Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout by Tomson Highway

Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout by Tomson Highway

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent.



Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a "Trickster language" within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.

Tomson Highway is an award-winning playwright, writer, and children's book author. He is the author of Fox on the Ice and Caribou Song, the first two picture books in the Songs of the North Wind trilogy. He's also the author of the plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, which received him the Dora Mavor Moore Prize and the Floyd S. Johnson Award, respectively. The Chalmers Prize is given to a person who has excelled in He currently resides in the Ottawa area.