At the least could we be friends?

My friend Ian Ross always describes himself to me with finger-quotations, saying "I'm kinda famous" and then I make fun of him for having a , wikipedia page or tell him to get a haircut.

Despite the fact that I mock him constantly, yesterday some of the girls from my office and I took a long lunch to go check out one of his more well-known plays called " An Illustrated History of the Anishnabe" at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP).

If the fact that it's at the MTYP didn't give it away, it's a play geared at pre-teens (I think), though from our seats I observed that there were a lot of younger kids in the audience as well.

Childrens plays fascinate me; they need to be entertaining in order to keep the audience engaged, but need to still be able to address them in a mature and relateable way in order to properly convey the message or story, and I felt like the play accomplished that wonderfully. Because of the method in which the story was presented, which was through acting as well as visuals and shadow puppets, I remained very much aware of the age gap between myself and the target audience, but the play remained simple and direct and felt much more universally accessible than many shows I watched as a young girl.

What surprised me, though, was how powerful the play managed to be while maintaining the guise of a "children's play".

One of the reasons I think this was possible was because Ian, who played the main character, addressed the audience and brought them into the play itself; they were no longer just members of an audience but active participants in their own education. As the story covered the basis behind many Native words and beliefs, as well as the destructive influence of the European presence in North America the audience made the journey with the characters and really seemed to absorb the information that was being given to them. By the end, the children were so enthralled that the question-and-answer period at the end of the run had to be cut short in order to accommodate for time.

I'm ashamed to say that even though I live in Winnipeg and a high percentage of the population here is Native or Métis, I never really learned anything on their culture or their history. As a girl of direct European descent from yuppie suburbia I was never exposed to it besides the occasional mention in History class growing up, and my opinion on these subjects has only really begun to change since I moved out and became a member of the real world .

What's interesting is that through all my years of schooling I never learned as much on the topic of Native peoples as I did yesterday, nor was it ever presented in a memorable, relateable, and compassionate way. I feel as though I gleaned a lot from my theater experience yesterday, and am confident that the children feel the same.

Congratulations on a fabulous play, Ian.