Leonard Linklater
Leonard Linklater grew up in Inuvik, NWT. He didn’t go to residential school but his mother did and so he didn’t learn the language. He did hear many great stories from Elders when he was a kid at summer fish camp. He learned journalism at Yukon Indian News with on-the-job-training. He met Vic Ischenko, the news director at Northern Native Broadcasting, and began his broadcasting career with CHON FM radio. He and his future wife Patti Flather were reporters when they joined the 24 Hour Playwriting Contest sponsored by Nakai Theatre. They wrote the very successful play, 60 Below, about people getting out of jail. Linklater started working for CBC Yukon in 2000 as host of the Midday Café.1)
In 1999, Flather and Linklater founded Gwaandak Theatre Adventures. Gwaandak joined Nakai Theatre to produce a remount of Sixty Below with a new script.2) 60 Below was nominated for seven Dora theatre awards in Toronto in the early 1990s.3)
In the 1990s, Leonard heard about Jim and Dawson Nantuck, the first people to be hanged in the Yukon, while Leonard was in British Columbia attending the Institute of Indigenous Government. He began writing a play, Justice, about justice meaning different things to people of differing heritage. Gwaandak Theatre included the play in their 2012-23 season. The Department of Justice developed a curriculum to go with the play. Leonard is quoted as saying “Stories are culture, and that’s what theatre is. It’s defining our culture in bits and pieces.”4) Justice played in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre’s Northern Scene.5)
Linklater is a co-producer with Ndoo Treedyaa Gogwaandak – Vuntat Gwitchin Stories of Ch’iitsii Khat Datl’oo / The Blue Cruiser, adapted from his godfather Stephen Frost’s story. Leonard was a co-creator of Gwaandak Theatre’s revised work Map of the Land, Map of the Stars. He is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and the winner of the Borealis Prize, the Commissioner of the Yukon award for literary contribution.6)