REDPATCH RACISM

PLAY EXPLORES MILITARY HISTORY

Raes Calvert and Sean Harris Oliver spent years researching World War I and the aboriginal soldiers who fought in it for their new play Redpatch. But it was a trip to Nootka Island, off Vancouver Island’s remote west coast, that took the script to a new level.

Redpatch, cowritten by the friends and theatre artists behind Hardline Productions, centres on Half-blood (played by Calvert), a soldier tormented by personal tragedy, a trickster raven, racist soldiers, and the horrors he’s witnessed in the trenches. His story comes to a head at the battle of Vimy Ridge, which marked its centennial on April 9. And Calvert, who had recently traced his own heritage back to Nootka and the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation, decided with Oliver to make Half-blood come from there too.

“To have the character come from a true place, a place of honesty, it became clear we had to go to this island,” Calvert tells the Straight over the phone with Oliver, describing the long trip by ferry and then floatplane to reach the wilderness-enveloped Nootka Sound. “We talked to elders, they taught us some stories. That was what was the next step that we needed to do so we were not just appropriating language or stories.

“It’s an amazing, amazing place,” he adds of the emotional experience. “It’s very magical. I have family from that land, and before that for thousands of years. And in a weird way it felt like being home, even though I’d never been there. I definitely felt a connection to what was there.”

Oliver says that journey brought a visceral, descriptive quality to Redpatch the critically lauded show might never have had without it.

“That experience going to Nootka Island is really what made the play,” he tells the Straight of the trip that’s chronicled on video at redpatch.ca/. “It took it from being a historical fiction to grounding it in something real. It gave us more scenes and story to draw from and put into the play. For example, when we flew into the island, we said, ‘Jeez, there’s a lot of fog here’—you sort of descend out of the fog and see the island,” Oliver explains. “And so we use the fog all the time in the play, transitioning from the war back to the island. We wouldn’t have had that knowledge if we had not been there.”

That trip to Nootka was a revelation for the pair, but the scale of indigenous peoples’ contribution to World War I should come as an almost equal surprise to audiences.

Calvert’s own grandfather fought in World War II, but he and Oliver found through research that it was in the trenches and battlefields of the earlier war that aboriginal people had the bigger role. Oliver had performed in the play Vimy at the Firehall Arts Centre in 2011, and both he and Calvert became fascinated with a side character who had a First Nations background.

“We were roommates at the time and we had gone to Studio 58 together, so we were always bumping around ideas for a theatrical take,” Calvert explains. “I shared that my grandfather fought in World War II and we started to do research. We found out there really was a story there that neither of us had learned about in high school.”

“The thing that got me the most was that this story wasn’t being told,” Oliver adds. “In World War II, because that war became more mechanized and technology was more prevalent, they didn’t have as big a role. The First World War was where the First Nations soldiers were very, very useful as trench raiders, scouts, snipers. They were using wilderness survival techniques that people wouldn’t necessarily have had coming from the city.”

The research snowballed, revealing the racism that undercut the respect among the troops. It led to meeting military experts, visiting libraries, and eventually that trip to Nootka Sound. In all, it’s taken more than four years, building to this 100th anniversary of Vimy, for the duo to interweave its tale of the historic battle with a First Nations origin story.

“We hope this play goes on and has a life definitely beyond this run and beyond ourselves,” Calvert says. “We’re both very proud because it’s taken a lot of time to get to this play; it was about taking the right amount of time to get to the right place for its world premiere.”

It seems Redpatch is coming to life at the same time as a general awareness of its subject is starting to happen. “My mother teaches in the Richmond school district and she says the story of aboriginal soldiers is only entering the curriculum this year,” Calvert says. “It’s about time these stories are being told. It’s a history of what it means to be Canadian and the history of Canada and its triumphs and defeats.”

Redpatch)