Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin, 2019) (Patreon)

For all my dedication to Canadian cinema, this is the first time I have watched a documentary by Obomsawin, the revered filmmaker who is at this point the world's leading chronicler of the experience of First Peoples. (I'll admit that the fact that this was a short one encouraged me to knuckle down and get to work.) And although Obomsawin's work was largely the sort of docu-activism that I anticipated, I was indeed impressed with her lyricism and attention to the beauty of tribal landscapes. Her film vividly conveys the vibrancy of reservation culture and why First Peoples would resist racist Canadian entreaties to leave.

This is of particular import in Jordan River Anderson, a film in which Canada shows its ugliest bureaucratic face at the intersection of racism and ablism. The film is named after a young Cree boy born with a rare affliction known as Carey-Fineman-Ziter syndrome. He lived his entire five-year life on a respirator; he could not walk or sit up unassisted; his facial muscles were paralyzed. But due to the various therapies he received at the Children's Hospital in Winnipeg, he should have been able to move into assisted home-care. Had he been a non-indigenous citizen, Health Canada would have paid for this, but since his family lived on the reservation, no agency would agree to pay. Jordan lived and died in hospital.

Canadian Parliament unanimously passed Jordan's Principle, making it the responsibility of whichever agency -- provincial or federal -- is contacted to provide for First Nations patients, thereby closing the loophole that essentially excluded them from universal healthcare. But as Obomsawin shows, making a law and putting it into action are two different things. Again and again, the burden is on indigenous families to fight for what they are entitled to, with the Harper Conservatives in many cases actually making it a policy to give Native people the runaround. Why should this be? As one attorney for one of the tribes articulates in court, "we are the colonists! We are the racists!"

Jordan River Anderson is highly unlikely to be seen outside Canada, which is a shame. It's the sort of document that punctures the frequent American mythos of our Northern neighbors are occupying a land of milk and honey. By the same token, indigenous policy is a major focal point in Canadian politics, whereas virtually no one in U.S. politics gives a shit about "Indians." Here, if you're not perceived as a significant voting bloc, you can forget about justice or reconciliation.