Three Young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a new play for the tenth anniversary of the Native Voices series at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

Clements dramatizes the emotional, psychological and social repercussions of this, and subsequent, bureaucratic incursions into the girls’ lives. Their arrival in California takes a tragic turn when their mother is suddenly killed and the girls are arbitrarily placed in different foster homes, never to see each other again.

We follow Janey, Miranda and Jessie as they lead very disparate adult lives: Janey, a troubled vagrant; Miranda, a burgeoning actress fighting typecasting in Hollywood; Jessie, an idealist physician who’s married to a medical colleague. As it was bureaucratic policy that had dismantled their secure family unit and sent each girl into the unknown, so too did a government paper ultimately bring them together, if only symbolically. Clements casts the sisters’ narrative against the backdrop of another historical injustice: the forced sterilization of thousands of Native women in the 1970s, a practice that was only abolished in 1981.

Clements’s play is a compelling, and poetic, investigation of the coldly bureaucratic machinations that have, throughout history, attempted to facilitate the disappearance of Native people. Though Tombs of the Vanishing Indian focuses on specific policies and locations, it speaks eloquently to broader themes of Aboriginal displacement. There are, indeed, echoes of Canadian policy aimed at the dissolution of First Nations families and culture: the potlatch ban, residential schools and the ban on Native language, whose profoundly damaging ramifications are our shared legacy.

Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

Marie Clements
Marie Clements is an award-winning Métis performer, playwright and director whose work has been presented on stages across Canada, the United States and Europe. She is the founder of urban ink productions, a Vancouver-based First Nations production company that creates, develops and produces Aboriginal and multi-cultural works of theatre, dance, music, film and video.

Clements was invited to the prestigious Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in 2001 for Urban Tattoo and in 2002 for Burning Vision. In 2002, she worked in the writing department of the television series Da Vinci’s Inquest. A fellowship award from the BC Film Commission enabled her to develop the film adaptation of her stage play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women. She is also a regular contributor on CBC Radio.

Clements writes, or perhaps more accurately, composes, with an urbane, incisive and sophisticated intellect; her refined artistry is deeply rooted in the particulars of her place, time and history. The world premiere of Copper Thunderbird is the first time Canada’s National Arts Centre has produced the work of a First Nations playwright on its main stage.

Awards and Recognition
Canada-Japan Literary Award (2004) Burning Vision

Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, Finalist (2003) Burning Vision

Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Play, Nominee (2002) Burning Vision

Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Canadian Theatre, Nominee (2002)

Jessie Richardson Awards, P.T.C. Award for Outstanding Original Play in Development (1998) The Unnatural and Accidental Women

Sundance Screenwriting Competition, Finalist (1998) Now Look What You Made Me Do

Praxis Screenwriting Competition, Short-listed (1997) Now Look What You Made Me Do

Jessie Richardson Awards, Sydney Risk Award for Original Script by an Emerging Playwright (1993) Age of Iron

Marie Clements' profile page

“Tombs of the Vanishing Indian is often deeply touching, a piece of theatrical anthropology about the determined survival of a people, not its demise.” – Toronto Sun