MONTREAL — After the closure of his polarizing show featuring white actors as black slaves, the renowned Quebec theater director Robert Lepage is facing a new backlash over the failure to cast Canadian Indigenous people in a coming production chronicling their historic suffering.

In recent weeks, the Canadian theater world has been embroiled in a vociferous debate over cultural appropriation after “Slav,” an odyssey about black slave music by Mr. LePage and starring the singer Betty Bonifassi, was shuttered at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. The closure this month followed an outcry that having a majority white cast portraying black slaves was insensitive and minimized black suffering.

Now, about 30 people, led by Indigenous artists, writers and activists, have lashed out at his new production, “Kanata,” which recounts aspects of Indigenuous Canadians’ subjugation by white people. It features 34 actors, none of whom are Indigenous Canadians. In an open letter published this weekend in Le Devoir, a leading French-language newspaper, the signatories lamented that the production was abetting the lack of Indigenous faces and voices in the cultural arena.

“Our invisibility in the public space, on the stage, doesn’t help us,” they wrote, noting that they were not interested in censorship. Alluding to “Slav,” they lamented that Mr. Lepage appeared to be repeating recent history and that they were fed up “hearing other people tell our stories.”