Land Acknowledgment
We acknowledge that the land on which the University of Toronto operates has for thousands of years been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. This land is covered by the Dish with One Spoon treaty, a covenant between several Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee nations to share the land in peace. Since then, all newly arrived peoples have been invited into this covenant, but the land hasn’t always been justly shared by those who came afterward. While it is tempting to think of the city’s indigenous history as remote in time and space, the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto at of Bloor and Spadina is virtually around the corner from the Luella Massey Studio where we rehearsed and performed The Dutch Courtesan, linking these histories to the ongoing activities and needs of a living community. Immediately to the west of the theatre, the Centre for Indigenous Studies connects the histories and communities to the academic and institutional life of the University of Toronto.
Within Toronto’s settler history, the neighbourhood around the Luella Massey Studio Theatre and the Drama Centre, are themselves part of narratives of immigration, exclusion, community building, and mixedness. The theatre has been a Lutheran church, and then a Russian Orthodox church, and was a centre of Toronto’s Russian community from the 1930s to the 1950s. The surrounding neighbourhood was home to one of Toronto’ oldest Jewish communities, before becoming the city’s second Chinatown (‘Old Chinatown’ as opposed to ‘First Chinatown’). More recently, this neighbourhood has served as an entry point for ‘strangers and aliens’ of various kinds, migrating to the city centre from the suburbs, from around Canada, and from around he world. Stories like Franceschina’s or the Mulligrubs’ are never as far away as we might think.
We should finally recall that, as with Shakespeare’s plays, The Dutch Courtesan was written in a period when violent colonial projects were taking shape across Britain and Europe; early modern drama’s attitudes towards sex and sex work, gender, faith, and ‘strangers’ are embedded in colonial thought and practice. We invite all students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners of early modern drama to reflect on how we can challenge colonial violence in our work, and help to build more equitable classrooms and theatres that include and protect the safety of those who have long been continue to be most vulnerable to the long history of colonial violence in Canada.