Arts and Culture

The Public Goes Native, Courtesy of a lot of Canadian Talent

Published in The Globe and Mail: November 13, 2008
By Simon Houpt

NEW YORK — In a coincidence that seems arranged by the spirits, aboriginal Canadian performers and writers spanning a century are appearing in New York this week as part of two separate events that demonstrate the enormous distance native culture has travelled in that time.

The American Museum of Natural History's annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, which presents works engaged in ethnography, will host a rare screening tomorrow evening of a newly restored print of In The Land of the Headhunters, a 1914 silent film set among the Kwakwaka'wakw in British Columbia....

The festival was originated by Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director now in his fourth year, who had actively sought out native writers during his tenure as head of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., including Canadian Drew Hayden Taylor, whose play The Buz'Gem Blues he produced in 2005. The Ford Foundation, a long-time supporter of the arts in the United States, is footing the festival's $175,000 bill.

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