Songs in the Key of Cree, Deer Woman and Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, three shows by Canada’s indigenous artists, are presented at the Edinburgh festival

This summer, Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls revealed “staggering” rates of violence and lay the blame at “persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses”. For decades, indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing and, for decades, the problem has been ignored.

The scandal is shocking in its own terms, but for many of those affected, it stands for an even broader malaise. They see the abuse as an expression of colonialism and link it not only to the excesses of capitalism but also the resultant climate emergency; all are about taking what doesn’t belong to you.

These are themes that repeatedly bubble to the surface in Indigenous Contemporary Scene, a series of shows in the Edinburgh international festival and fringe. Even in Tomson Highway’s jolly cabaret, Songs in the Key of Cree (★★★☆☆), which takes its influences everywhere from Greek myth to the music-theatre of Cole Porter, the temperature suddenly changes when the extraordinary Patricia Cano sings an impassioned number about Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree woman who died after being stabbed 50 times with a screwdriver in 1971. Beneath the bouncy Broadway rhythms, infused with jazz-inflected saxophone, lies a raw wound.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A play born of defiance and hurt … Cherish Violet Blood in Deer Woman. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

“White guys taking whatever they want,” is the motivating factor in Deer Woman (★★☆☆☆), a monologue by Tara Beagan about a Blackfoot woman’s revenge on a suspect male for the loss of her sister. Having enlisted in the military, she ensures she has the skills to complete the job properly – and gruesomely.

Beagan appears to be responding to Colleen Murphy’s Pig Girl, a play about a serial murderer, which drew criticism on its inaugural production in 2013 because neither the writer nor the performer was indigenous. In Deer Woman, actor Cherish Violet Blood satirises white liberal theatregoers for their willingness to be moved by a play (unnamed) that, to her, is not a true expression of lived experience. From the seemingly benign to the unquestionably brutal, Beagan asks us to draw parallels between all manifestations of colonialism.

This is incendiary stuff, but a play born of defiance and hurt is disappointingly flat in execution. What sharpness the cause-and-effect narrative might have had is blunted by a meandering storyline, little of which seems to be what a woman recording her last confession in a straight-to-camera monologue would say. In a tonally uncertain production, the act of revenge seems gratuitous instead of cathartic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Personal and political … Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Altogether more assured is Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools (★★★★☆), a fertile meeting of minds from north and south, as Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory of Nunavut’s Qaggiavuut Society shares perspectives with Evalyn Parry of Toronto’s queer theatre company Buddies in Bad Times. In a performance somewhere between cabaret, ceilidh, gig and theatrical poem, they mix the personal and the political in what Bathory calls a “story about resistance”.

Melding western folk songs and Inuit poetry, they create an impressionistic vision of a vast northern landscape, realised by Elysha Poirier in icy images on the big screens behind them and accompanied by Cris Derksen’s echoing cello. Taking a freeform approach to history and geography, they range widely and fluidly. The cultural expression of uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance, gives way to the political (“all these desperate white men nullifying the land in the name of capitalism”) in a rich, thoughtful and impassioned fusion.