For Dr. Shirley Cheechoo, overcoming the residential school legacy is the job of warriors
In a Q interview, the Canadian Cree actor and filmmaker discusses the healing she’s found through art
At age six, Dr. Shirley Cheechoo was taken from her parents and placed in a residential school where she experienced horrific abuse.
At 18, she remembers sitting alone on a bench in a Toronto park not knowing what to do or where to go. A man walked up to her and introduced himself as Tom Peltier, the founder of the Manitou Arts Foundation, which ran a summer art program for Indigenous youth.
"[The Manitou Arts Foundation] is where I gained all my invaluable support and resources that I needed to come out of the place where I was — I was in a very dark place," Dr. Cheechoo tells Q's Tom Power. "I was able to showcase my work there, I collaborated with everybody and we learned from each other, and [Tom] made everything possible for us."
Today, Dr. Cheechoo is one of Canada's most prominent voices in Indigenous film and theatre. She's known for her roles on the CBC-TV series Spirit Bay and The Rez, as well as her debut feature film, Bearwalker, which screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival.
But it was her widely acclaimed 1993 one-woman show Path with No Moccasins that saved her life and really made her reflect on the power of art as medicine. The play was an autobiographical work based on her life in residential school and the racism she suffered.
"I thought, 'I have to find a way to heal myself,'" Dr. Cheechoo says. "And the only way that I could heal myself was to tell my story."
But healing isn't a linear process and Dr. Cheechoo quickly realized that the trauma of surviving residential school is something she'll have to continue fighting for the rest of her life.
"Every time I did the play, I thought, 'I'm healing, I'm healing! I will never have to deal with this again,'" she says. "And that wasn't the case…. It never leaves you."
What people don't understand is that we fight this every day of our lives … and if you are able to fight it through all this time, you are a warrior.- Dr. Shirley Cheechoo
The Cree actor and filmmaker says she doesn't know where she'd be now without having done the play or having met Peltier, whom she feels an immense amount of gratitude toward.
"I was very self-destructive," she recalls. "I sabotaged everything that came to me because I didn't feel worth it. I was also on drugs and alcohol at that time, and I know that that's the path I probably would have taken without meeting Tom Peltier and without doing Path with No Moccasins."
Early on, Dr. Cheechoo decided she wanted to be like Peltier and find a way to give back to her community the way he did with the Manitou Arts Foundation.
Next month, her Weengushk Film Institute is holding its annual international film festival on Ontario's Manitoulin Island (July 12-14), along with a special event called Blanket of Stars: A Tribute to Resilience (July 11 and 12), dedicated to Canada's residential school survivors — or as Dr. Cheechoo calls them, residential school warriors.
"I always found that when we are called survivors, people belittle us," she says. "What people don't understand is that we fight this every day of our lives…. Every day, something triggers us and every day we have to fight that. And if you are able to fight it through all this time, you are a warrior."
The event includes performances by young Indigenous singers and dancers, workshops, keynote speakers and more.
"As a residential school warrior myself, I've seen so many conferences and reunions and things like that, and a lot of us never get invited to them," Dr. Cheechoo says. "So this year I thought, why not bring all these warriors … to Manitoulin Island where I would wrap them in star blankets and then have them walk across from the mainland to the island, representing the symbol of coming home."
The full interview with Dr. Shirley Cheechoo is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Dr. Shirley Cheechoo produced by Ben Edwards.
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