March 1, 2025
Started in 2017, the Indigenous Artist Spotlight series was created to foster greater awareness and understanding of the strength and diversity of Indigenous art available in Ontario and beyond.
Find all of our past Spotlight interviews here. This month, Ksenija Spasic interviewed actor, storyteller, and Assistant Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, Jesse Wabegijig.
Could you give us a sense of your career trajectory so far? What brought you into the arts and what kind of work have you done?
Funnily enough, I got into the arts as a bit of a survival tactic. I had a difficult housing situation around the time I started working at Debajehmujig. The name means “Storytellers” - they are a theatre company on Manitoulin Island, formerly on a reserve, but they’ve since moved, after buying some land in Manitowaning, because they found a partnership that would help with the construction costs. They tore out what was an old convenience store and built a theatre on top of it.
I grew up around Debajehmujig. I’d known some of the actors and artists. They had been over to my house to do script readings or have after parties there.
Freshly 16 years old, I had my high school placement and volunteer hours to manage, so I reconnected and became an intern there. This would be the start of my career in the arts. The company would eventually need new actors and I stepped into that role. I was also deeply embedded into their farming projects, so I was learning to farm.
Could you elaborate on the connection between the theater company and farming?
Oh, yeah. So Debajehmujig was experimenting with permaculture and reestablishing ties between Indigenous people and the land.
They trained artists by taking them out and actually putting them onto farms. And then, in the evenings, we’d have dinner together. The theater training also happened in the evenings and on days when I didn’t go to the farms.
When I was 17, I first came into contact with Jumblies and the National Arts Centre. They both wanted to connect with Debajehmujig, it being one of the oldest Indigenous theater companies in Canada. The National Arts Centre wanted to investigate the possibility of opening up what would become the Indigenous Theatre of Canada. I, being the young theatre intern, was thrown into the heart of it. So, I was doing play readings with people like Margo Cane and Rose Stella, who is the artistic director of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, which is actually how I would eventually end up coming to Toronto.
What were your first impressions of Toronto?
Constantly being overwhelmed by everything. By sound most of all, because I grew up on a reserve, in the woods. I did get some exposure to city life. My grandparents live in Peterborough, they had adopted my mother through what is now known as the Sixties Scoop.
What kind of work did you do after you moved?
Debajehmujig gave me fundamentals in Indigenous creation and permaculture, also some Clown work through John Turner.
In Toronto, I studied everything from Indigenous dance, theater, Shakespeare. Towards the end of my program, we focused on collective creation. I also did consultancy work with the National Arts Center and was a part of the hiring process for the artistic director of the Indigenous Theatre.
I then got involved with Shadowland - my first real introduction at community arts and puppetry. The year after that, I connected with Clay and Paper Theater and found my focus on puppetry there.
I also became part of Talking Treaties – a history and community-informed creation concerned with treaties, their history, their interpretation and impacts. This was my work with Ange Loft – a very influential person in my life.
I became a facilitator and then an actor in the show that they would eventually put on, which was a big spectacle presented at Fort York.
Yes, I recall the giant beaver and your resonant voice. The show had humour and depth. It was very dynamic, moving across the Fort York grounds. You were involved over a long period of time in the community creation aspect, I know, but I remember you as Sir William Johnston.
Yes. The funny thing is, I was still in school at that time. I think I was in my third year.
Every summer I worked with a different company in a different capacity.
And what about the rest of Ontario? Have you traveled much across the province and what were those experiences like?
Strange. The pandemic had created this pause, I began exploring my own art in puppetry and doing some storytelling at various festivals online and eventually in person.
And when you say storytelling, what exactly does that mean?
Storytelling of different myths and creation stories that I learned from Manitoulin. As I was learning at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and the Native Earth Centre, Indigenous people exist everywhere. I had the chance to train with and under people from all across the world and to see some of the common ground that connects us.
I started working with non-traditional people to consider Indigenous, such as people from Eastern Europe who have had so much of their history stripped from them such as it is here in Canada. I was asking “what does it mean to be of a land beyond nationhood and beyond drawn borders?”
At these storytelling events that I was engaged with in 2020 and on we were all distancing - physically present, but far away. You’re telling these really heartfelt stories and you’re getting to know these people and their experiences and you’re sitting there in a circle, but the circle is huge, people are miles away from you. It was still worth it.
I went to five Ontario towns, all accessible by train, which is nice. Niagara on the Lake, Hamilton, Welland, Stratford, Port Hope, Kingston and Coburg.
And then I did a number of online things. Such as a chance to help with the Hamilton Fringe.
Any memorable experiences from those travels?
Oh, I remember that I really enjoyed being in smaller towns. I just enjoyed the people, even though there was the occasional nasty interaction. There were also really pleasant ones and those felt like going home.
In a small town, you can chat with a thrift store owner about all of the strange things they’ve seen. They’re jovial, they have so many little treasures and I also like little treasures.
In 2022, I had a really unique experience when I first worked in Naivelt with Ruth Howard.
Yes, Naivelt is a strange and magical place. Camp Naivelt – Yiddish for “New World” – is a left-wing, secular Jewish community in Brampton. It was founded in 1925 as a children’s summer camp and is now a tiny village where everyone knows everyone.
I love all the people there. I love the bagel brunch, I love getting into big talks and getting into silly interactions.
And, more than small-town Ontario, that feels like being home on reserve. Everybody’s living five feet from each other, 20 minutes from each other, but we’re constantly in each other’s space, in each other’s houses and everyone has each other’s mugs.
And there’s always a strange tension about some topic or other. There’s always someone who has a big thing going on and they need to tell everyone about it.
What are your current artistic concerns and what’s next for you?
Right now, I am an Interim Artistic Director at the Community Arts Guild and Associate Artistic Director at Jumblies Theatre. I’m focused on the legacy of the companies that I’m attached to and the people that I care about.
My goal is to replace myself, to find Indigenous artists to take on the roles that I took on when I was younger.
When you were younger? You’re 28!
Yes, but I’ve been doing all these things now for 12 years! And I feel like “oh gosh, I need someone who’ll do exactly the thing I was doing when I was younger.
And I don’t know who that is. My hope is to find them or to nurture someone into being them. I imagine the reality would be some confluence of the two.
And once you’ve replaced yourself?
I will then need to do some soul searching and find out what I represent and what I want to leave behind.
What kind of support can a venue give an artist to help them do their best work?
I think just having someone who is interested. Again, with legacy in mind, having someone who’s interested in mentoring, someone who is committed to the space, to the organization.
And this is something deeply absent within our concept of the arts in Canada and, particularly, Toronto’s art scene.
There are blank spaces, galleries that can become anything, theatres that can become anything. But this approach prevents people from developing an independent or dependent relationship, a from-the-land or from-the-space relationship that is possible in unique spaces. But we’re missing it here because we’re so focused on this modularity of both experience and space. If a space can become anything then it’s lacking an identity. Which makes it…nothing.
If we’re not consistently building towards new things; we’re starting over and over, pretending we are the first to do something, when, in fact, the best artistic work has history and roots in what it is and where it happens.
Residencies are great. And not the big residencies, fancy ones, but little residencies, the ones that artists can live off of and where they can make a real contribution and connection to a place.
You also really need that point person to tell you what is possible, what has been done in the venue before, like “hey, one time, someone made a web thing across all of the ceiling and it went down to the ground. That’s possible in this space.”