Indigenous playwright Kim Senklip Harvey puts the power of her people on the stage

“Indigenous people, marginalized people, racialized folks need to understand how powerful we are,” said playwright, director and legal scholar Kim Senklip Harvey.

“The power lives within us. If you remove these systems of oppression from yourself, this guilt, this internalized racism, the patriarchy, you don’t need to ask anyone for more power. It’s in you,” said Harvey, who is a member of the Syilx and Tsilhqot’in nations with ancestral ties to the Dakelh, Secwepemc and Ktunaxa communities.

Toronto audiences can see these ideas put into action in Harvey’s play “Kamloopa,” a Soulpepper Theatre co-production with Native Earth Performing Arts, now at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Originally produced in Vancouver in 2018, “Kamloopa” won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama.

Subtitled “An Indigenous Matriarch Story” and directed by Harvey, “Kamloopa” is about two urban Indigenous sisters, Mikaya (Kaitlyn Yott) and Kilawna (Samantha Brown), who find their way to a deep connection with their culture and heritage via the intervention of a trickster character initially called Indian Friend #1 (Yolanda Bonnell).

The play starts out as almost slapstick comedy, with the sisters cracking wise about how white people start to treat them once they realize they’re Indigenous: “Like you were once a real person and then all of a sudden you’re in a museum, standing behind the glass, holding a basket of corn,” says Kilawna. The storytelling shifts into road-movie mode when the three women journey to Kamloopa, the biggest powwow on the West Coast.

And finally, the tone turns serious as the sisters embrace their identities. “I spend the first 80 minutes of this play trying to make you laugh … so that in the last 10 minutes when we’re at the powwow, your heart’s open,” said Harvey.

It was important to Harvey that the trickster character grew up in foster care. “When I was working in child welfare, of the 7,000 kids in foster care, 5,000 were Indigenous,” she said. “Once you find stuff like that, I have a responsibility to then represent them in a way that gives them good attention.”

It’s revealed late in the play that Indian Friend #1’s real name is Edith. Harvey named her after her great-grandmother, who was “a badass boss bitch,” said Harvey.

“I don’t agree with a lot of the way Indigenous theatre can tend to fall into the trauma trap,” she said, explaining why she wrote a play featuring only strong female characters. “The consumption of the pain of Indigenous peoples is getting a bit fetishy … the missing and murdered Indigenous women, the killing of us, the raping of us, the harming of us onstage, why are we watching that to the extent that we do?”

She is inspired by Maori filmmaker Taika Waititi, whose films “deal with the plight of Indigenous people, but they wrap it in a clown suit,” she said. “It’s my hope to write an Indigenous rom-com buddy film with Taika Waititi. I’m putting that out in the universe.”

Each performance of “Kamloopa” starts with a preamble in which the actors invite the audience to bear witness as active participants. “We treat people in the audience with a sense of respect,” said Harvey. “I want to make sure that they’re entertained. Long lodge and protocol people usually have a wicked sense of humour because, at the end of the day, they’re also entertainers. They have to keep your attention,” she said.

Harvey is pursuing a PhD in Indigenous law at the University of Victoria, in which she is documenting and exploring her creative practice as a form of artistic ceremony and as “a legal assertion,” she said.

According to Indigenous law professor Val Napoleon, “law is a set of systems that help societies solve problems or prevent problems. That’s all law is. And art absolutely does that,” said Harvey.

“Some people are just doing plays and that’s totally awesome and totally amazing. I’ve never felt that I’ve been doing that. I have felt that I have been fighting for my nations’ sovereignty using theatre as a mode to explicate our legalities,” she said. “Interior Salish laws have been supported by the arts and storytelling since time immemorial and we should respect that as such,” she said, calling herself a “cultural guardian in training.”

At the same time, she’s starting to work in television so that her stories can reach more people. “In theatre, if we’re playing to 15 or 20 per cent of Indigenous folks per night, we’re doing very well,” she said. “I’m shadowing a director under a Netflix job this summer. I’m getting paid $5,000 more than I did for directing and writing here at Soulpepper,” she said.

“I’ve worked in theatre for 19 years now and I love it … but in terms of cultural evolution and being where I need to be, TV-making is I where I’d like to move into.”

That said, she’s continuing to write new plays, and is glad that “Kamloopa” is being co-produced by Soulpepper and Native Earth with a much larger budget than was available for the world premiere production in Vancouver.

“It’s a big world we’re building,” said Harvey. “I think it’s so important that Indigenous and racialized people get to see a big, juicy, 30-costume play produced at this level.”

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