September 4, 2017
1628
If you like listening to native songs, chants and storytelling, you'll enjoy "Ipperwash," on now at the Blyth Festival Theatre until Sept. 16.
The world premiere of this play, written by Falen Johnson and Jessica Carmichael, opened Aug. 18, to a rather subdued audience. The 75-minute show runs with no intermission.
Opening night began with drumming songs by members of the Kettle and Stony Point reserve, as well as an address by a native elder from that reserve.
What follows is a painfully slow performance, featuring one monologue after another and very little action. It tells the story of the Canadian Department of National Defence expropriating 2,400 acres of the Stony Point people's territory in 1942, for the creation of Camp Ipperwash, a training base for Canadian soldiers. Sixteen families were displaced to neighbouring Kettle Point reserve.
The government promised to return the land to the people of Stony Point but it was more than 70 years before that promise was fulfilled, and the land was left contaminated, with $95-million in government money handed over to help clean it up.
The play, "Ipperwash," focuses on Bea, a young woman from the New Credit First Nation, who has been serving with the Canadian Forces since she graduated high school. After two tours of Afghanistan, she finds herself stationed with the Department of Defence at Ipperwash, and tasked with the clean-up of unexploded ordinance (UXOs), as part of the decontamination efforts, in preparation for the return of the land to the people of the Kettle and Stony Point reserve.
She rents a farmhouse from an aging veteran of the Second World War who slowly shares with her stories of his childhood growing up on the land she is now working to recover.
Jonathan Fisher is the stand-out actor in this show, as the veteran who talks with Bea about the Stony Point land being taken away. So, when he came home from the war, he had nowhere to come home to.
"There I was fighting their war, and they were stealing my land," he says, "and they desecrated the graves of our ancestors."
Jonathan Fisher in a scene from "Ipperwash" at the Blyth Festival Theatre; photos by Terry Manzo
Also taking the stage in this play, are Nicole Joy-Fraser as Bea, James Dallas Smith as the veteran's angry grandson, and Nyla Carpentier as the wandering woman searching for her home.
The show is touted as a story of resistance, resilience and reclamation, but it's simply a long, sad tale of woe. And while it downplays the crisis incident of 1995 and the shooting of Dudley George, it also makes no mention of the $95-million in compensation from the government either.
"Ipperwash" runs to Sept. 16 at the Blyth Festival Theatre. For tickets, call the Box Office at 519-523-9300, toll-free at 1-877-862-5984 or on-line at blythfestival.com.
Dallas James Smith (left), Nicole Joy-Fraser and Jonathan Fisher perform in "Ipperwash" at the Blyth Festival Theatre
Written ByLiz Dadson is the founder and editor of the Kincardine Record and has been in the news business since 1986.
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