Co-Learning with Land-Based World Building in Yvette Nolan’s The Unplugging

In this conversation, settler professor of Indigenous literature and drama, Brenda Vellino, and Mi’kmaq social work student Carolyn Simon, at Carleton University, collaboratively explore learning with both the script of Yvette Nolan’s The Unplugging and the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s 2023 production. Given the world-building proposals in Nolan’s play in the aftermath of a near-future “unplugging,” the authors situate their discussion in a continuum with other interventions in the genres of Indigenous speculative storywork or what Anishnaabe scholar Grace Dillon terms “Indigenous Futurisms.” The conversation is shaped around four sub-themes enacted or implied in the playscript and the 2023 Great Canadian Theatre Company production: intergenerational learning and knowledge keeping, staging queer Indigenous intimacy through non-binary casting, world-building possibilities in a time of apocalypse, and generative land-based teachings and dramaturgy. As a pedagogical intervention, this conversation is also prefigurative of the possibilities of Indigenous–settler exchange based on mutual respect. It is offered in the spirit of the work Nolan’s play does around the potential repair of Indigenous and settler relations enacted between the characters of Elena, Bern, and Seamus.