Tanya Nepinak, Morgan Harris, Ashlee Shingoose, also known as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Annie Yassie, Melissa Ivy Chaboyer, Hillary Angel Wilson, Lorlene Bone, Marcia Koostachin, Jennifer Leigh Catcheway, Tammy Nattaway, Kendara Ballantyne and many more – the list of names and their stories live on. 

Aunties, sisters, mothers and daughters are invoked in Tara Beagan’s Rise, Red River. This trilingual play unearths the history of a lineage buried in the depths of the now dry Red River. 

‘She’ is a blank slate and is trying to fill in who she is by dragging hooks through a desiccated riverbed, uncovering artifacts, stories, and people and accompanied by ‘Ancestor’ speaking Anishnaabemowin. 

‘She’ is reunited with the French speaking ‘Women’: Lisa, Tanya and Rhonda. These women hold space, transcending language barriers as they piece together their lives and rediscover what the river means to them. 

Playwright Tara Beagan is a proud Ntlaka’pamux and Irish “Canadian” halfbreed. She is cofounder/director of ARTICLE 11 with Andy Moro. A11 has worked in Aotearoa, Australia, and Edinburgh. Beagan has served as artistic director, community liaison, and co-artistic associate of Native Earth Performing Arts and currently resides in Calgary, Alberta. 

“When Thom asked me to do what I considered an eco-warrior play,” Beagan explains, “I didn’t know if I could really go there. But then I had the image of a woman dragging those hooks that the Drag the Red boat drags. Immediately, I saw ‘Her.’” 

Drag the Red is an active, Winnipeg based community group founded by the late Kyle Kematch and Minister Bernadette Smith in response to the 2014 discovery of Tina Fontaine’s body in the Red River. 

Smith was a key inspiration when it came to creating this play. “[Bernadette] came to a play reading that we did with Urban Indigenous Theatre Company. She was just so generous sharing her thoughts and heart and just to see her strength. And Winnipeg feels like a kind of nexus where all these energies collide and implode and bloom.” 

Beagan notes, “It shows in our women. My god these powerful women who live there, who come from there and who then go out into the world, or who build community there. It’s as big or bigger than how much loss has been experienced.” 

Though this play was first produced in 2024 and is set in a future, post-apocalyptic Winnipeg, the subject matter is still very present. As of spring 2025, we wait for updates on the search of the Prairie Green Landfill and the intended search of the Brady Road Landfill in the hope of more discoveries like that of the now-confirmed remains of Morgan Harris and Ashlee Shingoose, also known as, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe. It is a constant reminder that Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQ+ bodies continue to be discarded at an alarming rate and the list of names continues to grow.

“The deeply difficult thing about the subject matter that the play covers is that it is about our women and girls and Two-Spirit peoples and how we treat the Earth, and it’s never not relevant,” says Beagan. 

Rise, Red River offers us a story of connection and hope in a world where Indigenous matriarchs continue to laugh and cry, sing and yell.

“It’s being in production, it’s being in a room where every artist is Indigenous and feeling the strength of that and knowing that even when we tell stories of great loss, we embody resilience and we are there and there is choice now. It is in the doing, that’s the hope.”