Staging the North-South meridian: spatial and ontological explorations of the Northern experience in two Canadian dramas

Wendy Lill's 1986 monodrama The Occupation of Heather Rose employs the image of nurse and nursing, generally rich in positive associations, to make an unquestionably political statement about "whites in the wrong places," and about the imposition of the mainstream society's health care rhetoric upon the culturally distant and gravely maltreated northern communities in Canada. The play reveals not only the failure of the federal scheme as inappropriate and culturally insensitive, but also exposes its operation as one of the means of maintaining and structuring the persistent colonial legacy of which the character of the play, as well as the mainstream society, is both witness and victim. Minnie Aodla Freeman's earlier, 1971 play Survival in the South offers a directionally opposed perspective on the Northern experience: the first drama ever written by an Inuk is an authentic attempt to come to aesthetic, as well as emotional terms with the experience of the author's journey of (self)discovery of the Canadian south, and to contribute to establishing an independent contemporary Inuit literary culture which would help defend the ethnic and cultural standing of the Northern people. The article analyzes and compares the two women authors' dramatic journeys to/from the North in the larger context of the discourse of the North in Canada, with the aim to represent the Canadian North as experienced by the country's people on both sides of the geographical and cultural, perhaps self-constructed divide.