38 pages • 1 hour read
Tomson HighwayThe Rez Sisters
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Gender Roles On and Off the Reserve
The Rez Sisters explores the socially expected roles of women both in Wasy and off the reserve. Femininity and masculinity are often discussed among the seven sisters. Pelajia is consistently described—negatively—as masculine by the others. Her choice of wearing pants, rather than a skirt, is criticized a number of times by the other women. Pelajia considers her outfit choices to be practical—she says to Philomena, “gotta wear pants when you’re doing a man’s job. See? You got your skirt ripped on a nail” (7). The physical act of Philomena ripping her skirt supports Pelajia’s point that jeans are more durable when working on a roof. However, other women insult Pelajia for wearing pants. For instance, Veronique tells Pelajia she “look[s] obscene in those tight pants” (43) during the fight in the Wasy general store. Philomena takes this a step further, yelling at Pelajia, “At least I’m a woman” (44). The women on the reserve in the 1980s believe wearing pants as a woman is pretending to be a man and expect women to behave according to prescribed, stereotypical gender roles. Still, by the end of the play, even Annie acknowledges that Pelajia would make a suitable chief, a job traditionally held by a man. Pelajia refuses constricting gender roles out of their impracticality and to preserve her sense of self-sufficiency and independence.
Another woman who is coded as masculine by her sisters is Emily. Emily also wears pants—“tight blue jeans” (37). This, in addition to her bisexuality and sex-positivity, cause the women to consider Emily as masculine. When she speaks about her dead lover, Emily says, “I loved that woman [...] I loved her like no man’s ever loved a woman” (97). While same-sex love here is distinguished from heterosexual love, the other women in the play code lesbians—especially those who ride motorcycles in San Francisco—as masculine. Veronique says Emily is a “sick pervert” and should have stayed in San Francisco (45). During the time the play is set and was written, being openly gay was considered dangerous and socially risky. Emily’s admission of her relationship with another woman reveals that she has come to trust her sisters more deeply; Veronique’s insult reveals that the sisters may not be as ready to overcome their own prejudices as Emily hopes. As Highway writes Pelajia to interrogate social aspects of gender, he writes Emily to interrogate the intersection of sexuality and gender. Emily ends the play by revealing that her affair with Big Joey resulted in her becoming pregnant. She is set to become a mother figure, like all of her sisters, as well as being someone who loves women.
How Indigenous women are treated due to their romantic relationships with men, on and off the reserve, is also explored by Highway. During the drive to Toronto, Annie and Emily talk about Annie’s relationship with Fritz, the musician. Annie says, “Aw these white guys. They’re nicer to their women” (86). Her daughter, Ellen, is also “happy” with her white boyfriend. While Emily condemns this attitude, insulting Annie for her choices in men, the other women consistently gossip about Emily’s Indigenous lover Big Joey. Pelajia jokes that Philomena’s ripped skirt will make people think she “just came from Big Joey’s house” (7). Big Joey is notorious for being sexually promiscuous, and this ruins the reputation of the women who sleep with him. Being with Big Joey is considered as bad as or worse than dating a white man who is not from the reserve.
The attitude of each individual sister toward gender expectations often mirrors their attitude toward the reservation itself. Pelajia rejects stereotypical femininity, just as she longs for a different life off the reserve. Philomena believes life on the reserve is her fate, just as she does not question social expectations for women in her community. Only by leaving Wasaychigan Reserve is Emily able to explore her identity outside the boundaries of heterosexuality. Through each sister, Highway interrogates how identity is formed by both individual and communal notions of gender.
Trickster Spirit as a Guide Through Death
Nanabush is a trickster spirit who interacts with the dying and the ill. Highway explains that the Ojibway name Nanabush describes a “comic, clownish sort of figure, he teaches us about the nature and the meaning of existence on the planet Earth; he straddles the consciousness of man and that of God, the Great Spirit” (xii). While Nanabush is a well-known Indigenous figure, only Marie-Adele and Zhaboonigan—who are dying and disabled, respectively—interact with Nanabush. Nanabush also represents the sisters’ lost connection to Indigenous spirituality and traditions, symbolizing a connection between death and the spiritual realm. Although the trickster spirit is traditionally dual-gendered, Highway specifies that Nanabush should be portrayed by a male-identifying dancer, suggesting a relationship between gender and death for the women of the Wasaychigan Reserve.
Nanabush’s disguises as birds draw upon the symbolic meanings that these birds carry on the reservation. At the beginning and the end of the play, Pelajia notes if there are, or are not, many seagulls around Marie-Adele’s house. In Act I, Scene I, she sees “the seagulls circling over Marie-Adele Starblanket’s white picket fence” (2). However, after Marie-Adele’s death, in the last line of Act II, Pelajia says, “Not many seagulls flying over Eugene Starblanket’s house today” (118). The presence of multiple seagulls, not simply Nanabush disguised as one seagull, mark a place of the dying to Pelajia, the eldest and wisest of the sisters.
When Marie-Adele speaks to Nanabush in his bird disguises, she uses mostly Cree words. Her first lines in the play are: “Awus! Wee-chee-gis” (19), which Highway translates in a footnote as, “Go away! You stinking thing” (19). Nanabush is attempting to guide Marie-Adele into the afterlife, but she does not want to leave her family. Her last words are also in Cree. She finally says to Nanabush, in his nighthawk guise, “pee-na-sin” (104), which is translated in a footnote as “come and get me” (104). At this point, Marie-Adele accepts the inevitability of her death, and allows Nanabush to guide her to heaven, symbolically reconnecting with her ancestral traditions as well.
Nanabush is an ambiguous figure in the play, and by extension Highway portrays death as an amoral force. Nanabush escorts Marie-Adele to the afterlife but also bears witness to Zhaboonigan’s story of her assault and presents Marie-Adele’s moment of death as hitting the metaphorical jackpot of the bingo game. Marie-Adele’s death motivates the return of the other sisters to Wasaychigan, showing how Nanabush has not tricked the sisters into radical change but into maintaining the cyclical nature of life on the reserve.
Language and Identity
The sisters are mostly multilingual, especially the older sisters, and the moments when they switch between languages—from English to Cree or Ojibway—can be explored thematically. Highway connects the use of specific languages to specific identities and actions in the play. In addition to Cree being used to communicate with Nanabush, Ojibway is used in the traditional funeral music sung on stage. At Marie-Adele’s grave, the women sing “Wa-kwing, wa-kwing, / Wa-kwing nin wi-i-ja; / Wa-kwing, Wa-kwing, / Wa-kwing nin wi-i-ja” (105). This is translated in a footnote as “Heaven, heaven, heaven, I’m going there; Heaven, heaven, heaven, I’m going there” (105). The moments in the play dealing with death—both the foreshadowing Marie-Adele’s death and the mourning rituals that occur after she dies—utilize Indigenous language. As with Nanabush’s close alignment with death, Highway uses Indigenous languages to signify the spiritual importance of death and reveal the deep-seated connection the sisters retain to their Indigenous traditions and beliefs.
Indigenous languages are also used when characters admonish someone else, either in seriousness or jest. When Zhaboonigan is too forthright in asking about Marie-Adele’s cancer, Veronique admonishes her in Ojibway: “Shkanah, Zhaboonigan, sna-ma-bah” (30). A footnote translates this as “Shush, Zhaboonigan, don’t say that” (30). In a more playful manner, Pelajia and Philomena tell each other, “Oh, go on” in both English and in Ojibway: “Aw-ni-gi-naw-ee-dick” in the first scene (4, 5). The use of Indigenous languages is not only reserved for the deeply spiritual moments of life, but is also part of socialization, both in teaching social codes of behavior and in familial banter.
Finally, a language without words is used at various points in the play—the language of music, specifically drums. For instance, when the sisters petition the chief to fund their trip to Toronto, the “chief speaks: cacophonous percussion for about seven beats” (60). This replacement of drums for words spoken by a man ensures that all of the spoken words in the play come from women and a trickster spirit. The space of Highway’s play is a female space. Furthermore, this moment—and other uses of percussion in the play—emphasize the importance of drumming in Indigenous culture, both historically throughout what is now called North America, as well as on reservations in the 20th century. Even as the sisters experience alienation from their Indigenous traditions due to the effects of colonization and poverty, their connection to Indigenous languages helps them maintain their identities and connections to their community and history.
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By Tomson Highway
