W.L. Morton Community Lecture 2022

Named in honour of W.L. Morton, the Canadian historian and former Master of Trent's Champlain College, this prestigious lecture invites award-winning and multi-talented Aboriginal artist Tomson Highway. Highway has also found time to complement these great accomplishments with his work as a social worker, native artistic director, adjunct professor, and world traveller.

An Evening With Tomson Highway

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

7:00pm

Showplace Performance Centre, 290 George St. N, Peterborough

This Event is Free and Everyone is Welcome. Registration required.

Masks are welcome but not required.

This free public event is presented by The School for the Study of Canada, Champlain College, Catharine Parr Traill College, The Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies and the Department of History. The W.L. Morton Lecture is named in honour of W.L. Morton, the Canadian historian and former Master of Trent's Champlain College.

Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. When Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. 

He lived through the residential school system, faced prejudice, and struggled to have his work recognized. Along the way, he relied on music and art to heal and inspire himself and others around him.  Throughout his life, Highway has overcome incredible obstacles to find himself where he is today. 

He’s an acclaimed artist making international impact as a playwright, author, musician, and multilingual speaker (Cree, French & English). Highway has also found time to complement these great accomplishments with his work as a social worker, native artistic director, adjunct professor, and world traveller.

He’s author of numerous bestselling books including his first Kiss of the Fur Queen. In 2021, he released Permanent Astonishment: Growing Up in the Land of Snow and Sky, a “memoir offering insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival.” He won the Writers Trust Award for Non-Fiction for this work.

Having studied music and English literature at the Universities of Manitoba (Winnipeg) and Western Ontario (London), as well as in England, he earned both his Bachelor of Music Honours (Piano Performance major) and the equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts (English major), both from “Western.”