It’s possible you’ve heard Rosanna Deerchild’s voice on your commute to work.
Rosanna Deerchild.TEAGHAN HAWKE/Courtesy of CBC
The Cree poet, writer and radio personality is the host of CBC’s Unreserved, which since 2014 has amplified and celebrated the work of Indigenous people across Canada. Originally from O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation at South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba, Deerchild has spent her career on Canada’s airwaves, with appearances on APTN and Global as well as hosting stints at other CBC programs.
A decade ago, Deerchild urged her mother, a residential-school survivor named Edna, to share her story. Over tea, the women bonded, in an experience that Deerchild soon turned into Calling Down the Sky, a poetry collection.
After joining a playwriting group at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, Deerchild took the leap to theatre, revisiting the encounter with her mother to create The Secret to Good Tea, a full-length, two-act play about a broadcaster named Gwynn and her mother, Maggie, a residential-school survivor.
Marsha Knight and Michelle Bardach in The Secret to Good Tea.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
The Secret to Good Tea premiered in Winnipeg in 2023, and is playing again now with runs in London, Ont., and Ottawa, in a co-production between the Grand Theatre and the National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre.
The Globe and Mail spoke with Deerchild about her experience developing an Indigenous radio space, how her journalism and creative writing intersect and the real secret to good tea, before her play opened in London on Feb. 21.
You’ve been hosting Unreserved for nearly a decade. What was the initial pitch for the show, and what’s been the most surprising way it’s evolved in its 10 years on the air?
Unreserved started out as a regional show in Manitoba and the Prairies – it was a place to put the Indigenous interview stories into one hour. Then it developed into a true Indigenous radio space. It’s a fearless place for Indigenous stories and voices – I now have a rapport with the community. I can bring guests on the radio and say, “Hey, look how amazing we are. Look how strong we are. Look at how we are able to survive and continue to survive and thrive as a people here in Canada, despite the assimilation policies and the continuing eroding of our rights.”
How does your approach as a storyteller change between forms? Is writing for radio vastly different for you from writing for stage?
Every genre is different. Writing for radio is journalism, it’s broadcasting – you’re speaking to an audience as well as your guest. Playwriting is, of course, fiction. I get to say whatever I want. It’s quite different, and poetry is different again – poetry is very distilled, it’s a feeling, or a memory, or a picture, where every word has to matter. That’s sort of true in playwriting as well: Every piece of dialogue has to have at least five different meanings. Every time you cry has to be balanced with laughter.
You just made some pretty striking observations about theatre and dialogue. Were those beliefs you had about theatre before writing your first play, or did those realizations come about during the writing process?
I mean, when you work in broadcasting or journalism, you get really good at picking clips, right? Those gold moments to put in your article, or to put on the radio. That instinct was honed through my broadcasting and journalism – the beauty of the playwriting came through my poetry. Poetry is my ceremony. The ability to hear the ancestors and see beauty in the world has come to me through my poetry, and that all came together in The Secret to Good Tea.
Ian Ross, our teacher in the Pimootayowin Creators Circle in Winnipeg, really guided us as we were writing. He was gentle and wise – I jokingly called him Ojibwe-wan Kenobi because he’s like a Jedi master. He validated a lot of my instincts.
Is The Secret to Good Tea rooted in your poetry practice, or perhaps an adaptation of Calling Down the Sky?
No, The Secret to Good Tea is much more personal. I still had things I wanted to say to my mother, things I wanted to hear from her, things I wanted to say to my father, things I wanted to express about my own experience as a multigenerational residential-school survivor. I had questions I wanted to ask the community at large.
Maggie asks at the end of the play: “Now that I’ve told you my story, what are you going to do with it?” And I sort of wanted to ask that as well.
What, then, is the secret to good tea?
Rosanna and her mom, Edna Ferguson.Supplied
Truth. The play follows these people, this woman and this daughter, as they go from keeping secrets to telling the truth, and moving from that truth into a different relationship.
More literally, I like herb tea. But Mumsy likes her tea steeped in a pot, with three tea bags and a lot of cream and some Splenda.
This interview has been edited and condensed.