Children of God, a musical about an Oji-Cree family whose children are taken to a residential school, plays to a sold-out house in Yellowknife on Saturday.
Children of God is set in northern Ontario and covers two time periods, the 1950s and 1970s. It is performed in English and Anishinaabemowin.
Corey Payette, the musical’s creator, spent time with Cabin Radio’s Ehxea Antoine before Saturday’s performance at NACC. Here’s how Payette described the musical and the process of creating it.
As told to Ehxea Antoine on April 3, 2025. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Corey Payette: I’ve been working on this musical for the past 15 years. It premiered in 2017 and then has since toured across the country, and we’re so excited that it’s coming up here to the NACC.
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It’s a musical about an Oji-Cree family whose children were sent to residential schools. The musical takes place in two time periods, 20 years apart, and looks at the intergenerational impacts of the residential school system on one family.
It’s a really profound and heavy piece, but also we really aim to leave audiences with a sense of hope for the future and that – in sharing these stories, as difficult as that may be – sharing the truth is the only way we can truly feel like we’re on the same wavelength as a community.
A part of the story is about remembrance. It’s these kids in this really oppressive environment where they’re not allowed to speak their language. They’re called numbers, they’re not allowed to sing songs or really express any emotions, and so they find moments to sneak away and they share their language together, they share their dances.
A lot of what I’ve been taught over the years – from survivors and Elders that I know from my research, and also from my family and community – has been that these languages are alive today because of the strong survivors who whispered it to their siblings, who passed it on in secret. Talking about pow-wow steps [which appear in the show]: these dances were illegal. You couldn’t have practice. You couldn’t practise your culture in that way. In this setting of this school, it’s a fictional story but the kids? They drum, they sing, and they really are able to keep their culture alive in secret.
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The cast is a very diverse group of Indigenous representation. We have Indigenous people from all across Turtle Island and all of these performers have different connections to their language. Some of them, they were brought up with it. Some of them, they’re reconnecting and know different words and phrases today.
How I brought Anishinaabemowin into the musical was through language-keepers, through people who spoke the language who helped me, because I’m not a fluent speaker but I was able to tell them: “OK, this is what I’m wanting to say. This is the sort of music that I’ve come up with. How would that translate? How would we be able to include that language and include it in a way that’s also reflective of the character’s connection to the language?”
We didn’t want the characters to be super fluent with it. We wanted it to be alive in a sense where they’re trying to remember it and where they’re having to piece it together. That’s very much what audiences will see on stage on Saturday.
When we were developing the show, we developed it at the Chief Louis Centre in Kamloops, which is historically the residential school on that reserve. Now it’s been reclaimed.
In 2015 we developed this musical there and Elder Evelyn Camille came, and she was our Elder who welcomed us. After she saw it, she said: “You need to do this show in every community across Canada, because it’s not solely Indigenous people who need to understand this history. It’s everyone. If you live on this land, then this is your history.”
We are all dealing with the ripple effects of this 100 year-plus trauma, and so that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to bring it to every community across Canada.
