Discovering the power of theatre 

As the last act wrapped, Fiona Donnelly-Rheaume looked around the great hall of First Peoples House with tears in her eyes. “I still get choked up thinking about it,” she says, “Elder Vic Underwood, a residential school survivor, addressed the settler children as if no one else was in the room and thanked them for caring.”

As her final project in her applied theatre degree Fiona, under the mentorship of professor Phil Duchene, worked with Royal Oak Middle School students to perform the play No Stepping Back, during UVic’s IdeaFest. The play, written by  Dr. Warwick Dobson and Phil Duchene, aims to address the complex history of residential schools and their catastrophic effects on Indigenous communities, families and individuals.

“Seeing kids act out what happened at residential schools made the suffering and pain that Indigenous youth endured more real,” Fiona says.

Fiona's passion and hard work on projects like No Stepping Back didn’t go unnoticed. Her professors nominated her for the Muriel Conway Memorial Scholarship.

“Receiving donor support not only took some pressure off my family financially," Fiona explains, "It meant someone saw promise in me, and I can only hope to live up to that promise.”