In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

"It's the Do-Gooders Bum My Ass": Modem Canadian Drama and the Crisis of Liberalism JERRY WASSERMAN Near the beginning of The Ecstasy ofRita Joe (1967), George Ryga's classic Canadian play about the destruction of a young Native woman who has come to the city looking for a better life, Ryga introduces Mr. Homer, "a white citizen who has the hurried but fulfilled appearance of the socially respons(ble man."l Mr. Homer is a pillar of what is known in social welfare tenns as the voluntary sector. He runs an agency called (appropriately, in this postcolonial text) the Centre.2 "[W]e do a lot of things for our Indians here in the city at the Centre" (35), he explains to the audience in his superficially good-natured and benignly paternalistic way. His Centre is an important adjunct to the formal justice system represented by the Magistrate, who assures Rita Joe, during one of her frequent, nightmarish trials, "There are institutions to help you" (36). As the scene unfolds, Mr. Homer puts his hand "possessively" on Rita's shoulder , inviting her to confirm how he helped her when her mother got sick and died, and how he helps other "poor dears" who need a place to eat and sleep when they get drunk and leave home (35). He chuckles over how Indian women "get more of a kick diggin' through [old clothes] that's piled up" in a heap rather than hung on racks (36). Then he turns again to the audience and angrily complains that "It's the do-gooders bum my ass" (36), those newspaper or TV reporters for whom a drunken Indian becomes a story about "Red·Power" or the failure of government policy. "Let them live an' work among the Indians for a few months ... then they'd know what it's really like" (37). This scene and the character of Mr. Homer epitomize just about everything that Ryga felt was wrong with Canadian social policy towards Native people in the 1960s: the presumption that a non-Native would "know what it's really like," the manipulation and phony altruism, the condescension, the infantilization , the debilitating charity. The Magistrate acts as ideological point man for the System, employing his power to judge and imprison as leverage for the real work of social engineering he does under the guise of helping Rita: "You Modern Drama, 43:1 (Spring 2000) 32 Canadian Drama and the Crisis of Liberalism 33 can't walk around in old clothes and running shoes ... You should fix your hair ... perhaps even change your name. And try to tame that accent ..." (51-52). But the Mr. Homers are equally involved in the enterprise of cultural genocide . "He's the worst kind!" says Rita's boyfriend, Jaimie Paul (/06). Mr. Homer and his organization are part of the same shadowy, semi-official network of social services as the foster homes to which another young Native woman, Clara Hill, had to give her children away, the very thought of which discourages Rita and Jaimie from making love and possibly having children of their own. In Ken Kesey's paradigmatic countercultural text of the sixties, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Native Indian narrator, Broom Bromden , hypothesizes "a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as ... the Inside." He calls it "the Combine." The ward of the mental hospital that Broom inhabits is "a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches."3 Mr. Homer's Centre is another such factory, working in concert with the court, the school, and the church, Ryga suggests, in the Canadian Combine. The Centre is also a panopticon from which Mr. Homer, like Big Nurse in her glass nursing station, oversees those who most need adjusting, "watch[ingJ them night and day," in the words ofRyga's Singer that conclude Mr. Homer's first scene (37)·4 Although Mr. Homer distinguishes himself, with his no-nonsense brand of disciplinary, practical assistance, from those he sees as bleeding hearts, the irony is that he himself is a do-gooder, part...

pdf

Share