberately build in a literary tradition which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the aboriginal culture you're writing about?

It's not a deliberate choice. But there's two or three answers to that question. In order of importance, the first answer is that I find the whole process of writing to be so difficult, so painful, so humiliating and so humbling that I'm grateful for anything that works. The actual act of writing is an act of desperation at the best of times. So the first answer is that ultimately those characters and situations came out because I really didn't have a choice. There's a point where they start running on their own and they pull you. Secondly, those kind of characters are universal—they're story-telling conventions that exist in every culture. The concept of the hero is a universal and so is the heroic myth. And the comic or clown character. I also have a strong musical background and I believe that the process of writing plays is very much a musical act. Ultimately, you seduce an audience, you lull it into a kind of hypnotic state. To me the human mechanism responds naturally and subliminally to the concept of rhythm, the origins of which lie with the basic beat of the human heart.

Is that one of the ways you structure your plays, as if they were musical arrangements?

Yes, and that's the way it works psychologically on the human brain and on human emotions. You can subdivide that whole note, which is the beat of the human heart, into quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and complex configurations thereof, including variations and combinations of pitch, meaning, counterpart, harmony and so forth. What I'm saying is that I transfer all that knowledge into the construction of a line.

You score your language and the rhythm of the play that closely?

It's not a conscious process but ultimately that's what it boils down to. I'll give you a very blatant example. I find it comes naturally to create one character as a legato and contrast him with a staccato, so that in Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, there are the two guys who enter the play at the very top, one of whom, Creature Nataways, is a staccato character, and then the character with him is Big Joey, who talks in monosyllables. Then there are lyrical characters like Simon Starblanket who's full of dream visions and lilting, vaulting passages. And there are other variations, not all of which I can explain. Ultimately, for me writing a play is very much like writing a symphony.

You also use music more directly. The wail of the harmonica is used throughout Dry Lips, as is Kitty Wells. Are these part of the symphonic play you're making, as well? How do these songs and instruments interact with your musical characters?

During the initial productions of a new play, I'm usually very much a part of the rehearsal process. I usually end up playing the role of musical director, being very precise about choosing the music and choosing the rhythms of the music. If I want a drum to go boom boom I say so and if I want to change that drum to go digga dum, then I say that and we put it in. For instance, in Dry Lips the first musical sound you hear, other than the human voice, is the harmonica. In Rez Sisters it's the drum. Those are choices I made. And at the opening there's an upward climbing glissando, sort of like the opening of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." That was a very deliberate choice. I said to the harmonica player, "I would like you to start out with a trill on the low A flat, A flat combined with B flat, and then I would like you to do this glissando climbing all the way up to the high B flat above the high C." That's the way I talk in the rehearsal process.

I thought you'd given music up after you stopped playing classical piano, but you haven't given it up at all. You've just found a different way for it to operate in your art.

Absolutely.

You said earlier that there's always a hero. One of the things your plays seem to do is to create a mythology of the common folk. You have a female bingo player who's a legend for playing 27 cards simultaneously; another of your characters actually drinks a Kitty Wells record, presumably out of affection. These are stories that are part of a common mythology; if we were living in Greece, one assumes they would be our Olympians. Are you conscious of creating a substitute mythology?

Yes. One of my most passionate pursuits when I was at university was the study of mythology. Mostly European—specifically classical Christian, Celtic and Teutonic mythology—and its application in literature by the artists of those respective cultures. The first example that surfaces in my mind is William Butler Yeats. In Teutonic mythology, the most obvious example is Richard Wagner. And then, of course, there's Cree mythology. And making a comparative study of all those traditions of story-telling.

Was this a systematic study?

Very much so. I did go out and very specifically apply myself to the study of these mythologies. At some point I found out the process of myth-making is the same in every culture and it comes from a very basic human impulse—the need to communicate. To make people laugh, to make people enjoy and celebrate life. Let's say there was a party in a hotel room and the party got raided. The actual party was on the second floor. People are getting arrested but this one guy, who is the pusher, jumps out the window. It's only the second floor, so he takes off, unharmed and unheroic. But by the time the incident has gone from story-teller "A" to story-teller "X" a whole year has passed. By now the guy jumped out of the 15th floor of the hotel and hung on by his fingernails the entire time the police were investigating the party participants. He becomes a character of heroic proportions.

Robert Graves has done an exemplary job with the Greek myths in showing their actual historical and social beginnings. What intrigues me about your process is you also inherit a culture that already exists, the culture of the trickster Nanabush. The mythology is complete and intact. So how do you remake that mythology and continue to make it live? Can you pick it up and transform it, mix it with other stories without any worry?

I think with communication technology as highly developed as it is now it's pretty well impossible for a person to limit himself to his own specific mythology. Even though I come from northern Manitoba and from a Cree background, I've become very much a part of mythologies worldwide. I don't resist the impulse to create the characters that I do. And I don't resist the impulse to combine mythologies because ultimately I believe they are universal and that their archetypes are all the same. I was really surprised at the response to Dry Lips because I didn't realize that non-Native people were so ignorant of their own mythology. Putting it in the bluntest way possible, I was shocked to discover main-stream audiences knew more about the size of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts, Michael Jackson's most recent nose job and Madonna's most recent fuck than they did about their own systems of gods and goddesses. So that a Cree Indian from caribou country ended up knowing more about Hera and Zeus, about Apollo and Dionysius, about Mars and Mercury and about the roles they played within that society, than the people the stories belonged to.

So I assume as a result they didn't understand the importance of the central characters in your plays, either?

That's right. Dry Lips is the story of Hera and Zeus. Zeus was forever philandering because the Greeks were very much into the celebration of the sensual, visceral self. It's the same with Cree mythology.

This is the Zeus who had the imagination and the capability to turn up on earth in any number of guises—a swan or a bull.

Or a calf and so forth. He would come down and make love to mortal girls and then he'd go back up and Hera, the Queen of the Sky, would find out about it and shake the universe. Thunderbolts would fly and earthquakes would happen—that's the way the Greeks explained these natural disasters. So if you dig through all the layering in Dry Lips what happens at the simplest level is that Hera Keechigeesik—which in Cree means "Hera of the great sky"—finds her husband Zachary Jeremiah—I couldn't name him Zeus but I got close enough—in bed with another woman. Hera characteristically flies into a jealous rage and beats the living daylights out of the other woman, knocks a puck out of her bosom and only when that puck is released, after the whole world has been turned upside down, do things come back to normal. And it's Hera who is like a puppet mistress who manipulates her husband's dream world. Ultimately she puts back into his hands the reincarnation of herself and so you get the return of the goddess. A lot of people didn't understand that. All they saw was a woman being treated brutally.

That's a convincing explanation. Because you could be accused of being sentimental at the end of Dry Lips, in the way that you create the perfect aboriginal family in a kind of flawless, harmonic world. Coming out of the horror of the bar room scene and of the crucifix rape, the ending seems positively saccharine.

I put it in the dream context for a number of reasons. Number one, I wanted to make a distinction between so-called aboriginal societies and so-called industrialized societies, whether we're talking about the Indians of North America or the aboriginals of Australia. Putting it very simplistically, the collective intellect of industrialized society has been developed to such a high degree at the expense of its spiritual centre. Whereas, with aboriginal cultures it's the reverse. We're not a highly intellectualized or highly technologized society but we haven't sacrificed our spiritual centre. And extending that idea one step further, our spiritual centre is very much expressed in the way our dream world operates. Our dream visions affect our day-to-day lives and, certainly for North American Indian culture, our dream life is every bit as important as our physical, conscious life.

The cynical response to that would be that aboriginal people are probably a hell of a lot better off in their dream life than in their real life. In lots of cases that seems to me to be a kind of cop-out.

That's part of it. I don't know if cop-out's the word for it. I think that's being judgmental.

And equally cynical?

Yeah. I'm not passing judgement on these notions. At least, I don't wish to. We place such a tremendous amount of importance on the way our dream world works that I never thought that it could be considered a cop-out. Let's put it less pessimistically and call it a release. But I think that regardless of how you wish to judge the respective societies, it is beyond argument that these two comparative states exist.

Do you want the plays to be free of judgement?

I don't think so. I think that ultimately if they were not judged, if they were not criticized, if they did not generate emotional and other responses, then I wouldn't be doing my job.

Let me ask about judgement in another way. In Dry Lips there are two characters: Spooky Lacroix, a ridiculous, babbling Christian, and then there's Simon Starblanket, who wants the return of the drum, of the dance and of Nanabush. He wants to make the spiritual life powerful again. My sense is that as a playwright you have more sympathy with Starblanket than you do with Spooky.

I think it's inevitable that your writing will be coloured by your own point of view, by your own attitude towards the world and everything within it. Certainly coloured with your own experience. I've had a very specific type of experience with Roman Catholicism and so the play—and Spooky Lacroix—are coloured by that. It's unfortunate that my experience with Roman Catholicism has been what it is. Spooky Lacroix's opening speech, which is something about the end of the world being at hand, is taken almost verbatim from the mouth of a Jehovah's Witness.

Christianity isn't a neutral mythology for you though, is it? It can't be for someone who has been damaged by that mythology. Dickie Bird has such a rage in him that it leads him over the edge. I don't sense that you view Christianity as just being another neutral mythology that you can take this from and that from to layer your play so that it becomes more resonant and more dense.

I have every reason to fight when I think what Christianity has done to me personally, never mind what it has done to my race. It's been an act of monumental dishonesty, monumental two-facedness. To have it hammered into your head by so-called figures of authority (the priests and nuns and teachers) that sex and the human sex organs were disgusting and dirty instruments of the devil—at a time when your own sexuality is at such a delicate place of development—was deeply confusing. But then to turn that around and have ten-year-olds victimized by a priest who goes around diddling little boys. What I'm angry at is those priests who said one thing and then when the lights went out, they did the complete opposite. It's like a game. They're like that woman at the hotel this morning. The victim doesn't end up being the loser; it's the aggressor who debases himself and debases life. I think that truth should be told.

Were you sexually abused yourself?

Absolutely. Everybody was.

Do you mean at the Guy Hill Residential School in The Pas?

Yeah. It's been off the record so far, but I'll tell you what happened. There was this Brother—and he wasn't the only one—who was our supervisor. We were 30 beds of ten- to 12-year-old boys in the Intermediate Boys Dormitory. We were far away from home and our parents had no input whatsoever into our education. And they had no control over our teachers. There was no such thing as a PTA, for instance. Anyway, this Brother would put us to bed at 8:30 and we'd all be kneeling at our beds in our pajamas and he'd take us through the rosary. Then he'd turn the lights off and we'd all start falling asleep. About half an hour later he'd come through the dormitory in the dark and go from bed to bed and wank off little boys. He was a French guy with a very thick accent and I'll always remember that as he'd do this he'd go, "It's big, eh, it's big." The Hail Marys from the rosary were still ringing through your head. Through the course of the six years that this guy was at Guy Hill he must have gone through 300 boys, all of whom are now between the ages of 35 and 45, and many of whom are now lawyers and businessmen. Sooner or later that kind of activity is going to come up.

Is this Brother still alive?

He was quite old back then, so he's probably dead. But that's just one story. There are so many others. So to this day my experience is coloured with that singular act of dishonesty. I mean they lied to us.

You haven't yet written about that experience, of the massive hypocrisy involved.

Not yet.

I gather that prior to your encounter in the residential school system, you hadn't had much sexual experience?

No. It happened when I was ten. It's a very vulnerable time, just when you're entering puberty.

You have been accused by some feminists and by some aboriginal women of being sexist because of what happens to women in your plays.

I think I could boil it down to two or three women out of a raft of thousands, most of whom are totally in support of and who understand the material. Just because a few women misunderstand, misinterpret the material is no reason to condemn all of them as being unintelligent, for instance.

Do you have a personal sense of taboo within your own tradition and culture?

No, I don't think one should be frightened of violating one's culture. I think that the role of any artist in society is to criticize that society, to force that society to look at its own imperfections. In a sense the role of the artist is the role of the shaman in traditional, pre-Christian Indian society. Shamans were the visionaries who led that society into the future, who outlined the path that society was to take.

And outlining that path can be cruel and can expose raw nerves?

Well, I think that if society makes certain mistakes, then it's the role of the artist/visionary to tell society that it's made a mistake here, correct it, and then we'll move on. In the particular instance we've been talking about, the Roman Catholic church has made a tremendous error. And it should correct it and then either move on or die.

I once interviewed a Native jazz drummer who was scrupulous about not using sacred rhythms in his music. He felt a sense of taboo, even in the free-wheeling world of improvisational jazz. I was struck by his adherence to this self-imposed limitation and I'm wondering if there's anything about the world you live in that you would feel discomfort in exposing to a mainstream audience. Maybe even because you don't want to be critical at this point in the history of aboriginal culture.

I don't know. I often stand alone in these situations, which is why I've got myself into trouble in the past. I don't necessarily subscribe to that opinion. I don't think any religion or any society should be so holy as to be untouchable. I don't think that any icon should be put on a pedestal because once you put it on a pedestal it's too easy to tear down.

So is Nanabush—a figure who operates on both sides of the gender and sexual spectrum—susceptible to attack? He's a mischievous figure, a trickster, he's always getting into trouble and is in some senses dangerous. Or am I going too far?

No, I think he should be dangerous, I think he should push people right to the edge. I think—when he needs to be—he should be absolutely horrifying.

Does he ever get diabolical?

I think Nanabush is perfectly capable of it. I think he's capable of anything that the human heart is capable of, that God is capable of. I think God is ultimately Nanabush and by extension what he/she represents. God, the Great Spirit, whatever you wish to call this being. I think that God is every bit as capable of diabolical cruelty and evil as are human beings. He embodies beauty and incredible love and ecstasy and all these things. I also think that God is every bit as capable of being as enormous an asshole as that blonde was this morning. She's not the only one. They're an archetype and they're everywhere. Men treat women like that. And women have been angry about it for many generations, and are now doing something about it. But to go back to your question, no, nothing is too sacred too attack.

You use humour in a liberating kind of way. Is that tendency something that comes naturally out of your life and culture, or is it a strategy for taking some of the pressure off events in the plays that may get pretty hard to take?

Both. My favourite activity is to laugh. And the Cree culture is hilarious, the language is hilarious. When you speak Cree you laugh constantly. But the other side of it is that to make a statement that is brutally honest, you have to count upon incredible hilarity and incredible ridiculousness. And so the plays are structured in such a way that you do have to laugh at what seem to be the most inappropriate moments. But it works. It happened in Dry Lips time and time again. There's a scene where Zachary Jeremiah basically tells God to fuck himself. And people were crying. But then all of a sudden God is sitting up there on a toilet. You know, in drag as a woman with boobs hanging out and everything. And then people started to laugh. So there they were, laughing and crying at the same time.

Speaking about mixed emotions, because of your experience in The Pas, did you use the Helen Betty Osborne incident in the crucifixion rape scene?

I think the more specific application of the figure of Helen Betty Osborne comes in Dry Lips. I think the act that was committed up in The Pas back in 1971 has a complex metaphorical resonance. Because of society's response to the crime, she might as well have been raped with a crucifix. Did the church stand up for that girl, did the city council, the town council of The Pas? As they went to church every Sunday and prayed to their god, did they come back after church to stand up for that girl? Did the white women in that community stand up for another woman? No. I think those kinds of acts and those kinds of mistakes should be trumpeted.

You often describe one play as the flip side of the other. When you initially conceived of Rez Sisters, did you know immediately that there was another play you would do very quickly and that it would be a mirror image?

No.

So Dry Lips came out of Rez Sisters after you realized what you could do with it?

I don't know that it was that easy. Ultimately it was so difficult to do that I was just grateful that it came out the way it did. I mean, a lot of it is a happy accident. I'm just very fortunate. I'm so desperate at certain points that I'll write anything.

But after you had done Rez Sisters, you did sit yourself down and say, Okay, now I want to do a play about seven men where hockey is the governing metaphor rather than seven women obsessed with bingo?

Yeah, I think that was a rational choice.

Am I right in thinking that 'beauty' means usefulness in Cree and Ojibway? It's an interesting way of looking at art, isn't it, that it has a social message as well as an aesthetic one?

That's right, it is an interesting way of looking at things.