WARNING: This story has disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the US. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline in Canada can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
Miles Morrisseau
ICT
“Bones of Crows,” a multigenerational epic film that shares the tragic history and reality of the Indian Residential School System in Canada, is heading to the big screens across the country.
Written, produced and directed by Marie Clements, Métis/Dene, the independent film opens in theaters across Canada on Saturday, June 3, after making its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.
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“I believe if you’ve had a parent or parents or family members that have gone through the residential school experience, this is a story that resides in all of us to some extent,” Clements told ICT before the film premiered at TIFF.
“I think for myself, wanting to really look at this experience, not just as a singular event that happened way back when, as people want to sometimes place it, but have it as a living, breathing thing, that that we could see in our parents or seeing, in my case, as my mother and my aunties and uncles.”
The film is an account of the life of Cree matriarch Aline Spears and a powerful indictment of the abuse of Indigenous people, as well as a stirring story of resilience and resistance.
The film clocks in at just over two hours and is carried by the lead performance of Grace Dove, Shuswap, of “The Revenant,” who plays Spears, a boarding school survivor who becomes a codetalker for the Canadian Air Force during World War II.
Dove is joined by Michelle Thrush, Cree, of “Prey” and “Dead Man”; Gail Maurice, Métis, of “Night Raiders”; Glen Gould, Mik’kmaq, of “Cardinal”; and Canada’s matriarch of documentary film, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, who makes what has been described as a “brilliant” cameo appearance..
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Like the recently lauded film by Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the film tells of the acts of Indigenous genocide that became the foundations of the nation and that live on in Indigenous people today. The lens in this case is held by an Indigenous woman who lives with this reality.
“That experience also had domino effects on my brothers’ and sisters’ generation and my generation,” Clements said. “It was a real opportunity to look at it in a multigenerational way and at the same time be really affected by current events, what’s happening with bodies of our children being found. These things were happening as we were shooting.”
Canada has shocked the world with its recent discoveries of remains as it faces the most painful part of reconciliation with its past.On May 23, 2021, the Tk’emlups Te Secwepemc First Nation announced that the remains of 215 children had been found in unmarked graves around the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In the months and years since, numerous First Nations have been doing similar searches around former schools and are discovering graves or anomalies in the grounds that could be the remains of long-ago students.
“We shot at the Kamloops Residential School while there was a memorial outside and while hundreds of people were gathering there to pay respect,” Clements recalled. “So it was very synchronous in a way to have to be so inside a story that involves a lot of our stories around this experience, but also to see it played out in real time, and how history has a way of unearthing things that we didn’t know and hopefully for a deeper understanding, but also for some kind of resolution.”
In a time when theater screens are blotted with superhero, fantasy and horror escape films, it is rare for an Independent film to find space. “Bones of Crows” can be found at Cineplex and Landmark Cinemas across Canada.
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