Resilient Matriarchs

Abstract

‘Rising Matriarchs: Honouring kinship, resilience and resurgence in an Indigenous adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women, written by Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska with Floyd Favel, offers an exploration of an Indigenous adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women through Floyd Favel’s Native Performance Culture (NPC), an Indigenous theatre method. The Greek story of the plight of the dispossessed and disempowered women of Troy is adapted to follow the realities and aftermaths of invasion of Indigenous nations and Indigenous women’s bodies in Canada. The article presents how the NPC method’s incorporation of Indigenous cultural practices, storytelling, vocal patterns, Plains Indigenous Sign Language (PISL) and sitting positions inside Indigenous structures leads to a re-storying of invasion and its aftermaths. In this process, the original Greek story is transformed to give hope and empower by reconnecting with the stories of the matriarchs and their place in the communities. The authors discuss how by performing this re-storying, the adaptation intervenes and dismantles the colonial and patriarchal power structures of oppression and at the same time offers resurgence and renewal at this unpredictable time by bringing into the centre the stories of women’s resistance and resilience. Drawing from the Indigenous concept of relationality and kinship, this article explores how the performance of ancestral matriarchal stories and lived experiences lead to personal and embodied stories and acts of transformation and offers healing from the impacts of colonization, irrational patriarchal forces and intergenerational trauma. Ultimately, this theatrical project becomes part of a larger movement of decolonization, resurgence and renewal that rises out of the ruptures caused by the colonial invasion.

Notes

1 Poundmaker Cree Nation is a First Nation reserve near Cut Knife, Saskatchewan in Canada. Chief Poundmaker (Pitikwahanapiwiyin) signed the Treaty 6 in 1876 and in 1879 started living with his followers in the designated land called a reserve. For more details see Poundmaker Cree Nation: www. poundmakercn.ca/about.html.

2 Reserves are lands used by First Nations but set and managed under the Indian Act created by the Canadian government. For more details see Irwin (2011).

3 Treaty Indians are understood as Indigenous people who are part of a First Nation or Indian band that signed a treaty with the Crown and the Canadian government.

4 Sundance ceremony is an annual sacred ceremony undertaken by Plains Indigenous Nations across Canada and the United States. A sundance maker is a person who decides to sponsor and be the main sundancer through at least a cycle of four ceremonies.

5 Indigenous people refer to the North American continent as Turtle Island, also referred to in the creation story about the Fall of the Sky woman. For more details see Horn-Miller (2019) or Kimmerer (2013).

6 Lakota winter counts are a recordkeeping system in the form of visual representation of oral history through pictographs that stand for significant events marking each year. For more details see Smithsonian Education (2005).

7 Odissi dance originates from the eastern coastal state of Odisha in India, which lies next to West Bengal, my birthplace.