New Blood story still brings healing

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

New Blood, a theatrical dance show created by Deanne Bertsch and the dance, glee and Blackfoot classes at Strathmore High School in 2014, tells the story of Indian residential schools and is being performed at two reconciliation events this month.
On Sept. 23, it was performed at Moving Together as People in Stand Off, Alberta. It’ll be performed again on Sept. 28, in Calgary’s Central Public Library, for Bow Valley College’s Indian Residential School Awareness Day.
“Both events celebrate the healing that has taken place as a result of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has done,” Bertsch said, “and the healing that they hope will continue to take place.”
This year’s New Blood cast, dancing to Peter Gabriel’s music by the same title, ranges from 10 to 60 years in age, Bertsch said. It includes SHS students and graduates, Siksika elders and children, and students and graduates of Rosebud School of the Arts (RSA).
Eulalia Running Rabbit, who narrates the play and plays the mother, attended residential school as a child, but she was a day student, riding the bus home every day. She suffered abuse at school, but more than that, she remembers the stories of abuse she heard from her classmates and friends, who often said they wished they could go home at the end of the day like she did.
“There’s times when they would run up to the windows and stare out into nothing,” she said. “They would look at me and they would say, ‘I was just thinking I wish that I saw my parents coming.'”
Or they’d ask her, ‘What are you doing after school when you get home?’
Running Rabbit didn’t want to tell them.
“I didn’t want them feeling bad that I get to do things and they don’t. They’re not as free as I was,” she said. “You could tell that they were very, very lonely.
“Some were really abused, that (residential schools) ruined their lives. It ruined their future. It took our identity away, our self-esteem.”
So when we see aboriginal people homeless and on the streets, or struggling socially in other ways, she wants us to remember that many of them were the people who had no future after residential schools.
But now, performances of New Blood are bringing hope.
“It’s such a healing play. It heals a lot of people that see it,” Running Rabbit said, because most survivors of the schools see something in it that they relate to.
And survivors aren’t the only people it touches. After one performance, a young woman came to Running Rabbit in tears saying, ‘I cannot believe that this is what my grandparents went through’.
Running Rabbit added, “That’s how powerful the play is.”
Non-aboriginal audience members have also come to her afterward, saying they didn’t know this had happened in residential schools.
New Blood’s impact continues to grow.
“It’s still in demand, right today,” Running Rabbit said. “And what it’s doing is, it’s healing. It’s a healing play … It has healed many, and many more to come.”
Bertsch will teach New Blood to RSA dance students in 2016, and hopes to remount New Blood with her SHS dance class this year and to invite school groups to see it. Look at newbloodthedanceshow.com or New Blood on Facebook, to follow the performances.