Indigenous Literary Studies Association, Sk+te'kmujue'katik At the Place of Ghosts

The Indigenous Literary Studies Association met at UBC last month. The full program is here. It was great to see Daniel Heath Justice, Tenille Campbell, and Deana Reder. The event was structured in a way where we had a lot of opportunities to talk to each other so I was able to meet new people too such as Alexa Manuel. 

This is the first time that I was able to attend the Indigenous Literary Studies Association's Annual Gathering. I really enjoyed the experience of being in a room with people who also love Indigenous literature. They told me next year it is in Eastern Canada. I do not like time changes so I'm not sure whether or not I will go. But I will definitely keep an eye out for future events in Western Canada. 

I presented as part of a panel on The Future of Indigenous Literary Ethics. My contribution was Dystopian Dreaming: Indigenous Speculative Fiction as a Pedagogical Technique and my speaking notes are below. I hope to turn my presentation into a paper someday. My mom also came which was awesome. 

After we were done at the conference, my mom and I went with my dad to Jericho for lunch. It was a beautiful day. 

Last month I also did a panel presentation on Centering, Celebrating, and Supporting Indigenous Workers which you can read about here. The event was at McMaster in Ontario. When I leave Vancouver for a few days and come back, I like to do something Vancouver-y to shift my mind and reconnect me to this place. In this case, my Vancouver reconnect strategy was to go to a movie at International Village. I'm not sure why, but International Village often shows Indigenous movies which are not playing elsewhere. I think of it as the unofficial home of Indigenous film in Vancouver. I like it because it's easy to get to by transit. And Pappa Roti is just around the corner,.  

I didn't know anything about At the Place of Ghosts Sk+te'kmujue'katik before I went. The poster looked interesting and I like to keep up on Indigenous cinema so when I saw the poster I knew I had to see it. 

The first part of the show establishes the main character (Mise’l) working in this city. He suffers some kind of skin ailment and has an interaction with a malicious ghost. He tells his boyfriend he has to go home and his boyfriend wants to come to meet his brother but he says no. 

He goes home and his brother lives there. His brother has a daughter and lives with their aunt. Mise’l gets a cold reception from Antle when he arrives. Really, this sibling disconnect is the heart of the horror. The ghosts are the backdrop to this central tension. 

Mise'l tells Antle they have to go to the cave because a developer is going to develop that area of the forest. Antle says he does not want to go. But Antle is also suffering from the skin condition and his daughter almost gets drawn into the forest by the malicious ghost. 

They meet with an advisor before they go. They pack a canoe and begin to travel up the river but an incident causes a canoe crash and then there is a giant wolf and they barely escape with their lives and have few supplies. 

Mise'l is gathering firewood and he returns to their fire. We see Antle's face and it has an expression on it which is confusing to read. He is looking straight ahead at something and it's hard to know what it is because we as an audience can't see it. Then we get Mise'l's facial expression when looking at what Antle is looking at, and it too is an expression of shock. Misel sits down beside Antle, and across from them are two boys. One of the boys hands over half a sandwich, and one of them accepts it and begins to eat. They eat in silence, looking at each other. 

Maybe it was the time change, but this scene wrecked me. Probably because its called the place of ghosts and so here we have these youth who are ghosts. Even though they are young, they are taking care of Misel and Antle. But there is also something in the air which is vulnerable. When Antle opens the door for Mise'l earlier in the movie, he is so hard towards him. But now, they are on this joint quest and sharing this strange experience of eating ghost sandwiches after a canoe-wreck. I think that maybe this scene moved me because it was such an accurate emotional representation of fighting with a sibling while also being eternally connected to one's sibling. 

The scene was slow and careful. It was laden with some kind of subtle and disturbing grief, yet also incredibly tender. If you are watching this movie and this scene moves you, you will find the rest of the movie gripping. If this scene does nothing for you, you might not enjoy the rest of the movie as much as I did. 

It turns out (massive spoilers ahead and trigger warning for child abuse) these two ghost youth are Mise'l and Antle when they were younger. Through flashbacks we learn that when they were younger, their father was very abusive. Their body language in these scenes communicates overwhelming sadness. I think it was Mise'l's stepfather (but I can't really remember and I don't take notes at the movies). Antle is younger. Mise'l suffers particular cruelty. There is a scene where the father drives the boys to a field. He tells them to get out of the truck. He sets up a target. He has a gun. He tells Mise's to stand in front of the target. And then he gives the gun to Antle and tells him to shoot. The terror the boys are experiencing is palatable. Antle hesitates and there is a sense that both of the boys are in danger. Antle accidently shoots the father. Mise'l tells him it's not his fault. They wash up in a creek. And then they drop the body in an underground cave.

Later in the movie, they talk about why they became estranged as adults. Both of them carry guilt, one thinking that when the other looks at him, he makes him sad and the other thinking that his presence causes guilt. As youth, they saved each other. But they could not process the painful event that they had to go through in order to save each other, so they became estranged. But even in their estrangement, each was trying to save the other by drifting away. In the process of going and finding this body and putting it in a lake (I think one of the ghosts told them that they had to put the body in a lake but I don't remember why) they reconcile with each other and make peace with their past. 

There were a lot of cool elements of the show that I am skipping past here, including a futuristic forest house, time travel, colonial warfare, and a giant wolf. For me, sibling estrangement was the horror, and sibling reconnection was the thing I was waiting for. I don't think I have ever seen such an emotionally intense portrayal of sibling love on screen. I could not have expected that this would be such a ride. It was novel and well done. 

This movie is also visually beautiful. I'm glad I saw it on the big screen. The film did a good job of transporting us to this magical forest. 

After I got home I wanted to sort of stay in the movie for a bit longer, so I listened to some podcasts.

• Grave Tone, a horror podcast, did an excellent job of reviewing the film while also providing some context about some of the underlying themes in the movie. The episode is 51 minutes long and is a great deep dive if you have time for a deep dive. 
• The Queer Gaze did a shorter 14 minute episode which is also a great listen. They review At the Place of Ghosts and also recommend a Māori horror called Mārama. Mārama is not playing near me and is not available to watch at home yet, but I put an alert on my phone so that I will know when it is available to watch at home. 

 

Night raiders - Taming drones and toppling dystopia through Indigenous knowledge and innovation

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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