Being tied to a culture can be very detrimental to a person. The play, by Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters reveals this to us on many occasions. All people on the reserve in the play are aboriginal showing how their culture is giving them a lower quality of life. The only way for them to get money is by taking their chances in the bingo because there are no jobs on the reserve. The sisters that live on the reserve don’t have any money, transportation, or working appliances. The reason that they have no money is because they have no help from the government. The government and aboriginals have had many issues especially throughout the last 100 years.
It mainly started when residential schools were created for the aboriginal kids to go to. The children were taken from the parents and placed in these very strict schools. These schools stripped the students of their culture and beliefs. They made them believe in Christianity. If the students refused to believe in their new religion or speak english, they would suffer various consequences. These consequences would vary anywhere from being whipped to being locked in a small room with very little or sometimes no food. During The Rez Sisters, we see a character named Nanabush throughout the play. Nanabush is supposed to represent a spiritual creature within their culture. Many of the main characters within the play ignore Nanabush and do not see him.This is the result of the residential schools. They stripped the sisters of their beliefs in Nanabush. These residential schools were being used all over canada between 1831 and 1996. This means that the government sponsored these schools for 165 years. Ever since 1831, the aboriginal community has felt isolated from the rest of Canada.
In the play, the sisters all live on an island reservation which is isolated from the rest of the cities. Since the island only consists of aboriginal people, the government might not want to interfere because they might be afraid that they will make the aboriginal people think that they are taking their land like they did 100 years ago. The government will try to take things slow when building on aboriginal reserves to not cause any more conflict. As we can see in The rez sisters this might not be good for the people who live there. The government thinks that they should take it slow but we can clearly see that they are going a little to slow for the people who live there because there are no jobs and no money circulating around on the reserve. Having no government also means that there are no public services. This is revealed to us when Tomson Highway talks about the dirt roads and the garbage heap. Without the government there is no way for them to pave roads or to dispose of garbage to a landfill.
The questions to ask yourself, and your peers, is how could we solve these problems? How can we resolve these differences between the aboriginal people and the government?
Works Cited
Highway, Tomson. The Rez Sisters. Fifth House, 1988.
Miller, J.R. “Redidential Schools.” Thecanadianencyclopedia, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools/. Accessed 11 June 2018.
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