Love on the Rez (COVER STORY)
"My ancestors are storytellers. They’ve been storytellers for centuries, and that’s what I call myself too," says 23-year-old Waawaate Fobister, whose first play, Agokwe, opens Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 30th season. "I want to bring back stories from my traditions, my people."
Agokwe means "two spirited" and Fobister’s piece is an exploration of homophobia in a small native community that would once have celebrated two-spirited people as an important part of society. Fobister himself grew up on an Ojibwe reservation in northwestern Ontario, and the story is based on events from his own life.
Agokwe is primarily a coming-out story, following two young men from neighbouring reserves as they take their first steps toward expressing the attraction they share. But it is also a commentary on how native communities have been changed by white intervention and the residential school system, and those communities’ struggle to recapture what has been taken from them.
"There wasn’t any homophobia before we arrived," says Ed Roy, the production’s director, with whom Fobister has been working on the piece for more than a year. "The two-spirited person was acknowledged as a person of spiritual power and authority in the community. But when they were returned to the reservations after the schools they weren’t connected to the land, to their traditions.
"In Agokwe, Nanabush [a trickster spirit popular in Ojibwe stories] explains how we’re all trying to get back to this state of equilibrium within nature and ourselves," says Roy, "and we journey with these characters, Jake and Mike, star-crossed lovers who try to meet."
