Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He was “arguably the greatest soldier this country has ever produced,” as playwright Neil Grahn puts it. “And nobody knows his name….”

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Grahn’s new play The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, premiering Thursday to open the Shadow Theatre season, chronicles the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most decorated heroes in the horrific war that was supposed to end all wars. And when the star sniper and scout, an Ojibwa from Wasauksing First Nation near Lake Huron, returned home from fighting for his country in World War I, it was to a world where he didn’t even have a vote.

So, for the warrior/ Chief/ activist, the “second battle,” this time in the Canadian trenches, began, a battle that in so many ways has never been won in a war that has never ended.

It was when Grahn was researching the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division for his World War I play The Comedy Company, which premiered at Shadow in 2018, that he kept coming across a name he’d never heard. Francis Pegahmagabow’s achievements were startlingly impressive. He’d signed up early, and he stayed on for the duration, fighting through injuries. And to his Military Medal in 1916 was added two bars for bravery and excellence as a scout and sniper in some of the bloodiest, most dangerous, battles of the most destructive war in human history: Ypres, Passchendaele, Amiens, the second Battle of Arras among them.

“Who is this guy?” Grahn wondered. “Why do I not know who this guy is? I felt embarrassed, just by myself, not knowing….”

An indefatigably curious researcher, Grahn, a Métis writer/director/sometime actor who works in theatre, film, TV, and improv comedy, set about finding out. And in the process he uncovered an amazing, and expansive, story. “So many of the early political movements for First Nations were inspired by returning Indigenous veterans…. They went over to World War I and they were peers, one of the soldiers,” in short equals. “But when they came back they were … Indians.”

“The army was quite a good place for being treated for who you were not what you were,” says Grahn. Indigenous soldiers “had been given autonomy and respect, and so when they came back and it was taken away, that inspired them to take action. Many veterans were the leaders” in the Indigenous activist movements that followed.

Ben Kuchera and Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The injustice of Pegahmagabow’s situation was striking, to say the least. “He comes back a war hero and can’t even vote,” as Grahn says. He’s the Chief of his band, and his loan application — “he’d wanted to get some horses to improve his land and raise his station” — is turned down at least three times. “The Indian Agent felt he “‘wasn’t responsible enough’.” And an activist was born.

Grahn recounted the story to his friend Shadow artistic director John Hudson, with the annotation “this has got to be a movie!”. Hudson pushed him to make a play of it, “and I’m really glad he did,” Grahn says. The stylization built into theatre means that “cast of hundreds if not thousands” is conjured by the five actors of the Shadow cast led by Garrett Smith as Francis. “It’s very egalitarian,” says Grahn of the show we’ll see; “everybody plays everybody, women are soldiers; everybody is pitching in.” The only actor with a single role is Smith; he is, to say the least, busy. “It’s Francis’s story and he’s telling it…. I don’t think Garrett leaves the stage; he’s in everything! An exhausting adventure!”

“I am absolutely delighted with Garrett!” declares Grahn happily of the actor, a member of the Piikani and Kainai Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy of southern Alberta “He’s the deal! He has a real physicality to him, and a way about him. I sit beside him, and I think ‘I wouldn’t want to fight this guy’…. He reminds me — similar energy and body type — of my buddy Shaun Johnston,” the actor who was a Shadow co-founder with Hudson.

The production is co-directed by Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick. It crossed Grahn’s mind to direct it himself, but he’s right in the midst of creating and directing season 2 of the APTN documentary series Horse Warriors (season 1 is airing right now). As Grahn describes, “it follows the ‘Indigenous relay circuit: Crazy! So dangerous! They race horses in relay fashion; they get on a horse — a highly strung super-fast thoroughbred — and do one lap, jump off and jump on other horse, and do another lap, and then again. And they do it bareback. This is insane!” he says appreciatively. “If it’s happening live anywhere near, go see it! It’ll blow your doors off.”

“It’s kinda like stock car racing if the car could just randomly turn and run you over.” The circuit follows the old plains tribes, Grahn explains. “Where the buffalo roam. Used to room,” he amends. “We’re about as far north  as they go.…”

A documentarian he is, but comedy, improv and sketch, are part of Grahn’s showbiz DNA too. In the late ‘80s he became the fourth member of the storied sketch troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, famously nutty in a highly literate sort of way, and pioneers in fashioning full-length plays from sketches. For seven years he was the head writer for The Irrelevant Show, CBC Radio’s hit sketch show. And he’s created and written seven TV series.

Steven Greenfield, Sheldon Elter, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Jesse Gervais in The Comedy Company. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

“I don’t think I’m capable of doing anything without finding some joy or laughter,” he figures. The true story, unlikely and unknown, that Grahn culled from the mists of Canadian history, the inspiration for The Comedy Company, is a test case. In the darkest days of the First World War, members of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division were summoned by their commander to devise light musical comedy shows to divert and amuse their fellow soldiers — laughter in the face of death.

Grahn says his Indigenous connections have continued to inspire him. “The First Nations comedy sensibility is really dry,” he’s found, to his perpetual amusement. “As soon as I come in and they start to make fun of me, I know I’m in, I’m good. If they’re really polite I’m like ‘O No! What did I do wrong? I’ve pissed someone off’.” This continues to amuse him.

Francis Pegahmagabow, the Indigenous soldier whose life inspired the Neil Grahn play that launches the Shadow Theatre season. Photo supplied.

In the case of The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, “so much of my documentary background has really helped me with the script,” he says. “I’m a Métis guy writing an Ojibwa story,” so he consulted Ojibwa elders to see what they thought of that. “They all said ‘the story should be told, tell the story’.”

Theatre and TV have meant that time has proven in short supply in Grahn’s life. “I’d love to get back to weekly improv,” he says. “It’s so refreshing! When you’re improvising, if you’re doing it right, you’re nowhere else but there…. That, and pickleball (laughter). That’s where I’m at.”

And the research for the play was “brutal,” as he puts it cheerfully. Diving into the National Archives and newspaper sites was tricky, mainly because “not a lot of early First Nations political movements were covered much. You really have to dig.” He’s discovered that in 1927 the government effectively put a stop to First Nations activism by making it illegal for Indigenous people to hire and pay a lawyer.  “Whaaaat!?”

What was he like, Francis Pegahmagabow the man? “He could be fiery,” says Grahn. “And his beliefs were mixed. He was very very Catholic, and also very attached to the Great Spirit and traditional teachings as well…. There was a lot of magical thinking to him.”

PREVIEW

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick

Starring: Garrett Smith, Trevor Duplessis, Ben Kuchera, Julie Golosky, Monica Gate

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 24

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org