Inconvenient Indian started out on an amazing path. The film debuted at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, where the film won Best Canadian Feature Film and the People's Choice Award: Documentaries. Inconvenient Indian was headed to the Sundance Film Festival.
The rest of the Michelle Latimer saga is rather common knowledge. The question was whether this film would be locked away forever or have a chance, with a significant context, to be shown. Crave had the film on its schedule in late January this year but was yanked off the schedule.
APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) showed the film on April 8. Let's get down to what is in this film.
Thomas King, author of The Inconvenient Indian, provides the narration. Gail Maurice is dressed as the Coyote who drives King around downtown Toronto, especially on Yonge Street, and to the Fox Theatre on Queen Street East. King tells the story throughout about the coyote and ducks, how the coyote keeps coming back for more feathers.
The first part of the film examines the perception of Indigenous people while the second half of the film is more of uplifting positive stories about Indigenous people today. Often, documentaries suffer from the "everything is horrible" syndrome without discussing solutions.
Watching Indigenous people create video games where people who look like them thrive in a virtual world was exhilarating to watch. Learning to fish at camps so Indigenous people can connect to the land. Simple yet beautiful.
The people with interesting stories aren't identified during the film. You can sort of figure them out in the credits but you wanted to know who they were in the moment. Latimer also loses the King narration during this part of the film.
Turtle Island is mentioned in the film but that seems to apply to North America in the sense of an island, so not the island in Lake Erie controlled by Michigan and Ohio.
Latimer really focuses with time and music in slow-motion waves on key disturbing moments such as whacking a seal's head to make sure the seal is dead in a seal hunt to protesters resisting the force from police officers.
Latimer uses the juxtaposition of an Indigenous girl being pulled away from Kent Monkman's painting The Scream, which shows Royal Canadian Mounted Police taking a young Indigenous child from the parents.
The story is told well in a way that even the casual viewer wants to learn more. The content has reverence for what Indigenous people have gone through and the hope they have now for things to be better.
The coyote and ducks story within the story is a great way for people to understand how Indigenous people have been treated so poorly.
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If you saw Inconvenient Indian during the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, you might have wanted the film to reach a larger audience. The question is what will happen to this film and the message behind the film.
Outside of the context with Latimer, this is the kind of film you want to show in schools in Canada and the United States. Okay, the seal scenes might not go over well. The film's content could be a great educational tool.
The National Film Board of Canada said the film will be made available for educational and community screenings in the fall along with "supplementary material created to encourage reflection and discussion."
We think this film has serious merit and a great message to get out to people.
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My response to the CBC exposé written by @Kanhehsiio & @JorgeBarrera about Michelle Latimer’s Indigenous ancestry: pic.twitter.com/V3xAanCQuL
— Devery Jacobs (@kdeveryjacobs) December 18, 2020
"Once a story is told, it can not be called back," King said early in the film. King was speaking about history, which is a bunch of stories. This is also true about the film itself. Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs gave an eloquent comparison of being Indigenous and having Indigenous ancestry.
As we've noted on numerous occasions, we don't have the authority on these issues. Our concern is whether the final product — Inconvenient Indian and Trickster — has value that adds to telling Indigenous stories, even if directed by someone who isn't a part of the community.
Bruce McDonald did a documentary called Claire's Hat based on the troubles of making Picture Claire, which we reviewed. We humbly suggest someone in the community do a documentary on the making of Inconvenient Indian and Trickster to explain the concerns. Then have that same person be the showrunner for a Season 2 of Trickster.
We know the latter will not happen but the documentary would be useful in the ongoing conversation.
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You can find out more about the film from APTN. FNX is a channel in the United States that shows some APTN programming in select markets.
Inconvenient Indian is available in Canada for streaming on APTN lumi.
video credits: APTN; TIFF
photo credit: Inconvenient Indian film
Twitter capture: @kdeveryjacobs
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