The Rez Sisters

The Rez Sisters
Written by	Tomson Highway
Date premiered	November 26, 1986
Place premiered	Native Canadian Centre of Toronto
Original language	English
Subject	Indian reserve life
Setting	A fictional reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada

The Rez Sisters is a two act play by Cree Canadian writer Tomson Highway, first performed on November 26, 1986 by Act IV Theatre Company and Native Earth Performing Arts.

The Rez Sisters is partially inspired by Michel Tremblay's play Les Belles-soeurs, as it focuses on the hopes and dreams of a group of seven woman on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian reserve. While Highway's treatment of his women characters is sympathetic and perhaps gentler than Tremblay's, their portrayal can only be described as gritty and grim realism.

The Rez Sisters is the first of an unfinished cycle of seven plays the playwright refers to as his Rez Septology, which also includes 1989's 'flip side' play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, originally entitled The Rez Brothers.

The Rez Sisters features an ensemble cast of seven women dreaming of winning, and working toward raising enough money to attend, "The Biggest Bingo in the World," and one male actor/dancer in the role of Nanabush (originally played by the playwright's brother René Highway). The play melds the sometimes dark realities of life on an Indian reserve with humour and elements of Aboriginal spirituality. It features excerpts of dialogue in the Cree and Ojibway languages.

Characters

Main Characters	Background	Affliction	What happens to characters at the end
Pelajia Patchnose	Her sons are in Toronto, while her husband is in Espanola. Her mother is dead. Sister of Philomena. Works as a contractor.	She is trapped at the reserve which she has come to hate.	She is back where she started (on the roof) still trapped in the reserve. Considers becoming the chief.
Philomena Moosetail	She had an affair with her boss (garment district) in Toronto and conceived a child. But she gave the child away. Her mother is dead. Sister of Pelajia.	Her lover (her boss) got her pregnant but then left with his wife. She knows nothing of the child she bore, not even its gender.	She wins $600 from the bingo. Buys her new shiny, porcelain toilet bowl. But no major change occurs in life, as she is also back where she started, on the roof.
Marie-Adele Starblanket	Took Eugene from Annie, who drinks a lot. Has fourteen kids with him. Half-sister of above.	She has a growing cancer.	Her cancer kills her as the rest of the women lose the bingo game.
Annie Cook	Has a daughter, Ellen who lives with Raymond in Sudbury. Sister of Marie-Adele.	She lost her love to her own sister Marie	She gets a job as a back-up singer for Fritz at Little Current. She also comes closer to achieving her love, Fritz.
Emily Dictionary	She works at a store. Mistreated by her husband forcing her to abandon him and her children. Former member of the Rez Sisters’ motorbike gang, she left when her lover killed herself. Sister of Annie.	She was severely mistreated by her husband, who tried to kill her once. She was part of the Rez Sisters’ gang in San Francisco.	Comes back to her store, but is pregnant with Big Joey's baby.
Veronique St. Pierre	Adopted Zhaboonigan with Pierre. Sister-in-law of the above.	She is disliked by almost everybody. Husband Pierre drinks all the money away.	She gets her new stove and is delighted to be cooking for Eugene and the fourteen Starblanket children
Zhaboonigan Peterson	She is mentally challenged. Her parents died in a car crash. Adopted daughter of Veronique St. Pierre.	She is mentally challenged and was sexually abused by two white men.	Originally afraid of Emily Dictionary, she comes to trust her and in her final scene in the play is learning to help Emily at the store.

Synopsis

The opening scene begins with Pelajia Patchnose nailing shingles on her roof on the fictional Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. She is joined by her sister, Philomena, with whom she discusses her longing to leave the reserve, to which Philomena receives skeptically: "But you were born here. All your poop's on this reserve". They are joined by their half sister, Annie Cook, who they treat disdainfully, and who shares the news that she is expecting a package before leaving to pick it up.

Meanwhile, Marie-Adele is playing with Zhaboonigan, while Nanabush, in the form of a seagull, watches on. This is where we first learn of Marie-Adele's (cervical?) cancer, and Veronique's insecurity about having no blood children of her own. The various tensions between the seven sisters, such as shared lovers and stolen husbands, is slowly exposed. This is also when we first hear rumors about THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD, a possibility which all the women are ecstatic about. Soon Annie arrives and the women march to Emily Dictionary's store to discover the details.

Once the women are gathered at the store long suffering tempers flare and the scene dissolves into the sisters tussling and exchanging verbal attacks, during which Zhabooginan wanders to the side stage and re-accounts her brutal rape by two white boys with a screwdriver to her audience, Nanabush, who is experiencing "agonizing contortions" during the retelling.

However, as soon as news of THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD is confirmed, the women promptly stop their squabbling and cooperatively plan how to fund the trip to Toronto in order to attend. A mad flurry of activities ensue as the women plan the trip and raise money in various ways. Once they have consolidated their efforts and funds, they set out on the drive in a borrowed van.

They encounter several diversions, a flat tire, Marie-Adele collapsing (and having another encounter with Nanabush, this time as a nighthawk), but the most notable part of the scene is the emotional stories the women exchange: Emily re-accounts witnessing her lesbian lover die in a motorcycle accident, Marie-Adele expresses her fear of dying, etc.

Finally they arrive at THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD, where Nanabush plays the bingo master and the audience plays along. At the end of this climatic scene, Marie-Adele dies just as the other women are losing. The play jumps back to Wasaychigan Hill, and Philomena has won $600 and got a new toilet, but otherwise things remain largely unchanged.

Themes and motifs

Nanabush

Nanabush, who is described by Tomson, as a "pivotal and important a figure in the Native world as Christ is in the realm of Christian mythology", is a central and symbolic character in the play. Although he is specifically played by a male actor in the Rez Sisters, Tomson switches the gender in Dry Lips, noting that Nanabush is traditionally dual-gendered. The character is present in both scenes of joy (Marie-Adele and Zhabooginan innocently playing), and of anguish and despair (Zhabooginan describing her rape, the women fighting, Marie-Adele collapsing, dying). These appearances possibly speak to the understanding of Nanabush as an apathetic deity, reinforcing the ending of the play: circular (Pelajia is once more on her roof), and without resolution. It is worth noting that Nanabush, who ‘appears’ in bird form, is only seen as "the spirit inside" by Marie-Adele (who is close to death), and Zhabooginan (who has a mental handicap), perhaps speaking to the relegation of this deity to the margin in the Aboriginal community.

Rape/ Screwdriver

In the play, the details of Zhaboonigan's sexual assault - including her being abducted and attacked with a screwdriver - closely parallel the details of the 1971 murder of Helen Betty Osborne of Norway House, Manitoba. Despite overwhelming physical evidence — blood, hair and clothing fragments were found in one of the suspects' cars — it was not until 1987, a year after The Rez Sisters opened, that two out of the three suspects in Osbourne's murder were charged. Highway's deeply sympathetic character, Zhaboonigan, can be seen as a statement against the injustice inflicted upon Osborne.

The rape of an Aboriginal woman with a symbol of "western" domination is a reoccurring image in Highway's work, paralleled in Dry Lips with a woman raped by a crucifix. One reading is the crude image of the screwdriver as a western ideological "tool" used to "fix" the "broken" condition (Zhaboonigan is mentally handicapped) of the Indian.

Criticism and interpretation

Queer Theory

Emily Dictionary - Queer characters in the 1980s At the time that this play was written, being openly gay was an extremely risky endeavour. Though Highway subtly veils it, it can be understood that Emily Dictionary's love of the biker-women, and her "butch" leanings and subtle aversion to the male characters of the play point to her implicit lesbianism.

Camp

The over-the-top and sometimes brash character portrayal (sisters tickling one another on the breasts) can be attributed to camp theatrical style, intentionally meant to shock and evoke strong audience reaction.

Colour-blindness

Although the play is considered a classic of Canadian theatre, Highway himself has noted that it is rarely staged by theatre companies. According to Highway, theatres frequently face or perceive difficulty in finding a suitable cast of First Nations actors, but are reluctant to take the risk of casting non-aboriginal performers due to their sensitivity around accusations of cultural appropriation, with the result that the play is often simply passed over instead.

In 2011, director Ken Gass mounted a production of The Rez Sisters at Toronto's Factory Theatre. As part of an ongoing research project into the effects of colour-blind casting on theatre, he staged two readings of the play — one with an exclusively First Nations cast and one with a colour-blind cast of actors from a variety of racial backgrounds — before mounting a full colour-blind stage production.

Awards

• Won 1986-87 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play.
• Runner-up for the Floyd Chalmers Award for the outstanding Canadian play of 1986
• Nominated for the Governor General's Award.