Directors: Zaya Benazzo & Maurizio Benazzo
Running time: 94mins
If An Owl Calls Your Name walks a difficult path: it is both concerned with outlining the specific persecution of First Nations communities in Canada, and in drawing out more ‘universal’ threads around intergenerational trauma beyond that community. That obviously has its benefits; it helps to make a very specific story easier to relate to for a wide audience, and will hopefully encourage more of those viewers to engage with the First Nations community – and to protest against the governments and businesses attacking it – long after the film ends. It can also offer a window of introspection, for audiences to consider how they have been hurt – and how they may be hurting people – in their own lives.
The film splits its time sporadically with a group of indigenous elders, healers and activists from Esk’etemc, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en territories – who are survivors of the brutal forced assimilation project of Canada’s residential school system; and siblings Patricia June Vickers and Roy Henry Vickers, who have sought to extend their own healing into a project to help other survivors and their children as they heal from substance abuse, violence, and a profound disconnect from their culture.
There are some minor issues with the edit here – as the Vickers’ project only comes to the fore in the final fifth of the film, leaving the conclusions around it feeling a little rushed. That is partially understandable, because the testimony of the elders – which, viewers are informed of at the start, includes references to childhood sexual abuse – rightly takes centre-stage for the bulk of the film. In one particularly chilling moment between those stories, standing outside the residential school that imprisoned them, a member of the group blankly points to an area of ground and notes “some people tell me that nothing happened here”; and then, “that’s where” a number of children were buried.
More than 4,000 children died in the residential system, many left in unmarked graves – and as with any incidence of colonial murder, there are no shortage of modern reactionaries ready to declare this a ‘hoax‘ by whatever mode of mental gymnastics they find most expedient. The Benazzos are doing important work in presenting first-hand testimony to the contrary of those bad-faith arguments, and by enabling the First Nations community to commemorate the horrors they experienced in their own words – before forwarding it to an international audience that likely still buys into the myth of, as one witness puts it, the myth of the helpful Mounty, the friendly Canadian – and even the myth of ‘democratic’ Canada itself as anything other than an extractive experiment in pseudo-progressive colonialism. While some tiny spaces of land are reservations for First Nations people, and others have managed to buy deeds to plots beyond, the fact remains all that still ultimately belongs to the British crown.
At the same time, the impacts of the residential system, of that systemic violence meted out to cower the native population, to divorce them from their land, their history, their language and culture, carries into the private political sphere of the home. And the Benazzos do a good job of unflinchingly discussing the nightmarish ways that the grandparents and parents discussed in the film hurt their own loved ones in utterly horrific ways – before drawing things to a conclusion where each draws a line in the sand, and aims to end the intergenerational trauma with themselves.
Beyond Canada’s First Nations people, there is a recognisable pattern here which many viewers can hopefully take home with them to their own struggles. Around the world, whether in countries colonised by Britain and its contemporary powers; or residing in the heart of that empire, rulers have spent centuries trying to beat alternative cultures out of the ruled. Through internment, abduction, floggings, molestation and murder, there are few people whose families have not been in some way impacted by this process, however recent in their history – the descendants of religious minorities, indigenous people, slaves, travellers, and many other communities, have seen abuse and addiction echo through the ages, hobbling their ability to fight back against further ruling class assaults, or to live healthy and socially engaged lives.
Unfortunately, despite its 90-plus minutes of content, If An Owl Calls Your Name struggles with its timing. And amid its rushed ending, it fails to properly knit these two threads together.
What ultimately proves an uneasy compromise between specific testimonies, and universality, therefore sees the film fall short on arguably the most important front. It does not offer anything approaching a call to action for its viewers.
If we wanted to know how to support the fightback the Esk’etemc, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en subjects of the film are taking to Canada’s government and corporations, nobody seems to have been asked how we might do that – or even if that would be something they actually want. That is surely something worthy of exploring if you are going to go to the effort of telling their story in the first place.
At the same time, when it comes to intergenerational trauma, it is left to the audience to figure out what to do with the information, if and when they transpose this very specific situation on to their own lives. Where might people start to unravel that particular web of issues – where might they turn for support, and how might they extend that to others they know who need the same help?
It is left to use to transpose the concept of intergenerational trauma onto our own lives and experiences – and I think there is enough here for audiences to take care of that. But once we have managed that, facing up to it can be so daunting that it becomes exhausting even wondering about where to start. And considering the manner in which therapy and healthcare have become increasingly channelled into profit-making luxuries for a minority of the population, there are wider questions to answer about the functioning of the modern state, which If An Owl Calls Your Name also needs to find some space for.