Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Drama Canadian

Someday

A Native American Drama

by (author) Drew Hayden Taylor

Publisher
Fifth House Books
Initial publish date
Mar 1993
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781927083345
    Publish Date
    Nov 2015
    List Price
    $12.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781895618105
    Publish Date
    Mar 1993
    List Price
    $12.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781927083765
    Publish Date
    Nov 2014
    List Price
    $12.99

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels

  • Age: 15
  • Grade: 10

Description

Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor's distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families.

Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne's yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever.

p align=left">When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled.

The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. Somedayis an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.

About the author

Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor is from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, he writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national NEWSpapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. His 1998 play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth has been anthologized in Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, published by the Theatre Communications Group. Although based in Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and to attend arts festivals, workshops and productions of his plays. He was also invited to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in California, where he taught a series of seminars on the depiction of Native characters in fiction, drama and film. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.

Drew Hayden Taylor's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"One of the 50 Essential Canadian Plays"
Toronto Star

Librarian Reviews

Someday

This tragic story, written as a play, tells how one family was shattered by the 1960s “scoop up” of Aboriginal children from the reserves by the Children’s Aid Society. Ann, a middle-aged woman living on a reserve, has just won the lottery. She decides to hire a private detective to find her long lost daughter. Coincidentally, her daughter had just begun to search for her, and when she sees Anne’s name announced in the newspaper, she pays a visit to the reserve. Grace/Janice represents all the goals and aspirations of white society, while the younger daughter, Barb, lives, loves and works within her Aboriginal community and its values. Tensions run high and emotions are intense in this drama, but are offset with humour in the character of Barb’s boyfriend, Rodney.

Taylor is the multi award-winning playwright and Ojibway from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario.

Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. Canadian Aboriginal Books for Schools. 2008-2009.

Other titles by