Pep Talk

This book is a trick window. Tomson Highway, as we will see, is a Trickster and a window installer.

Highway’s favourite character and metaphysical persona is “a cosmic clown, as he/she has been called, a merry-maker called the Trickster, Weesageechaak in Cree, Nanabush in Ojibway, Glooscap in Mi’kmaq, Iktomi in Lakota, Coyote on the plains, Raven on the west coast.” The Trickster shows up in Highway’s plays, male in the all-female The Rez Sisters, female in the all-male Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, in each case taking shapes of different people, tricking and being tricked. The Trickster is like the spirit of thought being pinned by pen to paper.

Consider: Highway wrote his plays first in English. In them he also has words of Cree and Ojibwa, with English translations included for the reader. They are transcribed not in the Cree syllabic alphabet, and not in the international phonetic style usually used for representing Cree in the...