Sheldon Elter's Métis Mutt tackles the racism he endured and mirrored

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      Sheldon Elter has to revisit a lot of painful moments in his one-man show Métis Mutt. But some of the hardest to face are the jokes the Grande Prairie–born actor, comedian, and writer used to tell when he was an 18-year-old standup working Alberta bars and pool halls in the 1990s.

      In fact, he uses his old racist one-liners about “Indians” in the opening for the show—a cringe-inducing barrage that he’s now juxtaposed with a laugh track in this new version of the hit theatrical work.

      “It’s a difficult show: I have to revisit the demons in my closet,” says Elter from Edmonton. “When I was a young man, I’d get all those great laughs and someone would say, ‘I got one, maybe you can use this one in your act,’ and tell me some terrible racist one-liner. And I was not quite understanding that whatever I was doing made people feel like it was okay to tell me that.”

      That all changed, Elter recalls, when some prominent people from the Indigenous community confronted him about his act. “They said, ‘Do you have to do this?’ I said, ‘I was crushing it, I was killing it!’ One woman asked me, ‘Why do you think they’re laughing?’

      “That didn’t scare me away from comedy, just stand­up,” adds the affable artist, who ended up going to theatre school. “At least in theatre I felt I have support and people with me. I felt standup was a little lonely for me.”

      Sheldon Elter performs his one-man show Métis Mutt.
      Marc J. Chalifoux

      These days, Elter has a whole production team assisting him with his play, which was born in the early 2000s as a seven-minute monologue, grew into a full work at Edmonton’s Nextfest, and became a phenomenon that toured the country and even New Zealand. In Métis Mutt, Elter uses his comedic edge to ply some rough territory—his own upbringing by an abusive, alcoholic father, and his struggles with addiction and identity as a mixed-race kid disconnected from his Indigenous side but still the target of insults for being Indigenous.

      “I had this guilt for not being Native enough and at the same time I’m being constantly called an ‘Indian’. It’s a word I use a lot in the piece, but a word that’s not used anymore, and it’s a trigger word,” the artist says. “Forty-year-old Sheldon has to look at that and say, ‘Okay, I literally fought people over that.’ ”

      All of this makes performing Métis Mutt difficult enough that Elter took an extended break from the show to do other projects—including a starring role in Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears, which, coincidentally, he’ll appear in at the Cultch early next month. But a recent invitation to remount his solo show from Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts company allowed him to restructure it, and add some multimedia projections and a soundscape. Yet, even after all these years, he’s still finding tricks to help him perform it night after night.

      “When we rehearse the show, I have to find ways to disassociate from it that they don’t teach you in theatre school,” he says. “They don’t teach you in theatre school how to turn it off.…So it helps me to find good ritual practices. I literally shower after every show—it helps me say ‘I’m just telling a story.’ ”

      Elter has come a long way since those early standup experiments. He’s had a successful career that’s included award-winning writing for TV’s Caution: May Contain Nuts. And he has a surer, more nuanced grasp on his identity. In Métis Mutt, listen to Elter’s story of a medicine man who tells him his soul is grieving and that he has to go out into the woods to heal. But Elter wasn’t raised in the ways of the wilderness, and he doesn’t know how to use a shotgun.

      “So I never ended up going; I was too scared,” he says. “But I realized over time that spirituality and telling stories has been my church—my solace is to come back and to express myself. Then I can set my compass back.”

      Métis Mutt is at the Firehall Arts Centre from Wednesday (April 25) to May 5.

      Comments