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OCR
KRISZTINA Kopó ghost is Education Future: a man dressed in a three-piece suit, looking very business-like and full of self-esteem, very much the Indian yuppie figure, who first shows an image of a Native woman, as one example and conseguence of the issue, who cannot study medicine because of Cadieux’s decision. As a final confrontation, Cadieux is the teacher explaining “the Cadieux tragedy” to his students with three projected versions (stereotypes) of aboriginal life: “a dirty looking Indian,” “a bum, tramp, alcoholic, national disgrace”; then the “Reserve Indian,” whereby “Reserves today are seriously overpopulated by neurotic and socially dysfunctional people.”** And the third image is a nicely dressed young woman, “the Integrator,” the “outcast,” who “started out telling people she was Spanish or Hawaiian. Now she has everything she wants. Except her people.” These images reflect reality and the effects of white colonization, which points toward an identity crisis. One of the major questions is whether the survival of the Native Peoples is possible at all with the odds stacked against them. With the cap on post-secondary education, any possibility of educating their people is now strictly limited, predicting a bleak and pessimistic future for the Aboriginal population. Nevertheless, Taylor ends his play on an optimistic note, in the words of the ghost of Education Future: “everybody chooses their own future” In Dickens’ story Scrooge undergoes a definite change, willing to open his heart to his environment, and to extend his hand to those in need. Here, Cadieux’s last sarcastic remark is “that’s politics”,°° which hints at the untrustworthiness of government policies and politics in general. But there is a change taking place within the Native communities and the question of identity within the scope of past, present and future clearly emerges, pointing toward a promising future in Taylor’s plays. The Gothic and its machinery provide the props that manage the movement between past, present and future. The concept of time has major importance in another youth drama by Taylor, Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock (1990). The location of the play is Dreamer’s Rock, which is a “real place with real power. It’s located beside a highway on Birch Island Reserve, and many people still go there for guidance.”" The play was first produced by De-BaJeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group under the direction of Larry Lewis, and the cast consists of only three characters, three teenage boys, aged sixteen. The time of the performance is not particularly important but a summer afternoon, possibly a Saturday afternoon would be preferred to fit the references in the text. The Dickensian structural layout is used to connect past, present and future, and open dimensions to the otherworld. This work does not employ 58 Tbid., 133. 59 Tbid., 137. 60 Ibid., 139. 61 Drew Hayden Taylor, Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock, Calgary, Fifth House Publishers, 1990, 10. + 304 +
