If you’ve spent any time exploring Canadian Indigenous literature, chances are you’ve come across the name Drew Hayden Taylor. Born on the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, Drew Hayden Taylor has spent more than three decades turning stories about identity, community, and culture into some of the most widely read and performed Canadian works of the past forty years. He writes with a mix of wit and honesty that few authors manage to pull off, and that combination has made him one of the country’s most recognizable literary voices.
This article walks through who Drew Hayden Taylor is, what makes his writing distinct, and why his work continues to matter to readers, students, and theatre audiences across Canada and beyond.
Who Is Drew Hayden Taylor?
Drew Hayden Taylor was born on July 1, 1962, at Curve Lake First Nation, a small Ojibwe community northeast of Peterborough, Ontario. He is of mixed Ojibwe and white ancestry, a fact he has openly discussed and often turned into comedic material throughout his career. Rather than treating his background as a source of tension, Taylor has used it as a lens for examining stereotypes on both sides of the cultural divide.
He studied radio and television broadcasting at Seneca College in Toronto, earning his diploma in the early 1980s. That technical training shaped his early career, landing him writing credits on Canadian television shows like The Beachcombers, Street Legal, and North of 60 before he moved more fully into playwriting, fiction, and journalism.
Drew Hayden Taylor still lives at Curve Lake First Nation, the community where he grew up, and he continues to draw inspiration from the people and landscape around him.
Why Drew Hayden Taylor’s Writing Stands Out
Most Indigenous literature that reached mainstream Canadian audiences in the late twentieth century leaned heavily into themes of trauma, loss, and struggle. Drew Hayden Taylor took a different approach. He’s said that after visiting well over a hundred Native communities across Canada and the United States, he kept encountering warmth, humour, and resilience that simply wasn’t showing up in the books he was reading.
That observation became the foundation of his career. Drew Hayden Taylor writes about serious subjects, colonization, child apprehension, cultural erasure, reserve life but he refuses to strip the humour out of the telling. The result is work that disarms readers first and challenges them second, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.
A Signature Blend of Comedy and Critique
Taylor’s plays and books often use satire to expose absurdities in how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people perceive one another. His so-called Blues Quartet of plays, for example, pokes fun at stereotypes from multiple angles rather than lecturing the audience about them. This approach has earned him comparisons to satirists who use laughter as a tool for social commentary rather than pure entertainment.
Drew Hayden Taylor’s Career in Theatre
Playwriting is where Drew Hayden Taylor first built his reputation, and it remains central to his identity as a writer. He has written more than twenty plays that have collectively seen over a hundred productions across Canada, the United States, and Germany.
Some of his most notable plays include:
- Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock (1989) — his debut play, following three Ojibwe youths across different time periods
- Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (1996) — winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award and later anthologized internationally
- The Berlin Blues — a farce about a German company proposing to turn a reserve into an Ojibwe theme park
- Cottagers and Indians — one of the most frequently remounted Canadian plays in recent years, dealing with land and water disputes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous neighbours
- God and the Indian — a tense two-hander confronting the legacy of residential schools
From 1994 to 1997, Drew Hayden Taylor served as artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s leading Indigenous theatre company, after previously working there as playwright-in-residence. That role gave him a hand in shaping opportunities for other Indigenous playwrights, not just his own career.
Someday: Drew Hayden Taylor’s Breakthrough Story
No discussion of his work is complete without mentioning Someday. The story behind someday Drew Hayden Taylor wrote is significant in Canadian publishing history: it originally appeared as a short story on the front page of the Globe and Mail, marking the only time the paper ran a work of fiction on its front page.
Someday draws on the real Canadian policy that allowed child welfare authorities to remove Indigenous children from their families and place them with white families, a practice now widely recognized as devastating to Indigenous communities. Taylor adapted the short story into a stage play that critics praised for handling an emotionally difficult subject with restraint and clarity rather than melodrama. It remains one of the clearest examples of how Drew Hayden Taylor can take painful history and make it accessible without softening the truth.
Drew Hayden Taylor Books: Novels, Nonfiction, and Essays
Beyond theatre, Drew Hayden Taylor books span fiction, nonfiction, essay collections, and young adult literature, making him one of the more prolific Canadian authors working today, with more than thirty published titles.
His nonfiction essay collections, often built from his newspaper columns, include:
- Funny, You Don’t Look Like One (1998)
- Further Adventures of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (1999)
- Furious Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (2002)
- Futile Observations of the Blue-Eyed Ojibway (2004)
These collections became a kind of ongoing conversation with readers, using self-deprecating humour about his mixed heritage to open up bigger discussions about identity and belonging.
On the fiction side, The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel (2007) reimagines vampire mythology through an Ojibwe lens, aimed at younger readers but enjoyed widely by adults too. Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (2010) followed, blending magical realism with reserve life and earning a Governor General’s Award finalist nod.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Plays | Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock, Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, Cottagers and Indians |
| Novels | The Night Wanderer, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass |
| Essay Collections | Funny, You Don’t Look Like One series |
| Film/TV | Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, Searching for Winnetou, Cottagers and Indians (documentary), Going Native |
Film, Television, and Journalism Work
Drew Hayden Taylor’s career extends well past the page and stage. He wrote and directed Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, a National Film Board documentary on Indigenous humour, and co-created Searching for Winnetou for CBC, which explored Germany’s fascination with North American Indigenous culture. His documentary Cottagers and Indians examined land and water conflicts in cottage country, and The Pretendians (2022), which investigated people falsely claiming Indigenous identity, won a Canadian Screen Award.
He also hosts and co-writes Going Native, an APTN series launched in 2021 that examines contemporary Indigenous life and has since expanded to Indigenous broadcasters in Australia and New Zealand.
Awards and Recognition
Drew Hayden Taylor’s contributions to Canadian arts have earned significant recognition over the years, including:
- The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012)
- The Indspire Award in the Arts category (2021)
- An honorary doctorate from Trent University
- Multiple Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations and wins
- A Governor General’s Award nomination for drama
Frequently Asked Questions About Drew Hayden Taylor
Is Drew Hayden Taylor Indigenous? Yes. Drew Hayden Taylor is Ojibwe on his mother’s side and white on his father’s side. He was raised at Curve Lake First Nation and identifies as part of the contemporary Native Literary Renascence.
What is Drew Hayden Taylor best known for? He’s best known for plays like Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth and Cottagers and Indians, along with his humorous nonfiction essay collections and the story Someday.
How many books has Drew Hayden Taylor written? He has published more than thirty books across fiction, nonfiction, and young adult categories, alongside more than twenty stage plays.
Where does Drew Hayden Taylor live today? He still lives at Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, the community where he grew up.
Final Thoughts
Drew Hayden Taylor has spent his career proving that humour and hard truths aren’t opposites — they can sit on the same page, in the same scene, and land with equal force. Whether you come to his work through a play like Cottagers and Indians, a novel like Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, or the story that started it all with Someday, you’ll find a writer who trusts his audience enough to make them laugh before he makes them think.
If you haven’t read his work yet, start with one of his essay collections or The Night Wanderer for something more narrative-driven, then work your way toward his plays. Either way, you’ll come away with a clearer picture of why Drew Hayden Taylor remains one of the most important storytellers in Canadian literature today.
