Sisters (Paperback)
Sisters is a tough, uncompromising look at a convent-run Native residential school. While the play chronicles in graphic detail the by now well documented agenda of cultural genocide which motivated the establishment of Native residential schools in Canada, the daring triumph of this play is that it reveals the far less well documented cultural infrastructure and values of the society which created those schools--the church and the state of white, colonial, paternalist Canada.
Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Wendy Lill has not only written extensively for radio, magazines, film, television and the stage, but has also been active in national politics. In 1979, while with CBC Radio in Winnipeg, Lill wrote her first play, On the Line, to dramatize the plight of striking Winnipeg garment industry workers. Since then, her plays have gone on to examine the Canadian women's suffrage movement (Fighting Days); aboriginal-white relations (Occupation of Heather Rose and Sisters); pedophilia and mass hysteria (All Fall Down); the slashing of programs (Corker); and the dangerous lives of coal miners in her adopted province of Nova Scotia (The Glace Bay Miners' Museum).