THUNDER BAY - Writer, author, and playwright, Drew Hayden Taylor, believes in happy endings, but he’s just a story teller.
He can’t write the ending to an issue like reconciliation, because that ending will be different for everyone, but the story is being written and the journey is ongoing.
“I find that the best stories are those that have happy endings,” Taylor said.
“What that happy ending is in this particular instance you will have to talk to the people, you will have to talk to the government, you will have to talk to everybody involved. I can give you a happy ending, but that might not be the right happy ending for all people.”
Taylor, an Ojibway writer from Curve Lake First Nations in Ont., provided the keynote address on Wednesday to wrap up Confederation College’s Indigenous Awareness Month.
For the month of November, Confederation College held several initiatives to raise awareness about Indigenous cultures and history, including the Path to Reconciliation, an installation asking students to share their thoughts on what reconciliation means to them.
The focus of Taylor’s talk was the art of reconciliation and the artist’s role in healing. Taylor has written more than a dozen books and more than 20 plays throughout his career and he believes the artist has an important role to play in addressing the positive and negative issues in society.
“We find new and interesting ways of dealing with these issues by presenting them up there and shining a light on it,” he said. “You take issues that are very pertinent and conflicts and problems in any culture and you just present them in a new way and a more accessible way that they can be dealt with that may make it easier for people to understand.”
When it comes to complicated issue like reconciliation, it is difficult to define what it means because according to Taylor, reconciliation is a Rorschach term that means different things to different people, even Taylor.
“As of yet, I have not come up with a complete, succinct proper definition of what reconciliation is,” he said. “My definition is a work in progress right now.”
Even the idea of complete healing can be elusive. During his address, Taylor said in order to heal, the poison must be exposed. But exposing the poison of colonization, the residential school system, or the 60’s Scoop, can be difficult for people who have lived through those experiences.
“We all need some way of dealing with problems,” Taylor said. “If you hide them, if you push them down, they are not going to heal. It’s like with any wound, it needs air and it needs sunlight. But the way it’s treated can sometimes be problematic and actually inflict more damage.”
Taylor doesn’t have all the answers, he’s a writer not a therapist, he said. But everything needs to be handled with care, because these are real people and real stories.
“Everything that comes from the residential school system needs to be handled with kid’s gloves,” he said. “It has to be willingly shared, not pulled out.”
One of the tools Taylor and other First Nations people have used to expose the poison and start sharing is humour. Taylor said he embraces the Aboriginal funny bone, which is prevalent in much of his work.
“Humour gives us the ability to laugh, especially the kind of humour in the native community called survival humour,” he said. “It’s humour that’s been filtered through 500 years of colonization. It has two functions, it’s there to protect and to heal. It does that through taking the pain away from a painful situation. If you can laugh at it, you are defending yourself against it.”
There is a growing interest in reconciliation and more stories are being told in mainstream media, including Gord Downie’s Secret Path and author Joseph Boyden’s Wenjack, which recount the story of Charlie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibway boy who perished while trying to return home after escaping residential school in Northern Ontario.
Taylor said this interest from the public in stories that happened “when their parents weren’t looking,” is more prevalent now than ever before.
“All this stuff happened in our past, why didn’t we know about this, we should have known about this,” he said.
More than 70 students attended Taylor’s talk and he said he is very fortunate to provide his perspective to so many young minds.
“Young people here are our elders of tomorrow and they need to know all the different paths that are being followed out there and all the different pictures that are being painted,” he said.
Taylor believes these paths will lead to happy endings, the story will be written, and healing will begin. But healing takes time, he said, and if he knew what complete healing looked like, he would be a lot more successful.
“Complete healing is an acceptance of what has happened and the fact that it has been dealt with and moving on,” he said. “The problem right now as a lot of what has happened has not been dealt with by the dominant culture, by the government, by a lot of people that were directly or indirectly a part of everything that has happened. There is still movement to go, still a bit of a journey to be completed.”
Taylor will be returning to Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay this January, with his play Cree in the Caribbean.
