In Conversation with Trina Moyan
Content Disclaimer: The following piece discusses themes of racism, sexual violence, and abuse against Indigenous communities and women, which have occurred historically and still persist today.
In February, the SHIFT* team attended The Cave that Hummed a Song—a play written and performed by Trina Moyan. In her own words, the playwright connects the play’s narrative to sexual desire and greed that speaks to climate change, the MMIWG2S movement, matriarchal knowledge and the power of collective love and forgiveness, all laced with humour. We sat down with Trina Moyan afterwards to discuss inspirations behind her storytelling alongside her own experience as an Indigenous woman and practitioner.
The image above was taken by Marianne Sawchuck at a rehersal of The Cave that Hummed a Song. Trina Moyan is depicted on the right and Jill Carter, her director, on the left. Jill Carter is another Indigenous woman who Trina Moyan dedicates her play to through association as a woman who has survived the policies that have so deeply wounded Indigenous women.
Q: You seem to have a wide breadth of experience in many different fields— is there a practice of yours that you feel particularly lends itself to activism? How does activism look for you in all these different contexts?
First of all, I didn’t set out intending to be an activist at all. I was born into a structurally racist society—I had no choice. It also relates to the fact that I can’t white-pass. I have three other sisters and our middle sister white-passes—she’s very fair and this was both an advantage and a painful disadvantage because she struggled to be accepted by our own people. In terms of activism, because of how I look and the colour of my skin I always had to actively stand up for myself because I was never accepted by non-Indigenous people. So my activism started there, I had to fight for myself in order to survive. So the truth of being born into racism meant that all of my ‘practices’ are associated with being an activist.
“The truth of being born into racism meant that all of my ‘practices’ are associated with being an activist.”
As a child, I recall being on the receiving end of abuse from my teachers as early as second grade. During the Albertan winters, -20° or -30°, I watched my teacher take care of all the other children ensuring they had their winter clothes on for recess but nobody took care of me. My teacher would pull on my braids and whisper nasty things in my ear: “aren’t you just a dumb little Indian?” Racism was always there, and I was constantly exposed to it.
Activism today, I suppose in its pure definition, often pertains to lobbying or demonstrations, or protests—I’ve always had to actively protest for myself. So when it comes to my work, that’s just always been my life. I’m not a major activist leader you’ll see leading a protest but I’m always supporting. My lived experience and my entire career have been about advocating for Indigenous histories and presence. My work has always been about actively pushing against privileging European histories and trying to represent the truth of the Indigenous experience in this country—whether that’s been in my journalism, where I started my career, television, documentary filmmaking, or as an actor.
My hero was actually Lloyd Robertson. I remember as a little girl, watching him on the news and sharing a positive story about Indigenous people. During that era, the news only shared racist perceptions or negative aspects so when Lloyd reported a good story about us I became a fan. I remember telling my parents, “I want to tell stories too. I want to tell the good stories, the true stories about us.” We’re not these awful, horrible, drunk, dirty Natives—we’re good people who have been handed a terribly unfair deal.
Q: We’ve noticed you are very much a storyteller—and one concerned with the representation of Indigenous people and knowledge. What differences have you perceived from a Western setting, in your experience producing for CBC and APTN, and storytelling from an Indigenous perspective with Indigenous methods?
That would begin with the colonial, Western gaze which too often confines us to stereotypical tropes that either romanticizes us as stoic or fetishizes us as overtly sexual. So that is the fulcrum of how I share stories, I want to tear away those perceptions to share the immense power and knowledge of Indigenous people.
“That is the fulcrum of how I share stories, I want to tear away those perceptions to share the immense power and knowledge of Indigenous people.”
The framework, especially in theatre, as art is historically a patriarchal structure that often centers on the individual who becomes the hero. When I look at Indigenous storytelling, it’s always about the community or how the individual affects the community—and you saw this in my play, The Cave that Hummed a Song. It’s about how we’re all in this together. We’re in that circle—the medicine wheel of life. All of my documentary filmmaking for the CBC or APTN has been about centering the Indigenous worldview of the collective. That we are not able to survive without one another, we need each other and are nothing without one another.
This speaks to who I am because I’m actually Nehiyawak – not Cree. That is an exonym. So when I think about Indigenous storytelling and how it comes up against the Western practice, I think about how we are called ‘the Cree.’ When the French came, we called out to warn our people that the ships, that the Europeans had arrived. So the French called us La Cri—in the French language meaning the cry. This is how we got this exonym, but what we call ourselves is the Nehiyawak, based on the number four. Translated, this means four-bodied or four-spirited people.
When I say I’m Nehiyawak, I’m recognizing those four directions, the spiritual corners of life, the four stages in life, those four medicines, and the four elements. And those directions are not just flat, but a sphere that I have to balance and exist within. I center myself there – or at least try to.
So when I say I’m Nehiyaw Iskwew, I’m actually telling you I’m a four-spirited woman. That’s where Indigenous storytelling comes from. In everything I do, I have to recognize that balance and ensure that I honor Wahkohtowin, the number one law in our language—to love all beings and all of creation. This is what I’m trying to convey in my play, The Cave that Hummed a Song.
“So when I say I’m Nehiyaw Iskwew, I’m actually telling you I’m a four-spirited woman. That’s where Indigenous storytelling comes from.”
The way I’ve been raised, when we are storytelling, it’s not just about me or what I see, or my gaze, but it’s about what everyone is seeing and feeling and how we are all together in the story. Each time the story is shared it is transformed and changed because we are experiencing it together. It’s never the same.
—On Indigenous Worldviews
When the Europeans came over, the vast majority of Indigenous peoples embraced them as brothers, sisters, friends, and relatives because our worldview tells us we’re all one. This is where these friendship and peace treaties came from. The wampum belts were designed and woven with such detail and love, because they represented that familyship, that we would be together and exist in balance and with love. Respecting each other’s way of living.
You hear about the Grandfather Teachings of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in this region, which are powerful. My people, the Nehiyawak call them the Pipe Laws because when you are a pipe carrier, you sit together and remind each other that it is the code of ethics. Too often, they are viewed as simplistic romanticized ideals, but to us, these are laws. If you break the law, you’re hurting the community. They are a little different than the Grandfathering Teachings in this region but very similar. When my people smoke the pipe—we smoke to health, happiness, generations, compassion, respect, quietness, and generosity. Nehiyaw iskwew, Sylvia McAdam speaks of these laws online.
Q: On The Cave that Hummed a Song–what inspired you to create a performance piece? Can you tell us about your process in creating it, and how that experience may inform your other work?
It started from my lived experience as an Indigenous woman. Having been subjected to enormous racism, growing up. But it is mostly about my mother's experience. My mother is a residential school survivor. She was taken at the age of ten along with her little brothers. They were chased through the woods and kidnapped by the police, and taken to the Blue Quills residential school. The trauma was immediate. Her mother, my Nohkom, my grandmother, was also a residential school survivor, and so was my Nimosôm, my grandfather. So much intergenerational trauma. The way my mother was taken was traumatic and she was angry at her own mother. She wondered: “Why aren’t you coming to get me?” She didn’t know about the residential school policy and that it had become law—that Indigenous children had to go to the schools. It wasn’t until she got out of the residential school that it was explained to her that it was illegal for her to stay home. Indigenous people were never informed or consulted on any of these genocidal assimilation policies, they were forced upon them.
“Indigenous people were never informed or consulted on any of these genocidal assimilation policies, they were forced upon them.”
Fortunately, my mother survived the residential school system after suffering enormous abuse there. She witnessed her brothers suffering enormous abuse, she witnessed the extreme abuse of other girls and boys. When she was finally released at sixteen and returned to our first nation Ayiki-Sâkahikan, which is Frog Lake in Northern Alberta, she had to enter the Indian Day School system also run by the Catholic Church on our reserve. But because she worked such heavy labor in the residential school - she only received a grade 7 education. The nuns and the priests at the residential school used her along with the others for the gardening, the heavy labor, the cooking, the cleaning—you name it.. Ironically, they made fun of her for being sixteen and only having a seventh-grade education, but it was their fault. She endured many, many layers of suffering—emotional, mental, physical, and sexual abuse. And then, she met my father—at the local grocery store.
My father was this beautiful young man, and they had known each other since they were children. They had gone to ceremony together and spoke beautiful Nehiyawewin (the Cree language) together. They fell in love and ran away to Edmonton, came back, and the families threw them a beautiful, grand wedding. They thought they would get married, receive their piece of land like all the other people who married, have a family, and grow old. What they didn’t know was that because my father’s family had taken Métis scrip, another assimilation policy that stripped them of their identity, they were no longer considered Indigenous. He was stripped of his status as a Native man. What they didn’t know, was that the government created a policy stating that if an Indigenous woman married a non-status man, she was also stripped of her identity and not allowed to live on the reserve. So, they had this grand wedding, thinking they would receive their land and their home, but instead they were told, “no, you’re out of here.” They were kicked off the reserve—another layer, another blow.
The play I wrote was informed by all my mother’s, grandmother’s, aunties’, and sisters’ experiences and what we’ve survived as Indigenous women in this country. Many Indigenous nations were matriarchal societies, but when the Europeans arrived, they saw the power that the women had and did everything they could to whittle away at our power, our influence, and our voice.
“When the Europeans arrived, they saw the power that the women had and did everything they could to whittle away at our power, our influence, and our voice.”
My play is informed by the womb. You see it so clearly in the process of resource extraction; there’s an influx of industry in towns and villages, and the women are the first to suffer. You’re outnumbered by men, discarded, used, or abused—and you end up with a massive increase in domestic violence and violence against women. This is what the Europeans did when they came to Canada. They wanted the resources, but they also understood that the only way that they could survive the harshness of the Canadian winters and summers was by taking an Indigenous ‘wife’. They saw the power that women had—how we were not docile, but hunters, fishers, trappers, and medicine growers. We knew how to survive anything and everything. The Métis nation was born of the relationship between European men and mostly the Nehiyaw iskwewak (Cree women). In fact, the province of Manitoba was set aside for the Métis nation as negotiated by Métis leader Louis Riel, an agreement which was later dishonored by the government.
As the arrival of European women increased Indigenous women and their children were slowly discarded, now devalued, and considered useless. The European men who had depended upon their Indigenous ‘wives’ discarded them and their mixed-blood children for the arrival of European women. So this is where the history of Indigenous women as valueless emerges. Now, they’re just seen as single parents, often homeless without husbands, and dealing with this massive shift in the landscape of their traditional way of life. Their villages are being dispersed, divided, and cut up with the reservation system, and ultimately a population of Indigenous women who are viewed as worthless. Then the government legislates assimilation policies in the Indian act that stripped women of their status—the trauma for Indigenous women is endless. And we see it today in the MMIWG2S epidemic.
All of this is what inspired my play. When you rape the land, it often begins with the raping and discarding of women. Women are the land protectors, the medicine keepers, and the water protectors. So, when you start to treat women with violence and disrespect, you are also doing that directly to the land. When I was in Women’s Studies, we reviewed the feminist movements. For non-Indigenous women, these movements were based on equality and equal pay, but the Indigenous women’s movement is based on respecting Mother Earth. This is what the Indigenous women’s movement has always been about.
“When you start to treat women with violence and disrespect, you are also doing that directly to the land.”
But balance is so important. Yes, we’re trying to shift male dominance, but if we shift too far we’ll hurt our men. The Nehiyawak view is that we all matter; the two spirits, men, and women, all beings in the milieu of life. This is where the nameless man-boy in my play comes in. I have two sons, they are these beautiful, young men who need love and understanding too. We can’t just label young men as violent, misogynistic awful people. Yes, the history of the world has been clearly harsh and unfair to women but we need to share that truth with our young men and hope they see a better way forward in balance with women. There is a love inside the nameless man-boy character in my play —that’s why he sings to the women in the end. He sings with love for them knowing he is nothing without them. That we are all in this together. And that truth informs all of my work.