Tomson Highway:
My Way

But that's another story.

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."

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