rewrite this content and keep HTML tags CONTENT WARNING: This story contains details about abuse that took place at “Indian hospitals” that many will find distressing or triggering. Please look after your spirit and read with care. Dr. Laura Ann Cranmer was six years old when she contracted tuberculosis and was sent to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital. Confined there for three years, she recalls a sense of deep loneliness and confusion about why she had been sent there, so far from home. “No one told me, ‘Laura Ann, you’re going to the hospital, and you’re going to go away for a long time.’ I just was all of a sudden in the hospital, and no one explained [it] to me,” she says. Of ’Na̱mǥis and Haida descent, Cranmer’s Indigenous name is Ḵ̓ix̱t̕łala. As a child she was living with her paternal grandmother Agnes Cranmer in what has been briefly known as Alert Bay. As one of the few toddlers around, as a child Cranmer recalls being doted on, indulged and entertained by all the Elders who visited her grandmother Agnes’s house. She particularly remembers her great-grandmother Abaya entertaining her with kyota or string figures, for which there were accompanying songs in Kwak’wala. At the time she was sent away to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, it received patients from the more than 14,000 Indigenous residents of “Vancouver Island” and its adjacent communities. Now a retired professor of Indigenous/Xwulmuxw studies and an honorary research associate at Vancouver Island University (VIU), Cranmer began writing a script about her childhood experiences as a survivor 17 years ago. After retirement and during COVID-19 lockdown, Cranmer resumed her writing, which became the play Scenes from the Nanaimo Indian Hospital: Reawakening Hul’q’umin’um’, Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwak’wala Languages. With the support of an Insight Development grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the first workshopped reading of Cranmer’s script was hosted by Western Edge Theater’s New Waves Festival on Feb. 14, 2022. The next reading takes place on Jan. 31 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at the Port Theatre in Snuneymuxw territories, as part of the venue’s Discovery Series presentations. “What stands out for me is the loneliness and the sense of being in the dark, not knowing. ‘Why am I here for so long?’ And this silence. No one’s telling me what is happening with myself or with the people around me. Why are we all there for so long?” says Cranmer. Language forms a central theme in Cranmer’s script, which follows the storyline of three girls confined to Ward B at the “hospital” — Dorothy Myth representing Kwak’wala, Esther Williams representing Hul’q’umin’um’, and Mary Robins representing Nuu-chah-nulth — who quickly become friends through sharing words and culture. “During that time, in the late ’50s, early ’60s, lots of the Kwakwaka’wakw people were at the hospital, as well as people from the West Coast and the Coast Salish. So it became a meeting place for a lot of the people from all over,” says Cranmer. Located across from what is now VIU, the Nanaimo Indian Hospital operated from 1946 to 1967, was one of 29 across the country and the first to be accredited in “B.C.” These segregated “hospitals” were created to “assuage fears of a perceived threat that Indigenous people posed to the non-Indigenous population,” according to the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. They were under-resourced and offered lower standards of care. In 1953, the Indian Act was amended to make it a crime for Indigenous people to refuse to see a doctor, to refuse to go to a hospital, or to leave before they were discharged, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. Accounts from survivors describe sexual and physical abuse, forcible confinement, being restrained and shackled to beds — sometimes for years — and being subjected to sterilizations and medical experimentation. Its effects still reverberate today, with members of Indigenous communities often reluctant to seek care in hospitals “because that is where their grandparents died under atrocious conditions,” according to a 2020 report on the racism, stereotyping and discrimination experienced by Indigenous peoples in the B.C. health care system. During a gathering held by the Snuneymuxw First Nation in 2021 to announce funds to support a search for unmarked graves on the property, Elders shared some of their childhood experiences at the “hospital.” Snuneymuxw Elder Earl Manson recalled how when he was five or six years old he was sent to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in 1951 after he broke his arm, but was subsequently confined there for months and doesn’t understand why. Others recounted having entire sets of teeth forcibly removed without anesthetic. Others described being tied down and force-fed alcohol. “Indian hospitals” across the country are now the subject of a class action lawsuit against the federal government that was certified in 2020 and is still ongoing. Cranmer says it’s taken decades of therapy combined with her creative writing to reckon with her own experiences to the point that she feels comfortable talking about them. “I think in the process of rewriting my colonial script, I’m repopulating a world that was once filled with silence and now is full of laughter and light. I want to change that memory. And this is my way of recreating a painful memory and changing it into one that is not for entertainment, but for education. For sharing my deepest feelings, dressed up as fiction,” says Cranmer. “Theatre has the power not only to comment on the socio-cultural conditions of our existence but also the power to navigate, explore and express our collective response to moral injury through the applied theatre process.” “Part of reconciliation is being confronted with uncomfortable truths, and how to talk about these difficult, awkward, embarrassing topics. There are these amorphous feelings, we don’t know how to give them shape, even articulate them,” she says. Cranmer collaborated with Dr. Amanda Wager, Canada Research Chair in Community-Engaged Research at VIU. As the director of VIU’s Centre for Art, Research & Community, Wager says the project is part of a broader research goal to utilize art and theatre to support language acquisition. “Amanda had this wonderful suggestion in the middle of the writing of it: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the little girls can fall into a running [chatter] throughout the script?’ A running comparison of how they each say things in their languages. And so that’s how it turned out the way it is now. It creates humour and highjinks later on. They get into shenanigans.” The play has been impactful on the language learning for both the actors and audience members, says Wager. “We’ve hired language experts for each of the three Indigenous languages to teach, translate the script that Laura wrote, and teach pronunciation to the actors… It’s a really amazing, beautiful script that’s humorous, considering the intense subject matter of the Nanaimo Indian Hospital,” she adds. By design, the characters’ words are not translated into English, as the point is for the audience to “really listen to the language,” says Wager. During monologues at the Port Theatre reading, animations will be projected on a backdrop which represent what the characters are saying. “I think it’s really important that it is not translated,” says Ann Woodward, who plays two characters in the play and is part of its research team. “If you think of all of these people that went into the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, that went into residential ‘schools,’ day ‘schools,’ they didn’t speak English, but they had to sit and listen and try and figure out what was being said. So why are we going to give into them, to that colonial narrative that they have to know everything? [English speakers] can just sit and listen.” A post-show talk will take place after both shows, and mental health support workers will be on-site for both survivors and audience members. The Port Theater staff have also made a private room available for any audience member needing space to talk to a counsellor. Free tickets for the Port Theatre shows are available for survivors, the Snuneymuxw community and surrounding nations or any other patrons who want one with the code: VIPGuest online or call the Port Theatre ticket centre at 250-754-8550. Other events include a Lunch and Learn discussion at VIU on Jan. 16 at 11:30 a.m. in building 300, room 401. Readings will also be performed at: The Sid Williams Theatre in Courtenay on Feb. 16 at 1 p.m.…
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