Fort William FN & Tkarón:to Artist Profile: Yolanda Bonnell, Playwright, Actor

Yolanda Bonnell (She/They) is a Bi/Queer 2 Spirit AnishinaabeOjibwe, South Asian mixed performer, playwright and multidisciplinary creator/educator. Originally from Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Superior Robinson Treaty territory), her arts practice is now based in Tkarón:to. She is Co-artistic leader of manidoons collective, that she runs with Michif (Métis) artist, Cole Alvis. In February 2020, Yolanda’s four-time Dora nominated solo show bug was remounted at Theatre Passe Muraille while the published book was shortlisted for a Governor General Literary Award. In 2018, Yolanda was invited to be part of the Banff Playwright’s Lab with her piece, White Girls in Moccasins, which was produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in March 2022.

Yolanda was the Indigenous artist recipient of the Jayu Arts for Human Rights Award for her work and won the PGC Tom Hendry Drama Award for her play, My Sister’s Rage. Yolanda has taught at schools like York University and Sheridan College and proudly bases her practice in land-based creation, drawing on energy and inspiration from the earth and her ancestors.

We interviewed Yolanda for this Teacher Resource Package and asked her to say a few words about their experience in theatre and with Shakespeare. Here are a few quotes from that discussion.

On the role of a storyteller…

“In Anishinaabe culture, you were typically traditionally identified by your role and responsibility in the community. It was what you were giving, and how you were contributing. For me as a storyteller, that is my role.

“Our stories are medicine. The way that we pass on our information, disseminate our history, has often been oral or birchbark scrolls. When I talk about my work, I talk about it from a place of sovereignty. When I write things down, I document things, it's a contemporary form of documentation like on birch bark. Just that this is what we're doing now. I connect all that to my role as a playwright, to my role as a creator. What we know as theater, I call it storytelling because it connects that to my role as an Anishinaabe person.”

On the value of stories, theatre, and representation…

“The importance of it is how we are reaching out to our communities and how we are representing our communities. A lot of the stories that I'm telling are stories about my life. There are stories from my own experiences, predominantly as an Indigenous two-spirit woman (sometimes woman, sometimes not), from things I've witnessed, and from what I know about.

“I think about myself as a young person and not seeing myself anywhere in the world and not seeing myself on stages and all I was seeing was Pocahontas or like this ‘Hoka hey’ or super-Northern reservation life. My lived experience wasn't demonstrated to me. So for me representation is harm reduction. When I think about that within theater, I think about how we need to show our lived experiences. My lived experiences, my body on stage. These acts of sovereignty put us boldly out there so people can see us and that we're not disappearing, we're still here, our stories still matter. We're telling the truth of this country.

“Documentation and storytelling, oral or otherwise, has always been a way to maintain our history. Indigenous theater artists are just documenting our history. This is our truth right now.”

On the relevance of Shakespeare’s stories today…

“There are opportunities to take those [Shakespeare] stories and reimagine them. You can take themes from so many Shakespeare stories and turn them into a reflection of today.

“There's themes of betrayal, love and desire, lust for power, greed – these are things that we see today all over the place. And it doesn't have to be betrayal of love. It can be betrayal of, like, a treaty.

“You can connect these things to lots of issues that are happening today, to issues that some youth are feeling, especially in this day and age where you can't shield them from any of the truth that's happening. They can see greed. They can see lust for power. They see it in their governments every day. They see it in their households. Some of those themes can be translated, to make it important to people.

“Having a good understanding of Shakespeare and the language will give you an opinion on it. If you don't fully understand it, you can't form a well-rounded opinion. It wasn't until I went to theatre school that I deeply understood it. And I was like, ‘Now I get it. Now I can form a knowledge-based opinion on whether this work is relevant.’ I think that young people need that in high schools.

“The second part to that is not only understanding how it works but then also twisting it. Now that we understand how it works, how does it relate to you? What are what are the things you're pulling out of it? Understand the text, understand the stories, and then understand how to break them apart and find those themes and use them to your own experience.

“Find out what it is you want to say about the world, about your life. If you want to go out there and create, have a point of view. What is your perspective? What is your artistic voice? And that can mean whatever it is to what you want.”