Though they share personnel (the orchestra for the Pacific Opera Victoria in British Columbia is also the Victoria Symphony), it’s rare that they work together to bring a piece of music to the stage as a team, but that’s what happened last Friday (29 May 2025) at the McPherson Playhouse, and it was worth the wait. This joint performance, or maybe I mean their joint production skills, brought the Gryphon Trio to the stage in a multimedia piece that explored the tensions and the similarities between the history of the resident schools in Canada and the history of Western music, especially in Germany, and what happened in the Holocaust. These residential schools were founded by white people and intended to strip indigenous children of their cultures, their long hair, their dress and their language.
It's been a sad history to say the least, because it didn’t just aim at the culture of these children—too many of them died and too many were sexually assaulted, a stain that still lingers in both Canada and in the US. In my country, whites presented the story as if it were a Canadian problem only, and only recently has the fact that the US is also guilty of this same exact solution to what seemed an insolvable problem become a matter of discussion on our side of the border: that the indigenous folks originally resident in both countries refused to give up their culture, to resist assimilation, against the efforts of the colonisers in both countries to take over.
ECHO: Memories of the World, a joint production of the Gryphon Trio in partnership with the Chamber Factory, addresses these issues by bringing together in one space voice, both spoken and sung, video, and the Western musical tradition with indigenous music and poetry with live performances by the Gryphon Trio, Marion Newman Nege’ga, mezzo soprano (Kwagiulth and Stó:lō First Nations) and Cheri Maracle, actor (Mohawk of the Six Nations of the Grand River) and recorded interviews with numerous indigenous artists and recordings of the Omaa Biinding Choir.
The evening began with a drum and chant taught to the audience. As part of the evening’s goal, though we were very different people brought together, that chanting made us feel, at least for that moment, one. I don’t know (and can’t know) what exactly ECHO meant to indigenous folks on stage, on screen and in the audience, but there seemed to be a recognition that this was their history, that, like the Jewish Holocaust, it was necessary and will remain necessary to “never forget”. For this white person at least, I know I was an outsider, at least in terms of my colour—this was not my story, though I was glad to hear it and to learn it, so that maybe I can help it never happen again.
As a queer person, though, that story of cultural oppression was my story as well, a fact the evening made clear by making clear how the high musical art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries connected with the Nazi attempt for their final solution of the Jews and of homosexuals and of other so-called “degenerates” as well. After all, Jewish music and musicians were banned as well. Nazi genocide was carried out by people who loved Wagner as a German storyteller, as, really, a method of propaganda. To be part of such a nationalistic movement as the Nazi party, especially in the case of Richard Wagner who became more and more antisemitic as he aged, was to find an aesthetic counterpart and encouragement to the evil taking place in the concentration camps.
By reading the one history of the residential schools versus the history of that musical world we know so well, we were forced to complete the equation: if the Western music of that time is implicated in realities of the labour camps, then are those who love Western music today perhaps also implicated in what happened just a generation ago in the schools where long hair was cut, knowing it was damaging to those students? The answer is not a simple one, not really that kind of equation after all, but it did make me ask how or if I am myself implicated in today’s antisemitism, and how does my being queer complicate that? How do all of our different lives complicate these issues?
The similarities between queer lives and indigenous lives was made explicit by one of the images shown: as Queer Art History has noted, Cree artist Kent Monkman’s mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People, a reworking of Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. That scene of George Washington crossing the river, an iconic American image, is transformed into Monkman’s persona, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a gender-fluid two-spirit character in pumps. I wish the makers of ECHO had made the connection between gay gender identity and the figure of the two-spirit person more explicit yet. Monkman’s painting was displayed for a long time on screen, but with so much happening on stage and screen, it was hard to draw the obvious connection, though gay culture in the US at least has tied the idea of the “two-spirit” to our (white) issues of transgender culture.
For the most part, all this mixing and even some re-mixing works, though some images were repeated too many times. But to hear the songs of these people as they hear them, to hear a poet’s own voice, is to be brought, for the moment, into their culture. This helped bring both whites and indigenous people together.
ECHO is a brave work, and I was glad I was able to see it, thanks to the hard work of a large number of folks. It was worth seeing and became a way to think through the issues raised by white oppression of indigenous folk and by straight folk of queer folks like me, without erasing the pain of what happened to the indigenous and, sadly, continues to happen today.