ECSTASY AT INDIAN ROAD

ECSTASY AT INDIAN ROAD

1967 was Centennial year in Canada. Because it is rare for a human to live for 100 years, we consider a century to be a very long time. And so 1967 was a year of coast to coast celebration; our country had reached the century mark. The year was also a turning point for the crystallization of Canadianism, the development of a new maturity and consciousness separating us from our previous identity with our parents in England and France, and our older brother, the USA. All across Canada, there were Centennial projects to unite communities in celebration of ourselves. Forty years later, we still have parks, libraries, malls, schools, fire-halls, all named Centennial, as an on-going legacy or reminder. Most of the Kangaroo poets were teenagers in 1967; Andrea, the youngest, became a teenager that year. The surging of Canadianism which began that year is therefore of remembered significance for all of us, because for the first time, Canadian could mean first-class, not automatically second-class.
With the magnifying glass turned upon ourselves coast to coast for the first time, 1967 saw all kinds of political and cultural awakening throughout the country. There were flowerings in every field of the arts. In the west end of Toronto, this led Eugen Fandrich to establish the Catacombs Coffeehouse in the Indian Road Baptist Church as a meeting-point [later carried on by others at Café May] for the newly-creative, which included three of the Kangaroo poets. (Which is the excuse for this week’s poem by K’lakokum:)

Indian Road Coffeehouse ‘67

There we promised Love and Fame ---
I do remember whats-his-name
Who longed to teach us how to see
The light and eye of photography;
And I re-call that hip full blonde
Whose mamas cast a spell beyond,
Within, around, above, below; and
All the boys who joined her band;

Those many nameless threes and twos
Who all together sought their muse:
Musicians, actors, acrobats,
That energy then wore all hats:
All hope, all dream, refracted through
All-rosy lens, a new world, too;

I do remember whats-his-name
And that we promised Love and Fame,
But what-their-name I don’t know now
For all too few discovered how…
…and I am now their whats-his-name ---
Do they still promise Love and Fame?

Copyright © 1972, 2003 K’lakokum
[NOTE: if you do remember whats-his-name, please, please, get in touch!]

In 1980, Kangaroo Poet Andrea Riel-Lean performed the role of Eileen Joe in a production of George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. This play was first publicly performed on November 23, 1967 as a Centennial project of the Playhouse Theatre Company in Vancouver, and it carried several messages to Canadians. It was an opening shot in an Indian attempt to both a) convince public opinion of the need to de-institutionalize the aboriginal peoples, and b) to unite natives towards joint action. It was a beginning to using cultural activities to foster social action. And the play was also the first indigenous Canadian play to attain both popular and commercial success. For Andrea, first reading the play in 1980, it was a grim reminder of her own life on the streets during the latter part of the 60s – and she had personally experienced the thought poetically expressed in Eileen Joe’s lines which close the play: “When Rita Joe first come to the city, she told me…The cement made her feet hurt.”

ITEM AG37 in our bookstore:  THE ECSTASY OF RITA JOE

Cover photo shows Chief Dan George who played the role of David Joe, father of Rita and Eileen, in both the premiere run in Vancouver and the 1969 festival performance run for the opening of The National Arts Centre in Ottawa.  This is the August, 1998, 19th printing of this book. ISBN 088922000X.