Award-winning Indigenous actor and playwright to perform one-actor play in Toronto

By Rick Garrick

TORONTO—Indigenous playwright and actor Meegwun Fairbrother looks at whether healing has an expiry date in his play Isitwendam (An Understanding), which opens at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto on March 17.

“That was the big thing for me when I was doing my research, that they came out with the Truth and Reconciliation and they came out with the monies that will be allotted to survivors, this whole assessment process,” says Fairbrother, an award-winning actor, playwright, traditional singer and dancer from Grassy Narrows in Treaty #3 territory. “It didn’t make sense to me [that] there was a time limit that this money was going to be available. And how would money even heal people anyway.”

Fairbrother, who played a lead role in Aboriginal Peoples Television Network’s (APTN) Mohawk Girls and is currently a lead in the CBC series Burden of Truth, says he worked on the one-actor play for more than a decade.

“As a young artist at that time, I was doing a lot of travelling and I was meeting a lot of different people from all over Canada, so I was getting a lot of different responses,” Fairbrother says. “I’m [Anishinaabe] and part Scottish, but I didn’t grow up in towns, I grew up on reserves and northern fly-in reserves all over northern Ontario, so within me I had the perspectives of a lot of different people so I wanted to honour that story. So that is kind of where my angle was — does healing have an expiry date?”

Fairbrother performs the role of six or seven characters in the play, including a half Anishinaabe, half non-Indigenous conservative idealist who was hired by Aboriginal Affairs to discredit a residential school survivor’s reparation claim.

“My journey, and I think [for] a lot of young Indigenous people who are learning about their family histories, it’s kind of a detective story in a way when we start to uncover things and the stories start to get shared,” Fairbrother says. “Originally, nobody talked about it. My own history is that my father did go to residential school. He was an artist, a painter, a prolific painter, a beautiful visual artist, and the paintings he made are still all over Toronto and Canada.”

Fairbrother adds that the play features ancient Indigenous sign language, drumming, dance and song.

“It’s kind of a universal language amongst a lot of the plains tribes,” Fairbrother says. “Right from the beginning we wanted to put this into the show because there are just so many Indigenous people and so many different tribes. Even in my own community, the [Anishinabek] community from up in Treaty #3 doesn’t even recognize some of the words that are being spoken say down on Manitoulin Island. We wanted to find ways of unifying people, of unifying ideas and finding a common ground, so the Indigenous sign language was the right fit for that.”

Fairbrother worked with co-creator and director Jack Grinhaus, co-artistic director with Bound to Create Theatre, on the 75-minute play.

“I wanted somebody from outside the community but who has a link to genocide to be able to help me tell this story,” Fairbrother says, noting that Grinhaus is Jewish with a link to the Holocaust. “He really helped me to find the narrative and bring all of the story points together and making these perspectives into real people.”

The play, which is being performed at Aki Studio in Daniels Spectrum on Dundas St. East from March 17-31, includes a post-show talkback session after every performance.