Quelemia Sparrow
After I parked my car, I sat in the driver’s seat and didn’t get out. I sat still and thought about what I was going to say. I didn’t want to go to the meeting that was scheduled at the J J Bean on Commer- cial Drive with director Lois Anderson. We were to meet about my part in Lysistrata at Bard on the Beach. What was an exciting opportunity for me had turned into something all too familiar.
My name is Quelemia Sparrow. I am from the Musqueam Nation in Vancouver. I am an Indigenous actor, writer, and dir- ector. And I’ll preface that I had acted with Lois before and loved working with her. We already had a pretty solid working relation- ship, although this was my first time being directed by her.
I had read through a draft sent out to the cast, so I already knew the conceit of this adaptation of Lysistrata. In protest of the development of a new shipping terminal in Vanier Park, the site of Bard on the Beach, the acting ensemble refuses to perform Hamlet, the scheduled performance, and instead chooses to stage Lysistrata.
Essentially, in parts of the play, we were to play ourselves protesting a shipping terminal development in Vanier Park, the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil- Waututh Nations.
As I read through the script, I realized I (meaning my char- acter Quelemia) had absolutely nothing to say about the shipping terminal being developed on my land. Absolutely nothing. Instead, I was oddly silent. In multiple scenes, non-Indigenous characters rallied to protect their land from development. Strangely, I had no voice. I came to understand later, from conversations with Lois, that this silencing was some sort of metaphor of having no voice.
Much later, I would come to understand that this probably happened because Lois didn’t really know what to write. You real- ly can’t write what you don’t know—not can’t as in you shouldn’t, but it’s really hard. There are some successful exceptions, but for the most part, it doesn’t work. You end up writing the version of reality you know and nothing more.
I had just finished a disastrous season at the Stratford Festival where the director of The Komagata Maru Incident had the idea to cast the emcee as an Indigenous woman. The emcee also plays a colonizer throughout. It was an interesting choice, and I was enthusiastic about the potential and immense possibilities in play- ing a colonizer.
I won’t go into too much detail here. It really deserves its own article—and I only bring it up to lend some context to my appre- hension going into process with Lysistrata. At Stratford, noth- ing was researched. I was tasked with disseminating Indigenous knowledge to the team. And, I soon realized, the whole idea was
based in Eurocentrism. I was asked to dance every time I played the colonizer, which I suppose was an attempt to mock imperi- alism, but the satire itself was seeped in a settler paradigm that did not dismantle a colonial viewpoint but only strengthened it. I was an awkward ‘dancing Indian character’ used to represent my very own experience, which absurdly was manufactured by a settler perspective.
I was also assisting with sound (the Indigenous drumming off the top was straight out of a Disney movie, which I had to fix). I helped with the design of the props—there was no cultural advis- er, so I had to ‘get permission’ from my Auntie to use a feathered staff in the show—and I even shipped my regalia from Vancouver during rehearsal because the costume was incorrect. It was a Metis costume when it should have been a Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh costume given that the Komagata Maru attempted to land in Vancouver.
So, needless to say, I was nervous going into this meeting with yet another colonial institution with yet another well-intentioned director.
Lois and I met in the café, and my heart sank when she asked me to play The Earth and the Leader of the Women’s Chorus. I was being asked to play the Indigenous stereotype of the earth and the wise elder.
I told her I would think about it, and I did.
These challenging experiences have forced me to redefine my theatremaking practice, to demand agency, to have the confi- dence to continually include relational processes that connect us to Indigenous lands and the voices of our people and ancestors.
I was definitely not going to have a repeat of what had hap- pened the previous season at Stratford. I was being welcomed into these colonial spaces to play ‘Indians,’ and I had had enough. It was time to be heard and seen.
I knew in my heart that what was missing in the script was not out of a lack of desire to include or to share the Indigenous experience. It simply was because Lois did not know the whole story. And I did. I know the story.
I met with Lois again. The conversation was challenging. But we were both gracious and willing. We decided that I would write my sections of the script and fill in the missing pieces. The process wasn’t easy, but it was full of determination, grace, compassion, integrity, love, shame, guilt, sadness, hope, friendship, resiliency, passion, forgiveness, and, oh my gosh, dare I say it, reconciliation.
I have always said settlers really want to skip the truth in Truth and Reconciliation. You can’t have reconciliation without acknow- ledging the truth. And we acknowledged the truth in Lysistrata. I was able to write about the land. We didn’t skip over the hard part. We were together in it. That’s the only way toward reconciliation.
I wrote about sən̓aʔqw (Snauq).
sən̓aʔqw is the land that settlers call Vanier Park. sən̓aʔqw was our village.
‘... These waters were full of salmon, oyster beds, clams—it was so bountiful you could hear the smelts swimming on summer nights.... And right here, right underneath us were these blue camas lily fields.’
‘Listen, Cha-hy. Can you hear it? It’s the sound of thou- sands and thousands of smelts swimming. That’s the sound of their little tails wriggling: Cha-hy. At one time, they used to say, you could hear them on summer nights right here on the beach. The sound would travel across the water.... You know how sound travels across the water.’
‘The women used to cultivate these fields. They had these pretty flowers—some were white, some were blue.
But the women loved the blue ones the best because they were the prettiest.’
Every night onstage, I planted a camas lily bulb at sən̓aʔqw in honour of my ancestors. And I cried. Real tears. It was a reclama- tion happening in real time for all to witness.
I made sure to speak my truth this time. And Lois listened. She really listened.
Lois Anderson
We gather in the dark. A spoon in one hand and a fistful of blue camas lily bulbs in the other. We need to find good spots to plant—out of sight. Tomorrow, we close Lysistrata at Bard on the Beach. We run off into the night in pairs. Darkness stretches out between us, our iPhone flashlights twinkling, connecting us across the distance. To reintroduce this indigenous plant into a designat- ed park, we have to be sneaky or we could get a ticket or be fined, or the bulbs could be confiscated. The irony is not lost on us.
This site was once a summer gathering place for the Mus- queam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish nations. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Indigenous inhabitants of this place were coerced to sell, loaded onto a barge, and relocated elsewhere. The land had been scouted out by “prominent business men of the city” (Barman 13) and by the early Vancouver Parks Board. I did not know this story when we began Lysistrata. It has all but been erased: “Persons who were indigenous to the area, and consid- ered it their home long before the arrival of outsiders, were first removed from the land they called their own and then saw even their memory deliberately lost from view” (Barman 4).
Jennifer Wise and I adapted Lysistrata for Bard on the Beach in 2018. Aristophanes’s script follows the journey of a group of women in ancient Athens who stage a protest against a long, drawn-out war. In 2018, Greater Vancouver was embroiled in a debate over pipeline expansion, a debate that leads to larger ques- tions of land stewardship both provincially and nationally. It seemed timely to focus our production on the present ‘war’ being raged against the planet. To this end, we introduced a fiction. We devised a conceit in which Vanier Park, site of Bard on the Beach, was slated for development as a new shipping terminal. As part of the conceit, the actors highjacked the theatre, refusing to perform the scheduled play, Hamlet, choosing instead to stage an ad hoc version of Lysistrata.
I met with Quelemia Sparrow a few months before rehearsal to discuss what her voice in this piece might be. That day, over tea, I began to grapple with the slow realization that I was attempting to integrate Quelemia’s voice into my theatrical vision. However well intentioned my actions were, I was seeking a way to fash- ion her into the piece, as opposed to the other way around. Our discussion revealed that she had a completely different point of reference about that piece of land, and I understood that I had to re-examine my point of view. Perhaps most significantly, I went away meditating on what listening means in a creative process with an Indigenous artist.
As Lysistrata developed into a site-specific piece, the site itself demanded that truth be spoken beyond the fictional narratives of a shipping terminal development and the tale of Aristophanes. The piece became a tale within a tale within a truth: the story of Lysistrata, improvised by the company, in which Quelemia Spar- row performed at a Shakespeare festival in Vanier Park, on the unceded traditional territory of her ancestors, with the traditional placename Snauq (phonetically spelled). Our production had to crack open so that space could be made available for Quelemia’s voice. The fictional shipping terminal presented a fictional threat to only a landscaped remnant of what had once been. The truth had to include what was missing from the site in its present-day form—what had been removed, eradicated, and destroyed.
It became clear that listening can be adopted as an immediate action—stop talking and listen—but that hearing, which is much more comprehensive, takes great time, because of what has been erased from our collective civic knowledge. It also became clear that as Vancouverites we have a responsibility to educate ourselves, to seek out the true early history of our city—through reading and through research. Few, if any of us, in the company or audience had knowledge of the history of the place we were performing on and the longer story of a dismantled ecosystem and human displacement at that site.
I found myself thinking about the power dynamics of the rehearsal room and the nature of directing. It’s an interesting
experience to be a director and to recognize at the same time that you are not necessarily the elder in the room—to lead the vision of a piece by surrendering the vision of a piece, to relinquish directo- rial control while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the whole. The rehearsal process had to shift to allow time for Quele- mia’s meditations—not enough time, certainly, but a beginning. Furthermore, appropriate compensation for her ideas had to be considered as her thoughts became text.
The little iPhone lights are beginning to disappear. Maybe the company of actors have started to pack it in, having completed the guerrilla planting. I stumble toward a scrubby-looking tree. And under it I find Quelemia. The earth is scrabbly here, and it’s hard to dig. Our spoons bend. We giggle, our bums sticking up in the night air. In this moment, under this ridiculous landscaped tree with Q, I feel a sort of quiet epilogue to our creative process together. I am thankful for her gracious participation in our pro- duction. I am thankful for her patience with me. I acknowledge the blind spots I have had about the history of this place that I call home, and I take responsibility for my re-education. I acknow- ledge that Lysistrata was performed on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish people—where once the camas lily grew.
