By Trevor Greenway
Nathalie Coutou wants to share her story – and STO Union is helping her tell it.
The owner of Khewa, an Indigenous boutique in Wakefield, says she has faced questions about her ancestry and her connection to Indigenous, Inuit and Métis culture. She wants to tell the story of how devastating it is when someone questions your heritage and scrutinizes your right to share stories from your past.
Coutou is collaborating with STO Union, a world-renowned and award-winning, Wakefield-based, theatre company to explore what it means to belong.
The three-event series will feature Algonquin Traditional Elder Annie Smith St-George, Hereditary Chief on the Mi’Kmaq Grand Council Elder Stephen Augustine and Wakefield resident Elizabeth Logue, along with STO Union Artistic Director Nadia Ross and Coutou.
“I started to question my place of belonging, and that’s when fear kicked in,” said Coutou, who has owned and operated her Khewa Indigenous Art Boutique for 23 years in Wakefield.
When she first opened her boutique in 2001, she said nobody would come inside because of the stigma of the Oka Crisis – a 78-day standoff between Mohawk protesters and Quebec’s provincial law enforcement over a proposed golf course expansion on disputed land that encompassed a Mohawk burial ground.
The stigma of that standoff, in which Sûreté du Québec Corporal Marcel Lemay was killed, was still present and people began to question where Coutou was from and why she had set up an Indigenous boutique on unceded Algonquin territory, according to Coutou.
“Then it was like, ‘How Indigenous are you?’” said Coutou about customers who came in and asked where she was from. She said she would tell them that she is of French-European-Mi’kmaq-ancestry in Quebec and a single mother of two, rebuilding her life, alone. But she said they continued to press her, asking, “‘Well, this is unceded Algonquin territory. How come she’s here?’ Those are not questions I used to have.”
Through a three-event series entitled “A Soft Place to Land,” STO Union and Coutou are inviting the public to come, listen, learn and understand the different ways that people feel they belong – or don’t.
“As identity politics gained ground in the late 2010s and early 20s, [Coutou’s] identity and right to share anything from her mixed heritage’s perspective began to get scrutinized,” wrote Ross in the event’s official press release. “Who was she? And did she have the right to reconnect to her ancestry as a proud woman of mixed ancestry and share stories with the public about Indigenous, Inuit and Métis culture?”
Coutou said the questions about her heritage have brought up trauma from her past, as her father was a victim of “yellow journalism” – fake news that emphasized sensationalism over fact-based reporting. Coutou’s father, Claude, a well-known breeder of malamute dogs at his kennel in Saint-Alexis north of Montreal, would become the centre of a sensationalized media campaign in the Montreal-based tabloid Allô Police in the 1980s. The media campaign against her father was rumoured to have been initiated by organizations with competing agendas – that the smear campaign was meant to discredit the dog breed and her father as a breeder, according to Coutou and Ross.
“The family was completely destroyed by these weekly Sunday reports in this newspaper of people saying that their breed of dog were child killers – this specific breed of dog, the Malamute breed of dog, were child killers,” said Ross. The stress of the coverage tore Coutou’s family apart, with her father dying of cancer, leaving his 29-year-old wife to care for Coutou and her three siblings. Coutou said her father was in the midst of suing the tabloid over defamation when he fell ill and died.
The three-part series is happening at the Wakefield community centre over three different evenings: part 1 of the series, “A soft place to land”, takes place Nov. 8.; part 2, “Malamute”, is on Nov. 9; and the final part, “Welcome home”, is on Nov. 10. All three events start at 7 p.m. and they are non-ticketed with a $20 suggested donation.
“My hope is that we can come together to share stories and discuss what belonging means to us as a community,” added Coutou.
For more information, visit https://stounion.com/