Buz'Gem Blues

The Buz'Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor's ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his "Blues Quartet. "AKAKMarianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn't believe she has anything to offer anyone. Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on "the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary First Nations people as perceived by Western Society, "delivered by none other than a "Professor Savage. "Just to keep the caricatures in balance, Savage's nemesis throughout the action is a young Native man, replete with dark sunglasses and a Mountie coat, "The Warrior Who Never Sleeps. "AKAKAs absurdly claustrophobic as Gilligan's Island (the Professor and Marianne become an item), Taylor is pulling some of our most revered iconsóEuropean anthropologists, their Native Elder informants and their militant young warrior criticsóoff their pedestals, looking for a place to ground them in a world where the most politically correct ethnic representation is a young woman, 1/64th Native, coming up with recipes for choke-cherry parfait.AKAKThe Buz'Gem Blues is not a play about clichÈs with which we have become so familiar we recognize them as stereotypes instantly, but rather about how our ritualized and institutionalized systems of maintaining and policing those clichÈs prevents us from recognizing our common humanity within each other.AKAK AKAKLike the best black writers of the late 1950s...Taylor's plays are about ordinary people living ordinary lives. He skewers liberal and native stereotypes, preferring to deal on a more human level. "AKAKóHamilton ExaminerAKAKAlso available from Talonbooks:AKAKOnly Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (1998)AKFearless Warriors (1998)AKThe Baby Blues (1999)AKalterNatives (2000)AKThe Boy in the Treehouse / Girl Who Loved Her Horses (2000)AKAKAK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------AKAKISBN 0-88922-462-5 ; $16.95 Canada / $12.95 U.S.A.AK©2002; 128pp; 1st printingAKAKAK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------AKAKTo order TalonbooksTaylor, Drew Hayden is the author of 'Buz'Gem Blues' with ISBN 9780889224629 and ISBN 0889224625.