Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Marie Clements' two plays, "Burning Vision" and "The Unnatural and Accidental Women", both feature primarily Aboriginal characters, and foreground Aboriginal issues. The paper examines how the two plays approach these subject matters in very different ways and how Clements situates Aboriginals as people who have been oppressed by colonizers from over the seas. The paper also looks at how Clements depicts urban Aboriginals as living in poor socio-economic conditions, vulnerable to white psychopaths, and how she seems to imply that Aboriginal people belong where they were before the colonizers came - if not physically, then at least psychically.

From the Paper:

"Burning Vision is set in many different locations, as it is about colonialism and the atomic bomb. However, with regard to Aboriginals, it features the Dene people who mined pitchblende near Great Bear Lake in the North West Territory in the 1930s. The Unnatural and Accidental Women focuses on an entirely different group of Aboriginals, i.e. poor women living in Vancouver's Eastside in the 1980s. The two plays thus feature geographically and chronologically different people. However, certain commonalities can be detected, primarily related to the fact that both groups are the victims of colonization in one way or another."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Clements, Marie. Burning Vision. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003.
• Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
• Ponting, J. Rick. "Urban Aboriginal People." In Hiller, Harry H. Urban Canada: Sociological Perspectives. Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2005: 138-167.

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