Firehall Arts Centre wraps up 2023-24 season with Cheri Maracle's Paddle Song, May 24 to June 2

The energetic one-woman musical about trailblazing Mohawk poet Pauline E. Johnson is back

By Gail Johnson

Cheri Maracle in Paddle Song.

Firehall Arts Centre presents Paddle Song from May 24 to June 2

THE FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE is wrapping up its 2023-24 season with a remount of the acclaimed one-woman musical Paddle Song.

Gemini-nominated producer-performer Cheri Maracle, who hails from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Ontario, takes on the role of ground-breaking mixed-race Mohawk poet Pauline E. Johnson in the work written by Dinah Christie and Tom Hill.

Johnson was a provocateur and trailblazing feminist, appearing on stages all across Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.

Directed by Christie, Paddle Song was nominated for Best Solo Performance at the High Performance Rodeo: Calgary’s International Festival of the Arts in 2016, and Maracle has performed it as far away as New Delhi and at Norway’s Riddu Riđđu Festival.

The work follows Johnson’s journey from a young woman canoeing the Grand River at home on Chiefswood, to the beginning of her successful career, to earning her place on stages in a literary world dominated by white men. In her travelling solo show, Johnson would wear a buckskin dress adorned with rabbit pelts, silver trade brooches, wampum belts, her father’s hunting knife, and a necklace made of bear claws for the first half, then change into an evening gown, stockings, and heels for the latter half. She celebrated her Mohawk heritage and pushed for Indigenous rights everywhere she went. A monument in Stanley Park commemorates her work and legacy.

“It’s a big show, it’s a big journey, but what I love about the show is it is so intimate about her life and the struggles she had, being a trailblazer, being a woman back then saying the things she said in England to a white audience and playing both parts of her heritage,” Maracle told Stir when Paddle Song had its Vancouver premiere in 2021. “She went to the Chautauqua circuit [travelling cultural and educational events in rural America] and performed in the mud and got stuff hucked at her. The tenacity… The endurance… The fire and the beauty…

“Her poetry is the thing that I am in awe of, the poetry she did for that time; even now ‘The Cattle Thief’ is still very political,” Maracle says of the 1895 poem that opens with the killing of a Cree chief by English settlers then shifts to the man’s daughter rebuking the murderers. “It’s something that some people are not ready to hear now, to hear these things from a Mohawk actress by a Mohawk poet from the1900s. With what’s happening in the climate now…We need hope. We need strength. We need optimism. We need something to be prideful about. We need healing.” (Read Stir’s review of Paddle Song here.)

Like Johnson, Maracle is also mixed race, and she can relate to the late artist on that level.

“The duplicity of Pauline is shadowed in my own life,” Maracle told Stir. “Being a light-skinned Native gal saying ‘I want to be an actor’ parallels Pauline’s life and what she went through as a dual identity. Her Native name literally means ‘double wampum’, which suggests two individual personalities, and I can speak to that. Way back when, I had casting directors say ‘She doesn’t look Native enough.’ That has changed over time, because we have these trailblazers before us like Pauline Johnson.” 

---

Related Articles