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1952 -
Along with Harold Cardinal, Maria Campbell, Basil Johnston, Rita Joe, and Daniel David Moses, George Kenny is a significant figure in the Indigenous resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s. The writings of this generation helped bring Indigenous political and cultural issues to broader Canadian and international audiences. Kenny’s first book, Indians Don’t Cry (Chimo, 1977), has been described as “a landmark publication in the history of Aboriginal literatures in Canada” (Eigenbrod 181). Blending short stories and poems, the collection reflects on kinship, residential schooling, the arts, and political resistance.
An expanded edition of Indians Don’t Cry was published by NC Press in 1982. In 2014, the University of Manitoba Press re-released this expanded version as Gaawiin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg – Indians Don’t Cry, including Anishinaabemowin translations by Patricia Ningewance. While the book is often read for its attention to the impacts of residential schooling on Indigenous families and communities, it can also be understood through the lens of Indigenous survivance as a series of autobiographical portraits that record and resist the historical and current conditions imposed on Indigenous life in Canada.
Kenny was born in 1952 in Kejick Bay, home to the Lac Seul First Nation in Ontario. A member of the Bear Clan, he was raised by his parents until he was sent to Pelican Lake Residential School in 1958, where he spent eight difficult years. Despite constant pressure to assimilate, he carried family teachings and stories into adulthood and remains a fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin. In the late 1970s, he moved to Toronto to pursue a writing career. He worked as an editor for Wawatay News, a bilingual newspaper in Anishinaabemowin and English, and served as a guest editor for Tawow: Canadian Indian Cultural Magazine. From 1990 to 1995, he was a columnist for Thunder Bay’s Chronicle Journal, and he has taught creative writing at a variety of colleges.
In addition to working as a writer, playwright, editor, and teacher, Kenny is an anthropologist specializing in the Anishinaabe people of Lac Seul and the English River. He has worked as an archaeological assessment consultant for numerous Indigenous agencies and helped Lac Seul First Nation pursue settlement of its flood claim with the Canadian government. In 1929, Ontario Hydro flooded Lac Seul’s traditional territory without consultation to build the Ear Falls Dam, forcibly relocating many families (Eigenbrod 180). Throughout his adult life, Kenny has also served on non-profit Native community boards.
Kenny holds a Bachelor of Integrated Studies (University of Waterloo, 1984) and a BA (Honours) in Archaeology (Lakehead University, 1997). He is married to ethnobotanist Mary Bea Kenny, who has been trained in the plants of the boreal forest in Anishinaabe territory in both traditional and academic settings. His son, Michael Mahkwa Auski, is a hockey player who holds a Master of Social Work (Ryerson University, 2013).
Kenny adapted Indians Don’t Cry into the play October Stranger (1978), co-written with Cree actor Denis Lacroix. The play has been considered the first full-length Native play about contemporary Native people (Shäfer, qtd. Eigenbrod 179). Composed at the request of James H. Buller, Cree boxer, opera singer, and founder of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, the play was performed at the Sixth International Theatre Festival in Monaco, France, in 1977. In 1985, Alan Collins directed a film adaptation starring René Highway, Doris Linklater, and Ronalda Jones. Kenny’s work also appears in field-forming anthologies, including Penny Petrone’s First People, First Voices (1983), Hartmut Lutz’s Four Feathers (1992), and Jeannette Armstrong and Lally Grauer’s Native Poetry in Canada (2011).
In 2017, while hosting a Traditions Workshop, Kenny remarked, “My son and I are writing a sequel to Indians Don’t Cry… The sequel is called Indians Do Cry.” Indeed, there are reportedly unpublished works “piled up in [Kenny’s] drawers at home,” including a memoir (Eigenbrod 179). We hope these writings will one day become publicly available.
Selected Readings:
Kenny, George. “Christmas Carol.” The Native Perspective, vol. 2, no.1, December 1976, p. 27.
---. “Just Another Bureaucrat.” The Native Perspective, vol. 2, no.1, January-February 1977, p. 19.
---. “Welcome.” The Native Perspective, vol. 2, no. 4, May 1977, p. 24.
---. “The Shooting of a Beaver.” The Native Perspective, vol. 2, no. 5, July-August 1977, p. 74.
---. Indians Don't Cry. Chimo Publishing, 1977.
---. October Stranger. Written in collaboration with Denis Lacroix. Chimo Publishing. 1978.
---. “The Drowning.” The Native Perspective, vol. 2, no. 10, 1978, p. 30.
---. "I Don't Know this October Stranger." Tawow, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, p. 6.
---. Guest editor. Tawow: Canadian Indian Cultural Magazine, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978.
---. Guest Editorial: "Northwestern Ontario.... The People Then and Now." Tawow. vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, pp. 6-7.
---. “Soft and Trembling Cry.” Canadian Fiction Magazine, vol. 36/37, 1980, pp. 21-25.
---. Indians Don't Cry. Revised and expanded edition. Toronto: NC Press, 1982.
---. “The Bull-Frogs Got Theirs (as now I do).” First People, First Voices. ed. Penny Petrone. U of Toronto P, 1983, pp. 188-9.
---. “Note to Carl Ray from George Kenny.” The Sound of the Drum: The Sacred Art of the Anishnabe. ed. Mary E. (Beth) Southcott. Boston Mills Press, 1984.
---. “Whee-skay-chak and Kah-kah-ge.” Four Feathers, Poems and Stories by Canadian Native Authors. ed, Hartmut Lutz. Osnabrück, Germany: VC Verlags-Cooperative, 1992.
---. “News Girl.” Ontario Indian, vol. 5, no. 4, May 1982, p. 37.
---. Selected poems in Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology. ed. Jeannette C. Armstrong and Lally Grauer. Broadview Press, 2011, pp. 193-98.
---. “How He Served”. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature Canadienne, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, p. 49.
---. Unpublished. Memoir.
---. Unpublished poem. “Williams Lake.” University of Manitoba Press Blog. 27 Oct, 2014.
Films:
Collins, Alan, dir. October Stranger. Toronto: R.C. Ellis Enterprises, 1985.
Secondary Sources for Further Reading:
Anonymous. “Speakers Biographies: Mary Bea Kenny.” Northern Ontario First Nations Environment Conference. Web. Accessed 26 July 2018.
Anonymous. “Lac Seul Community.” Lac Seul First Nation. Web. Accessed 26 July, 2018. http://lacseul.firstnation.ca/node/2.
Däwes, Birgit. “Reaching for the Same Can of Beans: Transnational Indigenous Performance in the U.S. and Canada.” The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies. ed. Wilfried Raussert. Routledge, 2017, pp. 143-149.
---. “The Oral in the Written: A Literature between Two Cultures.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 1995, p. 89.
Elu, Eesti. "Hockey Player Mike Auksi will give a lecture in the series "Life as a Cosmopolitan Estonian." Estonia Life. 11 Jan 2016. Web. Accessed 26 July, 2018. https://www.eesti.ca/hockey-player-mike-auksi-will-give-a-lecture-in-the-series-life-as-a-cosmopolitan-estonian-estonia-life/article46800.
Garrick, Rick. "Lac Seul author hosts Transitions Workshop at Lakehead
University." Wawatay News. 31 August 2017. Web. Accessed 26 July,
2018. http://www.wawataynews.ca/arts-entertainment/lac-seul-author-hosts-transitions-workshop-lakehead-university.
Kornacki, Chris. "George Kenny Signs Books and Shares Stories." Wawatay News. 01 December 2017. Web. Accessed 26 July,
2018. http://www.wawataynews.ca/arts-entertainment/george-kenny-signs-
books-and-shares-stories.
Works Cited:
Eigenbrod. "Afterword: George Kenny--Anishnaabe, Son, and Writer." Indians Don't Cry: Gaawiin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg. U of Manitoba P, 2014, pp. 176-187.
Additional Resources:
For a mention of George Kenny’s book being turned into a play, see:
Henderson, Emily. Non-Indigenous Involvement in Indigenous Performance Arts: A Starting Point for Reconciliation?, U of Manitoba, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/34216. Master of Arts Thesis.
One mention:
The second stage of the modern Indigenous theatre movement in Canada took place from 1974 until 1984, where the ultimate creation of the Indigenous theatre field materialized. One of the predominant figures in this stage of the movement, was James H. Buller, a Cree boxer and opera singer. Buller’s main objective in the furtherance of the field was ensuring the training of theatre artists, and therefore in 1974 he established the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (ANDPVA) as well as the Native Theatre School (NTS). In 1977 Buller recruited Cree poet, George Kenny, to turn his book Indians Don’t Cry, published earlier that year, into a play, to represent Canada at a theatre festival in Monaco.
George Kenny entry by Madeleine Reddon, September 2018. Madeleine completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia and is currently an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines modernist and avant-garde Indigenous authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. She has transcribed, and continues to work on, an unpublished novel by Alootook Ipellie as part of her work with The People and the Text.
This image conforms to copyright laws. Image sourced from:
<http://www.wawataynews.ca/arts-entertainment/george-kenny-signs-books-an.... Accessed 30 September 2018.
Entry edits by Margery Fee, April 2024. Margery Fee is Professor Emerita at UBC in the Department of English.
Additional Resources collected by Eli Davidovici in March 2024. Eli is an alumnus of McGill University, graduating with an M.Mus. in Jazz Performance in Summer 2024.
Updated by Kayla MacInnis in November 2025. Kayla is an MA student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant with The People and the Text.
Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca regarding any comments or corrections at dhr@sfu.ca.