A blog on the August 17th CBC web story
Backwards, I agree. I can only quote from my friend d colleague Gitxsan Writer, playwright and poet Neil Benson who I worked with in British Columbia after our film and video training program was completed at the Chief Dan George Film Video training program in 1986. Life took us down a different path till 1989, when the late Ahasiw Kitocigan Maskegon-iskwew (Donald Ghostkeeper) asked me to do a performance piece for the International Pitt Gallery. Having finished my degree at SFU, life was not a bed of roses in the employment department.
Working from Ahasiw request, I decided to track Neil down and visit. He received a Canada Council Exploration grant for his new works & as I read his work I noticed how his writing style was considerably different than my writings. He read his poems out to me, very visceral, cutting images of colonialism affecting the language & culture of the north west people who lived off the salmon for thousands of years. I asked him about his work & style. It was a matter of translations, his mind, & tongue is Gitxsan, so he had to translate his mother tongue to English, & then work the foreign language to suit his culture his voice. Instead of allowing the colonial trappings of British Royal imperialism to destroy the mother tongue in Canada's First People through assimilation policies & residential schools, he kept his mothers tongue. Whereas the words that formed the poems & plays I wrote were very westernized, colonially correct in its narrative structure and development. Indians & Dogs (90, 92, & 94, & now on the net) was the result of juxtaposing his & my words together into a scripted, multi-media and oral traditional performance piece. Neil wrote, "colonialism is the dirtiest word in the English Language"
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