In today’s modern world, platforms such as the entertainment industry attempt to portray an image of history that they claim to have built on the truth. The truth is that for hundreds of years individuals have cherry-picked the parts of history that they approve of and presented them as facts. Today, the world is presented with limited historical data that does not come close to featuring the truly vast and complicated history of human civilization. Barker, Hanratty, Leuchter and Mand’s The Speedy attempts to cast a shadow of doubt on the general understanding of today’s world on important historical concepts. In The Speedy, ropes are portrayed as a metaphor portraying the structure of history, because the past is made up of the stories and …show more content…
The names of these individuals cannot be found in textbooks. The retelling of history is usually focused around a selected few. People who had an important standing and who were the victors of the cruel game of history. Historians only tell the story of ‘important’ characters in a particular event. In the The Speedy, a simple Google search helped described the way in which historians decided to tell the story of Ogetonicut: “Ogetonicut, drunk like a skunk, boasted that he had killed a white man to revenge his brother’s blood.”(Barker, Hanratty, Leuchter, Mand 24). Historians will never spend much time on Ogetonicut or his side of the story as an essential participant in the murder trial. Unfortunately, he will always be remembered as a drunken murderer while a character like Hunter will have books and plaques dedicated to him. As the play describes: “Of course, with Hunter, there are documents, quotes, pictures. It’s harder with someone like Ogetonicut. There is not much out there.” (Barker, Hanratty, Leuchter, Mand 24). In the metaphorical rope portrayed in the play, Hunter is a bigger and stronger strand than Ogetonicut therefore his story is told in great detail with supporting documents. But without Ogetonicut or the hundreds of thousands of other Aboriginals who were marginalized in the Canadian society, the rope of Canadian history would not be as strong as it is today. Ropes represent the true nature of history in The Speedy. When describing a rope, Keith, one of the characters, states: ”I would think of all the individual pieces of rope that looked all tucked and tangled together to make these huge, thick…I don’t know” (Barker, Hanratty, Leuchter, Mand 12). In describing the characteristics of a rope, Keith realizes the importance of the role that each