Patti Flather

Patti Flather moved to Whitehorse from Vancouver and started work as a reporter for the Whitehorse Star. Her friend Nancy Campbell was involved in the Guild Theatre and Patti auditioned for Romeo and Juliet with the Whitehorse Drama Club. She met Leonard Linklater, who would become her husband, and they entered a twenty-four-hour play writing competition. They emerged with the first take on Sixty Below about a young Gwich'in who is just out of jail and struggling to turn his life around. The play premiered at the Yukon Arts centre in 1993 and went on in 1997 as a production by Toronto's Native Earth Performing Arts. It was nominated for several Dora awards including best play. Flather went back to the University of British Columbia to get a master's degree in creative writing while Linklater was studying at the Institute of Indigenous Government in Vancouver. In 1999, they founded their own company Gwaandak Theatre Adventures. Gwaandak joined Nakai Theatre to produce a remount of Sixty Below with a new script.¹⁾

Since then Gwaandak has produced numerous plays including three penned by Flather: West Edmonton Mall, Where the River Meets the Sea and The Soul Menders. In 2014, the company had a board of directors, a general manager (Majolene Gauthier), and a managing artistic director (Flather). It commissioned two original plays by aboriginal playwrights: Cafe Daughter by Kenneth T. Williams (produced in 2011 and 2013) and Justice by Leonard Linklater (2012).²⁾ The project for their 15th anniversary in 2015 was a joint production of Flather's play Paradise with the Ontario based MT Space directed by Majdi Bou-Matar.³⁾ Paradise was published in 2017 with Playwrights Canada Press. The Gwaandak Theatre/MT Space production was featured at the international IMPACT 15 Festival in Kitchener and toured nationally.⁴⁾

Flather is a co-writer, dramaturg, and one of the directors of Ndoo Tr'eedyaa Gogwaandak (Forward Together) – Vuntut Gwitchin Stories. It was launched as radio plays and booklets in Gwich’in and English in 2019 with Gwaandak Theatre/Vuntut Gwitchin Government. It is available free at vuntutstories.ca.⁵⁾ Flather was a co-creator of Gwaandak’s devised work Map of the Land, Map of the Stars, which toured the Yukon and nationally and is published in Canadian Theatre Review (Spring 2018). In 2018, she and co-researcher Reneltta Arluk, conducted a Nightswimming Pure Research experiment at the University of Calgary. (Not) Our Mother Tongue explored the impactful use of Indigenous language in theatre. A 2019 residency at the Caravan Farm Theatre National Playwrights Retreat supported the development of a new play, Treaties, with Linklater. In the spring of 2020, Flather became the manager of Cultural Programs & Ceremonies for the Whitehorse 2020 Arctic Winter Games.⁶⁾

Pati Flather’s publications include Such a Lovely Afternoon (2022), Paradise (2017), and as a co-author, Refractions: Scene (2020). She was awarded the Borealis Prize for Literary Contribution in 2020.⁷⁾