A new wave of Indigenous opera arrives in Canada

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When Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North opens at Manitoba Opera this fall, it will mark an important moment in the evolution of Indigenous-led opera in Canada. Written by Métis poet and librettist Dr. Suzanne Steele, Métis fiddler and composer Alex Kusturok, and composer Neil Weisensel, Li Keur (“The Heart” in Michif, language of the Métis) is a large-scale opera set for its stage premiere at Winnipeg’s Centennial Hall. Bolstered by the $435,000 underwriting sponsorship by BMO, Li Keur is a rare pairing of an Indigenous creative process and a grand mainstage-sized opera.

“I see this project as one of re-placing us into the centre of the big stage where we have been shut out for over 150 years,” says Steele, whose libretto for Li Keur is written 70 per cent in Indigenous languages – Cree-Michif (sometimes called Heritage-Michif), French-Michif and Anishinaabemowin – as well as English and French. “I call it ‘Métis-ifying’ the actual art form.”

Canadians (Manitobans, certainly) will spot the nod to Louis Riel in the opera’s title, but Li Keur is not a historical account of the controversial Métis political leader. Rather, it’s an imaginative story about Métis women that spans multiple eras and places – including 19th-century Montana, where one Métisse sharpshooter has a fateful encounter with Riel.

It’s a story that Steele hopes will entertain, yet there’s something deeper in Li Keur and what it represents. It’s one thing to write an opera about Indigenous people, or to have an opera written by Indigenous artists; Steele’s work represents something new. “What I’m really doing is writing for the Indigenous audience,” she says.

Theatre, and opera in particular, has been influenced recently by an increased Indigenous presence in the arts. The ways stories are told, the nature of the relationships between the participants, the creators’ responsibilities, all are affected, and the end result is a noteworthy shift that honours the impacts of these projects beyond the stage.

Li Keur’s companion project is a language database Steele established with a team of translators, preserving at-risk languages such as Cree-Michif, French-Michif, and Anishinaabemowin. The database offers line-by-line written translations of Steele’s libretto, including the translators’ audio recordings of the Indigenous languages.

Works like Li Keur feel like an arrival point in the development of Indigenous-led opera.

Of course, there’s Louis Riel, the 1967 opera that Harry Somers and Mavor Moore wrote for the Canadian centennial. It was last mounted in 2018 by the Canadian Opera Company and the National Arts Centre, and the co-production took steps to fix and address some of the glaring problems with the 50-year-old work. One of these steps was commissioning Métis composer Ian Cusson to write Dodo, mon tout petit, the new aria that has replaced what’s known as the Kuyas aria, a Nisga’a song appropriated by Somers for Riel and used without its customary context or permissions.

Overdue overhauls aside, Louis Riel is as much an Indigenous opera as Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is Japanese.

The canon of actual Indigenous works is small, mighty and largely from the 21st century; that’s no surprise, considering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2007-2015 lifespan, and the Canada Council for the Arts’ $30-million in New Chapters grants, sent out to 200 artists across disciplines in 2017.

There’s Melissa Hui and Tomson Highway’s Pimooteewin/The Journey; Spy Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan’s Giiwedin/The North Wind and Canoe; two chamber operas about extraordinary women – Shanawdithit by Yvette Nolan and Dean Burry, and Nu Nah-Hup: Sacajawea’s Story by Rose Ann Abrahamson and Hovia Edwards; and Missing, the gutting story by Marie Clements and Brian Current of the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.

And there are more to come. Ian Cusson has two works currently in progress: the fantastical story of Namwayut with librettist Yvette Nolan, currently in development with Calgary Opera, and his comic operatic setting of Thomas King’s book Indians on Vacation, written alongside librettist Royce Vavrek and set for a 2025 premiere.

Just six years after the expanded funding from the Canada Council, Indigenous artists are curating their own projects and making opera in an Indigenous way. That creative process starts with gathering; Indigenous opera creators build relationships to facilitate creation, whereas in traditional opera settings, relationship-building is more often incidental to the task of creating a show.

The task of putting on an opera isn’t necessarily about the finished product, says Nicole Stonyk, a scholar in both Indigenous studies and classical music from the University of Manitoba. “It’s the relationships and the kinship ties that you’re building within the process,” she says. “But then also thinking past the show, how do those relationships continue moving forward?”

Stonyk is on Manitoba Opera’s advisory board for Li Keur, and she understands the new challenges presented to Canadian opera houses when producing Indigenous works, from making tickets affordable, to creating a performance venue that welcomes its audience rather than intimidates. “And then importantly,” adds Stonyk, “how are people being represented and how are they being taken care of?”

The first creators of Missing took particular consideration with community impact, in acknowledgment not only of the horrific and continuing subject of missing and murdered Indigenous women, but also as a natural extension of Indigenous practices. “We ended up with a shape that actually included aftercare,” says Rebecca Hass, director of engagement programs and partnerships at Pacific Opera Victoria. “People don’t come into events and then leave with hurt hearts. It’s not okay, you need to take care of people.”

That meant creating time and space for all to feel comfortable – artists and audiences alike. “There were Indigenous people downstairs in our offices who were offering brushings post-show,” says Hass, who is Métis. “You could be smudged before you went in. There were also Western health care professionals – we had therapists and psychologists on site.”

That idea of aftercare – both for the audience and for the artists of the production – came out of consultation with the non-operatic Indigenous community, particularly with Ron Rice, now executive director of the Victoria Native Friendship Centre in B.C. It was a “groundbreaking” approach, Hass recalls, and it was successful because the company worked to hand over control of the production to the Indigenous people in the room, thereby establishing trust.

And instead of expecting them to flock to the opera house – a space that, for many, comes with social barriers or a sense of inaccessibility – Missing sought out its audience. Starting with private performances for invited families in Vancouver’s Russian Hall in 2017, Missing played in intimate spaces for affected communities in Vancouver, Victoria, Prince George, Regina, and just this March in Anchorage, Alaska.

“It had a huge impact on us, because we could literally see the first few rows of people – and they all looked like me,” says Marion Newman, mezzo-soprano of Kwagiulth and Stó:lō First Nations, who sings in the cast of Missing. Newman, the current host of the CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, is in-demand as an artist and dramaturge for many Indigenous-led projects, and she sang the title roles in both Shanawdithit and Nu Nah-Hup: Sacajawea’s Story.

In the early performances of Missing, Newman remembers one woman who sobbed throughout most of the show, with whom she spoke in the post-show talking session. “It was actually a good experience for her, it turned out,” Newman recalls. “She had been holding on to all of this emotion, and she was getting to see that people outside of that community were making an effort to share that story that she was living through: missing her actual sister.”

Trauma-informed care on an opera production is certainly a thing of the 21st century. In order to tell a horrific and true story like Missing, established Canadian opera houses had to learn from Indigenous creators.

And once the creative space is made safe, the operas themselves can evolve. Even since 2017, Indigenous opera has seen a sharp turn away from trauma stories, or even historical accounts, which lay educational responsibility upon the shoulders of its artists. These stories, vital and true as they are, are not necessarily meant for an Indigenous audience. “We never drum or sing any trauma stories,” says Hass. “There’s trauma in the room, but the point of going in and drumming is that you lift people’s spirits up and you heal them.”

Moving away from trauma and toward other narratives marks an important checkpoint in the evolution of Indigenous opera. Swiftly and with exciting momentum, the art form has embraced the fantastical, time-travelling tales of Namwayut and Canoe, the comedy of Indians on Vacation, and the grand-scale works such as Li Keur.

“I can only hope that this will entertain and open the door for so many of us who have lost our languages and who, cast into diaspora like wildflower seeds, are finally coming home,” says Steele of Li Keur’s run in Winnipeg this November. She even has family coming to the premiere, including some she hasn’t yet met. “So in this alone,” says Steele, “the piece is already a triumph.”

Manitoba Opera’s production of Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North runs Nov. 18, 22 and 24 at Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg. For more information, visit mbopera.ca.

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