Denise Bolduc, Tributaries creative producer.JENNIFER ROBERTS
In the final stretch before staging Tributaries, an epic five-hour, open-air performance featuring more than 60 artists, creative producer Denise Bolduc and associate producer Erika Iserhoff say their massive mission to honour the resilience of Indigenous women comes down to a simple message.
"This is who we are: We're beautiful people. We're smart. We're brilliant. We're strong," Bolduc says.
"We're the original!" Iserhoff interjects, and the room breaks up laughing. "We're still here!"
Bolduc and Iserhoff could use the release. The pressure is on to produce an artistic counterpoint to the current messaging around Indigenous women in news media, which can be grim.
Tributaries was commissioned to kick off Luminato, Toronto's sprawling 11-day arts festival. It happens to come at a time when Canadians are experiencing the friction of the overlap of sesquicentennial pageantry with an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women that highlights the shameful way government policy has failed women of Indigenous nations. At the same time, social media is at a constant simmer with anger and hurt feelings around cultural appropriation and Indigenous expression.
Bolduc acknowledges the pressure. "It can be exhausting, those challenges of always having to step up to everything. You're constantly educating."
In a way, the rise in volume around Indigenous conversations in Canada makes the celebratory power of Tributaries seem almost inevitable. It helps that the show is borne of a deeper, broader sense of time and rooted in a perspective that embraces the eternal interconnected nature of water, women and the environment. Women are traditionally water keepers or protectors. Bolduc sees her role as being a protector of the artistic platform this show creates so that artists "can freely express their songs and stories."
"Women," she adds, "are the heart of our nation – of all nations really."
The vision for Tributaries began with what Bolduc, Anishinaabe from the Lake Superior region, calls the "heart berry," or strawberry. "It started with the Ode'min Giizis, the Strawberry Moon," Bolduc explains, referring to June, the month when Ontario sees its strawberry harvest. "The strawberry has its roots and vines and leaves and that's a system that sustains growth. Our water systems sustain and connect human, animal, plant, land. It's all interconnected."
Bolduc describes the show's collection of artists, which includes first-time teenage chorists, emerging electronic artist Iskwe and Polaris Prize-winning throat singer Tanya Tagaq, to be another kind of interconnected ecosystem, one that survives on mentorship.
Bolduc, who cites playwright-musician and Tributaries performer Tomson Highway as a personal mentor, says the show is as much for the artists themselves, to come together and inspire each other, as it is for a wide Luminato-primed audience.
"Process is longer and more important than the final product," Bolduc says. "Western culture is all about that final product in a lot of ways. Not to say that isn't important to us as well, but the process of getting there has many, many layers. You have to find your people to get permissions, your cultural leaders."
Bolduc gives the example of Norma Araiza, a Tributaries dancer who will perform a Yaqui deer dance, which is usually performed by men. The responsible way of presenting this dance was for them to seek permission from cultural keepers.
"Indigenous people don't speak on other cultures' behalf," Bolduc says. "And we've had so many people do that for us. And that is what we're trying to change."
When her grandfather was six years old, officials came to take him into a residential school. He hid in the bushes and never went.
Her Anishinaabe grandfather stayed with his community, but when his daughter married a non-Indigenous man, she lost her status, which was policy according to the Indian Act at the time. Bolduc was the youngest of six children.
"We lived one road away from the reserve, basically," Bolduc says. Her grandfather lived in Batchewana Reserve, "and I would literally cut through a trail in the bush and be at his house in seconds." Ultimately, both Bolduc and her mother regained their Indian status.
"I feel very fortunate that a lot of that history of trauma, there's limited amounts of it within my family," Bolduc says.
"I've recently developed the idea that trauma acts on the same principle as manure," says Tomson Highway, whose smaller, ticketed Cree Cabaret will kick off the evening before the free Tributaries show opens up to all passersby in a public performance.
"If you're a gardener, you know the more spectacular the manure is, the stinkier it is, the more spectacular the vegetation is that comes out of it. Trauma works in the same way. We have all suffered trauma. Nobody can escape it; it's part of the human experience. So you take that and you plant seeds and you tend and you till until you have extraordinary vegetation, these flowers and symphonies, plays and novels. That's how it works for me. You turn something negative into a positive energy."
In past interviews, Highway has described his experience at "boarding" school as being positive, including his first contact with a piano. A political firestorm erupted this past March, when Senator Lynn Beyak used Highway as an example of the "abundance of good" to come out of an almost century-long residential school system, in which thousands of Indigenous children, taken from their families, died.
"I missed all that," Highway says of the Beyak controversy, citing time away on travel. "I cannot control people's mouths. That's not my job. I have no control over Lynn Beyak's mouth. She can say whatever she wants. It's water off my back."
Do they know each other?
"I don't know her. Never met her. Don't know her from a hole in the wall."
Having stories and perspective stolen by those without the requisite lived experience is the root of cultural appropriation. But Highway, on the phone from Montreal, where he laughs through much of the conversation, doesn't want to focus on that. Instead, his beacon is his experience as a social worker in Indigenous communities during his younger years, which he uses to feed his artistic drive.
"It's healthy to work always for the betterment of your community. Denise is one of those people who gets that," he says of Bolduc.
Bolduc recruited classically-trained cellist Cris Derksen to serve as a musical director for a Tributaries arrangement that will involve a choir, traditional hand drums and a chamber ensemble.
"We are educated in all of the Western, colonial ways," says Derksen, who is part Cree. "I can create symphonies from an Indigenous perspective instead of a white man creating a symphony based around Indigenous ideas."
Derksen, who began her career with Tagaq and considers her a mentor, says that appropriation of Indigenous culture is not new.
"We've seen this happen over and over and over again in so many ways," Derksen says. "From taking our land to taking our art to actually physically taking our beings over to Europe to be in a museum, we've seen this over and over."
This show is a rejection of all of it. Derksen relays a favourite saying: "Nothing about us, without us."
"I think Canada is shifting its lens and I think it's actually an exciting time to be Indigenous in Canada right now," Derksen says.
"We can tell our own stories."
Tributaries opens this year's Luminato Festival on June 14, starting at 6 p.m., in David Pecaut Square (luminatofestival.com).