Randy Plain Eagle always felt he was different. He liked playing with Barbies and with the girls, rather than doing what the other boys did, and the bullying that followed taught him to hide.
“It really affected me,” he says, “I didn’t want to be seen.”
So he started skipping school.
By the time he reached Piikani Nation Secondary School, he longed to be seen and dreamed of acting. The school learned he hoped to perform and brought in Trickster Theatre, which built a production for the whole school about Randy setting out on a vision quest.
It was his first time working with lights, choreography, sound and other performers. When it ended, the audience stood and applauded, and afterward, people came to Randy’s part-time workplace to tell him how great he’d been in the show.
“This is what I’m meant to do,” he remembers thinking. In those moments Randy experienced the validation he didn’t feel growing up.
He is now 33 and an artist building a career with Justin Many Fingers, his partner in life and work. September has barely given Randy room to breathe, but he is revelling in it all.
On Sept. 2 he started his second year of arts and cultural management studies at MacEwan University, taking a full course load, and on Sept. 18 made his runway debut at the Indigenous Fashion Show at Casa in Lethbridge.
The next day, he and Justin spoke at Lethbridge Public Library’s Word on the Street festival about the Niitoyis Method, a Blackfoot approach to creating theatre that Justin developed, modelled on the structure of the teepee, and how it shaped Randy’s one-person show Sugar.
Last Friday the pair were busy helping with the Drum Grid choreography that moved drummers and powwow dancers around Fort Macleod’s main street.
All of this followed Aug. 31, when Sugar, Randy’s show about addiction, survival and recovery, was presented at Piikani Nation for International Overdose Awareness Day.
Randy has big plans and getting this far took him across the country and back.
Leaving home
Randy grew up one of eight children raised by a single mother, with a few early years in Pincher Creek before the family moved back to Brocket. Like many Indigenous families, his carried intergenerational trauma, including addiction and children being removed from their homes. Randy saw that cycle repeat in his own childhood.
“When I was about 16, I finally started to walk into my own confidence, but I was still trying to figure out who I was as a person and as a young, Blackfoot man,” Randy says. “I was by myself.”
Around that time, the late Troy Emery Twigg brought a performance workshop to Brocket. Troy was a Kainai dancer, choreographer and director who taught across the country, including at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre.
Randy shared his desire to perform with Troy, who told him about “this really cool opportunity out in Toronto.” Finishing high school and the Trickster performance came first, but the teenager now had a goal and was set on making a name for himself.
He spent weekends drinking and hanging out with friends.
“I’d drink all weekend, go home, wake up, go back to school,” Randy says. “I was managing it and just being a teenager, so at the time it wasn’t a problem.”
He was serious enough about acting to round up letters of support, look for funding and get a plan together. Randy’s mom and sister dropped him at the Greyhound depot in Fort Macleod, and 63 hours later he landed in Toronto.
Randy’s journey at CIT taught him to act, find his voice and create performances through an Indigenous lens. Ironically, it was also where he first met Justin, though the two came from neighbouring reserves.
There was a dark side to Randy’s time in Toronto and he discovered city life was fast and chaotic. It became a balancing act between school and the party, with him struggling to stay afloat.
“At that time I was still very much in the closet, not really stepping into who I am and what my identity is,” Randy says.
Along with the other challenges, he was young and naive, and navigating being a Two Spirit person.
After graduating, Randy hung onto the party lifestyle.
“That would be OK on Friday but by Sunday, I was just so damn depressed and questioning everything I’m doing,” he says. “Why am I here? I’m so lonely. I feel so disconnected, I feel so lost.”
He was 23, “and up until then it was trauma after trauma after trauma.”
It was time to make the bus trip home to Alberta.
The long way back
Randy went to Calgary, where he hoped to put his experience and skills to work. He researched companies and did some workshops, but found himself still drinking and partying. Nothing had changed except being introduced to meth.
“I was in a new environment doing the exact same shit,” he says.
After a performance in Brocket, Randy and his friends celebrated with drinks as he’d learned was the norm in the Toronto arts scene.
“It’s not normal for native people,” Randy says. “That’s not how we celebrate.”
But it’s what they did, and it led to a crash in Calgary when the driver, who had been drinking, hit a pole. Randy almost lost his life. His leg was badly cut through ligaments and tendons, and doctors said he might not walk again. It was devastating news for the young man who loved to dance and move.
“That’s what made me feel free and so that fear of not being able to do that again was very frightening, but then I was introduced to morphine for pain management,” Randy says.
He found it numbed more than his leg. For a while, the emotional pain he’d been carrying went quiet and he felt almost “normal.”
He missed an audition, but when he heard the director was leading a workshop in Pincher Creek, he went to find her. She asked whether he’d be healed by summer and when he said yes, she hired him.
He was one of only four Indigenous performers cast in the 2017 production of The Dream Catchers, a Canada 150 show that toured coast to coast. He says it gifted him the hoop dance but it also brought him face to face with Canada’s history with Indigenous people, and the road was lonely.
“You just felt all of the weight of the oppression and I think that was when I first learned of the bad, bad history that Canada has with my people,” he says. “I just became really bitter on that project. Every time we finished the show I drank.”
When the tour ended, Randy had a layover in Calgary and chose to stay rather than continue to Lethbridge. That choice, he says, is where the cycle of addiction began to snowball.
He worked for independent theatre companies for a time but, as his addiction deepened, Randy lost his housing and cycled through detox and relapse.
After about five years in the city, Randy went missing. His family and community members went to Calgary to search for him, plastering posters everywhere.
“When I realized my face was on almost every pole, I realized that I was loved and that my family was there looking for me and trying to take me home. That was the moment when I started to try,” Randy says.
“Recovery is not a straight-and-narrow path. For me it’s always getting back up and keeping trying.”
Randy needed to get sober for himself and for his family. In 2022, he went through detox and about 60 days in the pre-treatment program at Inii House on Piikani Nation, then treatment in Medicine Hat. He has been sober since 2023.
It was time to go home.
‘You have a story’
Randy and Justin also reconnected in 2022. After a family dinner, where Randy’s mother told Justin what Randy was like when he came home, Justin said, “Randy, you have a story.”
He wasn’t ready to tell it yet.
“There was guilt and shame in my body,” Randy says.
Justin reminded him the story was a gift that could help people. Randy asked himself how he could use what he’d lived through and learned, and started to write.
A professional development grant took him to Decidedly Jazz Danceworks in Calgary, a company he had researched years earlier and written off as out of reach. He was invited as an artist in residence and Sugar was developed there.
The Canada Council for the Arts funded its research and creation in March, and it played the Ignite! Festival in Calgary this spring.
Then Randy brought it home.
He spent the summer in a student position with Aakom-Kiyii Health Services and Akoka’tssini Mental Wellness, and together they built the Aug. 31 gathering to honour loved ones lost to addiction, and offer support and wellness information to everyone who came.
The show opens gently, with a grandmother telling her grandchildren a bedtime story about the Niitsitapi, the real people. Then Napi, the Blackfoot trickster, steps in and hands candy out to the audience, promising a sweet story with a warning attached.
“There’s always a cure for too much sugar,” he tells them, “and that, my friends, is more sugar!”
Randy plays every role. There is Sister Bear, who shares the boy’s childhood and later leads him into the city’s nightlife; Kitty, a street-smart booster who turns shoplifting into an art form; Danny, whose sweetness is its own kind of danger; and the Candyman, who runs downtown. On the street, the boy goes by Shugs. Sugar itself gets a voice too, promising confidence and belonging to anyone lonely enough to listen.
There is the mother, searching for her missing son, walking the back alleys and visiting shelters with posters and desperate hope until someone on the street says they know him. When the young man is close to dying, the spirit of a grandmother, wearing his mother’s face, turns him back, saying “Family is medicine.”
The show doesn’t gloss over drug use, overdose or the sickness of withdrawal, but it also has humorous moments and ends with a joyful dance.
Sugar is not an exact retelling of Randy’s story but draws on his life and people he met along the way.
Justin says a powerful moment came in the talk-back afterward, when a woman said her daughter has struggled with addiction for years and that she finally understood her after seeing the show.
That’s the point. “To have people feel something and work through it, and remind them that they’re not alone and that hope is possible, no matter how hard you struggle,” Randy says.
Justin Many Fingers joins Randy Plain Eagle for the talk-back after the performance of Sugar.
Submitted photo
Coming home
Randy made the dean’s list in his first year at MacEwan, where he studies online to learn the business side of running an arts company. His versatility as a performer and speaker is opening opportunities for him to give back to the community through Plain Eagle Productions.
Justin completed a master of fine arts degree at the University of Calgary this year, with research on Blackfoot knowledge and performance. In Blackfoot, he says, there is no single word for “artist” because art has always lived inside ceremony, song, story and design.
Coming home was deliberate.
“All of our stories come from here,” Justin says, and Drum Grid showed what that can look like.
Maria Crowshoe started the A’sitapiiksi Powwow Club in June because her grandson wanted to learn to dance. She saw Randy’s posters and asked him to teach the young dancers confidence and performance skills. He ended up choreographing and brought Justin in.
It was challenging to carry the spirit of powwow, which is celebration rather than performance, into a staged show, but they figured it out. Justin also says the setting mattered. Fort Macleod is where rations were handed out after the buffalo were gone and seeing young dancers celebrate on its main street felt like hope.
Randy and Justin are developing two versions of Sugar. One will be a full theatre production and the other a touring version suitable for schools, treatment centres and conferences. This includes creating a plan for audience members who need support and protecting the actor himself.
Other work is underway, including a Napi creation story, speaking engagements, a Treaty 7 anniversary project and “Two Directions,” a movement duet exploring Blackfoot understandings of Two Spirit identity. They also want to build an arts network that brings other nations’ shows to southern Alberta and takes theirs on the road.
The boy who once skipped school, so no one would see him, now stands on stage asking audiences to see one another and trust that anyone can find their way home.
If this story raises concerns for you or someone you love, Alberta’s 24-hour Addiction Helpline is 1-866-332-2322 and the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people is 1-855-242-3310. Aakom-Kiyii Health Services can be reached at 403-965-3919.
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