JUSTICE: A tragic event still searching for its stage presence
Photo: Bruce Barrett
Playwright Leonard Linklater from the Yukon, and founder of the Gwaandak Theatre, has joined with dramaturg DDKugler on the West coast as well as director Yvette Nolan from the Native Earth Performing Arts group in Toronto to tell us about the tragedy of the two Tagish Nantuck brothers. It appears in two parts. The first part shows the meeting and the killing. And second part becomes the murder trial. The sequence of events is the following. The brothers executed two white gold prospectors during the period of the Gold Rush. I say executed because the deaths were shown to be ritual killings. Other prospectors had accidentally poisoned two native people with the cyanide used for mining the gold. The brother’s did not kill these white men as acts of vengeance but rather as a debt that the prospectors owed to the families of the dead. The killings were therefore justifiable from the point of view of the Native culture.