Tomson Highway was awarded the degree of Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, at the 9-30 a.m. ceremony on Friday, June 14, “in recognition of outstanding contributions to the arts, exemplary leadership in the arts, and mentorship of Aboriginal Canadians.”
Tomson Highway was born in a snow bank on the Manitoba/Nunavut birders to a family of nomadic caribou hunters. He had the great privilege of growing up in two languages; Cree, his mother tongue, and Dene, the language of the neighboring “nation,” a people with whom they roamed and hunted.
Today, he enjoys an international career as playwright, novelist, and pianist/songwriter. His best known works are the plays, The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Rose, and Ernestine Shuswap
Gets Her Trout, and the bestselling novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, For many years, he ran Canada’s prerniere native theatre company, the Toronto- based Native Earth Performing Arts, out of which has emerged an entire
generation of professional native playwrights, actors and, more indirectly, the many other native theatre companies that now dot the country.
His many awards include the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and Best Production, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Toronto Arts Award, the Wang Harbourfront International Festival of Authors Award and the Silver Ticket Award. In 1994, he received the Order of Canada and in 2001, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award. He has eight honorary degrees from institutions across Canada.