"I wasn't trained for anything"

 Excerpt from "Indians and Residential School: A Study of the Breakdown of a Culture" by Vera Manuel, 26 April 1987

The People & The Text: Vera Manuel

 Vera Manuel (March 20, 1948 - January 2, 2010)

 Lara Estlin, March 2019

Vera Manuel (Kulilu Paⱡki Butterfly Woman) was an important poet, playwright, and dramatherapist. Drawing on her family’s experiences with the residential school system and the intergenerational trauma it gave rise to, as well as her own experiences with the healing power of writing and performing, Manuel composed a number of poems and plays, established dramatherapy groups and workshops, and, throughout her lifetime, became a respected activist and keynote speaker at several national and international conferences.

Vera Manuel was born on March 20, 1948 into a culturally and politically active family. Her mother, Marceline Paul (Ktunaxa), was a drug and alcohol counsellor, cultural leader, and respected elder. Her father, George Manuel (Secwepemc), was an influential activist both in Canada and abroad; he was President of the North American Indian Brotherhood (1959-1960), Chief of what was formerly the Shuswap Indian band (1960-1966), Chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (1970- 1976), President of the World Council on Indigenous Peoples (1975-1981), and President of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (1979-1981).

As a child, Vera Manuel grew up on the Neskonlith Reservation in the interior of British Columbia. While she and some of her siblings were able to attend local public schools, her younger brothers and sisters attended residential schools in Kamloops, Cranbrook, Port Alberni, and Mission. Both the immediate and the intergenerational impacts of Canada’s residential school system played a significant, but largely silent, role in Manuel’s family history—a theme she repeatedly returns to in her poetry, plays, and short stories. Although Manuel grew up aware of her mother’s and father’s experiences as survivors of what she has called “a world of violence and isolation” (26)[1]—of residential schools and tuberculosis sanatoriums—she did not learn about the physical and sexual abuse her parents experienced until much later in her life, when her mother began to share stories about her childhood and adolescence at St. Eugene’s Residential School. Much of Vera Manuel’s work, such as her critically acclaimed play, Strength of Indian Women, returns to the stories her mother and other women told her, and reflects on the effects that unacknowledged trauma can have on people’s lives, including her own.

The relationships between storytelling, writing, healing, and performing had always played an important role in Manuel’s life. As a young adult, she kept journals and wrote her own poetry. She lived in Vancouver for several years where she studied history, Indigenous culture, and writing at the University of British Columbia and at Langara College. Yet Vera Manuel did not fully realize her vocation as a creative writer, poet, and playwright until she was in her forties, after she returned home from having lived in Los Angeles with her sister, Emalene (Arlene), for several years. Following her return in the late 1980s, a number of deaths, several of which were suicides, occurred in her network of family and friends as well as in neighbouring communities—a pattern that, as Emalene notes, made the Manuel family “dizzy with grief” (3). 

After the passing of her mother in 1988 and her father in 1989, Vera Manuel was contracted to write her first play, Song of the Circle, for a youth conference.[2] In the same year, she had begun co-writing a project called In the Spirit of the Family, a training manual for a national organization for treaty directors. In an interview she gave for Redwire with Peter Morin, Manuel remarks that the process of writing the manual allowed her to begin reflecting on how much work she had to do in relation to her own family’s trauma, a process she had been coming to terms with ever since her mother began speaking about residential school shortly before her death. Around the same time, Vera Manuel began group therapy with Emalene and, feeling that others like her could benefit from what she had learnt, decided to start her own workshops shortly thereafter, which drew on Family Systems Theory and Indigenous Knowledge Systems as therapeutic models.[3]

In the early nineties, Vera Manuel began working on Strength of Indian Women,[4] perhaps her most well-known play on residential schools, abuse, intergenerational trauma, and healing. In the years that followed, she went on to write Journey through the Past to the Future, Echoes Of Our Mothers’ Past, and Every Warrior’s Song as well as a number of other plays she co-authored with other women.[5] She also wrote several short stories, including “That Grey Building,” “Theresa,” “The Letter,” and “The Abyss”; only the last one was published during her lifetime. She also wrote many poems, a handful of which have been included in The World Poetry Anthology (2002), ROCKSALT: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry (2008), Salish Seas: an anthology of text + image (2011); the largest collection of her poetry is included in Honouring the Strength of Indian Women (2019).

Throughout the last two decades of her life, Vera Manuel’s role as an artist, activist, therapist/healer, and cultural leader took various forms: she continued to facilitate healing groups, was a curriculum developer and keynote speaker at several national and international conferences, worked with other activists and artists on CDs, educational videos, and films, and was responsible for writing two journal publications and a number of training manuals.[6]

In 2004, she was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, which threatened to curb her impressive literary and cultural output. Despite her illness, she remained very active in her community.

From 2004-2005, she was contracted through Helping Spirit Lodge Society to do storytelling work and develop a Drama Therapy Program, a position which allowed her to continue working while remaining closer to home. She was also a featured poet and member of World Poetry (WP), and was awarded the World Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award. She continued holding poetry readings and conferences until her health took a turn for the worse. She passed away peacefully at Vancouver General Hospital on January 22, 2010, at the age of 61.

Selected Readings:

Manuel, Vera. “The Abyss.” Residential Schools: The Stolen Years. Edited by Linda Jaine. U of Saskatchewan P, 1993.

---. “The Catholic Church.” ROCKSALT: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry. Edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch. Mother Tongue, 2008. pp. 150-151.

---. Honouring the Strength of Indian Women. Edited by Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, and Emalene Manuel. U of Manitoba P, 2019.

---. “When I First Came To Know Myself” and “Two Brothers.” Salish Seas: an anthology of text + image. Edited by Joanne Arnott and Michelle Sylliboy. Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, 2011. pp. 68-70.

---. “Strength of Indian Women.” Two Plays About Residential Schools. Living Traditions, 1998. pp. 75-119.

 Works Cited:

Manuel, Emalene. “Introduction: Emalene (Arlene) Manuel.” Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry by Vera Manuel. (Manuscript). Edited and with Afterwords by Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, and Joanne Arnott. U of Manitoba P, 2018. 1-24.

Manuel, Vera. Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry by Vera Manuel. (Manuscript). Edited and with Afterwords by Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, and Joanne Arnott. U of Manitoba P, 2018.

---. Interview by Peter Morin. “Letting go of Trauma On and Off Stage.” Redwire. Accessed March 16, 2018. https://users.resist.ca/www.redwiremag.com/lettinggooftrauma.htm

 Vera Manuel entry by Lara Estlin, March 2019. Lara is a former SFU student who completed her English Honours project on Indigenous authors William Apess (Pequot) and George Copway (Anishinaabe). She works as a research assistant for the Department of First Nations Studies at SFU.

Please contact The People and the Text at people_text@sfu.ca with any comments or corrections.

Sources:

photos from an unpublished photo essay by EA Manuel, Vera's Belongings

text originally published on The People and The Text: for end notes to this essay and for more profiles, visit The People and The Text

Review (NAIS Journal)

 

Prairie Fire & Drama Therapy Reviews

 

"With this edition, the editors of Honouring the Strength of Indian Women are ensuring that Vera Manuel’s voice will be heard in all its fullness, range, and power for generations to come and beyond. It’s evident that Vera Manuel was ahead of her time in reckoning with the history of injustice that Indigenous people have faced in this land since the arrival of the Europeans. She confronts this history fearlessly but with such compassion and wisdom arising from the richness of Indigenous knowledge and ways that we can find within her vision our own individual duty and responsibility to the past.

"Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetryby Vera Manuel (Kulilu Patki), Edited by Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, and Emalene A. Manuel.
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019, 391 pp., $24.95
ISBN 978-0-88755-836-8

---

"Dale Lakevold is a playwright from Minnedosa, Manitoba. He teaches English and creative writing at Brandon University."

https://www.prairiefire.ca/honouring-the-strength-of-indian-women-plays-stories-poetry-by-vera-manuel-kulilu-patki-ed-by-michelle-coupal-deanna-reder-joanne-arnott-emalene-a-manuel/

 

 

From review in Drama Therapy ReviewVolume 6. Issue 1
 by

Rachel K. M. Lee Soon,,MA, LCAT, LMHC, RDT, USA

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/dtr/2020/00000006/00000001/art00007

Healing work of Vera Manuel honoured at U of R

Ben Schneider

November 8, 2019

Reading staged in memory of author

On Friday, Nov. 1, Dr. Michelle Coupal of the Department of English hosted a live-reading of Vera Manuel’s play, Strength of Indian Women, as part of a celebration of a newly-published volume of Manuel’s work.

Dr. Coupal, along with fellow editors Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, and Emalene A. Manuel, published a collection of plays, stories and poetry by Vera Manuel entitled, Honouring the Strength of Indian Women earlier this spring. The volume’s purpose is to give voice to Vera Manuel, an artist who was under-published at the height of her career in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Coupal originally planned to do a traditional book launch in Regina; however, the idea shifted slightly upon speaking with her colleague, Deanna Reder, Associate Professor in the Departments of First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University.

“Deanna and I were talking about the possibility of doing a live-reading. She’s read [Strength of Indian Women] aloud in her class and I have in mine as well. It really brings everyone into community by doing that, a community of talking and witnessing. We thought it’d be a great idea to do a live-reading and Emalene and Joanne were both on board with that idea.”

Coupal raised funds from the faculties of Arts and Education as well as the Office of the VP of Research, and the Office of Indigenization, in order to fly in both Manuel and Arnott.

The event was held at La Rotunde in La Cité and, in addition to Coupal, featured the voices of Emalene Manuel (sister to Vera); Dr. Allyson Stevenson of the Department of Politics and International Studies; Dr. Jesse Archibald-Barber of First Nations University of Canada; Joanne Arnott, who is a renowned Métis poet; Pamela Sparvier, administrative assistant at the Office of Indigenization; Dr. Heather Phipps of the Faculty of Education; Jesse Pelletier, senior student at First Nations University of Canada; and Alma Poitras, Faculty of Education Elder-in-Residence.

Elder Poitras offered prayers and an opening smudge for those in attendance as a way to prepare for the healing words and themes within the play. Elder Poitras also sang the beautifully sombre honour song at the play’s end, closing the reading.

Strength of Indian Women follows an Elder, Sousette, and her surrounding family members. The coming of age of Sousette’s granddaughter sparks a need for the women to acknowledge the role that the Residential School still plays in their lives. Each discuss memories of abuse, loss of innocence, regret, and their ability and inability to express love. In the tradition of Vera Manuel, the speaking of the words on the page inspire a feeling of empowerment for the reader, allowing the audience to witness the heart and healing happening, not only amongst the characters, but with the readers as well.

Vera Manuel was a Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer whose work sought to heal cyclical wounds affecting Indigenous families and individuals, stemming from the trauma of Residential Schools. Manuel’s theatrical works helped her to become a dramatherapist, reinforcing her role as a healer. She died in 2010 at the age of 61.

It is often noted that Vera’s observations in her writing were ahead of any national common knowledge surrounding the trauma caused by Residential Schools. Emalene spoke to Vera’s strong understanding of healing practices.

“People were saying, ‘what can we do for First Nations?’ and [Vera] was saying, ‘Create the resources and the space. Move aside, [leave] that space for us to develop our own ways, because we have the answers to our own situation.’”

Turning now to Honouring the Strength of Indian Women as a whole, Emalene and Coupal shared some insight into the volume’s origin.

After teaching Strength of Indian Women as a graduate student, Coupal became increasingly interested in Vera and other work that she had written. Deanna Reder introduced Coupal to several other of Manuel’s scripts which led to the two being put into contact with Vera’s sister, Emalene.

Emalene Manuel was holding on to Vera’s archives and she reflected on the emotional significance of entering into this project. “I didn’t feel quite ready even though it had been a while. I still hadn’t gone through or even looked at some of the boxes or anything. When I had, over a year or so before, it was quite emotional and so I was kind of keeping it at arm’s length. But I was so excited when [Coupal] called. I just thought, ‘this is the answer to what we’d been hoping for.’”

Joanne Arnott, who was a good friend of Vera’s, was welcomed onto the project, bringing with her a volume of poetry that Vera had written. It would be Arnott who would travel to Cranbrook to visit Emalene and look through Vera’s archives.

“[Arnott] just went through everything and I just felt totally fine with that; I could just step aside. One day I left the house for the day and I left [Arnott] there. Vera’s writings were in good hands, her sister poet.”

Coupal explained that the collection does not have a singular readership. “One of the reasons we chose a university press is that we were hoping to get [Honouring the Strength of Indian Women] into the university classrooms as a start, and into teacher education programs so that it would have a chance of getting into the high school system, which I think it would be fantastic material for.”

The volume was not solely intended for university students and scholars, however. “We also are hoping that it reaches more broadly into communities through some of the events that we’re having because there’s much interest from the general public for new understandings of the Residential School experience and reading about that in a positive and strong way, which is what the wonderful work of Vera is; it’s really intensely healing. We hope [the book] goes across Canada and goes across Turtle Island and then gets out to other countries.”

Emalene reflected on the long, healing journey, one that led to unexpected friendships and saw her sister properly honoured.

“That whole process, in the time that it took from that first phone call until it actually got published, it felt like we were really walking closely together, even though we were living in different places.

“We found each other and it’s like a perfect family.”

Regina: Staged Reading of The Strength of Indian Women

Many thanks to the volunteers who came together to present a staged reading of Vera Manuel's The Strength of Indian Women at the University of Regina, 1 November 2019. 
Thank you to Michelle Coupal for organizing, and to the funders for supporting her vision. 

Special thanks to Elder Alma Poitras for opening and closing the gathering in a beautiful way.

Photo two, presenters (and the characters played):

Front row (l to r): Emalene Manuel (Sousette), Pamela Sparvier (Agnes), Joanne Arnott (Lucy), Michelle Coupal (Mariah)

Back row (l to r): Elder Alma Poitras, Jesse Pelletier (Suzie), Allyson Stevenson (Eva), Heather Phipps (Sarah), Jesse Archibald-Barber (narrator, man's voice)

Thank you to Ben Schneider and the other students for generous photography!

Regina launch + first review

We'll be on campus at the University of Regina. Here's a link to the campus map: https://www.uregina.ca/contact/maps-directions/full.html

+

#610 Secwépemc playwright honoured

The Ormsby Review, September 7, 2019September 9, 2019

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry
by Vera Manuel (author) and Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, Emalene A. Manuel (editors)

Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019
$24.95 / 9780887558368

Reviewed by Diana French

Gratitude: Honouring the Strength of Indian Women

Thank you to all who came out for the launch of Honouring the Strength of Indian Women at the Sty-Wet-Tan Great Hall, First Nations House of Learning aka the Longhouse at UBC.  The gathering was a part of Congress, an ILSA gathering, and part of the Indigenous Voices Awards mentorship day. I saw some of Vera's dearest friends alongside emerging and established Indigenous writers, fans, and scholars from across the land. 

Thank you to my wise and loving co-editors, Emalene, Michelle, and Deanna, and to Warren and Glenn and all the collaborators at University of Manitoba Press/First Voices, First Texts for your support in bringing this project full circle.

If you'd like to order the book online check out Strong Nations, a BC-based, Indigenous owned and operated book distributor.

image: twitter

Vera's book: Honouring the Strength of Indian Women

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women

Plays, Stories, Poetry

Vera Manuel (Author), Michelle Coupal (Editor), Deanna Reder (Editor), Joanne Arnott (Editor), Emalene A. Manuel (Editor)

This critical edition delivers a unique and comprehensive collection of the works of Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer and educator Vera Manuel, daughter of prominent Indigenous leaders Marceline Paul and George Manuel. A vibrant force in the burgeoning Indigenous theatre scene, Vera was at the forefront of residential school writing and did groundbreaking work as a dramatherapist and healer. Long before mainstream Canada understood and discussed the impact and devastating legacy of Canada’s Indian residential schools, Vera Manuel wrote about it as part of her personal and community healing. She became a grassroots leader addressing the need to bring to light the stories of survivors, their journeys of healing, and the therapeutic value of writing and performing arts.

A collaboration by four Indigenous writers and scholars steeped in values of Indigenous ethics and editing practices, the volume features Manuel’s most famous play, Strength of Indian Women — first performed in 1992 and still one of the most important literary works to deal with the trauma of residential schools — along with an assemblage of plays, written between the late 1980s until Manuel’s untimely passing in 2010, that were performed but never before published. The volume also includes three previously unpublished short stories written in 1988, poetry written over three decades in a variety of venues, and a 1987 college essay that draws on family and community interviews on the effects of residential schools.

REVIEWS

“An invaluable contribution to our literature about residential school experiences and the effects of transgenerational trauma. With so many current projects focused on “reconciliation,” this republication of Vera Manuel’s works recalls the often forgotten side of the equation: the truth, unvarnished by politics or bureaucracy.”

– Jesse Archibald-Barber, Associate Professor of Indigenous Literatures and Performance, First Nations University of Canada

“Layered with intergenerational wisdom, replete with lived experience, this collection deftly presents both the devastating legacy of residential schools and the complex systems of care that sustain Indigenous women and fuel Indigenous resurgence.”

– Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vera Manuel (1948-2010) was an Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer at the forefront of Residential School writing who did tremendous work as a dramatherapist and healer.

Michelle Coupal (Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation) is Canada Research Chair in Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Literatures, and Associate Professor at the University of Regina.

Deanna Reder (Métis), Associate Professor in First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, leads The People and the Text.

Joanne Arnott (Métis/Mixed Blood), writer, editor, and arts activist, received the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Literary Arts.

Emalene A. Manuel (Ktunaxa-Secwepemc) worked with her sister, Vera, in Storyteller Theatre. In 2018 she completed her Masters of Education at the University of British Columbia.

BOOK DETAILS

• Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry
• Vera Manuel (Author), Michelle Coupal (Editor), Deanna Reder (Editor), Joanne Arnott (Editor), Emalene A. Manuel (Editor)
• Published April 2019, 296 pages
• Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-836-8 , 5.5 × 8.5, $24.95
• Topic(s): Indigenous Studies, Literature, Performing Arts
• Part of the U of M Press series: First Voices, First Texts

Source & to order: https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/honouring-the-strength-of-indian-women