Biography
COVER:
A
WORKING GIRL'S NIGHTMARE
The Murdered and Missing
Women of Skid Row
BIOGRAPHY:
Marko
Kane
Metis
born but raised by an adoptive working-class white father and three different
step-mothers...
Edith
Josie
HERE ARE THE NEWS
OLD CROW
Matthew
Coon Come
was elected the
new national chief of the Assembly of First Nations...
HUMOUR: Bee in the Bonnet
Elders
Know Which Way the Wind Blows
When they first
coined the phrase "Been there, done that!" there had already
been an old native there ...
Splapp
The legend of Splapp is an old
Indian story...
Smart Pills
Hopefully this is the generation that finally gets
it ... Never bring bows and arrows to a gun fight!
Sorry I'm Late ... I'm On Indian Time
Are you always
late for appointments? Have you ever been on time to pick someone up?
CULTURE:
Manitoba
Gang Members' Trial Moving at a Snail Pace
In legal parlance
it is known as the Queen v. Pangman et al...
POETRY:
Curses
Hay
Nursery
HISTORY:
Oka
Crisis
A decade later,
the 82-year-old woman hasn't forgotten the clamour of a hot, angry summer
afternoon...
POLITICS:
Phil
Fontaine
Three years ago,
when Phil Fontaine strode confidently in to the Assembly of First Nations'
national conference...
Matthew
Coon Responds to the Burnt Church Crisis
Exactly six years
ago, on September 6, 1995, Dudley George was shot and killed for defending
his land at Ipperwash Park in Ontario...
Margo
Kane: "I Have A Voice That Wants To Say Something"
Margo
Kane, Metis born but raised by an adoptive working-class white father
and three different step-mothers, was brought up with a white value system
and way of looking at the world. She was the only native child among seven.
Despite being an honour student, her cultural schizophrenia led to a suicidal
teenage depression. An abusive and overly strict step-mother traumatized
her badly. By the time she finished high school, Margo was totally alienated
from her family. She ran away from home.
By the time Margo was 20, she was living on skid row, on welfare; she
was dependent on drugs and alcohol; she was the mother of an illegitimate
child that she had to give up for adoption.
Yet this despairing young woman saved herself with an 11th-hour reserve
of spirit and an obstinate talent for dance she had refused to let die.
It was, she says, "the only thing I knew I could do."
And do it she did, literally dancing herself away from the demons of drugs
and drink into an internationally acclaimed career as a storyteller, singer,
animator, choreographer, video and installation artist, director, producer
, writer and dancer.
In Grade Seven before her father told her she was Indian, she had already
figured it out. When Indian students were bused into her school from a
residential school, she recalled: "We just stared at each other like cows
in the field. Just looking wide-eyed, wondering who was going to make
the first move."
"I had borne the brunt of enough prejudice as a young girl to really empathize
with other native students I met in high school," Kane said. "But it wasn't
until graduation from high school that I really had an inferiority complex."
"I fell apart. I was suicidal. There was a mechanism in me that wanted
to destroy myself."
Although Kane was never in government foster care, her early years were
pocked with great gaps in parenting.
"When I was a baby," she said, "I was adopted by my aunt and her husband,
a white man. We lived in Edmonton. About a year later, my aunt was killed
in a car accident and my step-father married a Metis woman. After a while,
he got married again, to a non-native. She had children and she died.
She was in my life for nine years. Then, my step-father married again,
to another woman with children. So, although I didn't grow up in foster
care, it felt like it. It has taken a long time to overcome my low self-esteem.
All my life I've feared that I wouldn't make it, that I wasn't worthy
enough to realize my dreams. I was always in the trauma mode... my step-father
was a laborer and a heavy machine operator. I know he loved me; he was
a good man, he just didn't know what to do."
With the help of some astute psychological counseling, Kane got off the
booze, got off the drugs, got off the skids. She enrolled in Edmonton's
Grant McEwan College for Performing Arts. Here she excelled in dance,
acting and singing. She won scholarships to the Banff School of Fine Arts
and Circle in the Square theatre school in New York City.
Yet her journey towards self-worth was an uphill struggle over a shale-slide
of self-doubt. Often she felt inadequate with only her Grade 12 diploma.
"It's been a continuing frustration to me that I've never taken creative
writing or English literature courses, because I'm always working with
people who have and they automatically assume I have, too," she said.
Kane qualifies this remark: "All the education in the world doesn't mean
you'll be able to speak from the heart and that you're really going to
be able to move people. Ultimately, to me, that's most important.
SEEKING SPIRIT
Dance. The core that Kane's life revives around is dance.
"I've had some very profound dancing experiences. When I asked myself
what in my life was really worth living for, the only answer I came up
with was this incredible feeling I experienced when I danced. I was bound
and determined to be happy, live well and figure out what I needed to
figure out. If there are problems, I need to deal with them. I'm tenacious,
I just don't give up."
Taking charge of her life has given Margo Kane focus and led her on a
spiritual path. "I realized there was something beyond my life that I
needed to understand and touch again, and my spiritual path came at the
forefront of who I was. When I trained as a dancer, an image came to mind
of what it was that I was seeking, to be a whole person, physically well
and intellectually developed. Emotionally, I needed to be well and spiritually
I wanted to be connected to that incredible power."
The woman who is the dancer has succeeded in making that connection. 48-year-old
Margo Kane is, indeed, a strikingly handsome woman. Yet, in performance,
she exudes a spiritual strength and beauty that far outshines the mundane
allure of merely structural good looks.
At certain points in performance, she will erupt with an uncanny, eerie
cry/moan/singing noise that is another-dimensioned touch point. The timbre
and resonance of her voice vibrate within the listener. One can sense
an almost tangible presence of spirit around her and coming through her.
And this sound brings to mind the Irish Banshee, the female faerie whose
wail is a harbringer of a death in the house. Or, as in the poem Kubla
Khan by Coleridge, of a sudden the stage becomes:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
ACTING AND TEACHING
Kane first came to national attention with George Ryga's play, The Ecstasy
of Rita Joe, in which she performed at the Citadel Theatre in her native
Edmonton in the late 70s and later, in 1982, on a national tour with Prairie
Theatre Exchange. She has also appeared in films and on television. For
much of the 1980s she was involved with community work with the National
Native Role Model Program - going to prisons, recovery centres and group
homes.
She has toured with a national youth caravan, bringing theatre to small
native communities across the country. When she mentions the children
in some of the northern Ontario reserves, her eyes fill with tears. "I
hated to leave them there. But you hoped, somehow, you know that when
they reached 18, maybe they'd think, they might remember our theatre caravan
and remember Margo and the others and maybe see some way out, instead
of becoming suicides."
Kane (Cree-Saulteaux) was the first Native artistic director of Spirit
Song Native Theatre School in the 1980s.
"After a while, I realized I was teaching performance, and I realized
I wasn't really practicing it as much as I'd like. This was what I was
trained for, but I wasn't doing it. I realized there weren't a whole lot
of roles for me out there - particularly since I was too old to be an
ingenue and too young to be an interesting old lady," she said.
"So I decided to create my own parts, and I used the experience I've had
as a cultural worker in my performances. There were things I needed to
share. I had to speak out and speak up. I found, as I went through a lot
of the healing I had to go through in my own life, that I have a voice
that wants to say something, and I have to honour that voice."
Much of Kane's work is autobiographical, and always about reconnecting
herself to her native past.
Since 1992, Kane has been artistic director of her own company, Full Circle:
First Nations Performance, which is an attempt to embody First Nations
traditions in a way of working together, creatively and artistically.
She strives to be a successful interdisciplinary artist. It has taken
her years of research and training, and it reflects her desire to be a
whole person and to express that to the world.
"I am integrating everything I know about becoming more available as a
human being, freeing yourself up to create. Its thrilling to work with
people who don't believe themselves to be creative."
The ensemble members are dancers, singers, actors, clowns, writers and
musicians. Kane employs a collaborative approach through workshops and
studio performances that become research and training projects for all
involved. Integral to Full Circle's mandate is networking and collaborating
with performing artists and arts organizations within Canada and internationally.
Margo Kane would like to see more collaboration between native and non-native
groups. "People are not aware of Canada's complex history. I want to honour
that history. We have many cultural streams running through our blood,
we owe it to ourselves to tell stories. As artists, we have the opportunity
to create inspiring works that celebrate diversity. Collaborations have
always happened when people come together. It's time to celebrate that."