Still from the documentary Inconvenient Indian (2020). Directed by Michelle Latimer.NFB, Courtesy of TIFF
Clayton Thomas-Müller is a member of the Treaty #6 based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in Northern Manitoba. Now based in Winnipeg, he is a campaigner, award-winning film director and media producer, and author.
There was a great deal in Michelle Latimer’s interview with The Globe and Mail that outraged me, as an Indigenous filmmaker and as a child of parents who both attended residential school. But this quote from Ms. Latimer, who quit as the director of the CBC series Trickster and had her documentary pulled from distribution amid questions about whether she was from Kitigan Zibi nation as she claimed, particularly stung: “I’ve certainly not tried to take any opportunities from others,” she said, “and the opportunities that I have been afforded, I have tried to use to bring other people up.”
Regardless of her intent, I can say with confidence that her career was in direct competition with mine.
In 2016, I partnered with a production company and pitched Vice on a show about Indigenous activism – specifically, about how to “start a revolution.” Vice was interested in pursuing something on the topic, and I felt confident that, with 20 years campaigning in the Indigenous rights movement and being an award-winning director and producer with my own documentary on CBC Gem, I’d get support.
We got declined. We later learned that Vice commissioned a TV series by Ms. Latimer, called Rise.
It was hard not to be bitter. With all due respect to the subjects profiled and the incredible hosts, I felt the series had many challenges. From a movement perspective, Rise felt extractive and reactive. It didn’t feel community-based or filled with any spirit, and it didn’t seem like Ms. Latimer did her research.
Still, when I was approached (on short notice) by one of the hosts of Rise who asked for help producing and connecting the project to subjects in my home city of Winnipeg after my pitch meeting, I agreed, because – from my lived experience – I understand that that’s what we do for each other in the Indigenous community.
If you’re going to sit on boards and arts advisory councils as a representative of Indigenous artists, or if you’re going to benefit from arts funding for Indigenous creators and storytellers, you must have lived experience – that is, you must truly know our struggles, and not be a tourist. Lived experience does not mean a DNA test, a search on ancestry.com, or – in the case of the privileged Ms. Latimer – a pro bono genealogy study done by experts attempting to replace this important validator of one’s self-identification, in a similar approach to Joseph Boyden’s, when he was questioned about his ancestry in 2017.
I fully support a human being’s right to self-identification and self-determination. I know that it is a hard journey to find out who you are; in particular, I support those ripped away from their families and Nations by the federal government’s First Nations Child and Family Services Program, beginning with the Sixties Scoop. I want all of you to find your way home. But I get jaded when I hear that, say, Grey Owl was some person’s great, great cousin of their dad’s auntie – before they launch into a blinding display of privilege, taking up space from people who actually deserve to speak from and for our communities.
I cannot count the number of times that white people have mocked me, claiming that some distant ancestor was Innu, which they felt empowered them to ask about racist fictions and myths – “free Indian funding” for school, health care, free houses, open hunting, and the ability to not pay taxes. These are people who do not face the daily systemic barriers many Indigenous people endure. It never ends. Every day, we go about our lives trying to succeed, all under an ongoing settler-colonial occupation of our sacred lands, waters and air spaces.
Secret settler-colonialists have not had to fight through the experienced trauma that Indigenous Peoples carry to win arts funding or to assist politicians in Ottawa, and the same story is too true in so many sectors and industries in Canada. The system, after all, is content to lift up people who won’t disrupt its self-interested and fragile engine of white supremacy.
I was certainly upset by Ms. Latimer’s words in that interview with The Globe. Rather than say sorry in it, she could only say that she was “speaking [her] truth” – which doesn’t mean anything, since anyone can say they own their truth, and what really matters is whether the community at large accepts the same truth. Rather than pursue a restorative justice process with Kitigan Zibi and then her Indigenous peers in the film community, she has hidden behind promises of forthcoming ancestry reports. But people should understand that she is not the villain: Rather, we should aim our outrage at the settler-colonial state, which seems set up to keep Indigenous peoples in line by dividing us with false narratives of Good and Bad Indians.
Ms. Latimer’s only way through these hard conversations of decolonization is through a community-based process with the very people she claims to belong to; I send her my good thoughts and hope that she gets the support she needs to say sorry and to extend her “truths” into true healing. We all need this to end with the emergence of a truth that honours all sides of this terrible circumstance. But I also send love and respect to all the storytellers out there, and put on notice Canada’s funders, distributors and power holders to do better, as we always can.
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