All Our Relations

At the beginning of my work in directing this production, I wanted to read more of Joseph’s writing. When I read this poem in his collection The Punishment, I thought, isn’t it remarkable that this poet, whose work delves into the dark recesses of the human heart and history is also writing funny plays and stories for children? And then I was awakened to the importance of Joseph’s experience and knowledge of how we work with children to learn about the world. How does the smile of a child transform us? How does this smile ignite a fire of transformation to compel us to be something better than we are now?

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In approaching the staging of this play, I began with the premise, or the play’s central question, which is usually implied in the title. For TH’OWXIYA – The Hungry Feast Dish, I wondered who is Th’owxiya? What is a feast dish, and why is it hungry? Th’owxiya is a powerful spirit of the woods in southern B.C. and is well-known and respected by a variety of First Nations in this territory, including the Kwantlen people, whose stories served as the source material for Joseph’s play. The feast dish is a feature of the Kwantlen long house and is a place that holds all of the food contributed to a community feast or various potlatch ceremonies, including weddings, funerals, naming celebrations, and other rites of passage. In my mind, the feast dish is a bit like a container for all of the food brought to a community-wide pot-luck meal. But what happens when this container of contribution and generosity becomes ‘hungry’, or less of a holder of generosity and more of a void of greedy demand?

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The effect of Th’owxiya is that a feast dish can be transformed from a place of plenty to a place of over-consumption, and in this, I think the central question of Joseph’s play is for us to consider how we, as Canadians in a land of plenty, have become greedy in our demands on natural resources. Why do we possess such an insatiable appetite to consume?

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First Nations forms of knowledge are carefully attuned to relationships. Dwayne Donald, a Cree artist-researcher whose work focuses on walking and attending to our relationship with the natural world, offers us a valuable perspective on how to address the settler, colonial practices of over-consumption. In nêhiyawêwin (the Cree language), a foundational wisdom concept is wâhkôhtowin. Translated into English, wâhkôhtowin is generally understood to refer to kinship and relationality. In a practical way, wâhkôhtowin describes ethical guidelines regarding how you relate to your kin and how to conduct yourself as a good relative. Most of us would consider this to be good advice for how to live well within our families, but Donald’s wisdom delves deeper:

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“Wâhkôhtowin also refers to more-than-human kinship relations. This is a worldview that honors the ancient kinship and relationships that humans have with all other forms of life that comprise their traditional territories. This emphasis teaches human beings to understand ourselves as fully enmeshed in networks of relationships that support and enable our lives and living” (Donald 29).

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Following this relational kinship wisdom, human beings are called to repeatedly acknowledge and honour the sun, the moon, the land, the wind, the water, the animals and the trees as our kinship relations – because we carry parts of each of them inside our own bodies. Humans are fully reliant on these beings for survival, and so a wise person works to ensure that those more-than-human relatives are healthy and honoured.

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In TH’OWXIYA – The Hungry Feast Dish, we have more-than-human characters discovering their capacity to care for and support one another, to find wâhkôhtowin and thereby confront and transform the over-consumption of Th’owxiya. Consuming more than we need is essentially an addictive behaviour in Canadian colonial society; that is to say, we have created a system of commerce that values above all else continuous growth through extraction and consumption. This reminds me of an illuminating quote from Dr. Gabor Maté in his book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: “addiction is a poor substitute for love” (Maté 247).

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I hope that in our collective experience of TH’OWXIYA – The Hungry Feast Dish we might consider why we are always hungry for more, and that perhaps this craving to consume, own, and dominate is masking a kind of hunger that can become a healthier relationship with the world through the transformative power of a child’s smile.

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Finally, in the creation of this production, I am deeply grateful for the relational kinship wisdom and creative collaboration of the faculty, staff, visiting artists, students, and Joseph Dandurand himself, who have invested so much of themselves in this meaningful and rewarding work.

 

Works Cited

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Dandurand, Joseph. The Punishment. Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions, 2022. Print.

Donald, Dwayne. “We Need a New Story: Walking and the Wâhkôhtowin Imagination.”

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Walking – Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Tom Jeffreys. London and