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The Citizen asked Randy Boswell, a longtime Ottawa journalist and Carleton University professor, to reconstruct life in the capital on the day Canada was born. The history specialist dug into archives and old newspapers, unearthing a series of long-overlooked stories that shed fresh light on Confederation’s first 24 hours and some of the people whose lives were touched by the events of that landmark day 150 years ago. This is the fourth such story, in a series that will continue to Canada Day.
There was considerable excitement in town about the twin bill scheduled at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the evening of Dominion Day in 1867.
Perhaps, for those of more refined tastes, a few hours spent enjoying the comforts of the Wellington Street playhouse — away from the carousing rabble, beyond earshot of the fireworks — offered some intellectually stimulating respite after a day of mingling with the masses.
The Ottawa Times drew attention in its news columns to the “grand entertainment” planned by John Townsend, the theatre’s manager and a Shakespearean actor of some note back in his native England. He would play the starring role in both plays to be staged that night: Nick of the Woods and Pizarro!
John Townsend in an 1858 sketch from The Illustrated London News.
A photograph of actor John Townsend’s daughter, Florence, courtesy of John Townsend’s great-great granddaughter, Bonnie Buxton.
His wife Sarah, herself an actress, had suffered health difficulties since the family’s arrival in Canada in 1862 and was not listed to perform. But 19-year-old daughter Florence — one of the Townsends’ seven children trained for the stage — had emerged as a versatile and popular performer (she could sing, too) and was cast in each of the shows: as “The Indian Girl” in the first, and as Cora, an Incan princess, in the second.
“The pieces are both very exciting,” the Times enthused, “and have been played with unflagging interest all over the English speaking world.”
It’s clear that the Townsend family theatre troupe had earned the admiration of the finest minds in the capital since arriving from Kingston a year earlier: “This company is far superior to what we expected to find it,” the Times had reported in May 1866, not long before John Townsend began publishing advertisements touting the patronage of Confederation patriarch John A. Macdonald, Ottawa mayor Moss Dickinson and local business leaders James Skead and J.M. Currier.
“We think that Mr. Townsend is on the right track to cultivate a taste for drama in this city,” the Times went on. “The stage is an institution of civilization.”
But the choice of productions at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the deeply meaningful date of July 1, 1867 — from the vantage of 2017, with the hindsight of 150 years of post-Confederation history, and in this present era of Truth and Reconciliation — can only be seen as a portent of imminent horrors. The two melodramas on that night’s program were highly popular plays of the time about clashing civilizations and the violent conquest of indigenous peoples.
The opening play, Nick of the Woods, On Horseback — Or, War With the Indians, was controversial even during its 19th century heyday because of the story’s unbridled brutality and hostile, dehumanizing depiction of Native Americans, specifically the Shawnee Nation of 18th century Kentucky.
Based on an 1837 novel by U.S. writer Robert Montgomery Bird, the play sparked a backlash among progressives in the U.S. and beyond for its relentlessly negative portrayal of indigenous America at a time when wars of extermination were being waged against the country’s original inhabitants. Bird, who spoke of himself in the royal “we,” was unapologetic: “The North American savage has never appeared to us the gallant and heroic personage he seems to others.”
The second Dominion Day performance, British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro! Or The Invasion of Peru, told of a Spanish conquistador’s tragic destruction of the Inca. While broadly critical of imperial atrocities — particularly those perpetrated by Britain’s rival empire, Spain — the play offered mixed messaging about the merits of European military might and colonial resistance, plus an abundance of violent spectacle.
Townsend’s ad for the evening’s show, hailing it as “by far the greatest attraction ever offered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in one night,” guaranteed that Pizarro! would be “terminating with a Terrific Combat” and the death of the Incan leader.
As one modern scholar has noted, Pizarro! “fit squarely within the popular Anglo-American literary tradition of the vanishing Indian” — a condescending belief that despite their many “noble” traits, the indigenous cultures of the Americas were “doomed” to disappear in the face of the “superior” morality and technology of European invaders, missionaries and settlers.
Nick of the Woods has been described by a 21st century critic as “an appalling brief for genocide” that depicted the murder and mutilation of indigenous characters as “a cause for celebration.”
In Montreal and Cornwall on Dominion Day, city lacrosse clubs played games against visiting First Nations teams (the victors in both contests) to provide entertainment for the holiday crowds. Ottawa lacrosse clubs, too, sometimes hosted teams from nearby indigenous communities, and Ottawa-area Algonquin paddlers were known to triumph — when invited to participate — in holiday canoe races on the Ottawa River.
But such friendly, uncomplicated interactions between indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Canada were rare by the time of Confederation. Though not Kentucky or Peru, the newborn Canada of 1867 was on the cusp of pursuing a range of aggressive, insidious and destructive policies that would displace indigenous Canadians from their lands, criminalize their languages and cultural traditions, and shatter their families.
What the First Nations, Métis and Inuit did not do was vanish.
The National Arts Centre, successor to Her Majesty’s Theatre as the prime venue for drama in today’s capital, recently announced the historic appointment of Kevin Loring as its first artistic director of a new Indigenous Theatre department. Loring, a Nlaka’pamux from B.C.’s Lytton First Nation, described the department’s founding as “an important step in reconciliation. Our stories from coast to coast to coast are the original songs of this land.”
The National Arts Centre announced recently that Kevin Loring, seen with his mother, Freda Loring, will become the artistic director of the new indigenous theatre.
It’s impossible to know exactly what the audience members were thinking and learning at Her Majesty’s Theatre on July 1, 1867 — the night the curtain opened on the Dominion of Canada — as they watched Bird, Sheridan and the Townsends explore the central tragedy of New World history.
But we can be certain that indigenous Canadians of that era wouldn’t have seen them as “our stories,” or as “original songs of the land.” And that may help explain why so many of their descendants today insist that the 150th anniversary of Confederation is no cause for celebration.
查看原文...
There was considerable excitement in town about the twin bill scheduled at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the evening of Dominion Day in 1867.
Perhaps, for those of more refined tastes, a few hours spent enjoying the comforts of the Wellington Street playhouse — away from the carousing rabble, beyond earshot of the fireworks — offered some intellectually stimulating respite after a day of mingling with the masses.
The Ottawa Times drew attention in its news columns to the “grand entertainment” planned by John Townsend, the theatre’s manager and a Shakespearean actor of some note back in his native England. He would play the starring role in both plays to be staged that night: Nick of the Woods and Pizarro!
John Townsend in an 1858 sketch from The Illustrated London News.
A photograph of actor John Townsend’s daughter, Florence, courtesy of John Townsend’s great-great granddaughter, Bonnie Buxton.
His wife Sarah, herself an actress, had suffered health difficulties since the family’s arrival in Canada in 1862 and was not listed to perform. But 19-year-old daughter Florence — one of the Townsends’ seven children trained for the stage — had emerged as a versatile and popular performer (she could sing, too) and was cast in each of the shows: as “The Indian Girl” in the first, and as Cora, an Incan princess, in the second.
“The pieces are both very exciting,” the Times enthused, “and have been played with unflagging interest all over the English speaking world.”
It’s clear that the Townsend family theatre troupe had earned the admiration of the finest minds in the capital since arriving from Kingston a year earlier: “This company is far superior to what we expected to find it,” the Times had reported in May 1866, not long before John Townsend began publishing advertisements touting the patronage of Confederation patriarch John A. Macdonald, Ottawa mayor Moss Dickinson and local business leaders James Skead and J.M. Currier.
“We think that Mr. Townsend is on the right track to cultivate a taste for drama in this city,” the Times went on. “The stage is an institution of civilization.”
But the choice of productions at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the deeply meaningful date of July 1, 1867 — from the vantage of 2017, with the hindsight of 150 years of post-Confederation history, and in this present era of Truth and Reconciliation — can only be seen as a portent of imminent horrors. The two melodramas on that night’s program were highly popular plays of the time about clashing civilizations and the violent conquest of indigenous peoples.
The opening play, Nick of the Woods, On Horseback — Or, War With the Indians, was controversial even during its 19th century heyday because of the story’s unbridled brutality and hostile, dehumanizing depiction of Native Americans, specifically the Shawnee Nation of 18th century Kentucky.
Based on an 1837 novel by U.S. writer Robert Montgomery Bird, the play sparked a backlash among progressives in the U.S. and beyond for its relentlessly negative portrayal of indigenous America at a time when wars of extermination were being waged against the country’s original inhabitants. Bird, who spoke of himself in the royal “we,” was unapologetic: “The North American savage has never appeared to us the gallant and heroic personage he seems to others.”
The second Dominion Day performance, British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro! Or The Invasion of Peru, told of a Spanish conquistador’s tragic destruction of the Inca. While broadly critical of imperial atrocities — particularly those perpetrated by Britain’s rival empire, Spain — the play offered mixed messaging about the merits of European military might and colonial resistance, plus an abundance of violent spectacle.
Townsend’s ad for the evening’s show, hailing it as “by far the greatest attraction ever offered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in one night,” guaranteed that Pizarro! would be “terminating with a Terrific Combat” and the death of the Incan leader.
As one modern scholar has noted, Pizarro! “fit squarely within the popular Anglo-American literary tradition of the vanishing Indian” — a condescending belief that despite their many “noble” traits, the indigenous cultures of the Americas were “doomed” to disappear in the face of the “superior” morality and technology of European invaders, missionaries and settlers.
Nick of the Woods has been described by a 21st century critic as “an appalling brief for genocide” that depicted the murder and mutilation of indigenous characters as “a cause for celebration.”
In Montreal and Cornwall on Dominion Day, city lacrosse clubs played games against visiting First Nations teams (the victors in both contests) to provide entertainment for the holiday crowds. Ottawa lacrosse clubs, too, sometimes hosted teams from nearby indigenous communities, and Ottawa-area Algonquin paddlers were known to triumph — when invited to participate — in holiday canoe races on the Ottawa River.
But such friendly, uncomplicated interactions between indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Canada were rare by the time of Confederation. Though not Kentucky or Peru, the newborn Canada of 1867 was on the cusp of pursuing a range of aggressive, insidious and destructive policies that would displace indigenous Canadians from their lands, criminalize their languages and cultural traditions, and shatter their families.
What the First Nations, Métis and Inuit did not do was vanish.
The National Arts Centre, successor to Her Majesty’s Theatre as the prime venue for drama in today’s capital, recently announced the historic appointment of Kevin Loring as its first artistic director of a new Indigenous Theatre department. Loring, a Nlaka’pamux from B.C.’s Lytton First Nation, described the department’s founding as “an important step in reconciliation. Our stories from coast to coast to coast are the original songs of this land.”
The National Arts Centre announced recently that Kevin Loring, seen with his mother, Freda Loring, will become the artistic director of the new indigenous theatre.
It’s impossible to know exactly what the audience members were thinking and learning at Her Majesty’s Theatre on July 1, 1867 — the night the curtain opened on the Dominion of Canada — as they watched Bird, Sheridan and the Townsends explore the central tragedy of New World history.
But we can be certain that indigenous Canadians of that era wouldn’t have seen them as “our stories,” or as “original songs of the land.” And that may help explain why so many of their descendants today insist that the 150th anniversary of Confederation is no cause for celebration.
查看原文...
