What we talk about when we talk about Indian

here are many Shakespearean plays I could see in a native setting, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Coriolanus, but Julius Caesar isn't one of them', wrote Richard Ouzounian in the Toronto Star in 2008.He was reviewing Native Earth Performing Arts' adaptation of Julius Caesar, entitled Death of a Chief, staged at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto.Ouzounian's pronouncement raises a number of questions about how Indigenous creators are mediated, and by whom, and how the arbiter shapes the idea of Indigenous. 1 On the one hand, white people seem to desire a Native Shakespeare; on the other, they appear to have a notion already of what constitutes an authentic Native Shakespeare.From 2003 to 2011, I served as the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada's oldest professional Aboriginal theatre company.During my tenure there, we premiered nine new plays and a trilingual opera, produced six extant scripts (four of which we toured regionally, nationally or internationally), copresented an interdisciplinary piece by an Inuit/Qubecois company, and created half a dozen short, made-to-order works, communitycommissioned pieces to address specific events or issues.One of the new plays was actually an old one, the aforementioned Death of a Chief, which we coproduced in 2008 with Canada's National Arts Centre (NAC).Death, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, took three years to develop.Shortly after I started at Native Earth, Aboriginal artists approached me about not being considered for roles in Shakespeare (unless producers were doing Midsummer Night's Dream, because apparently fairies can be Aboriginal, or Coriolanus, because its hero struggles to adapt to a consensus-based community).Even when they did get an audition, they often did not have the tools to nail the part.Most of our artists still do not have conservatory training; 1 There is no single appropriate or agreed-upon term that can be adopted to refer to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America), and nomenclature shifts and evolves in different cultures.This chapter uses the term Indigenous in the broadest sense, to include such disparate and far-flung groups as the Mori, Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal Australians.I often use Aboriginal when referring to a community of artists from different First Nations, or in the case of Native Earth, respecting the way the company self-identifies ('Canada's oldest professional Aboriginal theatre company').Where possible and appropriate, I refer to particular nations, such as Guna, Algonquin, Cree and so forth.

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