Kamloopa is a three-woman play opening this Friday at 7:30 pm in Persephone’s Backstage, and running until October 28th. Actor and playwright Yolanda Bonnell, based out of Toronto but originally from Fort William First Nation, graduated from Humber Theatre in 2016, says the play ran in Kamloops and Vancouver first.

“The show is an Indigenous matriarch show, following two sisters and a friend...on a road trip to Kamloopa, one of the biggest pow-wows,” says Bonnell, describing it as a search for identity, cultural self, sisterhood, and a celebration of “Indigenous matriarch love, and happiness, and joy.” Bonnell notes one of the things that playwright Kim Harvey says a lot is that Indigenous women are often either portrayed as either dying or crying, and she wanted to focus on laughter, love, fun. “It’s really kind of refreshing to be able to do that in this piece.”

Harvey says the play is about Indigenous women trying to figure out what it is to be Indigenous right now, today, in this era: with a starting point of going to a pow-wow to become a “real” Indian.

“Of course they find out along the way that’s not the journey they need to be going on — but it does put them in some pretty harrowing and funny and challenging circumstances. And this play really comes from a place of wanting to represent the people that I know in my life: the strong Indigenous women that I know who wake up every day and figure out the difficulties of what we are,” said Harvey, adding she wanted to write a play that showed the full scope and complexity of what it means to be an Indigenous woman today. “That we can make jokes, fight for what we believe in, we know politics, we can embody what it means to have our values as Indigenous peoples — but then also to have a lot of fun, and make a lot of jokes, and make each other laugh.”

Actor and playwright Yolanda Bonnell wants women to leave the play feeling powerful.

Harvey wanted to focus on the positive relationship Indigenous women have for and with each other — through love, sisterhood, kinship, and how strong those bonds are.

“Matriarchal love, to support each other, is something that I just really wanted to see on stage. And people keep saying that they leave feeling joyous, they leave feeling happy, they leave feeling powerful — and that’s what I wanted, I want women to leave feeling really powerful.”