Have you noticed that land acknowledgements have started to turn into plays and plays have started to turn into land acknowledgements?
No, really.
I affirm the importance of land acknowledgements. We must remember that we are settlers here and that this land was not given to us, but stolen by force. It’s also important to acknowledge that we heartlessly exterminated another culture, and to take responsibility for our crime.
Perhaps in a good land acknowledgement the speaker might suggest some course of action? Some way to try and compensate aboriginal people for the wrongs done to them? I know it’s not easy to figure out how to actually make change, but anything would be better than what land acknowledgements have been turning into.
Like…. personal memoirs? Like when the (usually white) person who is doing the land acknowledgement does not want to appear cold, or impersonal, or uninvolved, so they set about offering us a personal anecdote that they reckon is related to aboriginal issues? Inevitably the speaker strays from the topic at hand and sometimes (embarrassingly) ends up doing a little (perhaps unintentional) self-promotion?
Ugh.
But what’s really frightening is that not only are land acknowledgements turning into plays but plays are turning into land acknowledgements.
These days when I read a review of a play in Toronto tells us what the theme of the play is. And the play is judged to be good if the reviewer agrees with the that theme and bad-to- middling if the reviewer cannot find a theme to agree with. Is this what a theatre experience should be? I remember when a good play would set the reviewers puzzling over what it meant, or arguing about what they thought it meant — but nobody really knew for sure.
And I kind of liked that.
These days, at the beginning of the play, the author(s) tell you who is oppressed and who is not. After that it’s very boring. Am I suggesting that writers should be on the side of the oppressors? No. I’m just suggesting that plays should be more complicated and interesting than a game of football where you know before it starts which side you’re on.
I used to write gay plays that sometimes featured awful and nasty gay characters. I remember someone came up to me once and asked ‘Why do you hate gay people so much?” And I said “I don’t hate gay people it’s just that a lot of gay people are stupid and mean just like straight people. Would you like to see a play about people who were smart and nice? I think it would be a very boring play.”
Land acknowledgements are not suppose to be entertaining. They are supposed to make a point.
But plays…well plays used to be something other than well just — political views you know you agreed with before you came in, and still agree with, only more so, when you come out.
I long for that.
