Evening presented in partnership with Nightswimming
“Nightswimming is thrilled to collaborate with Native Earth on this evening of new work by PJ Prudat and Tai Amy Grauman. PJ is creating kiskisiwin nimihko (remembering my blood) with dramaturg Monique Mojica during a multi-year residency with Nightswimming, and Tai’s Wiwimaw was commissioned by Nightswimming as part of our 5×25 initiative. We’re delighted that excerpts from these powerful Métis works-in-progress can be shared together in a single evening.” – Gloria Mok & Brian Quirt / Nightswimming
kiskisiwin nimihko remembering my blood
a film created and told by PJ Prudat
in collaboration with Chala Hunter
Created while in Residency with Nightswimming
~ kiskisiwin nimihko found its breath on the land, and in digital form while moving through land-based research
kiskisiwin nimihko (remembering my blood) is a flower-beadwork calendar of events of a Métis woman’s life and the matriarchal michif stories held in her blood-bone-memory. A love letter and ode (kayas nikamon) to a çapan, (a 3rd great-grandmother) who lived her life as a mother, a buffalo hunter, and as part of the Résistance who went to war along with her nation’s kin against ‘la maudite police’ in Batoche in 1885.
Videographer Chala Hunter
Indigenous Dramaturge Monique Mojica
Dramaturge Brian Quirt
PJ Prudat (she/her) (creator/storyteller) is a Treaty 6, snowstorm-born, proud Métis Nation/nehiyaw (ancestral roots to batoche, red river, qu’appelle) & french/scandinavian actor and writer. She holds creative residencies with the Theatre Centre and Nightswimming and recently with Banff playwrights lab and Canadian Stage. PJ has played as a company actor at the National Arts Centre (english & Indigenous theatres), the Shaw Festival and performed in Indigenous-creative-led shows extensively across the country. She was last seen as Rebecca in the inaugural National Arts Centre-Indigenous Theatre production of Marie Clements’s the unnatural and accidental women directed by Muriel Miguel and at the Belfry Theatre in Tara Beagan’s Ministry of Grace as Grace. She is a jubilant one-fifth of the incoming Co-Artistic Leadership at Shakespeare in the Ruff. PJ can be heard on the CBC Radio’s this place: 150 years retold as the real-life, ever-deadly Annie of Red River. PJ teaches Writers Bloc at Young Peoples Theatre and recently led the Paprika Theatre Festival Indigenous Arts Program. She lives on the traditional lands of the Michi Saagiig and the Chippewas of the Williams Treaties First Nations while writing & workshopping several plays and a novel.
Wiwimaw
by Tai Amy Grauman
Wiwimaw tells 2 interwoven stories of Metis sisters (Marie and Rose Callihoo) between the height of the fur trade (1860s) and the age of road allowance peoples during the Great Depression (1930s).
“Metis women are the heart of the Metis Nation.” (LMFO’s MMIW report. June 30th, 2019).
T
ai Amy Grauman is Metis, Cree and Haudenosaunee from Ardrossan, Alberta. She is an actor, playwright and emerging director and producer. Tai is an artistic associate at Savage Society and an associate artist at the Citadel Theatre and currently pursuing her MFA in theatre practice at the U of A. She was named the Metis Nation of Alberta’s outstanding youth of 2020. Tai is currently writing commissions for Nightswimming, Axis theatre and the Arts Club. Selected Acting Credits include: Mary’s Wedding: A Metis love story, (Citadel Theatre), Honour Beat (Grand Theatre), Thanks For Giving (Arts Club). You used to call me Marie… (Savage Productions Society). Upcoming: Vanessa Brokenhorn in The Herd (The Citadel/ Tarragon Theatre). Assistant Director for Little Red Warriror and his Lawyer (The Belfry/ Savage Productions Society). Marie in ‘You used to call me Marie…’ with Savage Productions Society.