Today is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day to remember the Indigenous children who were taken from their families and sent to residential schools.
The schools were part of a system, also instituted in the U.S., designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into white culture. The legacy continues to affect Native families and communities.
The last such school was only closed down in 1997.
For Andrea Grant, telling the story of residential schools isn't about making another documentary.
Grant is a Coast Salish poet and filmmaker, whose film and spoken-word project, "The Bones of Our Never-cestors," explores that history through a different kind of storytelling.
It's about using art to preserve memory, and to give Indigenous people a different way to tell their own history.
"I think that coming from a point of view of being an artist and a creative, we tell stories differently from say a documentary filmmaker. And I think that art keeps memory alive in a way that reaches people on an emotional level," Grant told BTPM News. "So it still allows Indigenous voices to shape how our histories are carried forward, but just coming from a different creative perspective."
Grant's film combines spoken-word poetry, archival photographs and footage, acting — and even elements of the familiar fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel."
But the title comes from something much darker.
Grant said she began thinking about the children who died in the residential school system; children who never had the chance to grow up, have children of their own, or become ancestors.
“I thought, what happened to those little souls? First of all, how did they come to their demise? and they never really got to grow up," she said. "They never got to get married. They never got to have children, be aunties and uncles, and have that experience. And yet, they're a big part of families who felt the loss. So I thought, never-cestors. You never got to be an ancestor.”
Grant's own family has a connection to the residential school system. She said her grandfather attended a residential school run by the Catholic Church on what is now Penelakut Island in British Columbia.
She said the effects of that history can still be felt among relatives and elders, part of what is often described as intergenerational trauma.
To explain this, she turned to a story many audiences already know.
"With 'Hansel and Gretel,' my idea was lost children. Children that were not wanted, children that were stolen by the Wicked Witch in the forest, that could be representative of who stole the children from their parents to put them into the residential schools," Grant said of her inspiration. "But I didn't want to just take a European fairy tale and have that be the basis. I wanted to do the opposite and take the Indigenous story, and then weave 'Hansel and Gretel' in."
Grant said the familiar story gives audiences an entry point while still challenging them to see the history from an Indigenous perspective.
And as Canada observes Truth and Reconciliation Day, Grant said remembering the past and reconciling with it are two different things. Especially as an ideology is present which denies the treatment and deaths of thousands of Native children.
"I think to me, remembrance and reconciliation are different," said Grant. "Remembrance is about refusing to look away. And it means acknowledging what happened, naming it honestly, and honoring the people whose lives and futures were altered by the residential school system. But reconciliation is asking us, what are we going to do with that knowledge?”
For Grant, that means listening to Indigenous communities, respecting cultural sovereignty and supporting Indigenous languages and stories.
"The Bones of Our Never-cestors" has been making its way through the film festival circuit since its trailer was released earlier this year.
Grant says she plans to make the film available online after its festival run.
