TWO ONE ACT PLAYS: TORONTO AT DREAMER'S ROCK/EDUCATION IS OUR RIGHT Drew Haydon Taylor Saskatoon (Sask.), Fifth House Publishers, 1990. 144pp, paper, $10.95 ISBN 0-1920079-64-4. CIP Grades 8 and up/Ages 13 and up Reviewed by Alan Thomas. Volume 19 Number 2 1991 March The Ojibway writer Drew Taylor wrote these plays for the native theatre Company De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig, based in Manitoulin Island. Each about an hour in length, they were evidently conceived with a young audience in mind. Education Is Our Right was created for touring and has been performed at many schools in Ontario and Quebec, produced often in the bare staging conditions available in isolated communities. Taylor, who has written for CBC TV, uses the simple but potent dramatic conflict between past, present and future native societies as a basis for the action of both plays. Toronto (meeting-place) at Dreamer's Rock uses as dreamer a sixteen-year-old boy of the present, in jeans, and with a knapsack of Labatt's Blue on his back. To him comes a boy from the pre-Contact age, and another from a future in which native society enjoys self-government. The play reveals a clear intention to strengthen native consciousness and includes passages in the Odawa/Ojibway language (also given in English). The dreamer in Education Is Our Right is the minister of Indian Affairs, here named Ebenezer Cadieux. He is visited by disconcerting spirits of the native past, present and future, but fails to change his mind on the particular issue of the capping of funding for post-secondary education for native peoples. Evidently designed as a challenge to that policy, the play also touches on the march to Ottawa and the hunger strike that were part of the native campaign. These plays will be of interest to many young people outside the native communities at which they are prima­rily directed. Alan Thomas, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont.