Laura J. Murray
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 91-111

This essay investigates the problematic (post)colonial collaboration between Native Canadian writer Maria Campbell, white actress and playwright Linda Griffiths, and theater director Paul Thompson, as they strove to produce Campbell’s play, Jessica, in the 1980s. This article breaks important new ground in demonstrating Thompson’s central role in this collaboration and in analyzing the play from within the context of Campbell’s relationships to Griffiths and Thompson. Though Campbell’s autobiographical Halfbreed (1973) is generally perceived as heralding the beginning of Native Canadian literature, this article offers one of the first interpretations of Jessica. This essay argues that, from the start, Griffiths, Campbell, and Thompson understood their exchanges of experience in contradictory ways: in terms of the feminine gift economy parallel to the capitalist economy, in terms of a traditional native gift economy, and in terms of a trade economy. When these contradictions rose to the surface and when the more utopian and ongoing models of exchange, giving, and trading came into crisis with the contract, it was hardly surprising that talk would turn to stealing, for stealing has been the ground metaphor for relations between Native or Metis people and white people since the first treaties were made and broken.