Marie Clement’s “The Unnatural and Accidental Women”

Although the inevitably fragmented nature of a theatrical script makes it difficult for the reader to encapsulate, synthesize or make sense of specific events, Clements’ continual references to nature help to incorporate various forgotten tribal histories in to her present-day narrative.

I argue that these histories appear as ‘forgotten histories’ on account of how they appear in the play. In many cases, when references to the tides, trees or traplines appear in her play, they are often surrounded by the static of a faulty telephone connection, or the ebbing and flowing of entirely different scenes. In doing this, I feel as though Clements is cleverly making reference to Canada’s tendency to wash over a robust history of environmental plunder and racism.

In creating a play that illuminates the lives of many missing and murdered Indigenous women, while illuminating fragments of a forgotten environmental history, Clements enriches my understanding of the missing and murdered Indigenous women phenomena. As a matter of fact, the way Clements subtly draws the fragmented and ‘forgotten’ connections between the women and the environment, asserts that the missing and murdered Indigenous women are in realty far from a phenomena, but rather a manifestation of a history of colonial racism and plunder, and a culture of forgetting, in present day.