Fonds XZ1 MS A889 - Tomson Highway Script Collection

Canadian author, musician and playwright Tomson Highway is one of the foremost aboriginal voices in Canada. Highway was born in 1951 in northern Manitoba, the eleventh of twelve children of which only five survived. In a childhood marked by long days working on his father’s trapline and sexual abuse at a residential school, Highway developed into a gifted pianist. He earned a degree in music from the University of Western Ontario in 1975, and a B.A. in 1976. Highway turned to writing at the age of thirty. His first two plays, The Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) won the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the latter won the Chalmers Award. From 1986 to 1992, Highway was artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, the oldest aboriginal professional theatre company in Canada. There he worked closely with his brother René, a dancer and choreographer who died of AIDS in 1990. Highway holds three honourary degrees and was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1994. He has continued to produce plays, including a musical, Rose (2000); a best-selling novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998); and a trilogy of bilingual children’s books, Caribou Song (2001), Dragonfly Kites (2002) and Fox on the Ice (2003), all published in Cree and English.