Winter Moons

On Indigenous theatre, the land, whiteness, and humanity

Last year, a friend here in Halifax invited me to Pawâkan Macbeth, a brilliant retelling of Shakespeare’s play through a Cree lens. I didn’t write about it at the time, but I was blown away by it. Twisi, one of the theatre review blogs that’s very active here, wrote about it pretty thoroughly. I’ve seen a fair bit of theatre in town so far, between three Fringes and several other shows, but I don’t know that anything has touched me quite like that.

So when I saw that the Neptune was going to put on Winter Moons, a Mi’kmaw tale of surviving the cold season on this very land, I was keen to see it. Last Sunday afternoon, I went with that same friend and was again bowled over.

Not really a theatre review, but contains spoilers

Unlike the self-styled “Cree takeover” of Shakespeare, which was set in the 1870s against the backdrop of brutal colonization, Winter Moons is set a thousand years in the past, before settlers ever set foot here. The story is a tale and a history and a myth, the characters both detailed individuals and archetypes of Mi’kmaw life. The only other thing important about the timing of the story is that it begins on the first night of winter, the solstice, the longest night, and that it ends when the characters return to their village at the spring equinox. The three “winter moons” — as the program says, “December-ish, January-ish, February-ish” — cover the action of the play, an impressionistic, funny, and moving experience full of dance and music and stark beauty.

The story follows three young adults of a village, one the apprentice of the medicine woman (Pako’si), one a fleet messenger (Aknutawi’skw), and one a young hunter (Ntuksuinu). As winter closes in, they travel with their Grandmother, Nukumij, the elder and medicine woman of the village. As Fire Keepers, it is their duty to shelter in the wild, build a wigwam, live off the land, and by nurturing an ember inside a shell for the three winter moons, sing forth the Spring. Only when these ceremonies are done do they return, if they’ve survived their ordeal.

A fifth performer serves as modern-day storyteller, speaking directly to the audience and bridging the tale from the deep past into the present.

Nukumij begins the young ones’ journey by telling them that they will have to learn the ceremonies, the songs, and the ways so that they can carry them forward when she leaves her earth body for the spirit world. Though Pako’si jokes that Nukumij “says this every year,” it turns out that this year it truly is her time, and she passes quietly one night in the dead of winter. Acting as a kind of death-figure, the storyteller gently guides her to the periphery of the circle, where her spirit sits and observes and encourages for the rest of the show.

Of course Nukumij’s death is sorrowful. But this is where the emotional weight of this piece for me becomes harder to describe. There are many layers to it. But I will try.

First, there is the simple humanness of the young people’s responses, which are full of grief. There is also fear: now these untested young adults need to push through the second half of the winter alone; they will be thrust into their adult responsibilities, in a way that no one is ever truly ready for. The apprentice, Pako’si, in particular, is tested. Her friends comfort her as she weeps, but they also insist, gently, that she sit in the honored place, by the fire, as that will be her role now.

There was something magical about watching these large-scale, archetypal characters, who are after all being told about by a storyteller and are literally named for what they are: Grandmother, Hunter, Messenger-Woman, Medicine-Plant — respond in such a grounded, true, and small-scale way to a death. Even with the stylized performances, this felt far more immediate and modern, somehow, than, say, Antigone mourning her brother.

And this, it seems, is in the very nature of the storytelling of this piece, perhaps of most Indigenous theatre. So far I only have the two to point to, but both, coming from very different corners of Canada, hit on this combination of the mythic and the grounded that makes them living stories. As I watched both these pieces, I felt the Native groups performing them pulling on a cord, as it were, drawing the old stories forward. And at the same time, backward: completing the link, closing the circle, acknowledging and reminding us that time and life and breath is not a line but a circle. That these stories are as true and vital now as they ever were, despite the most concentrated attempts to stamp them out.

A white-girl confession

I have been fascinated by and drawn to Indigenous culture since I first started learning about it in, I guess, fourth grade? We studied the Lenape, who were the main indigenous group of that land, and on a field trip we went to some kind of state park and helped build a log rowhouse. I happened to go to public grammar school just before the whole thing really went to shit. We still made “Indian” headbands out of construction paper at Thanksgiving, sure. But I also learned quite a bit about the way our nascent country treated Native Americans and Black people. Some things about it were still sugar-coated, no doubt. But as sad as this is, I think my education in these matters in the 1980s was still stronger and more accurate than whatever the kids are getting now while their representatives howl about “critical race theory.”

I was transfixed by the narratives of oppression that my country was built on, but the Native narrative I found especially compelling, and found myself wanting to learn all I could about how people lived then, what it was like before my ancestors came and destroyed nearly everything. I did a lot of romanticizing, and felt a lot of what would later be called white guilt about it. I longed to learn more but increasingly saw how the ways white people tried to access Native culture were exploitative. It left me in a position of not feeling able to engage it at all, and besides, I didn’t know any Indigenous people. I ended with trying to support causes monetarily where I could, appreciate art, visit sites, and feel blessed if I happened to meet and get to know an Indigenous person even a little.

To this day, I continue to be drawn to Indigenous people, culture, and art, and I continue to feel too white to interact with the people on anything more than a superficial and highly apologetic level. I feel like living in Nova Scotia might finally be able to shift that, as the Mi’kmaw presence is strong and resources for getting involved and educated are many.

Side note on that: I did have a mortifying experience at one of the maker markets over at the Forum last year. A woman was making these gorgeous three-dimensional hummingbirds out of beads. At the time I was starting to get into paying attention to which plants and animals were originally from this place, and so I asked the artist, “Is this one native?” To which she replied, unfazed, “Yes, Ojibwe.” I don’t know what shades of red I turned as I furiously backpedaled and tried to explain that I meant, “is the hummingbird you’ve depicted here native to Nova Scotia?”

hopefully not quite the face I made but probably close tbh

But more seriously

I haven’t quite managed to make the connection yet. But this show may have been a further impetus. I wept, of course, at the death and grieving at the center of the story. But so much more about the show drew quieter tears from me, and a pull of deep longing. Watching these characters dance, sing their ceremonial songs, laugh and tease each other, build together, bury their dead, tell their stories through the night and sing through the white winds to bring their friend home again — I couldn’t help but feel like we’ve been doing it wrong, all of us, all along.

White people are often said to have no culture of our own. This is untrue, of course; we’re just deeply unplugged from it and in thrall to white supremacy even if we try to fight against it. Lacking connections to our ancestors and to the land, we look around instead to gobble up the richness of other cultures, especially ones we’ve conquered, exploited, enslaved, or massacred. Unsatisfied with the myths we’ve made about what we’re owed and what we own, we keep acquiring more and more in the hopes that we can fill the emptiness.

(This is especially true of North American whiteness, btw: every time I’ve been in Europe, especially Germany and to a lesser extent France, I’ve felt the way the people there are more connected to their lands and culture. Yes, the majority of colonizers come out of Europe. But there’s something about being in the places that my ancestors are truly from that makes me feel more grounded and as though there are cultural things that are truly for me.)

We’re alienated from the land, from its circles and cycles, from the plants and animals that sustain us, from the labor that makes our shelters, grows our food, builds our fires, and on and on. We don’t know the stories of our grandmothers, the songs of our villages, the dances that bring the sun back to life, the ways to keep an ember burning slowly and steadily through three months of winter. We don’t know what to do when someone in our community dies.

Watching this story of love and work and mourning and joyful survival, it came to me all as one thought:

We’ve been dehumanizing these people for centuries, when the fact is that they are more human than any of us.

I honestly don’t know what to do about any of that, yet. I haven’t known what to do about it for decades. I try to live as lightly on the land as I can, but it’s honestly not that lightly. I try to help, and to listen, and to make space. But short of running off to the woods and living off the land — which even if I did would be little better than a performance, and wouldn’t make much of a dent in the problem — there’s little I can do other than talk about it. I can connect with others. I can strive to build communities that share resources. I can protect who I can protect. I can’t undo a scrap of the generational harm that people who look like me have done to this land, this country, this earth, from believing that the way to live on it is to tame it and break it rather than to be part of it and all its creatures.

So. I cried about that a little, too, as I watched. As I think is only appropriate.

National Native American Heritage Month / Day

I started writing this earlier this week, and at that time I didn’t know that it was National Native American Heritage Month in the States. Today, the day after Thanksgiving, is also marked as a day for celebrating Native American heritage. In spite of these things always feeling like far too little and too late, it feels good to me to have this be the day I post this writing.

If you have stories about how you’re doing more, or want to talk to me about ways I can do more and better, please share.