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written and directed by Yvette Nolan

Native Earth Performing Arts, Native Canadian Centre, Toronto

March 20-April 14, 2001

“These white people think this country belongs to them - they don't realize that they are only in charge right now because there's more of them than there are of us”. Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash

Those who think that the lives of Canadians would make poor subjects for drama have probably been looking in the wrong places.  A swift glance over those in the corridors of power and the eyes glaze over.  But with a glance at those outside who believe they can change the world, the perspective changes.  Anna Mae Aquash née Pictou (called "Annie" by her friends) was one of these people.  Her life and mysterious death is the subject of Yvette Nolan's "Annie Mae's Movement" first performed in 1998 and now receiving its Toronto première under Nolan's direction by Native Earth Performing Arts in association with the Studio Lab Theatre Foundation.

Anna Mae was a Mi'qmak woman from Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia, left her husband and two daughters to become the only woman warrior in the American Indian Movement (AIM), becoming involved in activities from Wounded Knee to Pine Ridge.  When an FBI agent is murdered at Pine Ridge, the FBI interrogate her hoping she will be an informer.  After her release she is kidnapped and never heard of again.  In 1976 the body of the 31-year-old woman is found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  A medical examiner declared that she had died of exposure and sent her hands to the FBI for examination.  Not identified, she was buried in an unmarked grave.  Only after this burial is she identified as Anna Mae Aquash, prompting an exhumation and an autopsy showing she had died from a bullet fired at close range to the back of the head.  Who murdered her has never and probably will never be solved.  The FBI is suspected in the murder of other AIM members, the AIM leadership may have thought she betrayed them during interrogation, and  members Pine Ridge may have tried to prevent her from exposing a shady deal involving the sale of uranium-rich land.

Yvette Nolan's play leaves all of these possibilities open, tracing Anna Mae's life from her days as a teacher at the Little Red School House through her days as an ardent supporter of AIM up to her her last minutes.  For such a fascinating woman and such a complex story, Nolan has written a play lasting only an hour and fifteen minutes.  The result necessarily seems more like an outline for a play rather than a finished work.  The plays moves so rapidly through events that we are left wanting to know much more about the history covered and about Anna Mae as a person.  Nolan telegraphs Anna Mae's beliefs through various didactic passages in the first half of the play, which only becomes involving when it moves into Anna Mae's interrogations by the FBI in the second half.  Nolan does bring out the numerous prejudices Anna Mae encounters--a Native American in a white man's world, a Canadian in the United States and, most dishearteningly, a woman in a male-only movement.  Ultimately, she shows Anna Mae as an idealist in a cynical world.  The topics are vitally important but they cry out for fuller exploration.

What holds this outline of a play together is the outstanding performance of Rose Stella as Anna Mae.  Her quiet intensity gives life to the sketches of a character Nolan provides.  Her dance-inflected movement gives the character grace, dignity and power.  Jason Yuzicapi plays all six other characters, from a spirit called Rugaru, to Native men in AIM, to FBI agents.  Since they are all male, Nolan builds her feminist agenda into the very structure of the play.  Yuzicapi distinguishes all six quite clearly, but he does not yet have the same control over movement and voice as does Rose Stella. 

The performing space at the Native Canadian Centre has been divided into a kind of irregular cross with the audience sitting in four groups at each angle as if perched on cliffs over a canyon.  Designer Christine Plunkett has, in fact, designed the space to resemble a river, with the action beginning at the entrance to the theatre and gradually moving to the mountain  on the platform opposite where Anna Mae meets her death.  Rebecca Picherack provides the effective lighting and David DeLeary the sound. 

As playwright, Nolan frames the action with an apotheosis of Anna Mae in full traditional garb speaking of her destiny and its meaning.  This and her inclusion of the spirit Rugaru and the descent of FBI files from the sky suggest a surreal approach to the material, but this is undermined by the television drama-like style of the majority of the dialog.  As director, Nolan's approach is also divided between vision and documentary.  Sometimes the actors include the audience in the action, sometimes not.  Some scenes are directed as realistic, some satiric as in the court scene, and one as science fiction as when we hear Yuzicapi's voice through voice scrambler demanding to know how Anna Mae found out about the uranium.  The play would be much stronger if Nolan as playwright and director could find some way to mesh rather than haphazardly alternate the realistic and surrealistic.

We have not heard the last of the historical Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.  She lives on through the testimony of her deeds and ideals.  Yvette Nolan has broached this important subject, but I suspect this will not be the last play to commemorate the life and death of this remarkable woman.  

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash seen in an undated snapshot.