Her work as a playwright has been recognized with the 2004 Canada-Japan Literary Award and two Governor General’s Literary Award nominations, and her 15 plays have been presented on some of the most prestigious stages for Canadian and international work. The Unnatural and Accidental Women opened the first national Indigenous theatre at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and her opera Missing toured nationally. Of her extraordinary career as an artist across multiple media, Clements simply says, “I was interested in broadcast journalism in my teens and early 20s. I was looking for a place where I could tell stories, and theatre was going to allow an entry in. I expanded my craft, always asking myself what the genre was about and looking for how story works within the capabilities of each genre. All these different things are great taskmasters—they make you hone your discipline. It’s always exciting to be challenged and to rise to the challenge of every story.” She admits it’s taken a lot to get her work out there: “The reality of making things real is not for the faint of heart—you not only work as a craftsperson, but you have to be strategic, too. It’s not all sexy and great.” Before the pandemic, when travel was still a thing, Clements was always on the move, showing her work at festivals across North America and in Europe. Now she lives quietly on Galiano Island; these days even her trips to Vancouver are less frequent. But Clements is okay with that. “I’m a West Coast girl, born and raised in Vancouver and I live primarily on Galiano. There’s a certain grace to living here—my aunt and mother came down from the north and had their children here, so there’s a strong family connection,” she says. “I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, and on the island you’re close to nature, which is a great backdrop to writing a lot. The island is still quite small. There are no banks. There’s a gas station, a pub. We’re
close to a lot of things in nature, the ocean, the rain forest…it’s a simpler life.” While her work on features and documentaries “kind of goes on and on,” she is largely focused on writing a five-episode mini-series, Bones of Crows, about a Cree matriarch, a Second World War code talker, across five generations of her family’s experience of the residential school legacy. The Road Forward, a soul-stirring musical documentary that Clements first presented as a live musical performance in Vancouver, is probably her best-known film. Through song and narrative, she tells the compelling and powerful history of six generations of Indigenous activism, linking the beginning of Canadian First Nation nationalism in the 1930s with the First Nations activism of today. The Road Forward was produced by the National Film Board and had a huge festival run, premiering at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto in 2017, opening the 2017 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, closing the 2018 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and receiving five Leo Awards, including Best Production, Best Director and Best Screenwriter. Despite all the acclaim, Clements is very much that nature-loving West Coast girl. She feels the difference out here. “Certainly, the West Coast has its own style of activism and environmental concerns. We’re not separated from nature, we’re still in it. It makes us different people,” she says. “The culture that shapes the land and the language informs and shapes who we are.” She adds: “Like all creators around the world, I create different stories at the same time and there’s a natural rhythm to how they ultimately get told. This has changed radically for everyone—and we’re all looking to find a way in this new paradigm, understanding the urgency to tell a story always finds the way.”
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