Fringe play raises issues to talk about

Page 11

Dear Editor:

I recently saw a play at the Edmonton Fringe Festival called Black and White Pictures. I left feeling like I'd been kicked in the stomach. The plot unsettled me: a normal, if a little neurotic and naive white teacher, growing bitter and jaded teaching bad Grade 1 students on a bad, bad reserve. The backdrop, given the plot, disturbed me even more: photo slides of an obviously Aboriginal community, not just of buildings and landscapes, but of real people, elders, adults and children.

The playwright, Bob Hume, has taught on three reserves in northern Saskatchewan , and claims the majority of the plot is based on his and other teachers' experiences. He is convinced most Canadians only known about Aboriginals from movies like Dances with Wolves. He is a white knight crusading to alert the misinformed middle-class about the "emergency" on reserves. Noble? I would argue that the play is an old story used to justify a particularly insidious form of racism. A well-intentioned white person attempts to help the poor Aborigines out of their own muck, but is rejected, even mal-used for his or her efforts. If this is the thanks given for a kind offer to help assimilate, then that white person has earned the right to animosity and apathy.

At one point in this one-person play, the protagonist declares that she realizes, to her dismay, she hates the students in her class. The (white) audience laughed. I wonder if they would have if it was their children displayed on the screen behind her.

These photos serve to legitimize the play's story, and lump Aboriginals into a homogenous mass, into nameless representations in some white person's personal drama. I wonder if those people have any idea where their photos are, and what they are being used for? Teachers are in a position of trust, and to me, this play was a violation of that trust. So who is mal-using whom here?

Hadley Friedland