Night Raiders was one of my favourite movies of 2021. I am sure that the first trailer that I saw involved Cree language being spoken while panning over trees. That early trailer is apparently nowhere to be found, but here is the official trailer.
Taika Waititi was one of the executive producers. I loved his other movies like What we do in the shadows and Thor: Ragnarok. I thought that Hunt for the Wilderpeople was an extremely endearing coming of age film. And according to this film review, it's also a colonial critique of the judicial system.
I'm less familiar with Danis Goulet's work. She is the director for Night raiders. According to IMDb she has a project that will be released on Netlfix soon so keep an eye out for that.
Summary
Night raiders (2021) is a dystopian film written and directed by Danis Goulet (Cree-Métis). The film begins with a Cree voiceover with English text on the screen:
We knew that they would come for us. Like they always had before. We tried to warn the others that they would come for them too. Because we knew how far they would go. Four years ago, I was fasting in the bush. I saw that a swarm of giant mosquitos would be coming for us. I also saw that a person, a guardian, would come from the north to help us. We heard stories about this place called Bigstone. We thought this person could lead us there.
The first scene shows a pre-teen girl, Waseese who is poised to hit a bird with a slingshot. However, instead of killing the bird, she begins whispering to the bird in Cree. The bird flies away and her mother, Niska, asks her why she didn’t kill the bird. Waseese says she was listening to it, and Niska says "that won’t get us fed". Shortly after, Waseese is walking through the forest and looking up into the sky and she steps into a bear trap. Niska frees her from the trap but is unable to provide her with medical care. So, they leave the bush and go to an urban centre where Waseese is captured by The Regime and forced to go into the military academy so that she can train to serve The Regime. Through Niska, we learn that children who go into the academies never come home.
Waseese excels in the academy. Meanwhile, Niska meets up with a camp of Indigenous resisters who smuggle children out of the academy. They agree to help rescue Waseese on the condition that Niska lead them and the children up north to a rumoured place of sanctuary. The escape is successful. However, when they return to the camp it is under attack by the military. The resisters fight back. Waseese asks “can’t you hear that?” and covers her ears. The sky fills with military drones. Waseese walks into the middle of the battlefield, holds her hand out, and begins speaking the phrase she used when speaking to the birds. She engages the assistance of the drones to chase the military away. A sniper tries to shoot Waseese, but Niska steps in front of the bullet to save her. Niska asks “how did you do that?” but Waseese does not tell her. Instead, they hold each other. The movie concludes with a Cree voiceover and English text:
It was her mother that brought her to us. All the way down from the north. She came back to her people to protect us on that day. We call her the guardian.
Reflection
The most powerful moment for me in this film was when Waseese talked to the drones. At first, I thought that the thing that had been immediately revealed to me was that sometimes the next generation does things that seem to make no sense. We can support them, encourage them, and guide them. But we also have to be open hearted and trust them. If we trust them, they might surprise us by knowing and doing things beyond our comprehension. I meditated on this initial revelation. Waseese’s action moved me in a way that was celebratory, yes. But the moment also provoked a sadness and melancholy that was more difficult to decipher.
I related most to the character of Niska, the mother. She was trying her best, yet, due to circumstances, she was always on the edge of survival. She had found a strategy for sparing Waseese from suffering. And she was teaching Waseese about how to survive in the world. But then Waseese endangered them both through her carelessness, looking at the birds instead of paying attention to where she was walking. Niska was so focused on their survival that she didn’t really explore why Waseese was talking to the birds. She didn’t really understand, but she also didn’t scold her for being careless or discourage her from talking to birds. And it turns out that it was good that she didn’t discourage her from looking up and talking to birds, because it unexpectedly came in helpful later in the story. Thus, the second layer of what was revealed was that sometimes the actions of the next generation make no sense because our own generational wounds cloud our ability to see their gifts. Hence the emphasis on being open-hearted and trusting the next generation, even if we don’t totally understand what they are doing. When Waseese stepped into the middle of conflict, it must have been frightening for Niska. However, if she had intervened and removed Waseese from the clearing, the story would have not have ended with Waseese being a hero. When I think about the story from the perspective of Niska, I feel inspired to support the younger generations in my family to pursue whatever goals that they desire, even if they are not goals that I would choose for myself. Likewise, as a professional, when people who are new to education enter the workforce with enthusiastic new ideas, I can try to keep an open mind.
When I think of Waseese, I am inspired by the degree that she had self trust. She persists in talking to birds, even though she is not actively encouraged to talk to birds. Likely in her culture there are no traditional teachings on how to talk to drones, and yet, she figured out how to transfer her knowledge of talking to birds into the new context of talking to drones. She acted on her intuition regarding the right thing to do in the moment. She did not wait for permission or approval. She trusted her language and she believed in herself. May we all be so brave when encountering novel hardships.
Works Cited
Goulet, D. (2021). Night raiders [Film]. Alcina Pictures, Eagle Vision, Miss Concepion Films & Uno Bravo.
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