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Kim O’Bomsawin is getting married Saturday, so spending six hours Thursday evening talking cultural appropriation with Robert Lepage was not part of her original plans for the week.

But she could hardly say no after signing the open letter by members of Quebec’s indigenous communities and their allies questioning the absence of indigenous actors in the Quebec theatre luminary’s upcoming play Kanata, and then being invited along with more than 30 of her peers to take part in a discussion with Lepage and his collaborator, Ariane Mnouchkine of France’s Théâtre du Soleil.

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“I thought, ‘Maybe with the experience I have, I can talk some sense into (Lepage), to make him see what it represents on a human scale — the pain of people’,” said the Abenaki filmmaker, whose recent documentary, Ce silence qui tue, looks at missing and murdered indigenous women. “Is it really necessary (to exclude indigenous actors), in the name of art? Sure you have the right, but is it really necessary?”