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Most mainstream films and media continue to portray native culture as part of the past. As the number of aboriginal youth interested in becoming filmmakers, writers, directors and producers increases, a greater variety of aboriginal experiences and representations are beginning to appear on screen. From its natural environment presents three films that address the distinct experiences of aboriginal youth in the world of contemporary art, on the streets and in native reserves. Artist Jimmie Durham, video artist/musician Geoffrey Pranteau (aka Daybi), and filmmaker Noam Gonick, explore concepts and experiences of city/reserve transitions through a variety of film genres, including spaghetti westerns, Kung fu movies, art house, and crime/gangster movies. Their work speaks of rural-urban-rural movements, as well as the power of youth to claim their own territory in the midst of societal pressures, racism, poverty and isolation. Although different, each story speaks of an immediate, contemporary experience in a time of great transition and movement. Each film presents a unique perspective on the construction of space and societal expectations, adding further to discussions of aboriginal identity. These films provide us with no clear conclusion or happy ending. There is no romance or futuristic ideal of hopeful youths, and we are left to understand and assess the stories on our own, expanding and complicating our present knowledge of younger minds, younger ambitions, and their role in our future considerations. This screening is part of ongoing curatorial research that aims to expand upon and explore ideas and experiences of urbanity and aboriginal diversity, as well as the negotiations of urban aboriginal artists working in multicultural communities. A brief discussion is scheduled after each screening. Daybi and Noam Gonick will be present at the screening. Pursuit of HappinessGermany 2002, 13 min. Director: Jimmie Durham A film without dialogue that chronicles the rise of Joe Hill (Anri Sala), a ficticious Native American artist, who makes it to the top after a successful exhibition of art made from garbage. Producers: Alves-Durham GbR, Mario Pieroni and Dora Stiefelmeier Zerynthia Made with support from Gallery 101 (Canada), the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art (France), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, Gemany), and Tommaso & Giuliana Setari NeutralCanada 2003, 25 min. Director: Daybi (Cree) Neutral is a story about Ismail Renaud, a young man who inherits a house from his aunt, moves from the city to the reserve and begins a downward spiral. Producers: Metal Sky Media and Kanien'kehaka Onkwawén:na Raotitiohkwa Production Award: Best Emerging Artist - imagineNATIVE Film and Media Art Festival, 2003 StrykerCanada 2004, 85 min. Director: Noam Gonick “Stryker” is Canadian slang for a prospective gang member. This film follows one Stryker, a 14-year-old Native arsonist from a northern reserve, through a turf war between two street gangs in Winnipeg’s North End. Producers: Juliette Hagoian (Wild Boars of Manitoba) and Ryan Black Made with support from Telefilm Canada, Manitoba Film & Sound, Showcase, Movie Central, The Movie Network, The Centre for Aboriginal Human Resources Development, Manitoba Arts Council Synopsis Stryker is the story of a brutal turf war between two street gangs in Winnipeg's North End. Omar (Ryan Black), the mixed-blood leader of the ABS (Asian Bomb Squad), dominates the ’hood with his crew of Filipino enforcers. His nemesis, Mama Ceece (Deena Fontaine), is the girl-thug leader of the Indian Posse. She has just been released from jail and is determined to regain control of her neighbourhood. "Stryker" is Canadian slang for a prospective gang member. This film follows one Stryker (Kyle Henry), a 14-year-old Native arsonist from a northern reserve whose arrival in the city serves as a catalyst in this fierce battle. The Story Brokenhead First Nation Reserve, northern Manitoba, Canada. The dead of winter. Stryker, a fourteen year-old Native arsonist, burns down an abandoned church on the reservation. He runs away from the scene of the crime, over frozen rivers and through a herd of wild buffalo, and hops aboard a freight train to ride the rails to Winnipeg, Indigenous Peoples’ capital of Canada. Winnipeg's North End is a poverty stricken neighbourhood and home to most of Winnipeg’s Native population. Stryker arrives in the North End in the middle of a turf war between two gangs. The North End illicit drug and prostitution trade is controlled by Omar, a part-Native half-breed, and his Asian Bomb Squad, a clique of stylish émigré Filipinos. Omar took control of the North End while his arch rival, Mama Ceece, girl-thug leader of the Indian Posse, was in jail. Mama Ceece is now back on the streets and fighting to get back her gang and her turf. Filipinos and Natives are clashing in a racial gang war. When Stryker's train comes crashing to a halt in Winnipeg’s North End rail yards, the kid witnesses a violent car jacking: Asian Bomb Squad lieutenant Orville loses a large cocaine shipment to train-jumping Indian Posse boys. Stryker is impressed by Mama Ceece and the Indian Posse. He wants nothing more than to be in their gang. A "Stryker", in Canadian slang, is a prospective gang-banger who must prove himself with a body count or property damage while being hazed, or "jumped-in" by older gang members. But the Indian Posse wants nothing to do with Stryker. Wandering the unfamiliar boarded-up streets of Winnipeg's North End alone, Stryker hooks up with Daisy, a Métis (mixed blood) trannie hooker -- and he comes face to face with Omar -- the Napoleon-complex pimp of the district. Omar bitch slaps Daisy, rolling her for “holding out” on him. Stryker helps Daisy walk to her house – a trannie haven for the North End. Stryker has a home. After having their drugs heisted, the Asian Bomb Squad boys pick up their own castaway off the street, the teen prostitute Ruby, sister to an Indian Posse boy and part time lesbian girlfriend of Mama Ceece. The Asian Bomb Squad delivers Ruby to Omar as a flesh offering to make up for the loss of their drugs to the Indian Posse. At a house party at Daisy’s, Omar explodes with abusive rage that the Indian Posse is back and attacking, but he falls for the irresistible Ruby. This is the beginning of the end for Omar. As he party’s, his world starts to spiral down: Mama Ceece and the Indian Posse make a frontal attack, fire bombing his car and scrawling the words "Native Land" on it. While Omar is spooked that the war over North End turf is now on, Stryker becomes even more enamored of the Indian Posse. Stryker leaves the relative safety of Daisy’s house in search of the Indian Posse. He finds them but they play nice and proceed to beat and stomp him in the middle of a North End street. The police arrive and everyone is shuttled to youth prison -- where the Indian Posse encounters their former rivals, The Deuce Crew, another native gang spending a warm winter incarcerated. The two enemy aboriginal gangs collide in an all out brawl, but Stryker breaks it up with an impressive display of talent for arson. Stryker has finally won the Indian Posse’s admiration. But Stryker is taken into isolation by the guards, while the others are tossed into the yard to duke it out. Mama Ceece arrives at the barbed wire fence to break things up and pull the two gangs together to work for a common purpose. With a handshake and enough coke to share, the two gangs become one in order to finish off Omar. As Mama Ceece says, “Native peoples gotta come together, take back what’s ours.” The police release Stryker into the custody of Talia – an abusive foster mother who has had every member of the Native gangs, from Omar on down, in her clutches at one time or another. Omar is the only one who still considers Talia his mother. Meanwhile, Omar's bosses are punishing him for his gang’s loss of drug merchandise. The sadistic bosses send Omar back to where he came from, back to his days of stripping on ladies night at the local bar. Humiliated, Omar does his strip routine at the sleazy bar, with his “mother” Talia cheering him on, with Mama Ceece and the Indian Posse jeering form the sidelines. All hell breaks loose as the Indian Posse and the Asian Bomb Squad clash in a brutal bar brawl. As the battle rages, Stryker sets fire to the bar, inadvertently knocking out Mama Ceece with a hurled bottle. Everybody runs for the doors as Omar takes his arsonist-saviour Stryker under his arm to safety. Despite having his lucky firebug talisman Stryker at his side, Omar continues to lose his grip on the North End. The Indian Posse steal his best customers, his own Filipino gang mutinies and rips off his cash, his best whore Daisy turns on him, and Stryker delivers a final traitorous blow by burning down the evil Talia’s house. Omar is alone and defeated. In a frenzy of near insanity he dumps gasoline all over himself. Stryker could light the final match and put Omar out of his misery. But life is sometimes worse punishment than death, so Stryker lets Omar beg for release without delivering it. Stryker walks off into the night. Alone again, Stryker is sleeping in the freezing North End street. He is picked up by police, beaten and taken out of town for a starlight tour – so named in Winnipeg after the infamous police practice of driving Native youth and other undesirables out of the city limits on cold winter nights and leaving them bloodied to freeze to death on the snow drifts. Stryker lies near death on the frozen tundra. But, as if in a dream, Stryker wakes up in a herd of buffalo, picks himself up and walks up a snowy hill. At the top of the hill, Stryker stands resolutely before the vista of the Winnipeg skyline – ready to return to his future. Director's Notes After generations of genocide at the hands of this place we call "Canada", I saw the surfacing of Native street gangs in Winnipeg as an army of resistance. During the arson epidemics of the last few years, when the city was being burnt to the ground, I cheered these kids on – the gangs pushed back at an impossible situation thrust on them by birthright. It's the oldest story in Canada, and one which we rarely admit to ourselves – but there is an apartheid in effect here – gasoline sniffing, teenage prostitution, crack use, are all symptoms of this system. Native teens are told how to make it on white middleclass terms, told that it's the only way to transcend their situation. But away from this evil coercion, within the gang underworld, I have found an amazing sense of camaraderie, and a belonging to something pure and raw. Gang family life mimics the abusive ways of the superstructure, yet as misguided as it can be, I admire the impulse to resist. From the first stolen treaties where Cree and Ojibwa land was acquired to create “Manitoba” to the local police custom of “Starlight Tours” - taking undesirable kids out to the frozen outskirts of the city to die of exposure - resistance is vital. Its been said that when the State starts to condone the killing of a particular people, that’s when teen gangs emerge – as a way of self-protection. The theory works for the Indian Posse, which made its debut after the Oka uprising in Quebec in the early 1990's, when the military was called in to settle a Mohawk land dispute with the barrel of a gun. Stryker the fourteen year-old arsonist is an avenging angel – settling the score with a pack of matches as his only weapon. In scene one of the film, the Church takes some payback for its history of residential schools where the priests and nuns attempted to erase a peoples' culture. As Stryker's adventures progress, he settles the score a few more times, torching the lecherous foster mother who keeps photos of all the baby thugs on her refrigerator, but in the end he doesn’t kill Omar – the mixed race (Métis) failed overlord. Co-writer David McIntosh and I were determined that in this script no Native people would die – a new-style cowboys and Indians movie. With the fastest growing aboriginal population in the country, Winnipeg is not only a centre for Native struggles – but also for the rebirth of ancient traditions, like the concept of the "two-spirited people". These transgendered, inter-sex individuals were originally revered in pre-colonial North America, regarded as magically gifted. I see an echo of this in the trannie crack whores of the low track. Daisy is the one person who gets out of the violent cycle, out of the city that is the child poverty and murder capital of Canada. She is the center of goodness in the film. Omar is all about masculinity in crisis – a failure to live up to the archetypal movie thug. The idea of gangsters pimping for and carousing with other men dressed as women might seem like a stretch, but I’ve taken little artistic liberty here. Nightlife in the core area of this frontier town is wilder than anything I’ve managed to get on film. As someone says in the film: "A hole's a hole." If you believe in the idea that the Native people in North America got here thousands of years ago by walking over a land bridge from Asia, then the members of the Asian Bomb Squad and the Indian Posse aren’t really all that foreign to each other. I was partly inspired by Japanese genre flicks, and wanted Stryker to fit in somewhere between the Far East and the mean streets of Winnipeg. This film is about racial strife, one that is very real in this community. Maybe it is the similar DNA that makes the feud between Filipinos and Natives so bitter. Or, maybe it's the way that Filipino immigrants have attained middleclass status within one generation of landing here, while the first people to settle this area millennia ago are still the underdogs. I really want this film to act as a catalyst – kind of like the way the character of Stryker acts a catalyst for the people he meets on his journey. I hope that people watching this story will be stirred to push back, and that Native youth watching it will feel as inspired and charged by the experience as many of the cast members were. Almost all of the people you see on screen have never acted before, but they have first-hand experience with street life. In talking to the real Indian Posse about the project they said: “it’s about time someone gave us the respect to make a movie about us.” I do respect the Indian Posse, whoever they are, however many Posse’s there are. This film is for street gangs everywhere who are trying to make a world of their own. Noam Gonick: Bio The son of a radical Marxist, as a precocious twelve year-old Noam Gonick directed A Mid Summers Night's Dream in the local church basement. At eighteen, he ran around naked covered in vegetable oil in a Berlin bomb shelter with a skinhead Artaud ensemble. After a sketchy film school experience he studied filmmakers Guy Maddin and Bruce LaBruce, producing a documentary and book on their work before making his own first feature, Hey, Happy! which premiered at Sundance in 2001. |
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