The year we finished Oksana G, we began work on an opera about climate change called The Breathing Hole, about the life and death of a 500-year-old polar bear. It unfolds from 1534 to 2034 and is set by a breathing hole in Nunavut, a massive territory in Northern Canada that makes up most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Nunavut is a territory governed and primarily populated by the Inuit people who live there.
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This article brings up an issue in theatrical writing that is extremely important: how can one ethically write stories about an ethnicity to which one doesn’t belong? And should someone who does not belong to an ethnicity be writing stories that aren’t theirs at all?
It sounds like, despite significant mistakes, the playwright, Colleen Murphy, did her best to address those mistakes and tell a story about climate change with Inuit characters with sensitivity and care. She engaged a director with Inuit and other First Nations heritage who organized a reading through an organization dedicated to Nunavut performing arts. As a result, her play was workshopped with a group of Nunavut artists who were able to not only tell her everything she’d written incorrectly, but could draw boundaries in her use of Inuit characters. They were given the opportunity to be very clear that she could not, as a non-Inuit, write an Inuit story. She could only use Inuit Cultural Dramaturgy to write a play with Inuit characters and that she is required to acknowledge that difference (and give perpetual credit to her cultural collaborators.)
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