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Tomson Highway: My Way
by Judy Steed
Today, Highway's talking about his play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, starring Graham Greene, whose been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as a Sioux medecine man in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves. Highway has never been to Kapuskasing - "a reporter from Kapuskasing phoned me up once" - nor did he ever imagine Dry Lips going to the plush Royal Alexandra Theatre, where it opens on April 13 for a month, only the third original Canadian drama selected by the Alex's David Mirvish. Highway can be found, most days by 1 p.m., in the renovated basement offices of Native Earth Performing Arts on Spadina across the road from the Native Canadian Centre. Artistic Director of the centre, Highway dresses like his fellow Manitoban Cree, Elijah Harper, in black: black shirt, black pants, with long black hair tumbling down his back. He wears round totoise-rimmed glasses and greets the world with a disarming charm. Eloquent, passionate, driven, he exudes joy and sorrow. A powerful presence in the Native community, Highway has also been embraced by the Toronto theatrical establishment. He is a classically trained musician, a pianist and a composer with a university English degree. Through his father, a trapper who died at the age of eighty, two years ago, and his mother, who is still living, and his huge extended family - he is the 11th of 12 children - he is deeply connected to Native tradition. His life is a clamourous crossroads of cultural influences. "I have nurtured the ability to live in two worlds," says Highway, smoking cigarettes and speaking in his distincly soft, lilting voice. Cree is his mother tongue, the language of his imagination. He didn't learn to speak English until he was six years old and was taken away to a Roman Catholic residential school for Native children where he was, along with generations of Native children, sexually abused by the priests who were his teachers. That is a story he is going to tell in one of his next plays. Suffice to say that, in his lover Raymond's phrase, "Tom is so anti-catholic that he's almost anti-morality." Does Highway hate the Catholic Church? Gently: "It's not hate so much as tremendous sadness at how a beautiful idea went wrong; it's tragic. I don't like the word hate. I try to keep myself away from the emotion of hatred. It scares me. Karma, it all comes back." As a child he fished with his father and brothers on the icy lakes of northern Manitoba and lived in tents with his family. He remembers seeing his parents, sitting together in the evenings, on each others laps, jiggling each other, laughing, so much in love. As a young man he became a widely travelled connoiseur of European culture, which, he says, "I admire to a huge extent." During trips to the continent in the 1970s, still in his early 20s, he absorbed the best of art, architecture and opera - and then quit music, his metier, at the age of 23, to work in the Native community. At 30, he began to write. His literary mentors were largely Canadian: he studied with the poet and playwright James Reany, who introduced him to the work of Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay, who is, like Highway, fascinated with parochial characters through whom he speacks about the collective survival of the race. For that is the theme that obseses Highway. "My father was a powerful, beautiful, magnificent man," he says, describing how he wrote Dry Lips in his father's hospital room, where his father lay dying. "Someone came in and asked my father 'Will your people ever find themsleves again?' and my father said 'Yes.'" The certainty of his father's convictions continues to inspire the son. Tomson likes to say that Nanabush, the male-female trickster-god at the heart of Native mythlogy, never really died. She just got drunk and passed out under the table and "it's up to us to give Nanabush one good kick in the ass so she can stand on her own two feet." Commercial Success (continued...) "He's mesmerizing," says novelist Katherine Govier, who saw him accept the Wang computer system at the Author's Aestival: "He wears his emotions very openly: he cried and talked about how he comes from one of the most remote reserves in Canada, with no roads, and that he was going to donate the computer to the Native Earth collective." It is here that Highway works with aspiring Native playwrights and does most of his writing. Rene framed next to the computer, Rene Highway, who danced with the Toronto Dance Theatre and choreographed Tomson's plays, died from an AIDS-related ailment last October. "Tom and Rene talked on the phone all the time, three times a day, always in Cree," says Raymond, a French-Canadian teacher in Northern Ontario who asked to have his last name omitted for professional reasons. "Since Rene's death, Tom has a huge void to fill: Tom needs his Native roots. He's surrounded by his artistic, educated, whitish Toronto friends, and now that Rene is gone he has to make an effort to spend time with his Native friends." Too often, that means hanging out in bars. The plight of city Indians haunts Highway. "One of the most common visual symbols within the Canadian urban psyche is that of an Indian drunk at every street corner," he said two years ago on the eve of Theatre Passe Murraille's premiere of Dry Lips. "Most white Canadians have seen that more often than the beaver. You might as well put that Indian drunk on the nickel and retire the beaver. . . every time I walk past one of these guys my heart just screams." Raymond says it's true: "We'll be walking down the street and some Native guy will be panhandling, and Tom will always stop and give him money and talk to him. And then Tom won't speak for a long time. It's very painful for him." What is also painful for an artist is criticism. Though Highway says "it is necessary - I'd be a bit bored if I got nothing but praise," he has been stung by suggestions that Dry lips is mysoginistic. "Dry lips is easily misunderstood, and that's partly my fault. Portraying the trickster as a woman is tantamount to portraying God as a woman. It's about the empowerment of the female principle, the reawakening of the feminine in men." When he wrote the play in the late 1980s, he was upset about the conflicts that were ripping apart Native reserves across the country, including his own. While The Rez Sisters - part one of Highway's planned seven part epic - was about seven women on a reserve, Dry Lips was conceived as the male response to the sexual revolution precipitated by women and endorsed by the playwright. "The missionaries made such a mess of things," Highway says. In the rape scene (in Dry Lips), a women is raped with a crucifix. On a metaphorical level, the scene symbolizes the matriarchal religion raped by the patriarchy, the Godess raped by God. "Until the central symbol of the crucifix is not a central symbol in our society, women will always be second class citizens." And so will Native people. Did he know what he was doing when he wrote the play? "No, you don't know half the time what's happening. You just have to write. When I was staying in the hopsital with my father, I told a doctor he was lucky to have his profession because writing can be hell." Says Raymond: "Tom talks to himself all the time, in his head or out loud. I've gotten used to it. He's always working on his work. He juggles three plays in his head at once. He needs a lot of space to do what he needs to do, he needs silence. I had to get used to that: being in a room with him and not talking for long periods. When his mother came to Toronto, when Rene was dying, it was like that. They would sit silently for a long time, then she would burst out volubly, and they'd rattle away for maybe five minutes, then they'd stop." In the Highway family, communication transcends language, says Raymond. "I loved going to rehearsels when Rene and Tom were working together. They are very different. Rene was not an intellectual, he was not agile with language the way Tom is. He wasn't educated. Rene played on the streets more, Tom's more into business, administration, writing. But together, in the theatre, they clicked. They didn't have to talk, they knew what had to be done to get to where they wanted to go." The brother's artistry began when they made up games to play in the bush and became a central survival strategy in the Catholic school, where they seem to have removed themselves from the worst aspects of sexual abuse by living in their imaginations.
In Between People Highway does not attribute his homsexuality to the abuse. He says he always knew he was gay and that he's comfortable with it, though he never told his parents. In Native tradition, he says, "men hunted, women had children, and then there was the in-between people - their task was to commune with the spirit world." In his in-between state, Highway communes. In Mexico - he loved the climate because the heat was dry, not humid - "I was sitting on the beach alone one night with the waves washing on the shore and it was like Rene was speaking to me." Now he's finished speaking. The interview is over. At the door of Native Earth, Highway has a last comment. "In our society, two men holding hands and kissing is considered perverse, but watching thousands of men killing each other on TV is fine." He turns: "The patriarchy must go. It's killing us." 
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