Fed by Spirits: Mamâhtâwisiwin in René Highway’s New Song . . . New Dance

GAY WOODS CREE PLAYWRIGHT Tomson Highway’s much-analysed semiautobiographical novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) chronicles his and his younger brother René Highway’s¹ experiences as children in northern Manitoba, in residential school, and as artists in Winnipeg and Toronto. However, scholars have written little about Highway’s own artistic practices as a modern dancer and choreographer before his AIDS-related death in 1990 at age thirty-five. Highway is a crucial figure in Indigenous performing arts in Canada who brought together a still-active community of Indigenous performers. I explore how Highway used his mamâhtâwisiwin² or spiritual power, talent, or magic,³ particularly his experiences with “intense animal [caribou] energy when [he] was very young,”⁴ throughout his artistic and personal life to create new traditions. Although Highway was forced to attend Guy Hill residential school, three hundred miles south of his home in northern Manitoba, he became a talented dancer despite aggressive assimilation and colonisation to “develop [his] potential in . . . dance from within the colonial violence that [was] inflicted sexually on [his] bod[y].”⁵ The relative obscurity of Highway’s papers and videos of his performances means that his work is largely unknown. He receives only brief mention in dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories, although he was one of the first Indigenous choreographers in Canada to reflect a nation-specific, in this case, Woods Cree, sensibility in his work. Tomson Highway refers to his younger brother as the “Che Guevara of the native community. The odds against him would have crushed many men. He made an impossible leap”⁶ for Indigenous arts in Canada. He also inspired the early career in theater and in music of Tomson Highway, who wrote the role of the gender-bending Nanabush in the canonical play The Rez Sisters specifically for Highway.

Dance is a way of resisting colonisation, but more important, a way of centring Indigenous language, stories, and traditions for contemporary Indigenous people. Two-Spirited⁷ scholar Qwo-Li Driskill affirms that “if we can find ways to kinaesthetically know historical trauma, power and oppression, we can more deeply understand the nature of our oppression and the impact of colonization on our lives and our communities.”⁸ However, Driskill doesn’t want to frame Indigenous peoples as only reacting to trauma and to the history of colonisation as they stress that the “body is also a central site of healing and resistance.”⁹ Highway’s insistence on embodiment of both colonial violence and Woods Cree ways of knowing—encompassing epistemologies, histories, stories, language, spirituality, legal systems, and artistic practices—in the 1970s and 1980s Canadian performing arts scene made him a path clearer for other Indigenous artists. His choreography, particularly in New Song . . . New Dance (1988), reminds us that bodies are not merely physical entities but are “sites of both colonized conflict and passionate decolonization.”¹⁰ He admitted that he became upset when people think of his work as “native dancing with modern dance stuff thrown in,” which he found too predictable.¹¹ He wanted to Indigenise modern dance because “of our background and what we’ve been through,”¹² including residential school. While Highway excelled at his chosen art form, he appeared to have an uneasy relationship with Western dance. Like many Indigenous dancers, he believed that connection to other Indigenous peoples was of the utmost importance. He describes his experience performing at the 1976 Association for Native Development in Performing and Visual Arts conference as a sharing of spirit: “While I was dancing I felt as though I was touching each one of them individually yet all of them together.”¹³

Indigenous performance counteracts official histories by “looking at [how] performance as a retainer of social memory engages history without necessarily being a supporter of history.”¹⁴ Plains Cree new media artist Archer Pechawis concurs: “The performance space becomes part of the moccasin telegraph: a gathering place, a communal council fire. Grievances are aired. Relations are shown.”¹⁵ Highway’s...