Justice: from the Gwaandak Theatre in Whitehorse, a performance from the Northern Scene.
Photo. Bruce Barrett
Reviewed Thursday, May 2 for the Ottawa Citizen.
OTTAWA — Leonard Linklater has written a play about a very important issue: the collision of two radically different systems of justice — that of native North Americans and that of European colonizers who imposed a foreign system on First Nation peoples.
It’s an issue that, at heart, is about the collision of cultures and the failure to communicate which still characterize so much of native/white relations to the obvious detriment of First Nation peoples.
Unfortunately, neither the play nor this production, directed by Yvette Nolan, does a good job of communicating that tragedy.Linklater tells the true story of the four Nantuck brothers, members of the Tagish Kwan First Nation who, during the Klondike gold rush, were sentenced to death for the shooting of two white prospectors, one of whom died.
The natives shot the prospectors after members of the Nantuck’s clan died from accidentally consuming arsenic carelessly left at a campground by a different group of prospectors.According to the Tagish Kwan system of justice, those deaths meant the offending clan — in this case, all white men — owed a debt to the natives for the poisoning. When the Nantucks approached the two prospectors to collect, neither side understood the other so the debt was settled by shooting the two white men….