Adam Beach, Thomson Highway and Cherie Dimaline have taught me more about the Indigenous experience in Canada than any news story or university course ever could.
Indigenous actors, playwrights and authors and the arts, entertainment and cultural products they produce are my preferred route into complex and challenging concepts of racism, colonialism and my role in speeding Canada’s transition to a more just and sustainable nation.
Now I can add Metis filmmaker Marie Clements to my list of favoured teachers.
Her new film Bones of Crows opened across Canada last Friday.
Every Canadian needs to see this film.
I felt that when I attended the world premiere with my mom at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last September.
It’s what my friend Michelle told me after seeing it a few weeks later at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
And it is what my husband Michael said after watching the press screening with me last week.
That was all any of us said because as the credits rolled, we couldn’t quite articulate how we felt after viewing what Clements described as her attempt to tell the Canadian equivalent of Alex Haley’s Roots.
Mission accomplished.
Bones of Crows is a film of painful beauty, an epic, multi-generational story centred around Cree woman Aline Spears, from her childhood on the Prairies to octogenarian matriarch living in Toronto.
It is an Indigenous story centred on Indigenous life, told by Indigenous creators.
There is only a handful of speaking parts for white folks in this film, all but one an employee of a powerful Canadian institution that commands and attempts to control the lives of Aline, her family and her friends to devastating results.
Yes, Bones of Crows tells the story of institutionalized racism and trauma via residential schools, the Canadian military, the Canadian justice system and Canadian citizens’ ignorance and everyday racism.
However, despite the abuse, broken promises and racism, white folks sit on the periphery of this story.
This film is about how Indigenous people have survived and continue to move forward.
And if Clements had stopped there, Bones of Crows would have been a good film of Indigenous resistance, but Clements has an artist’s eye, and we are the better for it.
She does what great artists do; she tells a very specific story via universal elements so we can relate to people and situations that are not our own.
Bones of Crows is not a linear story. Instead, it jumps back and forth in time, opening in Montreal on the day of Aline’s wedding to handsome Adam Whallach during the Second World War, taking us back to her childhood in Manitoba in the 1930s, then forward to her life in Toronto at the turn of this century.
As we trace Aline’s memories and experiences, Clement employs two powerful storytelling devices to pull us in: colour and mood.
For instance, the Catholic residential school to which Aline and her three siblings are forcibly sent exists in cold blues and greys; its story slowly told piece by painful piece.
In contrast, Aline’s loves are illuminated in gold and sunlight. While the residential school is foreign to us, non-Indigenous viewers, the people who occupy Aline’s heart, match our own: her parents, her siblings, her husband, her children and her granddaughter.
We meet each for the first time through a lens of happiness and love.
There is no foreboding in these scenes, only children playing, singing and sitting down to dinner with their parents – scenes so familiar because we have all lived them ourselves.
The opening scene with Adam is sensual, passionate and hopeful – young love as we have all known it.
Her grown children’s concern and protectiveness of their 80-something mom is recognizable in its normalcy.
Which makes the trauma we witness all that more affecting.
Because Aline, Adam, January, Matthew, Perseverance, Taylor, and Percy are not Indigenous archetypes, they are us in every way but one.
The one constant in my three-decade journalism career has been telling Indigenous stories to non-Indigenous Canadians; Cree and Ojibway in northern Ontario, Mohawks in eastern Ontario, and Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq, and Peskotomuhkati in the Maritimes.
Bones of Crows does in a couple of hours what I and scores of Canadian journalists have never been able to do, despite our best efforts: to help Canadians relate to the Indigenous experience in Canada, human to human.
To feel connection rather than division.
To feel something familiar rather than different.
To see ourselves in someone else’s story.
Go see Bones of Crows. You will feel love and pain, and hopefully, you’ll leave the theatre ready to help and heal.
