Drew Hayden Taylor

Tiffany Hunter, a young Ojibwa, struggles with growing up, as a man who calls himself Pierre L'Errant, an Ojibwa whose thirst for adventure took him to Europe, where he was turned into a vampire, becomes her family's guest.

A Native Gothic Novel

The Night Wanderer

Maggie Second is the chief of the community in central Ontario and her mother, Lillian, is dying. When the old woman summonds a handsome white stranger who has come to town, and only known to her, she charges him with a mission to help the people she loves the most, her daugher and grandson, Virgil. Maggie finds herself increasingly enamoured with the handsome young White man, but Virgil, is less than enchanted. With the help of his uncle, Wayne they will try and drive the stranger from the reserve.

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

A forgotten Haudenosaunee social song beams into the cosmos like a homing beacon for interstellar visitors. A computer learns to feel sadness and grief from the history of atrocities committed against First Nations. A young Native man discovers the secret to time travel in ancient petroglyphs. Drawing inspiration from science fiction legends like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Drew Hayden Taylor frames classic science-fiction tropes in an Aboriginal perspective. The nine stories in this collection span all traditional topics of science fiction--from peaceful aliens to hostile invaders; from space travel to time travel; from government conspiracies to connections across generations. Yet Taylor's First Nations perspective draws fresh parallels, likening the cultural implications of alien contact to those of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, or highlighting the impossibility of remaining a "good Native" in such an unnatural situation as a space mission. Infused with Native stories and variously mysterious, magical and humorous, Take Us to Your Chief is the perfect mesh of nostalgically 1950s-esque science fiction with modern First Nations discourse.

And Other Stories

Take Us to Your Chief

A Novel

Cold

"On the cusp of becoming teenagers, Ralph, his sister Shelley, and their friend William, befriend Danielle, an odd girl in their school. She draws an extraordinary horse in a competition created by Ralph's mother. It's the kind of drawing no child -- or adult, for that matter -- should be able to draw. It will haunt Ralph into adulthood, because it represents everything wrong in Danielle's life and everything she wished her life could be. As teenagers and later adults, Ralph, Shelley, and William are struck, trying to figure out what the horse means to the girl, and how they can help."--

Chasing Painted Horses

A funny yet thought-provoking play about identity politics. Cast of 4 men and 1 woman.

Dead White Writer on the Floor

An irreverent, insightful take on our First Nations' great gift to Canada, delivered by a stellar cast of contributors. Humour has always been an essential part of North American Aboriginal culture. This fact remained unnoticed by most settlers, however, since non-Aboriginals just didn't get the joke. Indians, it was believed, never laughed. But Indians themselves always knew better. As an award-winning playwright, columnist and comedy-sketch creator, Drew Hayden Taylor has spent fifteen years writing and researching Aboriginal humour. For this book, he asked a leading group of writers from a variety of fields -- among them such celebrated wordsmiths as Thomas King, Lee Maracle and Tomson Highway -- to take a look at what makes Aboriginal humour tick. Their challenging, informative and hilarious contributions examine the use of humour in areas as diverse as stand-up comedy, fiction, visual art, drama, performance, poetry, traditional storytelling and education. As Me Funny makes clear, there is no single definition of Aboriginal humour. But the contributors do agree on some common ground: Native humour pushes the envelope. With this collection, readers will have the unforgettable opportunity to appreciate that for themselves.

Me Funny

Richard Wagamese

Richard Wagamese Selected

Play's Subjects:Interracial relations; Social issues; Social matters.

Alternatives

The emotional struggle of an adopted Native woman to acknowledge her birth family. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth

First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists, activists, educators and writers, youth and elders come together to envision Indigenous futures in Canada and around the world. Discussing everything from language renewal to sci-fi, this collection is a powerful and important expression of imagination rooted in social critique, cultural experience, traditional knowledge, activism and the multifaceted experiences of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. In Me Tomorrow... Darrel J. McLeod, Cree author from Treaty-8 territory in Northern Alberta, blends the four elements of the Indigenous cosmovision with the four directions of the medicine wheel to create a prayer for the power, strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples. Autumn Peltier, Anishinaabe water-rights activist, tells the origin story of her present and future career in advocacy--and how the nine months she spent in her mother's womb formed her first water teaching. When the water breaks, like snow melting in the spring, new life comes. Lee Maracle, acclaimed Stó:lō Nation author and educator, reflects on cultural revival--imagining a future a century from now in which Indigenous people are more united than ever before. Other essayists include Cyndy and Makwa Baskin, Norma Dunning, Shalan Joudry, Shelley Knott-Fife, Tracie Léost, Stephanie Peltier, Romeo Saganash, Drew Hayden Taylor and Raymond Yakeleya. For readers who want to imagine the future, and to cultivate a better one, Me Tomorrow is a journey through the visions generously offered by a diverse group of Indigenous thinkers.

Me Tomorrow: Indigenous Views on the Future

Baiser De Nanabush (Le).

This new comedy by the author of Toronto at Dreamer's Rock and Education Is Our Right is about love, family, and what to do with too much beer. Set on a reserve, it follows the plight of Martha, a church-going, teetotaling woman who finds herself stuck with 143 cases of beer after a church fundraiser fails. She decides to bootleg the beer, to the horror of her son Andrew, nicknamed Blue, who is a special constable on the reserve. Meanwhile, Andrew has fallen for a young woman he thinks is his cousin, and his sister Marianne is bored with her "Indian Yuppie" husband and finds herself attracted to a handsome dancer at the powwow. The pace is fast and vigorous in this romantic situation comedy.

A Play

The Bootlegger Blues

The Night Wanderer: A Graphic Novel

Motorcycles and Sweet Grass

A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons. Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle - and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve's chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger's intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne - a master of aboriginal martial arts - to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Is Cree really the sexiest of all languages? Do Native people have less or more public hair? Does Inuit sex have a dark side? These are some of the questions answered in this witty, thoughtful collection. Twelve important voices in the Native culture — including Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road, and Marissa Crazytrain, a descendant of Chief Sitting Bull — tackle a variety of previously taboo subjects with humor and insight. Noted comic writer and editor Drew Hayden Taylor wraps it up with an original contribution of his own.

An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality

Me Sexy

While panhandling outside a coffee shop, Johnny, a Cree woman who lives on the streets, is shocked to recognize a face from her childhood, which was spent in a residential school. Desperate to hear the man acknowledge the terrible abuse he inflicted on her and other children at the school, Johnny follows Anglican bishop George King to his office to confront him. Inside King’s office, Johnny’s memories are fluid, shifting, and her voice cracks with raw emotion. Is the bishop actually guilty of what she claims, or has her ability to recollect been altered by poverty, abuse, and starvation experienced on the streets? Can her memories be trusted? Who is responsible for what? At its core, God and the Indian, by celebrated Aboriginal playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, explores the complex process of healing through dialogue. Loosely based on Death and the Maiden by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, the play identifies the ambiguities that frame past traumatic events. Against the backdrop of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has facilitated the recent outpouring of stories from residential school survivors across the country, the play explores what is possible when the abused meets the abuser and is given a free forum for expression. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

God and the Indian

The third play in Taylor's hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

400 Kilometres

Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor's distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families. Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne's yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever. When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled. The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. Somedayis an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.

Drew Hayden Taylor

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