By Nea Maaty

(Nea is a journalist with the Focus Media Arts Centre)

Regent Park is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek and the Huron-Wendat.  According to Canada's 2016 Census Metropolitan Area statistics, the Indigenous population in Toronto is 46,315. Many of these habitants reside in the down town, low-income neighbourhoods of Regent Park, Moss Park and St. James Town. However, far too often Indigenous residents are invisible and only reflected in issues related to homelessness.  

In an effort to change this – we present the art of Yolanda Bonnell.

Yolanda Bonnell (pronoun they/them/theirs) is an Indigenous artist based in Toronto who expresses her identity, ideology, and issues faced by their community in their art. “ I introduce myself in my language because someone once told me that it makes our ancestors happy to hear our language. So, I try to speak as much as possible and that's why I always introduce myself in Anishinaabe Moines, which is my language”, said Yolanda Bonnell.

They are originally from Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay and started their career as a poet and storyteller. Their first writings were an escape from reality and from the problems they had in real life, but over time their poet became a way of facing issues. Now their arts practice is based in Tkarónto . Toronto originates from the Mohawk word “Tkaronto,” meaning "the place in the water where the trees are standing”. 

It is while in Tkaronto, in 2016, that Yolanda Bonnell met Michif (Métis) artist Cole Alvis and began the Manidoons Collective, a circle of artists creating Indigenous performance.

Yolanda Bonnell's work with the collective is focused on Indigenous women, youth, and two-Spirits. “It was a platform to showcase their voices. I grew up not seeing myself represented in the media anywhere on stages”, said Bonnell.

In February 2020, their four-time Dora nominated solo, Show Bug was remounted in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille. They were also a part of Factory Theatre’s The Foundry, a creation program for new career writers, where their play, Scanner, continues to be developed towards production.

They believe passionately in the power of their community. Their writing and performance art addresses the effects of colonization and the stereotypes people don't realize when they look at indigenous people.  “They see a stereotype. They see the thing that's been fed to them. This idea that racism doesn't exist in Canada is a narrative that gets fed over and over again and as indigenous people, we know that that's not true.”

They believe that the intergenerational trauma will not end if people don’t address it properly. Addiction, loss of identity, poverty, all these problems will end when people come together and stop stereotyping and start having a normal life.

“Those are the things that I really felt connected to are drawn to because a lot of those were my own experiences growing up with people around me.”

“ I watched myself get addicted to things, I watched other people get addicted to things and the question always being like where does it come from? Why are these things happening? And I don't think that contemporary Canada is asking that. I think that often folks are just seeing what they want to see and not asking why? For me that was one of the reasons why I began writing that piece. Was to show the connections between intergenerational trauma colonisation and the effects on the outside.”

Many of Bonnell's art focuses on Indigenous women.

“ Indigenous women get missed and murdered, two-Spirits, and girls. It is such a huge issue and as an Indigenous woman if I feel like it's part of my responsibility to write stories about not only what we experience in our lives, but how we heal and how we find joy and how we exist in our daily lives and are complicated relationships and just our existence and our wrists and and our existence through our resistance through existence, which I think is  really important.”

Yolanda Bonnell doesn’t like the narratives that always portrays indigenous life as a tragedy and believes that indigenous lives also have resilience, resistance, and strength. They also have a history of defeating these tragedies with joy, with prayers, and with connecting to their ancestors.

Fog was Bonnell's first solo show that they began in theatre school. It's about a young girl who gets taken away from her mother at a young age and put into the foster care system, which is really today's residential schools. And so, she gets cycled through the in-care system and we see her struggle with her addictions and then we see her mother also struggling with her substance abuse and then through her daughter we see the generations before them struggling with trauma.  
 
Yolanda Bonnnell is now working on their new piece” The 8th fire''. It is an epic prayer on togetherness and how to achieve sovereignty, black liberation, communities rising and keeping people safe.

“We need to rethink how those systems could be in the future. That's the piece that I'm writing. I'm trying to imagine hope for the future and hoping that it's more Queer, more non-binary, more trans, more free, and more open. The land will breathe again.”

That’s the 8th fire of Yolanda Bonnell is a hope for a bright future for Indigenous people and everybody.