About native Earth

Native Earth Performing Arts
Playwrights/Directors

Yvette Nolan

Yvette Nolan's plays include:BLADE, Job's Wife, Video And A Marginal Man ans Donne In. Shakedown Shakespeare, co-written with Philip Adams, toured Yukon communities in the spring of 1997. The premiere production of Annie Mae's Movement played in Whitehorse, Yukon; Winnepeg, Manitoba and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 1999. Her directing credits include: Miche Genest's The Fasting Girl, Drew Haydon Taylor's Someday, Philip Adam's Free's Point. She has served as dramaturg on Bev Brett's The Margaret, Catherine Banks' Three Story Ocean View, Donna Smith's Soul Survivors, Sharon Shoty's Trickster Visits The Old Folks Home, The Fasting Girl, and Free's Point. Yvette is currently President of the Playwrights Union Of Canada.

Playwright Note:

It has been twenty five years since the body of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mi'qmak woman from Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia, was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Twenty five years since the FBi cut off her hands and informed us she died from exposure. Twenty five years and her Murder is still unsolved.

I did not write this play to explain what happened to Anna Mae. Rather I wanted to explore what it must have been like to be Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a woman in a man's movement, a Canadian in America, an Aboriginal in a white dominant culture at a time when it felt like we really could change the world. I wanted to give voice to one who they tried silence in life and in death.

I never intended to write a documentary. What really happened to Anna Mae back in 1975/1976 cannot be truly known, not to the satisfaction of her family and her freinds. the facts are now lost in disinformation and denial, in misinformation and memory. Instead of facts, I am looking for the truths we can gleam from examining the life and death of Anna Mae Aquash: that we must fight for what we believe in; that we cannot know the consequences of our actions; that we live on in the work that we do and the people we affect long after we have passed from this world.

Annie Mae's Movement was first workshopped at Native Earth Performing Arts' Weesageechak Begins To Dance-Festival X. directed by Anne Anglin and featuring Rose Stella and Thomas Hauff. Annie Mae's Movement has since been produced by Hardly Art Theatre in the Yukon, Red Roots Theatre in Winnepeg and by Hardly Art Theatre in Halifax at Eastern Front's `On The Waterfront Festival'.