Anti-Colonial Practice in Indigenous Film: An Interview with Jade Baxter

 Jade Baxter is a filmmaker from the Nlaka'pamux Nation and grew up in Skuppah. Her work—ranging from documentaries to narrative fiction shorts—has been screened at festivals such as imagiNATIVE, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Victoria Film Festival and The Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). Jade is a part of the Testify Art + Law Collective, 2019 Hot Docs Accelerator Program, EMO Collective and was the Directing Mentee on The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Dir. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn). 

Jade will be appearing at the 2020 Growing Room Literary & Arts festival alongside Métis filmmaker Justin Ducharme during one of three Indigenous Brilliance events, curated by the Indigenous Brilliance team at Room magazine. The pair will lead a discussion on Indigenous film and filmakers at the event, following a screening of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. 

Jessica Johns, managing editor of Room magazine and festival director for the fourth annual Growing Room festival sat down with Jade to talk about Indigenous film, anti-colonial practices on film sets, and the art of filmmaking.

 Jess: What was your position in the production of the film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open? 

Jade: My position was Directing Mentee, so I was shadowing and being mentored by the directors Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. Also Violet Nelson, who plays the other lead character, I would very much say was another mentor as well as the producers Tyler Hagan and Lori Lozinski. There was a formal way it was set up, but the mentorship was very flowy. It was six weeks of formal mentorship, and I was paid, which is also incredible. 

The whole mentorship came from an idea to build capacity within community. There were eleven mentees in total, one person in each major creative role. So that covers all the departments including folks working in camera, sound, set dec, art, and costume. In every space there was someone learning and witnessing the production.

It's really interesting to talk about building capacity in artistic spaces, because I feel like that's a difficulty across all arts organizations. Capacity is just constantly stretched. So how was your mentorship experience? Have you experienced anything else like it working in the film industry before?

Well, not every mentee actually had a lot of experience in film. There were probably two of us who had formal film training, but then everyone else was interested in film and wanted the experience. But the mentorship was a two-way street, primarily because there were a lot of non-Indigenous crew. Elle-Máijá was a mentor to everyone, because she was one of the few Indigenous mentors. So for the folks who had mentors who were settlers, those [non-Indigenous mentors] had an obligation to educate themselves so that they weren't perpetuating harmful things towards their mentees. And some of that came through the mandatory cultural competency training that was done by Sarah Robinson. 

And this training was a full prep day. In film, time is everything. To tell the whole crew you have to show up for a cultural competency training on one of the prep days when they have like 18 million things to do before we shoot, I think some people were like "Ah!" But they showed up. And afterwards they were like, "Oh, we really needed to do that." The training was like “Colonialism 101.” But lots of people don't have that at all. So that helped create a safer space for the Indigenous mentees. But then there was still so much learning that happens in community and in conversation. So there were those discussions that happened too. Breaking down the classic hierarchy on film sets means that the process becomes more community based and supportive. There was reciprocal learning happening. 

I almost want to say it sounds like a decolonizing effort, but I know the term “decolonizing”, especially in film, can be fraught. You've talked about this a little bit before: how it's difficult to aim to "decolonize" something when its invention was from colonization.

Well film has always been tied to industry and industrialism, and art has always appeared with it. But film wasn't originally crafted to be an art form, necessarily. But it had that application. I think the history of film is so rooted in the western world, which is rooted in the foundations of white supremacy and capitalism and imperialism. Film has been used to disempower people for so long. Still, to this day. I think of the history of ethnography and who had access to film, which was used as a tool for propaganda. 

It's really complex and the English language is really limited. So I have a hesitancy towards terms like decolonize and decolonial because they're somewhat inaccessible and so easily co-opted. Even though I have a decolonize sticker on my MacBook [laughs]. But when I say that I don't think you can necessarily decolonize cinema or decolonize film, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think you can make anti-colonial work and I think you can work in anti-colonial ways. And this means looking at the roots of structures and asking: do we have to work in that way? What are other ways we can do this?

I’m trying to just figure out what that means for me. I think it's okay that I probably won't figure it out for like 20 years and then maybe I'll write a big long manifesto. This isn't to say that I think people are wrong when they say you can decolonize cinema. I just think it's too limited to what our engagement with it is. Because the English language stratifies and codifies what things mean. And I think it needs to be more fluid than that, because my engagement with film as a Nlaka'pamux person is different than someone who's Kwakwaka'wakw, Maori, Cree, Dene. 

So for me, I think you can make anti-colonial cinema. I don't think every single story has to be a resistance narrative, but I think that's almost always inherently there. 

I think Indigenous folks making film is, in itself, a resistance narrative. The fact that it’s even happening. But it's also difficult when it comes down to thinking about how films are even made in Canada.

Exactly. So much of our arts funding is tied to the government, which is inherently tied to land expropriation, theft, and exploitation. And then the fucked up idea that I'm going to get funded if I put the word "reconciliation" in my treatment because that's the buzzword some boards want to hear. Like if you say something along the lines of "We hope to hold healing circles between settlers and Indigenous people" or "It will be healing for settlers" or that there's something in it for the white gaze and audience, you’re more appealing. It's not that white people or people who aren't native shouldn't see Indigenous cinema, but it's not always for them, in the same way that there's lots of cinema that isn't for us.

For example, I'm getting into hand drawn animation lately, which is really fun. But for me, certain colours will feel like, for example, coyote’s energy. But it's fine that someone could look at it and not see that. And sometimes I will get in shit for writing things and people will be like, "People aren't going to get your reference. It's inaccessible." I really hate that because I'm like "Accessible to who? You're talking about white people." This isn't going to be accessible to them. And if I'm not talking to them then, again, they can watch it, read it, and consume it. But just because they don't necessarily see coyote in those colours doesn't mean I have to change it. That's fine. They don't have to see it. But don't devalue it just because of that.

What are, in your opinion, some anti-colonial ways to engage with film as a filmmaker?

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is about Indigenous women having to  survive and helping each other survive. Which is happening right now, every day. People may have different responses to the film based on where they're at so always say "Take care of yourself when watching this film." I think that's also important for The Body Remembers because not everyone's ready to watch something that engages with that. That's what scared me when I read the script. I had my walls up around the violence because I don't watch things that I think are going to be re-traumatizing, but when I read the script, it was so genuinely sweet and beautiful. I just wanted to know the two characters so badly. And the writers take care of these women in the script, they're not putting them in situations that both make the characters and the audience unsafe. 

That's an active part of taking care of audience members and the people working on the film. Elle-Máijá and Kathleen have said that it's also a love letter to women and Indigenous women. I think that's pretty neat because we don't get a lot of those that aren't through the lens of like, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character in 500 days of Summer, you know what I mean? It's like someone would say those male driven movies are like love letters to women, but it's like, "Oh, do we want those love letters?"

For sure, and I think this also relates to the idea that there are some things we can understand without outright spelling it out. Or, at least, the people who understand can read between the lines, and the people who don’t understand it have just never had that experience.

 Exactly. There's an interview that Kathleen and Elle-Máijá did where Kathleen said "We really don't feel like it's necessary to show violence onscreen for women to understand the presence of violence." There's a lot of subtle cues [in The Body Remembers] to pick it up because when you show violence, it can glamorize the situation, or make it feel thrilling. I think that's messed up because I shouldn't be watching violence towards marginalized people for the thrill. I recently had to walk out of a movie with my cousin because that was happening. I think you should fully be able to walk out at any moment. I think it should be very consensual, how long you want to engage in a film, and some people get sour about people leaving. But really, the filmmaker has an obligation to you and you have an obligation to the filmmaker based on how much you want to engage.

 I understand this by bringing it back to treaty frameworks, because I'm that bitch. But a framework of consent should always be present. So, if there’s a moment where you're like, "Nope, I'm not going to engage with this anymore." That is 100 per cent okay. And should be valued, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. This is like for the Nlaka’pamux, because so much of our language is tied to the land. Like everything comes from the land, so many stories are about consensual engagements with land. And stories that talk about boundaries, and if you've crossed a boundary, how you need to rectify that. So many stories are like that. 

Boundary making is a treaty too. And revisiting conversations if a boundary has been crossed, which is learning what accountability looks like in specific situations. 

Yeah, it's always an ongoing process. There's two things I think about when it comes to consent and boundaries with film: who's in the space who might be making it unsafe? And what have people agreed to when they're in this space? It's a lot of responsibility, but it's good to have responsibility. That's what tethers you to things and people and kin, and it's just work. People just want to go so fast and have things solidified and check-listed, but it's like, what else do we have to do, but do things right? And it's going to take a long ass time, and it's not going to change overnight. So it's like, why not do it right then? If we got all this time until we die? 

And consent is also for engagement. I had a cousin act in one of my films and she's never acted before and hasn't acted since. I had a really fun time with her. We had to try to learn the language and run around our rez doing things. But she never watched the film and she doesn't want to watch the film and that's fine. Her mom watched it and the community watched it and they liked it, but she doesn't want to watch it and that's fine.

The other thing that I always think about with film, and that it’s harder in the city than it is in the Bush cause it's easier not having police involvement. Having cops on set can be general practice for film. And so as far as I can remember, I didn't see any cops on the set of The Body Remembers. Which is so important because generally a bunch of Indigenous youth don't want to be around police.

And I think about the fact that I've been living and going to school and working in proximity to the Downtown East Side the whole time I've lived in Vancouver. I don't claim to be a member of the Downtown East Side community. I haven't done work in those ways. But there is a lot of community for me there as well. And there's so much extraction with social services down there and social enterprises.

Carnegie has a really beautiful report called zones of exclusion and it includes restaurants that are outside of the financial capacity of a lot of the residents, making it a zone of exclusion. There's a lot of filming that happens around the Downtown East Side and it's gross: the extraction from the TV sets coming in and then the influx of law enforcement to an area because they're filming there.

And there should be competency in the fact that you're in a community. It's not a film set, it's a community. It's a place with people. And you get that on the rez, you get that anywhere. In location spaces the way some film crews view things is really fucked up. They don't see it as a community. They see it as this thing that they're going into and it looks this way, so they're going to use it. I think that's one of the ways the Vancouver film industry really needs to step up. This is a city that's undergoing so many crises as an ongoing occupation of Indigenous land, the opioid crisis, the housing crisis. Like there's so many different levels of a crisis right now, your film doesn't matter that much. Your TV show does not matter that much. You should always be willing to stop for real life. Film sets should have mandatory cultural competency and mandatory trauma informed practices. If there's any way any subject they're engaging with needs to be engaged with as a human, like everyone, there should be a level of trauma informed safe practices. Healing and trauma is an ongoing process, just like consent.

I really wanted to again touch on the limit of the English language. Because the wonderful thing about film is that there's non-verbal communication happening all the time that helps tell the story. There's visual elements, sound, camera angles, character movement and so much more.

 Film is a really beautiful medium. When I first moved to the city, I was taking some medication that was making me throw up all the time [laughs] and I was freaking out. So, I called my mom and I was like, "Mom, I keep throwing up." And she's like, "You've literally thrown up all the time since you were a child. Like you throw up all the time, you just maybe stopped for a little bit and now you're freaking out again." And I was like, "Oh, okay."

I equate the same thing with crying. I've always been such a cry baby. I cry all the time. And I love crying to movies. I love sitting there and just having tears roll down my face. It can be anything— I cried when Optimus Prime died, I can still picture the scene with his robotic body. It was the same with Lord of the Rings. I'm really reactive when I watch films. And maybe it's unhealthy to cry that much, but it's also such a weird good release. I went and saw the film Interstellar and there's a dad-daughter storyline. And that made me cry while I watched it. And then three hours later, I'm lying in bed and I start crying again. So, for me, film is felt so deeply in my body. 

The first time I ever showed one of my documentaries in community was at an nkshAytkn— it's a Nlaka’pamux cultural knowledge sharing gathering. We do it once a month, and they let me show three of my short films. I showed this one that's all about Nlaka’pamux water law and I literally could feel this energy building in my chest as people were watching it. And no one said anything about it afterwards other than that people liked it. But having older people in my community reacting so positively was insane. That is why I still want to make films. I think so much of that is unsaid or it's shown in different ways on the screen.

Jade Baxter (Shelanne Justice Photography)

Did you always feel this? Have you always wanted to make films?

I didn't start out wanting to make films! I wanted to be an actor. I was like "I want to be Jim Carey." But I've always been surrounded by story, and two of the things that come to my mind are being taught our oral stories. Which is usually, you know, an Elder sharing with everybody and we're all listening and imagining it. And then one of them is a transformative way I heard stories. I would have been like in Grade 8 or 7, and there's a playwright named Kevin Loring. He's Nlaka’pamux and he is the Artistic Director of Indigenous Theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. He's from Lytton. And he wrote a play called The Blood Mixes, which is sort of a translation of tlkemcheen, which is in my nation. But he told this story in this really beautiful play, and it was the first time I ever saw Nlaka’pamux stories produced in this way. That definitely set the stage for me when I was like, "Oh, storytelling is anything you want it to be and here's a really powerful way it's being done." 

Another example of this is ShchEma-mee.tkt, a project I witnessed my Auntie Ardith Walkem and Mother Romona Baxter work on which took foundational Nlaka’pamux stories and re-understood them into ways we can understand child protection and disrupt the violent Child Welfare system in BC. 

I was taught that when you're going to tell a story, you have to tell the story right. Like you need to know what you're saying. You're not just reiterating something, you're telling a story. And each person might tell the story in their own way, but they'll almost always tell the story the same way every time. So, with film once it's made, once you export it and start showing it, and screening it, it's almost as if you've told the story, you're telling the story and that's the way it'll always be told. But if someone took the exact same story and told it their way, it's then their version of telling it. But it's a little removed because they're not hearing it directly from your mouth. So that's why I like being in the room when I screen my films. Because then it bridges that gap.

You and Justin Ducharme, a brilliant Métis filmmaker, have an ongoing film screening series, can you tell me a little bit about that? 

Justin and I are neighbors. We share a wall and we always joke that we're just touching the wall and both crying to Hilary Duff or something. But we've gotten to spend a lot of time together watching movies. And I really love Justin as a filmmaker, as a poet, as a human being. I think he's awesome. We spend a lot of time just sitting in each other's rooms, endlessly chatting on about film. 

So, Justin and I had to do some programming for the residency we're in. We decided to show some films and talk about them. And Justin does a great job with his programming at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. At our screenings, we've talked about the use of archival footage, queer Indigenous representation onscreen, and other important critical conversations. It's fun and a space to get these ideas out there, and a lot of people don't have the same technical language if they're not a filmmaker, so we try to keep that in mind. Right now, they're called Indigenous cinema evenings. And we show films, eat food, and talk.

This is what we want to bring into the event we're doing at the Growing Room festival: accessible cinema. We're trying to figure out what that means more so, because accessible is a word that needs to have meat behind it. You have to think about your venue, close captions, sensory accessibility. Accessible showings is a big thing in theatre that's starting recently, but what does that look like for film? We definitely are not there fully yet at all, but free is important. Paying the filmmakers who we show is really important.

And also moving away from the thinking that after watching a film, you leave. It's like, why don't we hang out together and talk for a bit? So, Justin and I will talk and then we open it up and invite questions. 

When and where do the screenings happen and how do folks become involved?

We've been doing most of them at Skwachays lodge so far, but it's a small room with a T.V. So we plan to branch out and find free space in Vancouver, which is an undeniably challenging feat. Also making it revolve, so it doesn't have to be in the same space all the time. And there's been people who are interested in wanting to support and engage. So more info to come, but essentially it’ll happen like once a month, always free.

Okay. And you'll probably put that information up on your Instagram.

Yeah. @jadeblade_ on Instagram and Twitter. My Instagram's private. So if you try to follow me, I'm going to creep first. But Twitter you can see me fall apart online. And Justin cyberbullying me. You don't have to be invited to see that.

Registration for Growing Room Literary & Arts Festival 2020 is now open. The festival will take place on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples (Vancouver, British Columbia) from March 11 – 15, 2020. You can join Jade at the screening of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open on March 15 at Beaumont Studios or at the “As Seen on Twitter: Pop Culture as Archive” panel on March 14 at Reliance Theatre, Emily Carr University.

Interviewer bio:

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta and is currently living and learning on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the Managing Editor for Room Magazine and a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance reading series. Her short story, “The Bull of the Cromdale,” was nominated for a 2019 National Magazine Award in fiction and her debut poetry chapbook, How Not to Spill, won the 2019 BP Nichol Chapbook Award.