When the Canadian Opera Company presented Harry Somers’ 1967 opera Louis Riel in spring 2017, they made concerted efforts to include Indigenous voices at every step, from production to presentation.

At the time, the show’s director Peter Hinton commented in a press release that “the most considerable challenge in staging this opera is the Eurocentric tradition of opera as a form and its collision with the voice, culture and representation of Indigeneity in this history. It is a delicate balance of renewing the original spirit of the opera with contemporary perspectives in order to revise the opera’s colonial biases and bring forward its inherent strengths and powers.”

The production included what was called the ‘Land Assembly’, a symbolically-placed group of Indigenous men and women who were present onstage throughout the entire work, and described as “a silent chorus in protest, stand[ing] for the people for whom the opera has not provided a voice.”

Adam Gaudry is Métis and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies and Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. In an eloquently argued essay on his website, Gaudry wrote about his many reservations with both the opera and the Hinton production, the silence of the