Rhymes for Young Ghouls with Jess Murwin: The Re-release

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Speaker 1: On the Bechdelcast.

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Speaker 2: The questions asked if movies have.

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Speaker 3: Women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zeph and best start changing with the Bechdel Cast.

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Speaker 4: Hello Bechdel Cast listeners. Hello, here we are.

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Speaker 1: Bet you didn't expect to hear us today. Well here we are. Well, here we are fake holiday. So we're clocking in.

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Speaker 4: We're clocking in, and we are re releasing an episode on Rhymes fore Young Gruls, which we recorded back in twenty twenty, kind of in the height of lockdown, if I remember correctly.

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Speaker 1: Yes, In fact, the day this episode originally came out, I was arrested at a protest. Just to set us in time and place. I had kind of a fun physical response to revisiting this.

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Speaker 4: Episode, right, yes, oh my gosh. So yeah, we're re releasing this episode on the day that a lot of people still observe as American Thanksgiving, which which these days, I you know. More, it is more widely understood that the popular narrative around this quote unquote holiday is completely false, and that it actually celebrates genocide and settler colonialism.

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Speaker 1: Is very much in conversation with Columbus Day for that same reason.

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Speaker 4: You know, the the.

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Speaker 1: American celebration of genocide that is just really relentless. I agree that, like people are coming around to acknowledging it, but it's.

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Speaker 5: Still you know, it's here, it is, and I.

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Speaker 1: We wanted to both re release an episode that we really love with a guest that you if you're a longtime listener of the show, you're very familiar with Jess Merwin talking about an indigenous film that does not shy away from these themes and is very rooted in Canadian reservation schools. So if you haven't seen the movie yet, this is a great week to maybe watch the movie and then listen to our conversation. But we wanted to just yeah, pop in at the top and make a few notes in about the half decade that's passed.

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Speaker 4: Indeed. Yes, So during this episode we talk about a media metric called the Ala Test that was inspired by the main character of this movie and that was originated by friend of the show, Ali Noddy. Since this episode was released, that test has been renamed to the Ali Naughty Test. So if you're trying to look up the Ala Test or whatever, the name has changed, but it's the same metric that examines representation of Indigenous women in media.

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Speaker 1: So shout out Ali. We love Ali she Rocks.

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Speaker 4: Be sure to check her out on social media her YouTube channel. She's doing excellent work. And then we wanted to provide a content warning because both our discussion and the context of the movie involve things like sexual and physical violence, child sex abuse, suicide, just so listeners are aware of that.

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Speaker 1: Absolutely, and also for what it's worth, Unfortunately, since we recorded this, the filmmaker has passed. Jeff Barnaby passed away a couple of years ago. Yeah, so yeah, definitely. I mean, as you'll hear, it's a movie that we have a lot of love for and also for what it's worth, I mean, we fully intent and would love to hear other Indigenous and Native filmmakers that you would like for us to cover on the show. This is not something that we want to just discuss once a year, and so if you have requests for or just favorite indigenous filmmakers, If you are an Indigenous filmmaker and would like to come on the show, just reach out d m us. That's honestly the easiest way to do it yeah on Instagram, and yes, if you are with family today, best of luck with that. And yeah, and also that we are going to be making a contribution this week to the Native Women's Collection. Will also you know, we can link that in the description as well.

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Speaker 4: Absolutely. In the meantime, please enjoy this slightly abridged version of this episode. I went back through and just edited a little bit and made sure we really focused on the movie at hand and didn't go into tirades about me talking about cat nipples, for example, So that stuff from the original episode has been trimmed out a bit.

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Speaker 1: But but listen to the original if you want the full cut.

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Speaker 4: It's so true. But yeah, enjoy this re released episode on Rhymes for Young Guls cast.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm really excited for today's episode and for our guest.

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Speaker 4: Yes, our guest today is a non binary, mixed race MIGMA artist, curator and educator. Their work focuses on reclaiming narrative space and fusing genre with social justice and holding space collaboration. You also might have heard and seen them on our recent live reading of Twilight. It is Jess Merwin.

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Speaker 2: Hi, Hi, welcome, Thank you for having me. I this is like a dream come true. Quite literally, this is wonderful. I'm so happy to be here.

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Speaker 4: Yay, We're so happy to have you.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I really like can't wait to talk about this, this weird native movie that nobody's heard of.

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Speaker 1: We're really excited to talk about it because it was originally recommended to us by Ali, who spoke about it when Ali came on to discuss Frozen two a couple of months ago podcast. Canonically, I think, what is time? I've lost all.

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Speaker 4: Definitely is it.

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Speaker 1: But yeah, Ali brought this movie to us originally, and we were kind of tipped off about this movie.

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Speaker 6: I guess we should just say the name of the movie. I don't know what we're being No, it's a secret about We were talking, of course, about Rhymes for Young Gules, a Jeff Barnaby movie from twenty and thirteen, and the reason we're talking about it with Ali was first of all, because it's a movie that Ali's a big fan of, but also because it was the basis for the Ala Test, which is the test that Ali created.

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Speaker 4: Yes, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, But first, Jess, what's your relationship with Rhymes for Young Gules?

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Speaker 2: Oh Man so growing up in like the eighties and nineties as a mixed race like Migma kid. So I don't I didn't grow up in Reserve, and I'm Migma through my mother's mother, through my grandmother, and she had been she was orphaned at a very young age, so she didn't really grow up in a like a traditional sort of way in terms of like learning how to do a lot of like traditional Magma things. So, you know, I was growing up with this like identity that was very unresolved in a lot of ways, and I felt like very conflicted about because it's you know, being white passing, but also being like I'm also an indigenous person and didn't really know how I like fit. And on top of that, being queer and being trans and just dealing with like a lot of other stuff meant that I ended up feeling like I couldn't really like claim to anything.

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Speaker 3: You know.

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Speaker 2: It was just sort of like it's it's too much. You can't be queer and native and you know, mentally ill, it's just like too many things. So so when this film came out, I had just been back in Canada for a couple of years because I spent some time living overseas and it was like, we have this expression of trench. It's like a kut food, like a lightning strike, and like we use it a lot, like when you're like fall in love at first sight or when you get like an idea, and it was almost like that for seeing this film. You know, I was in my sort of early twenties and just moved back to Canada or like recent moved back to Canada and was sort of like, oh my god, here's like a film about Migma people with people speaking Magma and it's like the first time that I'm ever seeing this, and all of a sudden it sort of is like this way of starting to reconnect with Magma culture, like all of a sudden sort of like seeing this film and being like, oh my god, there is this part of me that's like that feels something so profound in just like hearing people speak Migma and seeing that represented on the screen. And then and we'll talk about this a little bit, but there was so much other stuff going on in terms of like indigenous rights and Indigenous culture at that time, and so it was like this was really the catalyst for me like reconnecting in a big way to yeah, to to sort of like Migmaness.

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Speaker 4: That's incredible and one of so many examples we see of why representation is so important.

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Speaker 1: It's amazing.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, my relationship with this movie is it was not super on my radar until I knew about.

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Speaker 1: A few months Blood Quantum. I did not know about rhymes for youngl How did you.

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Speaker 2: Know about bood Quantum, Jamie.

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Speaker 4: I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I think it was just I was paying closer attention to movies that were coming out last year than I was in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen. But then when Ali brought up rhymes for young gouls instead of with the same director, I was like, oh and cool. Yeah.

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Speaker 4: I think we did have a couple listeners as well recommend this movie to us, So it's been on our kind of watch list, our list of movies to cover.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for our like horror movies last year in the request it popped up a couple of times, and maybe that was why I was familiar with it.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, but I'm happy to have seen the movie now. I watched it three times. But yeah, I'm so excited to talk about it. Should we dive into the recap? Yeah, let's do it all, right, So we open with text at the beginning describing the law in Canada that states that every Indigenous child between the age of five and sixteen must attend an Indian residential school. There are true ruined officers who more or less police the schools and the community, and who are responsible for bringing into custody more or less any child who is absent from school, and they are allowed to use force to do.

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Speaker 2: That, any force that they see necessary.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, yep, So we're starting off.

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Speaker 1: Chill legal wording that was Yeah, yep.

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Speaker 2: So that's an excerpt from the Indian Act. And we can talk a little bit more about this in terms of like context for the film, because there's a lot to talk about because it's an act that's been around since essentially the beginning of Canada, since confederation in eighteen sixty seven, and it still exists today. So that's cool. But yeah, so that's an actual law that essentially governs all of the federal government's interactions with Indigenous people. So to say it's racist is a little bit of an understatement. And this kind of like opening package that Jeff is chosen here kind of helps like highlight a lot of the issues with the Indian.

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Speaker 1: Act, absolutely, and I feel like we goofy Americans have a tendency to really romanticize Canada as this place of justice that it you know, clearly is not. And so I mean, even just from the beginning frame of the movie, you're just like, yeah, no, we are desperate to feel a way about Canada that is not true.

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Speaker 2: No, no. And it's one of those things too that like, you know, don't get me wrong, we have like legal weed and free healthcare, so pretty you know, things are pretty good. But on the other hand, yeah, we do still have a lot of the systemic racism and discrimination that exists in the United States, and like Canadians are you know, aren't necessarily all like super polite and super for you know, courteous, Like there's I think that we have this sort of angel complex with regards to the rest of the world where we're like, oh, we're perfect, We're not the United States, and it's like.

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Speaker 1: Oh, the bar is on the floor, like.

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Speaker 2: All the Native people in the back are like, m well, I don't know about that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, have you read that law lately?

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Speaker 2: Yeah? Or even just the fact that like since this year there's been like a half dozen high profile killings of Indigenous people, either at the hands of police or at the hands of our medical system. You know that sins like January horrifying.

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Speaker 4: So yeah, So we open on the movie. It is nineteen sixty nine. We are on a fictional reserve called the Red Crow Indian Reservation. We meet a Migma family, including young Ala. She's a little girl who loved to try and she usually draws kind of like morbid horror imagery of like zombies and ghoules and whatnot. She has a little brother, Tyler. We meet her mother, Anna, and her father Joseph, as well as her uncle Berner. They are all drug dealers on the reserve. When then one night, the adults they're all smoking weed, they're drinking heavily, and then a bunch of tragic things happen kind of all at once, where AILA's mother accidentally kills her little brother Tyler in a drunk driving accident, and then her mother kills herself. Her father takes the blame for it and is taken away to prison.

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Speaker 2: So that's put in like the first ten minutes of this movie that we're talking about on a humorous podcast. You know, and it doesn't. I think that there's like a lot of stuff even in that that we should talk about in terms of like pictions of Indians using drugs and being broken. But again, like all of these parentheses are kind of like paragraphs, So it might make more sense to finish with like the plot smur and then get into it because otherwise, yeah, it's like, right, we got things to say.

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Speaker 4: It is so much.

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Speaker 1: It is quite a bit of trauma in I think ninety seconds. Yeah, it all happens very very very quickly.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, and then there continues to be trauma after this. Oh yeah, yes, So we cut to seven years later. It is now the mid seventies. A La played by Davey Jacobs is now a teenager living with her uncle Berner, and we also learned that Berner is kind of a snitch in the community where he kind of rats out his fellow man on the reserve to these white truant officers, the main one of those being this guy named Popper, and Popper comes to collect quote truant taxes, which are basically this family bribing him so that the kids don't have to go to the nearby residential school. And we will also provide a lot of context in our discussion about residential schools and that system, but it's know that it's a place that you don't want to go. So ALA's friends Solo and Angus tell her that Solo had gotten robbed by Stripper and can't pay the truant tax, and Aila realizes that Popper kind of set up this whole thing. And this I might need a little bit of clarification on my kind of assumption, was that Popper did that kind of like orchestrated this whole setup and like robbed them so that they wouldn't be able to pay the bribe so that he could justify sending them to the school.

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Speaker 2: Is that Yeah, I think that's that's sort of the idea. And I think that also has to do with the fact that Joseph is coming out of prison. Like essentially Popper sets up Burner in that first sort of scene where he's like they're at the fish Mitten and he's like, thanks for telling us you're here, so they'll get the shit kicked out of him by guys in the community, so that like Joseph will come home and stay in line, okay, right, And so that's also part of like why Popper would steal their money is because then you know, he can get Scholo and Angus and Aila, you know, scoop them up and take them to the to Saint Demfinas to the residential school. That's sort of again like a way of sort of being like you know, and this will keep Joseph in.

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Speaker 4: Line, got it right, because he gets released from prison. And we also meet Cyrus, a kind of grandmother figure for Aila, and she tells a story about a wolf that's kind of delirious and ends a beautiful animal.

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Speaker 1: Yeah right, but I didn't. I didn't.

00:18:03
Speaker 4: I was.

00:18:03
Speaker 1: I love when I don't see an animated sequence coming and then it hasn't been beautiful. I loved it.

00:18:09
Speaker 4: There's one. There's one like that in Blood Quantum too. That's really cool.

00:18:12
Speaker 1: Oh cool.

00:18:13
Speaker 2: And in both of the cases, like Jeff's using it as a way to sort of like insert some of the like oral tradition and like the way that like our traditional storytelling works and sort of differentiate and distinguish it from the rest of the story.

00:18:32
Speaker 4: Right, you know.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: And it's really interesting because like talking about the animation, I, you know, I also as an animator, like love those sequences, and yeah, I think I think some people sort of when they first saw the movie were like, I don't get it. I don't get why there's like an animated sequence. It's like, nah, you just got to like experience it as part of the film, you know.

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Speaker 4: Like, Yeah, so we hear this story about a wolf that is like kind of ruaming the land. It's delirious and it ends up eating itself, which I'm interested to kind of talk about like thematic implications of that later on. But so Aila decides to steal the money back that got robbed from them, and we also at this around this time, reveal that Aila has now gotten into this drug business ever since her father left for prison, and her dad, Joseph, comes back and is like kind of disappointed, disappointed to learn that Berner let her get into all this. But because she's an artist, she's like a really skilled kind of crafts person of like rolling the joints and like flavoring them and like lacing them and stuff.

00:19:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like, damn, she's cool.

00:19:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's so very cool.

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Speaker 2: It's also she doesn't like one of the things that keeps coming back, like and even one of the things that like in that scene, you know, Berner's like been drinking and smoking and stuff like that. She's like, you can't roll for shit, Like she doesn't. She never, like she doesn't spoke weed. And that's like also part of like that gas mask is like this idea of sort of like yeah, she's she's also sort of like not she's part of this world, but she's not like in that world in the same functioning, in the same way as the people around her.

00:20:15
Speaker 4: She's not gonna be a wolf who eats herself. She's not gonna destroy herself. Yeah. So Ala pitches this plan to her friend's Sholoh and Angus that they break into the nearby residential school Saint Dez is what they like nickname it, and they're gonna steal their money back from Popper. So she orchestrates this heist. She draws a map. There's this little kid, jujij who I think does he attend the school? Yeah, and and he will kind of be theres like the inside man. He's the man on the inside.

00:20:49
Speaker 1: I think he's like ten.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: I don't know what that kid is doing now, but oh my god, what a sweet kid, like I know, a star.

00:20:57
Speaker 4: He always calls a La boss.

00:20:59
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:20:59
Speaker 2: He's like, well, what now, boss, I yeah, and Tuci is like, A, I don't know if that would be like his given name, because that's like a nickname mgma oh okay, which means like like little bug or little thing.

00:21:13
Speaker 1: Ah, I'm as stand yeah.

00:21:18
Speaker 4: So meanwhile, Ala is having some dreams and visions of her dead mother and brother, sometimes as zombies, sometimes not, but this is kind of like a recurring visual motif throughout the film. And then one day Ala is out with her dad and they have this violent run in with Popper and his cronies because Berner sold them out to Popper and let them know about ALA's plan to break into the school. So Popper's like, you wanted to go into the school, fine, now you're you're there. So he sends her there as punishment, but and correct me if I'm mistaken, But it feels like that's kind of part of her plan. She gets sent there on purpose so that she can also kind of be on the inside. Or I might be wrong about that. I'm not totally sure.

00:22:02
Speaker 2: The thing, you know what I've gone over the years, I've gone back and forth on it, honestly. Caitlin like I feel like when I first saw the film, I was like, Oh, this is definitely like like she's improvising, sort of like this wasn't her plan. And I sort of feel like now when I'm seeing it, I'm like, I feel like this was part of her plan in a way, because Jiuji knows to come and let her out of the hole. Uh huh, right, yeah, So like I think that it was her plan, right.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: I was also questioning that because I was like, if if that was her plan? Galaxy brain genius, right, like, because the first time I watched the movie, it didn't even occur to me. But then on the second watch, I was like, wait, she's so smart that it didn't even occur to me that that might have been intentional.

00:22:47
Speaker 2: Right, But I also think that it sort of like speaks to the character that Aila is, and like because I think in a way that she she talks about aging a thousand years, and I think that like after her mother, and I think that there is a certain wisdom in that character that's sort of outpaced with her age, you know, And and like at the end of the film, you know, Joseph says to her, like, you know, I just want you to know, you're a little girl. Yeah, and she's like, I was never a little girl. I think that there is a certain she knows that Berner is gonna crack under pressure and wrap them out, like yeah, and she knows that like there's a there's a chance of that. So I think that she's kind of got some ideas in her head. She knows that they're not supposed to go out on the water. They've been out on the water, you know, so I think that I think it is planned.

00:23:37
Speaker 4: Mm hmmmmm. She also like engages in that fight where she could have just like stood back, and I think maybe, like, oh if she if she's fighting there, that's going to be all the more reason that they might send her to the school. For sure. In any case she gets sent there, they cut her hair off, they put her in solitary confinement.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: That's it. Like that's the scene that still and I've seen this film so many times now throughout the years, I still cry every time I watch that scene. That scene is so hard to watch because they used to do that to people, you know, yeah, and for us, like your hair is really sacred because it's your connection back to like the earth, so I'm tearing up now even talking about it. So like the you know, that was one of the things that they always used to do when the kids were taking to residential schools, as they would cut off their braids. And I was doing this project with a bunch of youth up north here in Quebec, where we were creating this like woven tapestry, and it was all made up of these different like lengths of braid that were woven together into this like five x ten tapestry. And we had this one elder who came and sat with us one day and was like telling us about her residential school experience and was talking about how seeing all these braids woven together was like so powerful to her because and this was not, you know, not something I had really thought about beforehand, but she was talking about how like, you know, you would see all the hair too, like after all the kids had had their haircut off, just like swept to the side, you know, like all these braids like on the ground. So it holds a lot of cultural significance in that way.

00:25:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, that scene was Yeah, that scene was devastating.

00:25:16
Speaker 2: And also if you don't really know whether she planned or not to get sent to Saint Diffin as all of a sudden, You're like, our hero is in this peril. You know, you don't know what's going to happen to her next.

00:25:25
Speaker 4: Right, so it's either like a huge deliberate sacrifice or just her kind of falling victim to these horrible circumstances.

00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:25:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, So while this is happening, her friend's sholo Angus. And then there's another friend of theirs who I'd never caught the name of Maytag. Is that Maytag? Okay? Yeah, so they are prepping for this heist and they go into the school, they break Ala out, they rig up the plumbing so that literal human shit comes out when Papper turns on the shower, which satisfying.

00:26:07
Speaker 6: Yeah, so satisfying, really good stuff, and like a whole bunch of like male full frontal nudity.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: Not that it was like you were wanting it, that's sailing, but it's like this independent Canadian film where you get to see like a whole lot of dick there.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: Like to see a little bit of shit raining on full frontal nudity.

00:26:31
Speaker 4: Right, You're just like you deserve this.

00:26:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's just at the lowest moment in that moment and you're just like, ah, so.

00:26:40
Speaker 4: Good that's been.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: That's been kind of a I feel like a discussion that's been picking up in the last couple of years of like how rare male nudity is shown period, and then on top of that, when it is shown, like the way it shown is never humiliating, which whatever speaks to who making most movies. But it was that's true, right, very satisfying to see him humiliated in such a like primal way.

00:27:08
Speaker 2: I don't know, yeah, oh totally, and especially because you you've sort of spent the entire movie up to this point just watching him and his goons kick the shit at everybody, you know, and it's like I remember seeing this. So when I originally saw this film, I saw it at a festival, and at that point the film when Hopper's like lying on the bathroom floor covered in shit just like I'm gonna get you people that the audience were like cheering. It was amazing, you know, it was like the end of Get Out. People were like full on like being like yeah.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, yeah, this would have been a cool movie to see in theaters. Yeah, god damn it.

00:27:49
Speaker 2: It was. It got a really limited release. So I was fortuned to see end a festival. But we'll talk about that. That's that's also something we need to like, Yeah, I think people need to think about sometime for sure.

00:28:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. So he's covered in shit. Meanwhile, they steal the money out of his safe and run away. They get away with I think twenty thousand dollars. But when Aila gets back home, she finds out that her grandmother, Sarahs, has been killed by Popper's thugs. And then when Popper comes for Aila, he beats her. He's about to rape her, but then little Jujij shows up with a gun and another very cathartic moment blows Popper's head off. AILA's father takes the fall for it again. He gets carted off to prison again, and then the story ends with a it is that a family friend or a relative juicegu or juicegu? I wasn't sure. Oh the old man, Yeah.

00:28:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so he's like he's like a family friend. Okay, there's a lot of like on small reserves. We always joked that it's like, well, everybody's related like somehow. It's like they're probably related.

00:29:05
Speaker 4: Somehow, like right, Yeah, he was the guy who earlier in the story had also there was talk of him having aged a thousand years because he had gone to fight in World War Two and came back like a thousand years older because he had like lied about his age, saying he was older than he was to be able to fight and then you know, experience a trauma of war and then came back.

00:29:28
Speaker 2: And he gives Aila a really interesting piece of advice during that conversation too that they're having when they talk about him being a thousand years older, because he's the only other character that we here referred to in that way, and he says this thing that I ended up picking up on and I ended up reading a couple of articles about it too, of like, you know, he's like courages sometimes moving with the dead, you know, like as like bodies were sort of piling up. You know, it's like you have to keep moving. And I think that that's almost an interesting like thesis point, I think, or like what AILA's doing in a certain way of sort of like despite everything, like having to like keep moving forward, Like you know, they are going to be casualties along the way, but it's like you have to keep moving forward. Because otherwise you're one of them, you know, right. So yeah, so he's an interesting character. He pops up a little bit in Blood Quantum too. It's interesting because Blood Quantum also takes place on the Red Crow Reserve and yes, but in like a parallel universe.

00:30:29
Speaker 4: So because the Fish Mittens Strip Club is also in Blood Quantum.

00:30:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love an expanded universe, that's the right.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so there's like these interesting sort of like crossover points that kind of happen where like and a lot of the folks I think in the film weren't actors. I think that like some of them are just like people who maybe had a little bit of like outside of like the main cast, who are like Canadian indigenous, like Film Royalty. Glenn Gould has been in everything like you don't make it like you don't make a Native film in Canada and not include Glenn Gould because what are you doing? Who plays Joseph in the film.

00:31:06
Speaker 1: He's incredible. I mean that like the scene that I think, like, I mean stuck out to be I'm sure everybody was. The scene at his wife's grave was just so oh holy shit, It's just like, yeah, he was, He's incredible.

00:31:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So then this character shows up who we've seen here, and there is just saying like Aila, I don't want you. I don't want you to work in this drug trade anymore. And she's like, good, I don't want to either. And then Juji the little Boy comes back and he's like, okay, now what do we do boss? And she's like, I don't know. And that's how the movie ends. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back for discussion, and we're back.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: Yes, where shall we begin?

00:32:06
Speaker 4: Well, I think it's probably helpful to provide some historical context for the residential school system, because you really have to have an understanding of what that is to appreciate the events of this film and why the characters are doing everything that they do to not have to go to a residential school for sure.

00:32:28
Speaker 2: And I think that it'd be good too to talk a little bit about the a little bit about reserves, and a little bit about the Indian Act, because I think that there's like there's layers to this, right, It's not just the residential school, it's like it's everything, you know, And this time watching it through too, where I was thinking a lot about like the violence in the film and thinking about how it's sort of it's incessant, like it's just like around every corner, like ALA's just biking down the road at one point and like somebody like comes out of nowhere and punch and like yeah, and that's you know, such a visual metaphor for I think what it feels like sometimes to be a like a marginalized person, whether it's you know, your you're black, Indigenous, or like a person of color, or whether you're trans or whether you're I think that there's like a sense sometimes of like things can come out of nowhere and kind of like knock you on your ass. So uh, yeah, just to talk a little bit about and like feel free to jump in too. But yeah, so talk to talk a little bit about the Indian Act because that's kind of where it all starts off, right. So the Indian Act was officially passed in eighteen seventy six. I hope there's no like Canadian history buffs who are like like checking my because like it's the one like I can remember meeting a person ten years ago for like fifteen minutes, but I cannot rumber dates.

00:33:50
Speaker 1: For the life well most of our most of our listenership are Canadian history scholars.

00:33:55
Speaker 4: So yes, but I do believe that date is correct. Yes, I have that in my notes as well.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah So, but before that there had been sort of a patchwork of different colonial laws that had existed, and then sort of when Canada became like a country as opposed to sort of different like sort of colonies, you know, like between like New France and Upper Canada and Lower Canada, then it was sort of brought into law in a sort of more official sense. And the Indian Act. The short version of the Indian Act is that it was legislation that was designed to very literally like legislate out of existence indigenous people, and it did that through a number of ways. So the residential schools, which we'll talk more about, were part of the Indian Act. This idea that you'll civilize and, abusing air quotes, you'll civilize indiangenous children and assimilate them into Canadian society. The Indian Act also, you know, targeted women. So if you were an Indigenous woman and you married a non indigenous man, you lost your status and indigenous status our native status which exists in the United States as well, is sort of like your only pathway for being able to access things like on reserve housing, like certain like educational scholarships and benefits and things like that are only accessible through your status card. There's other services and things like that that are only accessible through your status card. So losing your status, you know, was a big deal, and so we often refer to when women married non indigenous men has happened a lot in the you know, early days of Canada as marrying out because it was essentially like, well, now you're out of the culture, goodbye, one less Indian. And you know, there were other things like the Indian Act did. You couldn't leave the reserve to get a higher education. You couldn't just like leave the reserve togotiate a doctor. There was a whole system of passes that Indigenous people had to have for a long time, Like it was essentially like a passport that said like okay, I'm leaving my reserve now, and that you know, there was no thought given to It's like okay, well we don't have a hospital on reserve. I have to leave the reserve to go to the hospital, or even just like I want to go visit a friend on a different reserve, like you'd have to like have that passport signed off on by the Indian agent, who could also say no. So people's movement was really controlled. People's lives were really controlled. And like I said, you know, disproportionately. The Indian Act targeted children and women through things like the residential school system, through things like losing status if you married out, which wasn't applied to men. If men, if Indigenous men married non Indigenous women, their non Indigenous wives would get status and all their children would get status.

00:36:50
Speaker 1: Oh and they were able to remain a part of their communities. Yeah, Jesus Christ.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: So like it's not even like, uh, it's so blatant. It's almost like a bond villain who's like, and then I'm going to set up the laser and then it's going to catch you in half, and then I'm going to take over the world. It's like the Canadian government essentially said from the beginning, we don't want any more Indigenous people, and this is what we're gonna do to get rid of them. However, the double edged sword of the Indian of the Indian Act, you know, and you're I can imagine it's sort of like, well, if it's so terrible and so sexist and so racist, just get rid of it. Unfortunately, it's really one of the major legislative tools that we have in Canada as Indigenous people to be able to hold the federal government accountable because it defines what an Indigenous person is, so which is just like magnitudes of frustrating.

00:37:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: Originally, and this ties into the film. In nineteen sixty nine, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who Justin Trudeau's daddy, was Prime Minister at the time, and he introduced this essentially this act that would have gotten rid of the Indian Act. This is so this is nineteen sixty nine. This paper ended up becoming called the White Paper, and it was this really catalyzing moment for a lot of what we call red power or like an Indigenous like civil rights movement sort of stuff began happening because you know, people were really hit to the idea that like, if we get rid of the status of Indian, which is what it would have been called at the time, then the government doesn't legally have any enforceable responsibility towards Indians. If Indians don't exist, they don't exist. Does that make sense right?

00:38:46
Speaker 1: I'm sure, yes, it makes sense the way you're explaining it. It's just okay that that's so. There's so many layers of mind fuckery going on.

00:38:56
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's a whole like it's a whole terror issue of like fucked up, which is terrible. I shouldn't do that to Terra Massu Taaramasus.

00:39:05
Speaker 1: Delightful will recovery.

00:39:09
Speaker 2: Tarasu's got a good rap, you know, I feel like it can come back from this. But yeah, so so what the solution has sort of become, you know, is because we can't get rid of the Indian Act, it's sort of amend it and a lot of these amendments, I think sort of the most recent big push of amendments. There's little things going through all the time, but I think two thousand and two was like a big push of like a whole bunch of amendments to it. In the eighties, we had a big push of amendments that allowed women who had lost their status through marriage to get their status back, which was a huge thing. You know. I had I have a friend who you know, at that point in time, was already you know, like a teenager and she talks about how important it was like that moment when her mom gets status back, which meant that she could get status, and like because even though it isn't like like having status is not what makes you an indigenous person, sure it still can feel like a very significant thing in terms of belonging. Sure, you know, of course, yeah, so is this whole sort of mess. Unfortunately, and the Indian agents, like we see Popper in the film, were the enforcers of this incredibly racist law. So Indian agents had total, like unchecked control. It was like even worse in some ways than sort of like you know how we talk about like, oh, you know, the sheriff and the Old West, and you know, they could sort of make up the rules as they go along. Indian agents were sort of that, except they were white, racist assholes. So, you know, I've read different things over the years about like people talking about how like, oh, well, is Popper's attitude and behavior a little bit extreme. It's like, well, like some of the stuff did happen, Like some of the stuff we know has happened because we've heard stories from people and it's also been documented. You know, By the time that we get to the late sixties early seventies, the Indian agents were starting to be phased out because we were starting to move into a new period in terms of like the Indian Act, and like I said, some of those like big changes that were to come in the eighties, but at the time, we still had Indian agents that were quite sort of literally allowed to do whatever the fuck they wanted with impunity. You had Indian agents in the States as well, and they were this may be chuckle, not because it's funny, but because it's sort of again Macavelian. The original Indian agents were under the US War Department initially, which is like very blatantly.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: Like could you be any less like clear about how you feel? Yeah, Jesus Christ.

00:41:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so, But what happened with the Indian agents and the States is as we moved through the eighteen hundreds and into the nineteen hundreds, they sort of transitioned into being superintendents for what the AMIC equivalent of residential schools is the Indian boarding school system, and they were that position shifted into more of a civilian role later on, but yeah, it was it was like a government Department of War position. It was essentially like I brought up in the Twilight Reading it was to swindle people out of their land whatever way you could, And yeah, it was it was about like this idea of like manifest destiny. You know, it's like, well, we've we've arrived and now it's ours. Like yeah, So that's a little bit of a background on the Indian Act and so, like I said, the residential school system was established as part of the Indian Act under the mandate of kill the Indian and educate the child sort of thing, which is just like a real cool, chill sentiment to have. And so they started out, you know, we had Jesuit schools, especially coming into like New France, oh sort of what is like Nova Scotia and Brunswick like part of Quebec, like New England sort of area. So we would have had like early Jesubit schools, and like you know, those were a little bit less rigorously sort of organized than those that are mostly we're in the sixteen hundreds, some in the seventeen hundreds. But like I said, it functioned a lot more sort of like what's that word as a missionary sort of effort. Like it was like we're gonna go on Christianize.

00:43:27
Speaker 1: Sure, there's nothing colonial about this, No.

00:43:31
Speaker 2: We're just talking about Jesus. And it's really interesting because we from that the Migmah converted to Christianity in sixteen oh four, and like a lot of that had to do with the presence of like Jesuit missionaries in Mgmagi in Migma Terratory at the time. But moving out of that period, moving into the moving into the nineteenth century is when we sort of get officially into the like what we call the residential school period. And these were schools that were government funded, managed by Christian churches. So there was like different denominations that were involved. The Roman Catholic Church was a big one of course, but like there were Presbyterians, I think, Anglican Anglicans. Yeah, the Church of England was very big just kind of not facilitating getting all tripped up on my words, but like essentially administering the school. So like they were all run by nuns and priests and like layered clergy as sort of like the only attendance at the school. And we estimate that about one hundred and fifty thousand children Indigenous children in Canada went to residential school.

00:44:42
Speaker 1: And is it safe to I just for our listeners who are not fully clear and what the intent was. The intent of the school is to take your culture from you and replace it with something else.

00:44:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was essentially that it was this idea that like, like I said, you know, like it's the idea of like killing the Indian through education. So you'd be taken away from your community, you'd be taken out of your language, so you only spoke English. At residential school. They would cut off your braids much like we see in the movie. You'd be wearing Western clothing. You'd only be educated, educated in sort of like European centric like history and like customs and mannerisms. In the States more than in Canada, there was also like this idea of vocational training. But yeah, it was about westernizing indigenous Indigenous kids because they were seen as being savages.

00:45:40
Speaker 4: Yeah, I like it was forced assimilation. And then in addition to that, it was also the like officials at these schools inflicting severe amounts of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse upon the children. A lot of children died in the residential schoo system. Yeah. Throughout the years, there was a lot of like malnutrition. I read I even read some cases of like experiments being done on the children. Yeah, and there was just like not really much education happening. It was just abuse.

00:46:16
Speaker 2: No, And that's sort of the problem, right, is that their primary goal was forced assimulation.

00:46:22
Speaker 1: You know.

00:46:22
Speaker 2: Their goal wasn't to sort of build young people up so that they'd be able to stand in the world afterwards, you know, like like one would hope that the education system does to some degree. It was it was really about like, you are bad, you are dirty. We're going to make you clean and pure, and you know, we can't bleach you, but will make you as white as possible. You know. It decimated now that about six thousand children died as a result of the regidential school system. However, those numbers don't take into account well one, you know, the records are not complete. A lot of schools as they were shutting down, you know, especially in the eighties and nineties, you know, burned records just like wholesale got rid of stuff. Was like we don't know, graves were often not marked. So there's been a whole process even now sort of like trying to figure out like people trying to figure out where their relatives are buried. Conditions in the school were really terrible. You know, so kids were not only dying of like malnutrition, but also disease, also of abuse. Like at times the abuse would be so severe, Like there was one case that I was reading about where the children were routinely like electrocuted and like small doses, and sometimes they would die because they were like as a punishment being electrocuted.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: And that doesn't even take into account the I think what we see through al as parents is like the after effects of that abuse and how if you do make it out, what is life like after that, know, coping with all that Yeah, trauma, Oh exactly.

00:48:04
Speaker 2: And you know that's just it too. Like how many people, you know, their whole lives have had to struggle with, you know, the weight of that abuse. Have you know, people who have died by suicide, Like, yeah, it's it's it's a very hard thing to put a number on, you know, the fatalities of people coming in through the residential school system because it was this terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible machine that just like like I said, you know, was meant to get rid of what the Prime Minister at the times for John A. MacDonald, which was he was like very famous Canadian prime minister from my back when Cannon was sort of created as a country. You know, like he was like the Indian problem, Like people were seen as a problem. It was like, oh, well, we'll just get rid of them, you know. You know, we talked about this a little bit before the phone call, you know, YouTube were sort of saying, like, you didn't learn anything about this in school. I learned a little bit about this in school, but it's really only been the last like couple generations that we've even started talking about this openly. So the last residents of school in Canada closed in nineteen ninety six. Yeah, you know, so like there are people my age whose like parents went to residential school, you know, and their aunties and uncles and like we're really directly impacted by that. Yeah, and we just didn't talk about it. We just didn't talk about it. We'd like there was a sense that for a really long time, even like in two thousand and nine, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, was like Canada doesn't have a colonial history, you know, like we don't where everything's great, you know, when we start looking at like the time in which the rhyme thrown guls is coming out in a lot of ways. It was like a big piece of media that was made about this terrible, terrible system. And yeah, and so I think that a lot of the violence and stuff that you see in the film was really done with the idea of like trying to convey just how distructive this was. You know, was there anything, Caitlyn, I don't know if, like you had mentioned that you had like a specific timeline for residential schools. I kind of jumped all over the place.

00:50:13
Speaker 4: Oh sure, And I mean I think what you covered was really helpful context. I have just some kind of dates scattered through in some additional numbers. For example, like the sixties scoop was this moment in history that was actually several decades long where I think an estimated twenty thousand Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed into foster care or adoption homes, often with non Indigenous families. This was happening from like the late fifties into the nineteen eighties.

00:50:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I know folks who were scooped and like, which is a weird way of putting it, but in some cases it was literally like oh, you know, these social workers arrived at your house and they loaded you and your siblings in a car and then you never saw your siblings again because you were all adopted by different families, which you know, the term that we would use for this now is child.

00:51:10
Speaker 1: Trafficking, you know, right absolutely.

00:51:14
Speaker 2: And this was a government this was government mandate that this was like government endorsed. So that's another way in which, like the Indian Act has been used to sort of separate children from Indigenous communities, right is through things like the sixties and seventies scoop, which really could be called like you said, like started in the fifties and went until the eighties.

00:51:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:51:35
Speaker 2: And now another thing too that has become that's gotten a lot more attention in recent years and is something that there's been a lot of call to abolish is we call them birth alerts. So what can happen, unfortunately, is that like social workers can essentially seize a newborn from an Indigenous mother if they deem her to be potentially not a good parent some way. It was a couple of provinces have abolished these like birth alert systems, but it's still upheld in Saskatchewan and I believe Alberta as well here. So, yeah, so if you're an Indigenous woman, giving birth in a hospital can be very risky because if you're not, if they're like, oh you're kind of young, you know, or are you a single mother? You know, like essentially the staff will alert child Services and then will come and take your child before even like the drugs have worn off from the birth. You know, Like it's a really, really horrific system.

00:52:35
Speaker 1: I also wanted to this was Unfortunately, as I was watching this, I was reminded of a news item that I read not too long ago in September around just issues that would have certainly been affecting in particular forced sterilization as well, which when I did a little more research, I found out it peaked in the years that this movie is covering. It peaked between nineteen sixty six and nineteen seventy six. Over a thousand Indigenous women in Canada were forced to be sterilized. And the reason that the story is relevant right now is because it's still happening.

00:53:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you said, you know, it is still happening. There's still a lot of pressure in terms of and you know, in California as well, like there were a lot of Indigenous women sterilized in California during the sixties and seventies. Not that I'm picking on California. It just happened to know these statistics of California. But yeah, it's it's still going on today. There's still a lot of pressure, especially if women like have any sort of even minor health concerns. Like a lot of times, like there still is this pressure of like, well you could just you know, sterilize you. If women are incarcerated, there's also pressure. Yeah, you know, it disproportionately affects the indigenous community of course because of colonialism, because there is still huge bias unfortunately with regards to with regards to Indigenous people.

00:54:08
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

00:54:08
Speaker 1: Absolutely.

00:54:09
Speaker 2: Oh, I was gonna say in top of the sixties scoop, if you want to know some other said statistics. I feel like we're just like, oh, and this thing that's also really depressing. So today talking to about the birth alert system. You know, even though the last residential school closed here in Canada in the in the nineties and nineteen ninety six, which like spoiler alert, we were all alive. Then wait, how.

00:54:32
Speaker 4: Old are you, Jamie?

00:54:33
Speaker 2: We were all alive. Then it was like Jamie's young, jamie' J's scrappy.

00:54:38
Speaker 4: I was there, but yeah.

00:54:39
Speaker 2: So it's within our lifetimes, you know, and I think that that's a really important thing to remember. However, a lot of Indigenous folks will argue that the child deutrour system has taken over the place of the residential schools in terms of like taking kids out of communities. You know, you have the birth alert system. You also just have like tremendous like scrutiny and surveillance of Indigenous families. And you know, what should be shocking and upsetting to people is the fact that Indigenous children represent fifty three percent of the children in foster care in Canada, even though they only represent seven percent of the youth population in Quebecutt's estimated that one out of every Indigenous family has a child that's in foster care with like non Indigenous people, and it's endemic. It's just like, you know, if it's not something you have experienced directly, it's something that like you know other people who have and when you start looking at things like that, you know, with regards to kids in the child retro system, with regards to you know, suicidality, with regards to incarceration, you know, with regards to like drug abuse, like all the things that we sort of see in this movie. You know, you can draw a straight line from one to the other and it can't be an accident. At this point, you know, there's just so much like paperwork and documentation of how things of intentionally been done, you know, throughout the years to make that this is the case. At a certain point in time, you have to kind of be like, well, it's not even a conspiracy anymore, because.

00:56:09
Speaker 1: You know it happened documented and to speak to your point from earlier, that's just the documentation that still exists.

00:56:18
Speaker 4: Right what what was burned and what was destroyed and.

00:56:22
Speaker 2: What was lost, and you know, and what will not come to light, you know, for whatever reason, and on and on and on.

00:56:31
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll discuss how this context informs the film. Shall we will? And we're back.

00:56:53
Speaker 1: I wanted to, if it's cool with everybody's share some quotes from Jeff Barnaby please about the production of this movie and just kind of his motivation behind writing it and sort of where he was at. There was an interview he did, I believe around the time this movie was first coming out in festivals with musk Rat magazine, and he was asked by the interviewer, let me get their name, Jamais DaCosta. He was asked why he chose to have a female protagonist for this story, so I thought relevant to our interests, and here is how he replied. He said, my nation is a matriarchal society and paying respect to that archetype of a woman and the strength that is there, particularly in First Nations women. It's imperative for me, as a First Nation's man who loves his mom and loves his wife and loves his sisters, to pay reverence to their struggle and their strength. I think women are awesome.

00:57:55
Speaker 4: Great ques Wow.

00:57:57
Speaker 1: My mom had me as a T shirt a new merg stright up there with our Robert Eggers quote. Ah, Yes, women, I've heard of them. Jeff Farvey thinks women are awesome. My mom had me at such a young age and didn't have a lot of support around her, but still managed to make it work. She and my stepmam were a big influence, along with my sisters and seeing what they went through at such a young age gave me a measuring stick in terms of the things you can complain about in life. And then he said, kind of going off of that, why he chose the era in residential schools that he chose. I believe this movie is set in the year that he was born, in nineteen seventy six, but he says about that in the same interview quote, I thought, if there was ever a point in time that this residential school was going to crumble, it would have been in the seventies. It just made sense to me to have a young Native girl bring this institution of ugliness to its knees. It made sense to me because First Nations women are the language and cultural keepers. They are the epicenter of our matriarchal society. I've mostly only known strength come from the women in my life, which isn't to say that men haven't been influential, but the rock steady power that doesn't waiver seems to only come from women, and which I think. He compliments his wife for a long time. It's nice, but I'm not gonna read the whole His wife is really lovely.

00:59:15
Speaker 4: To very nice. Well, I think you see that in the film, this this ideology with like, of AILA's peers, who seem to be entirely boys, she is the smartest and most competent of them, not even of just her peers, of all the like adult men around her. She seems to have kind of the most awareness of what is going around, because like there's scenes where like Sholo and Angus are just like, oops, I got robbed by a stripper. Dough like t either kind of laughing about it. You know, He's like, oh, well, no big deal, We'll just sell some bottles. We'll get the money back that way. And AILA's like, no, like, do you see what's happening? Do you see what we have to do? And she's by far the most competent, and and like why is this We talked about sort of having to age prematurely almost and having to be wise beyond your years, not in a like precocious child tropey way that we you know, always take guff with on the podcast, but when you're growing up in these horrible, like systematic oppression situations, there's no other choice. You can't like, it's that's just it hardens you. And it and the fact.

01:00:33
Speaker 1: That the story of the wolf eating itself that becomes so important to how she views herself and how we view her as the audience comes from really the only other woman that we get to know besides her mother in the movie of like She I mean, I guess, going off of what Jeff Barnaby said, she was the keeper of that wisdom and passed it along for sure.

01:00:59
Speaker 2: And I was going to say too that just like a little bit of like added Magma context. There is this huge reverence in our culture for not just women, although you know, like Jeff says, you know, it's a it's a very matriarchal, matrilineal culture, but also grandmother is in particular are really revered, you know, as elders, as elder women. There's a lot of stories of gluse Cap whose are our sort of how to describe glose Cap. He's a trickster figure and he's within traditional storytelling, but he's also like a protector figure for the Migma. You know, he was sort of helped when Creator made the Magma at the beginning, you know, to shape the landscape. So he plays this really important role throughout all of our traditional stories. And there's a lot of stories about Gluscap just like doing stuff with his grandmother. And even the word that we use for grandmother, nugumige, comes from what goluse Caap calls his grand which is nukumi and jij that like adding that ja on the end is like how you sort of like talk about like something being smaller like we talk about is like a small bug. So like our grandmothers are like a small version of Gluscap's grandmother, you know. And there's also a lot of reverence in Bigma culture for figures like sant Anne. There's a very important UH cathedral called sant Enne de Beaupre where a lot of Migma folks do pilgrimages too, because, like I said, we converted very early on, so Christianity has gotten very tied into our traditional culture. And St Anne in the Bible. I'm now I'm talking at my ass a little bit. I'll be anest.

01:02:42
Speaker 4: I cannot help you because I have never read the Bible.

01:02:46
Speaker 2: But San Anne is is Jesus's grandmother, and so you know she she remains very symbolic and very important for the Migma in that sense. So the fact that Sarah's is really the only female figure that we know in the film, I think is like is very emblematic of like Migma culture, you know. And I love those scenes so much because they're actually speaking Migma. She's making Bannick, you know, she's doing like all these things that like are so familiar and are so like grounding. And when we're in Sarah's house too, you have a sense of like Aila doesn't have to be you know, the smartest, you know, most sort of like aware person. She can just kind of be there and like is comforting.

01:03:34
Speaker 1: It feels like the closest scenes to where she feels like being a kid, because it's really easy to forget that she's a kid because she has the weight of the world and then some on her shoulders. But yeah, in those scenes with Sarah's and I think like part of why it's so devastating to see that Sarah's has been murdered is because that's I mean one of the only times you sort of see Aila relax the smallest bit and just feel, like you said, comfortable.

01:04:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, big time, you know. And it's also interesting because what you're saying too about her, I really see it as after her mother's death and her father's in prison, you know, Aila kind of has to become the adult, has to become the parent, you know, and like, you know, you both mentioned like that's not rare, unfortunately for kids who grow up in circumstances where there is like substance abuse or there's like a parent absence for whatever reason, you know. And I really refer to I always think about like all the men in the film kind of as like lost boys in a sense, because there is sort of like this waywardness, this sort of sense of like there's not like any other kind of like parent like child relationships really depicted, and sometimes it can kind of like feel like that in circumstances, you know, where there is so much intergenerational traumas, like everyone's kind like lost and everyone's kind of like separated from each other, you know. And so I thought that that was really interesting the way that they treated that in film.

01:05:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, particularly with AILA's relationship with her father, which I thought was the way that that was developed was I mean it really emotionally effective, but really interesting too, where it's I don't know, every character in this movie is so multi dimensional and so complex where it's like I can be mad at AILA's dad in one scene and then in the next scene be like, oh, but I but I understand where he's coming from. Where I mean when we flash forward, Aila is essentially her uncle's boss. She's clearly the brains behind the operation, and her dad is not able to, like I don't know, get emotionally where he needs to be, and the anger sort of is lashed out towards her when it is his anger with the circumstances, not with her. And seeing them navigate that relationship and reach i mean, go full circle in the best and the worst way by the end was just so so so impactful. It was just yeah, so beautifully written.

01:06:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and sort of you know, you're right and sort of like seeing that full There's a lot of like circular sort of narratives that happened in the film, and I think that that's very intentional in the sense of like kind of being caught in systemic racism can often feel like you can't escape this vicious circle that you're in, right, like any kind of systemic repression. But we sort of we opened the movie with her father going to prison, we close the movie with her father going to prison. You know, the amount of journey that he has to do in between, you know, in terms of his relationship with Aila is huge. Sorry, my cat's eating my notes as I am trying to read them, you know, is absolutely huge, you know. And I think that exchange at the end of the film where where Joseph like just comes out and says, you know, like you're still a kid. I want you to be a kid, you know. I think that that you finally understand in that moment what the stakes are for him, and like the fact that like, you know, he understands even though he's like, I want you to be a kid, he understands that like Dayla can never really be a kid, you know, like that's just not on the table. And I think that's kind of interesting in terms of like looking at this film as like in comparison with like other films about like teenage girls, because I think there could be an argument made that in some ways Rhymes is a coming of age story. Yeah, but it's just like, you know, you look at that and then you look at something like BookSmart and you're like, oh right. You know, you guys talk so much about like how you know, oftentimes teen movies take place in a very like narrow sort of class oh yeah, and you know, it's sort of interesting to see the way that this film steps kind of outside of that, you know, to tell this story of it's like, well, you know, sometimes coming of age means having to be your own parent at.

01:08:06
Speaker 1: You know, absolutely, yeah, I mean, and I feel like I would I would qualify this movie as I wrote down all the different genres I felt like this movie touched on at different points, which is another thing that I loved about. It was like, there's just there were whole sequences that were a heist movie. There were whole sequences that were very much drama. There were whole sequences. But it feels like a coming of age movie to me. Yeah, And I don't know, I mean, maybe not at first glance, because it's not an experience that we usually see reflected on screen, but we definitely see her come of age and.

01:08:48
Speaker 4: Right, it's like, I mean, it's it's almost like you might not necessarily immediately recognize it as a coming of age story because.

01:08:55
Speaker 1: There's no party at a rich kid's house, so maybe that's where.

01:09:00
Speaker 4: Right, there's no like oops, I smoked weed for the first time and now I'm true, I guess, so dizzy, Yeah, at my friend's mansion that I'm hanging out at right. It's like but but it's like, yeah, a movie about a young Indigenous teen girl in the nineteen seventies in Canada, Like that is what coming of age would look like.

01:09:26
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, you know, and even I think that, like, you know, there were even things like like I think that in my own coming of it that like I like resonated with me in terms of the film, you know, like, like I said, I didn't grow up in a res but I did grow up with two parents who had serious substance of these issues. And yeah, there were definitely things about like ALA's story that resonated so so strongly with me, like on this very prefun level. And I think that's important. I think that's so important in the media that like young people can see. You know, I was older than Ala when I saw than Ayala would have been then when I saw the film. But it's a film that like I try and like show young people too, because it's important. You know, we're talking about like representation. You know, it's important to sort of see like, yes, it is this very brutal, violent, I don't think particularly optimistic story. But Jeff Barnaby talks a lot about this idea of like wanting to portray the res in, you know, in a way that's like true to his experience, you know. And I think that, like whether you're Indigenous or not, if you're a young person who is living in like in a precarious situation where you know that's because you know it's always because of things like that you can't control, then I think that there's things you're going to relate to. In terms of AILA's story.

01:10:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, I mean even getting back to the relationship with her dad, I mean just navigating a complicated relationship with I had a number of people in my family who had sense abuse problems, but you love them and you feel like it's not especially when you're still a kid, you can't really sever that chord. And I don't know, it's something you almost never see in teen movies, and if you do, it's kind of framed like a joke instead of you know, a problem that is something you know, very sensitive that needs to be navigated, and another thing that kind of I guess I'm curious.

01:11:28
Speaker 7: At what you both felt about this, But I also was really affected by the like Aila is so mature in ways that I'm like, I currently don't even know if.

01:11:41
Speaker 1: I can be where the amount of grace and understanding that she's able to extend to both of her parents consistently, even when she is, particularly with her dad, who she's often pissed off at the decision she's making, she realized as he's lashing out, he's compartmentalizing. He's not able to fully, you know, deal with what's in front of him. But she has this very I mean, there's that scene with her and her uncle where she says, the jail didn't break him, we did, which is her putting more blame on her. You know, we know as a viewer she's putting a lot of undue blame on herself. But just the amount of grace that she extends the people in her life because she has such a thorough understanding of how circumstantial a lot of their problems are, I thought was like really cool, and again, just something you don't see that subtlety expressed in this genre really ever.

01:12:46
Speaker 4: Right, And something you mentioned about the there's this kind of ongoing discussion throughout the movie about characters kind of having to age too rapidly on a maturity and kind of emotional and psychological level. There's also this idea of characters being broken, and there is that discussion between Ayla and Berner talking about Joseph saying, you know, like you said Jamie, like Ala thinks that like we broke him, and it's not necessarily clear if she means like we as the family or we as a community or what exactly. But then there's another quick interaction between Aila and Joseph at the end when he's saying the whole like you you're just a little girl, and she's like, I was never a little girl. And then he says, you know, your mother was broken way before what happened, meaning like way before the accident that killed her brother, and this has nothing to do with you, and that, you know, is a reference to them becoming broken, being survivors of this residential school system and of this systemic oppression and racism of being you know, forced into reserve life, and it's it's just heartbreaking.

01:13:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that in some ways I was thinking about this, I think a little bit closer this time, because I was thinking about the podcast, and I was thinking about other films that you've discussed that have like teenage female protagonists, and I think that Aila has a certain amount of like is portrayed as having a certain amount of stoicism and a certain amount of like restraint, and a certain amount of like ability to see the larger picture that you kind of see crack at the end when she's like, you know, right before Popularize, when she's crying after she's found Sarah's and she sort of says, you know, the the you know, the last rule sort of surviving in the Kingdom of the Crow is never let your emotional guard down. And I think that sometimes for kids who grow up or people just in general who grow up in difficult situations, I think that sometimes like in order to survive, you need to kind of compartmentalize and you need to kind of like have a very calm, steady demeanor because there's nothing else in your life that is that way, right, you know, And so I think that there's like a certain amount of that as well. And there's a certain amount of it too that like I kind of question how realistic it is, because I mean, I work with teenagers, you know, and like, and they're all lovely, and none of them are going to listen to this, but I adore them all, and you know, I think that there is a certain amount of that that is sort of like creative license. But it is really hard to like place ALA's age, and it's really hard to like I think that, like a more turbulent character wouldn't have worked for the film. So I think that, like, also from a storytelling perspective, you know, Ala being this rock is is sort of important for the narrative, but also sort of perhaps a little bit idealized.

01:15:48
Speaker 1: I see that, Yeah, yeah, and I feel like that kind of like undo. I mean that extreme strength and ability to compartmentalize also cross over into how she remembers her mother and how which was kind of another I thought, pretty different, incredible approach by Jeff Barnabet that I totally agree if she were acting, you know, like your average teenager, may not have been possible. But I mean, it's I forget. I think it's her uncle. I think it's Berner. Early in the movie, once we flash forward and everything has happened, who insults her mother in front of her and she immediately because she has I mean, this understanding of the circumstance of what happened was so tragic and so terrible, and even though it was an accident that involves her mother, you know, she's able to kind of see the fuller picture and protect her mother's memory.

01:16:55
Speaker 4: Are you talking about the moment where he like he calls someone an old wit and then she's like, don't call her that, and then he's like, sorry, the old lady. I thought he was talking about cirus.

01:17:06
Speaker 1: There was he I think he might have been Okay, then I misunderstood that.

01:17:10
Speaker 4: Because I think, yeah, he's talking about because she seems to be Sarah seems to be sort of it's at her house where like they're growing all the marijuana. I think that they sell, yeah, and he's so there's certain kind of debts to her that they oh because like she's supplying stuff and then and then yeah, so and then they're like kind of moving the product around. But yeah, I think he's talking to her. But even so, I think your points still valid, Jamie. Of like, I mean, everyone is broken and everyone's having to kind of compartmentalize, and it's.

01:17:46
Speaker 1: And that's something that Aila has. I feel like just you were touching on this a little bit where in a world where there is not a lot that she has control over how she views her mother and how she holds her mother's memory is something that she has control over.

01:18:02
Speaker 2: Bad time. And it's interesting too because I was going to say, you know, even though Indigenous women have been, you know, a target of colonialism and colonial violence through the Indian Act and in other ways, you know, Indigenous women are also at the forefront of a lot of activism that happens and is still happening.

01:18:25
Speaker 3: You know.

01:18:27
Speaker 2: One thing that was going on when this film first came out in twenty thirteen was the beginning of Idle No More, which is an indigenous rights movement here in Canada and in some parts of the United States as well. Like It's Standing Rock, there was Idle No More, folks, and it was started by four women, three Indigenous and one white, ally because they wanted to stand up against this bill that the government was introducing that would have changed not only a lot of Indigenous rights but also a lot of environmental protections. So they got together and they're like, we're not going to be anymore. And it's spread to becoming this national protest movement. It spread to becoming a bigger sort of movement for Indigenous rights here in Canada, and that was started, you know, by by four women sort of sitting around a table in the Prairies like just like deciding, you know, we're done. So there is, like I think, in in the character Veila, like and understanding some of like Jeff's like motivations for wanting to create a character that way, Like I think I understand like that he's also paying tribute to women like that, you know, who have like held it together and who are like trying to make change and who are in so many ways taking all this garbage that the world puts on them and trying to like make change and do things that are different, and also like the compassion that it takes to take all that shit and and still turn around and be able to say, like, you know, I'm going to march and I'm gonna I'm going to write letters and I'm going to do a hunger fast. And yeah, I think that that's really really powerful. And I think that like so I think that there's also like that element too, of like when I say that Aila is a little bit of an idealized character, like I think that there's also a measure of that that's like paying tribute in like a positive way to the role that Indigenous women play in politics and in their communities.

01:20:22
Speaker 4: Mm hm, for sure.

01:20:25
Speaker 2: There was one thing that just kind of coming off of something that I think you mentioned Caitlin about like the selling drugs and like being broken, And I wanted to talk a little bit about that because I'm so I'm interested in what your first impressions of that were, because we're so used to seeing these images of like drunk Indians and you know, that's been so prevalent in North American cinema since the beginning of North American cinema. Yeah, so did you feel at all sort of did you feel any kind of way, I guess like sort of like seeing those scenes in the beginning.

01:21:07
Speaker 1: Like I honestly, I mean, I my first reaction was, I mean, I knew that, you know, Jeff Barnaby is an Indigenous filmmaker. I'm like, I'm gonna I'm on this ride with him he and I knew he was speaking to his own community. It did like make me go oh no for for a moment, only because I don't know, I mean, like we've all seen movies where those stereotypes have played out and then you get no context for anything, but this movie felt like it was all context for like, what what led to those stereotypes being so widely perpetuated without context entirely? So yeah, I think it gave me pause for like a second, but then when it was clear, I mean the first frame of the movie is context. Yeah, So I feel like this. And I was reading in just this same interview with him in Muskrat Magazine that he had experienced some pushback from other filmmakers in the community that were just like, well, you're showing these stereotypes and like, you know, like I don't have any interest in seeing that portrayed on screen in any way, and his response being something you've already referenced just where he was just like, well, I'm showing you my community and reflecting my own experiences growing up, So like, how can you tell me what I can? Wow? Like I can't reflect my own experience, right.

01:22:41
Speaker 4: It almost it's like sort of finding a balance of like do I do a disservice to my community by ignoring some very real truths of what is taking place, or do I I mean, we talked about this a little bit on a recent episode we recorded on the Matreon about what we Do in the Shadows, where it was written and directed by both take Away Titi and Jamaine Clement, who are both Maori, and we were talking about how cool it is to see because there's like this kind of discussion around there's a lot of pressure on filmmakers of any marginalized community to only talk about that. It's like, if you're black, you can only make movies about racism, and that's your expertise, so that's what you have to make art about. And how it was like really cool to see this like really goofy vampire mockumentary that's like so funny and just like so silly made by these indigenous Maori filmmakers. But then there's also like you know, Taika made Boy, which is about his upbringing in his like Maori community. I mean, and you can speak to this as a filmmaker too, Jess, of feeling this pressure of like do I make movies that I want to make that are fun and stilly if if those are the movies I want to make, or do I you know, it's like this kind of ongoing dilemma.

01:24:09
Speaker 2: Oh for sure. And it's I mean, like Taika also directed one of the thor films I think, right, yes.

01:24:17
Speaker 4: You know those films, tiny little movies that no one's ever heard of.

01:24:23
Speaker 2: Right, And it's it's interesting because I think that, like, yeah, I feel so acutely where Jeff is coming from, especially because you know, we all kind of in terms of like filmmaking here in Canada, we all kind of have to navigate the same systems of the same funders. So you know, we're fortunate in the sense that, like we do have public funding for the arts. You know, I wouldn't trade that for anything, but that also means that and you know, this is changing a little bit now, but you know, I've been doing this for like a decade close on, and you know, a lot of the funders are not like bipop people. They're not queer people, they're not you know, a lot of the funders are still like a very specific type of bureaucrat. So when you're talking about like yeah, it can feel sometimes like you're just ticking boxes of sort of like Okay, I want to make my film, but I want to make it this way. And it's like, you know, a funder is not necessarily going to be like, well, you know, you're an indigenous filmmaker and you just want to make like a zombie movie, Like I don't know, you know, Like so it's complicated some of the way that we have to navigate that I also make work and want to continue to make work that is also in that genre sort of space. Yeah, it can be really it can be really difficult at times, and there is all this kind of like pressure sometimes to yeah, like to not show certain things because like it always comes back to the reality of representation, because you know, this is like blood Quantum. We keep talking about bloo quantum. People are just gonna have blood quantum.

01:26:03
Speaker 1: We just have to do blood Quantum for Halloween next year.

01:26:07
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I will come back if you want me to, no, please, Yes, I waited like four years for that film. Anyway, that's another story for another day. But when you're talking about rhymester Ingoules, it's such a singular film. It's a coming of age story, it's a heist movie, it's a story of revenge, and it's it's taking place in this you know, it's a historical piece as well. Like it's such a particular thing that like when the pressure is on you, it's like you are the one that we are giving our small amounts of Canadian money to to make this film. It's like, not only are you just like the only like at that point in time, you know, like one of the most high profile like Migma filmmakers, one of only a handful of indigenous filmmakers, right, it's also like you know, you you've been awarded this like highly sought after like money, you know. So yeah, so there are all these weird pressures sometimes and sometimes like as an indigenous filmmaker, you can feel like you're battling against like so many different like things that you might have to compromise on, you know, like, Okay, not everybody's gonna like then I'm gonna show this in this way. At the same time, am I working with a funder who understands my nation's culture? You know? Am I just being tokenized? Am I like wasting this like tiny little bit of money but it's the only money we have, you know, Like right, So there's all these different things that kind of play into that. But you know, we're starting to talk a lot more about narrative sovereignty. Even just the idea that it should be indigenous filmmakers making indigenous films is very new, which it shouldn't be, but is a very new idea in Canada and the United States. So I'm hoping with that that they'll just be more opportunities, you know. And if there are more opportunities and there can be more people making films therefore, you know, so the one Native person making a film doesn't have to make a film that represents all Native people, you know. They can just make the one Native film that they want to make, and then me over here, I can make the Native film that I want to make, you know, like exactly, and they don't have to be the same thing, and it doesn't have to fit into sort of like this very specific expectation, you know, right.

01:28:19
Speaker 4: And they can have be all different kinds of stories, and they can span all different genres and they it's it's almost as like, well, I'm wondering if, like Jeff Barnaby is like, this is my one chance to make a film, I have to just like pack in every genre.

01:28:33
Speaker 3: That I can.

01:28:34
Speaker 2: Yeh.

01:28:34
Speaker 4: It's not as though the movie is like feels muddled or anything like that, but it's like we need to get to a place where.

01:28:40
Speaker 1: There just should never be that much pressure on a single filmmaker. Yeah, like it just it doesn't make sense. And I'm glad that he spoke to that issue and also just said, like, there are indigenous filmmakers that didn't like the movie I made, and I disagree with them, and it is what it is.

01:29:02
Speaker 2: It is what it is.

01:29:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there shouldn't have been that much pressure on his movie to represent everybody, but like you were saying, just that there's not enough opportunities and so that pressure is created.

01:29:17
Speaker 2: And it just spirals up from there, and it's I mean, I think that like even in a broader sense like of just like any kind of marginalized filmmaker. I mean I would even include like female filmmakers in that. Like you know, when you look at somebody like a Catherine Bigelow, you know, often people are like, oh, well, she's so exemplary as like a as a female filmmaker because she's making like action films, you know, And it should be fine for a woman to make an action film. It should be fine for an African American filmmaker to make like an experimental video work. It should be fine for an indigenous filmmaker to make an alien movie, you know, like it should be fine, because when a cis hit, like a white straight you know, filmmaker wants to go and make a film about I don't know, let's just pick like like a female coming of age story. Nobody's like, well, are you sure, are you sure that you can speak to that? You like, nobody scrutinizes, and I know that, like I know, we pick on white straight men an awful lot, and they're awful fragile, but it's true, you know, Like I I've had conversations with like filmmaking friends, you know, people that I absolutely adore, you know, who are male filmmakers, and nobody questions them about like why they want to make a film that they want to make. They're like, oh, I just want to tell this story.

01:30:36
Speaker 4: It's like, well, are you the person to do it? Though?

01:30:38
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I'm like, well, you know, I want to make like a film where it's like two dudes and they travel through time. People are like are you sure though? Are they going to be native dudes? And You're like, you can't win, you can't win. And I feel like we're fed this idea of scarcity, this idea of like it has to be these like select few people who get to have the keys to the Kingdom, and it's just not it's just not true and like, and so any shift away from that that we can have, I think is a positive thing. I mean, it's unfortunate, but you know, we're talking so much about like Jeff's work, you know, and like seeing his films and things like that, and I feel like, as brilliant as this film is, in so many ways, more people have probably seen Pocahontas, more people have probably seen Dances with Wolves, more people have probably seen Dead Man. You know, these films that like are super dubious and do a lot of damage in terms of like the representation of Indigenous people. And yet when I'm like, oh, hey, you want to talk indigenous cinema, people are sort of like, ah, I don't know what that is. Yeah, or they might know, they might know Taika, But that's like it, you know, right, which is better than nothing. But it's not enough.

01:31:53
Speaker 4: Sure, it certainly not enough.

01:31:54
Speaker 1: Well that I should be more Indigenous filmmakers who are household names, period, period, absolutely period.

01:32:01
Speaker 4: According to and I don't know exactly how accurate this number is, but according to box Office Mojo dot com ever heard of it, this movie. I do consult it a lot.

01:32:15
Speaker 2: Mojo just makes me think of Austin Powers.

01:32:17
Speaker 4: I know, I'm just like com paint.

01:32:20
Speaker 1: That makes me be a bombshell and that makes me want to die.

01:32:23
Speaker 4: Oh gosh. But this movie earned at the box office basically fifteen hundred dollars because of its very limited distribution and exhibitions. So yeah, I mean, I think that's why a lot of people haven't seen this movie. A lot of people haven't heard of this movie. Admittedly, we were not familiar with it until quite recently, Jamie and I, so it's just a matter of their and I don't even know exactly how to fix this of like getting the word out there. I mean, hopefully this episode of this podcast encourages people to watch this movie. It's it's accessible. I watched it on develop on Hoopla and like Canopy, which is free if you have a library.

01:33:07
Speaker 1: Card, you can rent it anywhere and rent it if you want to make some money back. Yes, yeah, I rented it on YouTube like it was.

01:33:16
Speaker 2: It's easily accessible, you know, and and increasingly easily accessible. I own a copy of this film because that's the only way that I could like keep watching it after I saw it, you know, in festival. But yeah, people can see this movie. It's it's I mean, so I would say that we have to do this, like we have to go old school on this. So this is the plan that I've come up with in the last like five seconds. And I don't know why I particularly old school, except for so everybody listening to the podcast, you have to watch the movie and you have to tell five friends about the movie, or you'll be haunted by an ancient Indian burial ground. That's how we bring it around, invoke the burial ground. All.

01:34:00
Speaker 1: It's a pyramid scheme for good.

01:34:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right.

01:34:04
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh. Remember those emails though, right back in twenty four hours and send it to five friends or else you'll be killed.

01:34:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like Auntie's always send those.

01:34:16
Speaker 1: Alongs that were the number one perpetrator of the year abouts And it was like, I'm your niece, Why are you sending me this email thing? I'm going to be murdered? Like I don't know twenty five people. I'm seven, Like.

01:34:31
Speaker 4: I'm a test.

01:34:33
Speaker 2: It's like I think sometimes like it's just like yeah, I sort of miss stuff like that sometimes because it's weird. Like it's sort of like it's paranormal in a weird way, but like, yeah, Auntie's being like, you gotta pass this one on and like all your wishes will come true.

01:34:48
Speaker 4: You're like, right, your crush will fall in love with you if you send this, but if you don't, you'll die.

01:34:55
Speaker 1: You'll be murdered tonight, do you hear? Okay, Annie?

01:34:59
Speaker 4: Did?

01:35:01
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the Ala tests?

01:35:03
Speaker 3: Oh?

01:35:03
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, really quickly.

01:35:05
Speaker 2: And I wanted to talk to about Ala being a two spirit character, but we can do that after.

01:35:09
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely, so the Ala Test. We obviously talked with the creator of the Ala Test, but the ale test just as a reminder to all of our listeners. We discussed it on the Frozen two episodes. But the Ala Test was inspired by the Bechdel Test and Ali wrote it and named it after Aila, from rhymes for young guls. The Ala Test asks three questions about a film's character. Is she an indigenous or Aboriginal woman who is the main character, She cannot fall in love with a white man, and third, does not end up raped or murdered at any point in the story. So obviously this movie passes the Alea Test or wouldn't be called that, but for all media. The al test, like the beck, can be applied to any kind of narrative media. And you can find the full list and all the updates that the dash Ala dash test dot tumblr dot com.

01:36:10
Speaker 4: And try and follow Ellie on Twitter. She's at Ali Noddy nahd ees how you spell her last name?

01:36:19
Speaker 1: So listen to the Frozen two episode you know what to do and then tell five people.

01:36:23
Speaker 4: And then tell five people. Is there anything else anyone wants to talk about regarding I.

01:36:33
Speaker 2: Mean, I still have pages and pages of terrible, sad statistics, but we don't have to get into those. I did want to just add that one of the things that I've come to appreciate about Aila is that I think that, whether it's intentional or not, I think she can be read as a queer character. And a lot of that has to do with some interpretations of too spirit, which is a Pandigenous term that was adopted in the early nineties to describe LGBTQ plus indigenous folks. One of the interpretations of too spirit is coming out of sort of like in a Jibwei perspective, is that like you have male and female energy and they're balanced. Another interpretation of it, coming more sort of from like Eastern Woodlands or like more sort of like Migma and Showny traditions, is that you walk between worlds and that's what it means to be too spirit And so you see that a lot in this film, where Ala sort of doesn't have like strict boundaries in terms of like like the visions that she's having of her mom and you know, the dreams that she's having, and also you know she sees Tyler at one brother. You know, she's sort of having these these moments where you know, worlds are not Yeah, she's passing sort of between worlds. She's also shape shifting, which is also a part of some of the conversations around queer identity. Is from a traditional perspective. So she goes from having long braids to having very short hair. She's wearing costumes. At one point she has like that which's face like on the back of her head. Yes, yeah, which is like also a very interesting sort of like duality in a sense.

01:38:20
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:38:20
Speaker 2: So, as I've grown with this movie, and as I you know, continue to watch it and continue to grow in terms of too, like my my own identity as like a queer trans indigenous person. I like understand her better now as also an indigenous character.

01:38:37
Speaker 1: That's so cool.

01:38:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's it's like, it's interesting, like it's it's something that like I don't think I'll have to ask Jeff about but I don't think it was ever intentional because it's never mentioned in anything, right, But yeah, it sort of fits really interestingly in that way with a lot of traditional beliefs.

01:38:58
Speaker 1: I love growing with movies. That's the best.

01:39:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, There's so many things that don't hold up anymore, So it's really nice when you can like watch something that's so cherished and you're like, oh.

01:39:12
Speaker 1: You won't betray me.

01:39:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could still love you. Something interesting too to think about in the context of this film is the idea of unsettling. So we talk about unsettling in terms of like something that disturbs us, right, but we also talk about unsettling as the process of decolonizing. You know, you're becoming You're not a settler, you're becoming unsettled. And I think that this film is such an interesting and interesting representation of that of sort of like Jeff Barnaby's leaning into all this very spooky imagery and all this very like you know, very graphic imagery even you know, like you really do see Popper get his head blown off, like there's a big check of his head missing.

01:39:58
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:39:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's this so sort of like this desire to disturb and kind of like upset, but also that that's a path to kind of like interrupt and get some movement in what can be of sometimes a very stagnant conversation with regards to Canadian history and indigenous history and in the country. So it's like, it's it's interesting that that exists in this film in that way, and there's also a conversation to have around the idea of like revenge or reconciliation. You know, I think that, you know, Indigenous people aren't a monolith. There's always going to be people who you know, like we were talking about earlier, aren't gonna like, you know, the type of films that Jeff Barnaby is making, and there's gonna be you know, people who do like them that don't like other types of films. And then like there's gonna be certain types of discourse that like certain Indigenous people are going to really support, and there's gonna be other ones that they don't agree with, you know, but it's very interesting. This conversation is sort of about like revenge versus reconciliation, because in an interesting way, we can own, we really decide what we ourselves as individuals are going to do. And because of that, Yeah, there's so many questions that kind of exist out there about like whether that is even like meaningful, you know, if it's just like an individual sort of thing. But I don't know. I am a big believer in that, Like, our individual actions are important. So whether we go to the revenge side of things or the reconciliation side of things, it's just that we make that choice, you know, alternately in the end. Yeah, I think that's kind of kind of all I decide. Yeah, Oh, I do have recommendations.

01:41:35
Speaker 4: Please, yes, please, So if.

01:41:37
Speaker 2: People are interested, and I'll talk to you guys more about this off mic. But if people are interested in learning more about indigenous issues, if like this episode is like catching you totally off guard and you're like, I've never heard of Indians before in my life, Well, welcome to twenty twenty. I don't know where you're been living, but congratulations, I guess, but I would say that learning about indigenous issues isn't as difficult as we might think. So much of our school system, you know, has been set up in a way that maintains weight supremacy. So we have to do a lot of the work ourselves, and that can be intimidating, especially if you don't know where to start. For both, you know, Caitlin and you Jamie, like I feel like, you know, the process of learning about residential schools this past week, even though it's important, like history to learn about, I imagine it was also very very taxing because it is very taxing because it should be. It's genocide. Yeah, you know, it's not a fun thing to learn about. It's not a fun thing to discuss, but it is a necessary thing for us to learn about because we have to stop it. It's actively still happening and we have to, you know, make that decision, that personal decision whether we are are going to be with it or against it in a sense. So with all that in mind, there are a ton of resources out there that exists for folks who are interested in learning that are really easy to access free even you know, and I will put together some of those maybe we can time it so that like we'll put like put a bunch together for like the release of this episode.

01:43:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we can release a resource guide the whole thing for.

01:43:19
Speaker 2: Sure, because there's like there's so much stuff out there, even like really little things like there's an app that you can download for free called native land dot Ca. It's a world map and like you essentially use it like Google Maps. You look up different locations and it tells you whose traditional territory you're living on. And just even like little gestures like that are really really important because there needs to be that recognition. There needs to be that starting point. You know. I think that a lot of us feel very attached to the places that we grew up in different ways, you know, whether we spent physically long periods of time there or whether it's a sentimental sort of attachment. And just being able to recognize that it's like Okay, that's Migmap territory, or that's Le Nape territory, or that's Osage territory, that's you know, Soue territory. Then even just understanding that all of a sudden can be such an opening of a door, because then it's like, oh, when you hear about like protests happening at Standing Rock. It's not like, oh, those are nameless, faceless like Indigenous people protesting. We're not sure what it's like. Oh, I get it. Those are like the Coda and Lakota Sue. You know, I grew up on Sue territory. Like all of a sudden, you have a much more personal tie to that. There's also tons and tons and tons of Indigenous activists out there, people like Pam Palmitter who are doing great work, and all their stuff is like on YouTube and they're active on social media. So there's like, so there is hope, there's hope you can learn about these things. It might be uncomfortable, as any kind of unlearning, unsettling process is, but I would really encourage people to do that work because you know, we've seen with this past year we cannot continue to live is black, Indigenous and people of color like we carry this tremendous weight all the time of this violence of this system. You know, even though I'm not currently in Nova Scotia, I am connected to the MIGMN Nova Scotia right now who are fighting for their treaty rights. You know, I am as an Indigenous person, I am connected to the struggles of other indigenous people. I'm connected to the struggles of black people because it's all part of the same system, you know, And that's why you care, and that's why you have to be mobilized, and that's why you have to educate yourself, and that's why you have to speak out and try and do better.

01:45:38
Speaker 3: You know.

01:45:39
Speaker 2: My grandmother, who was migmn is like was like my anchor for my mag man has for a really long time passed away a couple of years ago, and her dying words were, I love you all. And love is such an important value within Migma culture that like I love you all is not just talking about I love you all as in like the people who are physically in the room there, but like love is something that influences all of our actions. You know. We have a lot of intention and a lot of thought that goes towards like how we are in the world in terms of like how we relate to everything, you know, and so yeah, like starting to educate yourself is like starting to take responsibility as like part of that interconnectedness.

01:46:26
Speaker 8: Yes, it's like a big taint, no no, no, I think as a lot of us who are, you know, on a pretty steep learning curve honestly, because they're I mean, like we.

01:46:38
Speaker 1: Were saying, there's just so much of this. I mean, this is just things I didn't learn in school. I feel like you hit the same three points in at least American public schools. And that's kind of it. And it's like the information is accessible, it's just making the commitment to do it like it. That is all it is.

01:47:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was going to say, there's this fantastic film that I just got to see it at the Toronto International Film Festival, but we'll hopefully get why release soon and everybody can check it out. It's a documentary based on Thomas King's book The Inconvenient Indian, which everybody should read. But there's this fabulous line in the film at the end that is I think, sort of very emblematic, kind of about this whole conversation, you know, And it's essentially, once you know this story, you can't unknow it. You just have to live with the fact that you know it now. So now that you know about residential schools, you can't say, oh, well, I didn't know, you know, and therefore it was allowed to go on there are still residential schools open in the United States. By the way, I don't know if you guys found that in your research.

01:47:52
Speaker 4: But I did.

01:47:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah, so it's like, well, now that you know, you know, and go forward with that and you can do it. I believe in you.

01:48:03
Speaker 4: Thanks Jazz. I didn't write this quote down from a YouTube video A wh I love watching YouTube. I love going to box office Mojo dot com classic Caitlin. Yeah. Senator Murray Sinclair, oh yes, said and again I'm going to paraphrase this, but he was talking about how people have said to him regarding oppression in the residential school system, saying like, you know what that was in the past, why can't you just forget it? And his response is always why can't you remember? No?

01:48:37
Speaker 2: And that's just it. And like I said, you know earlier in our conversation, like these things are still impacting us today. I still have friends who, you know, grew up in the foster care system. I still have friends whose parents were in residential school I. You know, this is an ancient history. And that's the most fundamental thing is that, you know, so often we portray indigenous people as being real and being like of the past. And even when I was growing up, I was like, I feel like the most like contact I had with Indigenous culture was like a racist diorama at like a history museum, you know, and we have to remind ourselves that like Indigenous people still exist and colonialism still exists, and ignoring it is what we have been doing and that has not been effective. So yeah, so it is like it is something that like I think people especially here in Canada are very are starting to become a lot more aware of. But it's it feels sometimes like such a slow process, you know that, Like I wish everybody could get a copy of Tom King's Inconvenient Indian and a copy of like Rhymes for Young Ghouls, and it's like this is your homework, like citizen, you know, like this is what you have to do this weekend.

01:49:56
Speaker 4: Is there anything left to discuss?

01:49:58
Speaker 1: Well, we know it certainly passes the Ala test because it's ALA, but I believe that kaylin I had this movie passing the Bechdel test.

01:50:09
Speaker 4: Yes, there's a scene at the end where Aila and her she's watching sort of like her own flashback from Afar. Toward the end of the movie where she and her mom, Anna are painting something by firelight, and they're kind of discussing what they're painting and why and.

01:50:28
Speaker 1: Just weaving right.

01:50:32
Speaker 4: And then it also passes between Ala in series, I think when she relates the story about the wolf. Yep, yeah, in that whole conversation. So yeah, definite Bechdel Test passing.

01:50:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like that's another reason that, like, I was so excited to talk about this film because I was, like, I know that it passes the Bechdel test because I was watching it with that intention, you know, seven years ago. Hell yeah, So that's that's awesome. Yeah.

01:51:03
Speaker 4: And then that's that brings it to our nipple scale, So zero to five nipples based on examining the movie from an intersectional feminist lens, and hmmm, it's gonna I mean it's very high. Yeah, I mean I I feel like it could be a five nipple situation. Yeah, I think so, And I'm interested to hear.

01:51:25
Speaker 3: Right.

01:51:25
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm trolling you guys in the video and nobody can see it. I mean, it's five nipples for me. But I also feel like I'm a little bit biased because I mean, I just this film has meant so much throughout the years and I love it so much and just you know, have a bad ass MGMA female heroin fuck yeah, like.

01:51:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I don't really have any like notes for like, there's nothing that like rubbed me wrong or any show.

01:51:55
Speaker 1: Me a more motivated female protagonist with.

01:51:59
Speaker 2: More ata like she's running the show, you know.

01:52:03
Speaker 1: And with higher stakes. I mean this that it's wonderful and again that that phrase narrative sovereignty and having this be an indigenous filmmaker, writing, directing, editing this amazing character. Who Yeah, I have no no, it's I think the more we talk about it, I do feel like it is very squarely a coming of age film of sorts, just not the tone we're used to in that genre. But it's it's such like you said, just it's such a singular movie, and we are seeing a community that is almost never represented in movies. And on top of that, we're seeing Aila who is not just dealing with systemic oppression as it pertains to being indigenous, she's also experiencing sexism within her own community and navigating that and just navigating all this stuff, and she she makes mistakes. She just yeah, I feel it's it's five nips for me.

01:53:07
Speaker 4: Mm hmm. The plan where they're like, you know what, we're gonna make shit shower down upon this guy and then st try to steal the money like their plan wasn't maybe like.

01:53:20
Speaker 1: Danny Ocean could never can never, he could never.

01:53:26
Speaker 4: Like it's great, and the catharsis of it is great, but I'm just like, like, he's right there, he knows that you're there. Maybe like steal the money first and then like you know, just like teenager it's like teenagers. Yeah, of course they're gonna come up with a bit of a hair brain plan and it works.

01:53:45
Speaker 2: So yeah, and it's so rewarding too, because the ship Like at one point when they're putting the ship like in the van, like getting ready to go to the school, they're like, yeah, everybody contributed, and I can just like I can just picture like everybody abody just been like, oh, oh you need some shit you need like we get that. Yeah, And it's just like the fact that it's like a community effort to like shit on.

01:54:10
Speaker 1: This opie, the crowdsource this shit. It's love and that sequence we didn't talk about it too much, but that sequence is it's just like another way this movie is so cool where there's I mean understandably so there's so many very very emotionally heavy scenes and plotlines in this movie. And then for this, I mean, it fits very well inside of what the movie is, but it's also this moment of like you're in Ocean's eleven for a second, but if it fits very clearly inside this world, and it's like fun and they win and it's exciting and it's just oh, that sequence is so cool.

01:54:50
Speaker 4: M hmm.

01:54:51
Speaker 2: Agreed.

01:54:51
Speaker 4: I mean, and even just like we talked about the little bit of criticism or like some pushback that Jeff Barnaby received, like from his own community, like are you really gonna like show these stereotypes, which again like I don't. This is an exploration of what like systemic racism and oppression does to an Indigenous community, does to families, and does to individuals, and like that's this is just an authentic story about this young woman, this teenage girl, and it's just an incredibly crafted and told story. Ask glad you like it.

01:55:27
Speaker 2: I'm so glad you're like, because I think there's also like this nervousness on my part of like I'm like, oh no, what if they don't like it, I'm gonna have to sit on this call and like explain like why it's a brilliant film. But I'm so glad you guys liked it, and and and yeah, and thank you so much for this opportunity and for holding this space for indigenous film and for me and for Aila and yeah, thank you so much.

01:55:54
Speaker 4: Thank you for being and providing all your insights, information everything.

01:56:02
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, extremely grateful and just like stoked that you're on the show.

01:56:06
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you.

01:56:08
Speaker 4: And there you have it. That's our re released episode on rhymes for Young Grules. You can follow our guest Jess on Instagram at Jess Merwin. You can follow us at Bechdelcast, as well as subscribe to our Patreon aka the Matreon.

01:56:30
Speaker 1: We love the Matreon. It is where for five dollars a month you can.

01:56:33
Speaker 5: Get two bonus episodes with just Caitlin and myself on a theme of usually yours and occasionally are choosing if we didn't like what you chose, So it's.

01:56:45
Speaker 1: Always a weird time to join the Matreon. It's a really fun community of people over there. You get us say in the episodes, you get you know, when we go on tour, you get pre tickets, you get discounts, you get bonus merch if you come to our live shows. It's really fun. This upcoming month, we're going to be covering some holiday films you've been asking us to do for years and we're finally doing. We're doing The Family Stone and Black Christmas over there, so.

01:57:11
Speaker 4: True, so meet us over there.

01:57:13
Speaker 1: The link is in the description.

01:57:14
Speaker 4: It's a great way to spend five dollars. And speaking of spending money or not spending money, the last thing I want to say is I'd like to encourage listeners to participate in the economic blackout that is currently happening. I've seen different date ranges for different versions of this, but more or less between November twenty fifth, so it's already started to December. Tewod there's a huge economic blackout where rather than participating in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales from huge corporations, exercise the power you have as a consumer to withhold your money because that will beak volumes if enough people do it.

01:58:03
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and in addition to as we've discussed in the show before, keeping up with and observing the BDS boycott list as well and rerouting maybe some of that money that you would have been spending at business Corp or wherever the fuck you you spend your money and rerouting at two places like the Native Women's Collective, which we mentioned at the beginning of the episode. You can give to them in the description or you know, in addition, you know, get involved in it or at very least aware of mutual aid efforts in your community. You know, you can obviously, if you're not able to donate your money, you can donate your time. There's just a massive, massive need for you and whatever you are able to do, whether that's financial, whether that's donating your time, and just you know, get involved in your community because that's the only way that we weather these kinds of horrific times that we find ourselves in. So if you're able to do it, you absolutely should, and it's just you know, a great way to build community and focus on community.

01:59:13
Speaker 4: Absolutely.

01:59:13
Speaker 1: My last plug is listen to We the Unhoused. It's a show I also produce on iHeartRadio that discusses specifically issues that affect the unhouse, told by unhoused people and their advocates.

01:59:29
Speaker 4: There's a really great.

01:59:30
Speaker 1: Episode coming out this coming Tuesday that interviews a wonderful filmmaker named Caitlin Crenn who just released a wonderful documentary on PBS about the queer unhoused community in New York. It's a really great movie. It's called Outcast Nation. It's a great interview with her and.

01:59:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, amazing. That's my It's my little plug with that. Thank you for listening. Be safe, take care of yourself, and take care of each other. Bye bye.

02:00:07
Speaker 1: The Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted and produced by Me Jamie Loftus.

02:00:12
Speaker 4: And me Caitlyn Dorante. The podcast is also produced by Sophie Lichtermann and.

02:00:17
Speaker 1: Edited by Caitlyn Dorante. Ever heard of them?

02:00:20
Speaker 4: That's me and our logo and merch and all of our artwork in fact are designed by Jamie Loftis, Ever heard of her? Oh my God?

02:00:29
Speaker 1: And our theme song, by the way, was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Katherine Voskrasinski Iconic and a special thanks to the one and only Aristotle Acevedo.

02:00:40
Speaker 4: For more information about the podcast, please visit linktree slash Bechdel Cast