Tomson Highway

Tomson Highway (born 6 December 1951) is an Indigenous Canadian playwright, novelist, children's author and musician. He is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award. Cree is his first language and he was raised according to Cree tradition before being sent to residential school. He is related to  actor/playwright Billy Merasty.

When he was six, Tomson's father voluntarily enrolled him at Guy Hill Indian Residential School. Until he was fifteen, he was allowed to return home only during the summer months.

Some children who attended residential schools later reported abuse. Highway has said that "Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent it at that school," crediting it with teaching him English and to play piano. He has said that "There are many very successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn't have happened without that school."

Drawing from these experiences, he has written novels and plays that have won him widespread recognition across Canada and around the world.

In 1986, Highway published The Rez Sisters, which won multiple awards in productions across Canada. It also went to the Edinburgh International Festival in 1988. In 1989, he published Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, which was the first Canadian play to receive a full production at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Both of these plays explore the community on a fictional First Nation reserve of Wasychigan Hill on Manitoulin Island. The Rez Sisters depicts seven women of the community planning a trip to the "BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD" in Toronto and features a male trickster, called Nanabush. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing depicts the men's interest in ice hockey and features a female trickster. Rose, written in 2000, is the third play in the heptalogy, featuring characters from each of the previous plays.

Highway was artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto from 1986 to 1992,

His musical The (Post) Mistress premiered in 2009 as a cabaret titled Kisageetin. It was developed as a full musical, which has since been staged across Canada in both English and French versions. A soundtrack album for the musical was released in 2014; it garnered a Juno Award nomination for Aboriginal Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2015.

In 2022, Cree Country, an album of original Cree-language country songs written by Highway and sung by his frequent collaborator Patricia Cano, was released.

Highway divides his time between residences in Gatineau, Québec, in France and in Italy with his life partner Raymond Lalonde.

Awards and recognition

Highway has been awarded ten honorary degrees, from Brandon University, the University of Winnipeg, the University of Western Ontario (London), the University of Windsor, Laurentian University (Sudbury, Ontario), Lakehead University (Thunder Bay, Ontario), l'Universite de Montreal, University of Manitoba, Carleton University and the University of Toronto. In addition, he holds two "equivalents" of such honours: from The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and The National Theatre School in Montreal.

In 2011, director Ken Gass mounted a production of The Rez Sisters at Toronto's Factory Theatre. As part of an ongoing research project into the effects of colour-blind casting on theatre, he staged two readings of the play — one with an exclusively First Nations cast and one with a colour-blind cast of actors from a variety of racial backgrounds — before mounting a full colour-blind stage production.

Highway gave the 2022 Massey Lecture.

Works

Plays

New Song...New Dance - 1986
Aria - 1987
The Rez Sisters - first produced 1986; toured nationally 1988 (nominated for a Governor General's Award; won Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play 1986-87)
Annie and the Old One - 1989
The Sage, the Dancer, and The Fool - 1989
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing - 1989 (nominated for a Governor General's Award; nominated for 7, won 4 Dora Mavor Moore Awards including Best New Play; won Floyd S. Chalmers Award)
The Incredible Adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito - 1991
Rose - 2000
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout - 2005
Kisageetin - 2009
The (Post) Mistress - 2010
Iskooniguni Iskweewuk - The Rez Sisters in its original version: Cree - 2010
Paasteewitoon Kaapooskaysing Tageespichit - Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing in its original version: Cree - 2010
The Incredible Adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito - 2016

Novels

Kiss of the Fur Queen - 1998 (shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Canadian Booksellers' Association Fiction Book of the Year Award)

Films

Tomson Highway appears in the 2019 documentary Chaakapesh which describes the process by which the Montreal Symphony Orchestra presented a trilingual (Innu, Cree, Inuktitut) chamber opera called Chaakapesh, le périple du fripon, in 2018.

Critical works

Comparing Mythologies - 2003
From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010 - 2017

Children's books

Caribou Song - 2001 (selected as one of the "Top 10 Children's Books" by Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail)
Dragonfly Kites - 2002
Fox on the Ice - 2003

Libretti

Pimooteewin - 2008
Chaakapesh: The Trickster's Quest - 2018

Essay

A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism, with an introduction by Christine Sokaymoh Frederick. Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series - 2015
Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions, House of Anansi Press, Massey Lectures, 2022