The refreshing part about this dark story is the calm confidence and self-assurance of an unapologetic Native female protagonist who is unafraid to take risks and clearly provides leadership to her friends and family.
How much courage must one young Mi’g Maq girl possess in order to endure and survive her mother’s suicide, her father’s imprisonment, and her own quest for vengeance? Rhymes for Young Ghouls answers this question in satisfying ways through layered storytelling, poetic cinematography, dark humor, pain, and a touch of the supernatural. All of this AND it passes the Bechdel Test!
Although the cliché of alcohol and drug abuse on the reservation plays a central role in the plot, the film rises above the expectations that this cliché sets up in surprising ways, drawing the viewer in with dialogue, artistry, strong acting, a truly heinous bad guy in Popper, the violent and vindictive Indian agent played by Mark Antony Krupa, and a soundtrack that enhances both active and quiet moments. Plus, it introduces viewers to one potential negative experience of Indian residential schools, which is a subject not covered in most K-12 classrooms.
In Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, Margaret Connell Szasz writes about power, position, and knowledge through these boarding schools in “Through a Wide-Angle Lens,” beginning with this statement: “Boarding schools go against the grain of human experience. By substituting an institutional setting for the traditional family, they intervene in the educational nurturing historically provided by home, kin group, and community . . . In Indian country, the subject of boarding schools always evokes an emotional response” (187-88). In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, this idea of interference and the breakdown of family, as well as a risky and brazen solution to this intervention is brought to life. Szasz continues, “The federal boarding schools, alongside the Residential Schools of Canada, left a decidedly mixed legacy, one that remains alive in Native communities across North America” (Boarding School Blues, 196). If you want a good idea about the horrific side of this legacy, Rhymes is the film to watch.
The film starts simply enough, with the following historical text in white on a black background, privileging the words and asking the viewer to consider this premise as the foundation of the story to come:
“The law in the Kingdom decreed that every child between the age of 5 and 16 who is physically able must attend Indian Residential School.
“Her Majesty’s attendants, to be called truant officers, will take into custody a child whom they believe to be absent from school using as much force as the circumstance requires.
“–Indian Act, by will of Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada”
The first image is a closeup of marijuana with blues music playing as the scene opens to reveal a woman and two men in a kitchen getting drunk and high on the Red Crow Indian Reservation in 1969. They are relaxed and counting up product to sell while getting drunk and then the couple, the parents of the film’s main character, Aila (Kawennahere Devery Jacobs), decide to drive away. Aila and her younger brother, Ty, are sitting and talking on the hood of the car when their parents stagger out of the house. Aila’s uncle, Burner, suggests that Aila, who is a little girl, be the one to drive. What happens next sets the rest of the film’s events in motion.
Kawennahere Devery Jacobs as Aila
The next scene shows Aila’s father being arrested as he shouts to her, “Don’t look, Aila! Don’t look!” Of course Aila looks and sees her mother’s body hanging from a porch rafter as her voiceover says, “The day I saw my mother dead, I aged by a thousand years.”
This instant maturity might be the reason Aila decides to take over the marijuana business in order to pay Popper a “truant tax” so that she and her friends can stay out of the Residential School that he controls.
Mark Antony Krupa as “Popper” in Rhymes for Young Ghouls
The refreshing part about this dark story is the calm confidence and self-assurance of an unapologetic Native female protagonist who is unafraid to take risks and clearly provides leadership to her friends and family. When her father returns from prison and finds her in charge instead of his brother, he says that they are supposed to take care of her, not the other way around. And he affirms this idea several times when he refers to Aila as a little girl. But the inexperienced and immature concept of a little girl is not the character that Jacobs portrays in Aila. In fact, this character is quite the opposite – worldwise, smart, practical, and sensitive. When it comes time to confront the domineering and violent Residential School truant officer, Popper, Aila and her friends execute a daring revenge plot that ends this sadistic man’s rein over the reservation community.
Winning such awards as Best Director at the American Indian Film Festival in 2014, Best Canadian Feature Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2013, and Outstanding Actress in a Supporting Role (Roseanne Supernault) at the Red Nation Film Festival in 2014, Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a Native American film that challenges stereotypes of indigenous peoples while also telling a compelling story accessible to all. Originally released in May 2014, this film runs 88 minutes and can be streamed online via Amazon (free with Prime), or on Vudu (rental or purchase).
In the preface to Boarding School Blues, the editors warn against accepting any single interpretation of the Indian boarding school experience because there were a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative. So I will similarly caution that this film does not represent ALL indigenous peoples’ experiences with the Indian boarding school or residential school systems, but it IS a good film to start the conversation about a subject that most people know nothing about. Incorporating such a film into a brief unit about the Indian boarding school experience would provide that dramatic and artistic touch that students enjoy, but a chapter from Boarding School Blues would also provide a balanced perspective.
Dr. Amanda Morris is an Associate Professor of Multiethnic Rhetorics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a specialty in Indigenous Rhetorics.
The most remarkable feature of Ron E. Scott’s Canadian drama ‘Blackstone,’ apart from its blistering probing of Kellogg’s “ugly facts” of demoralization, is how closely it links gendered oppressions with other exploitations.
(No spoilers in the comments past Season Two please, deprived Irish viewer here.)
“It is a cause of astonishment to us that you white women are only now, in this twentieth century, claiming what has been the Indian woman’s privilege as far back as history traces.” – Laura Kellogg
The writings of pioneering suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton reveal that the political status of Iroquoian (Haudenosaunee) women inspired her vision of gender equality. The early 20th century Oneida political activist, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, also highlighted Benjamin Franklin’s acknowledged debt to the Five Nations’ (Iroquois) Great Law in inspiring distinctive features of American democracy. Kellogg: “have you not pauperized and debauched a whole people who were not only the richest in possessions, but whose native character has inspired those of your arts and literature which contain national distinction?”
As we in Europe benefited from peace-building through federal government, and from female emancipation, those very qualities were stripped from the civilizations that birthed them. Diverse Native cultures were reimagined as a patriarchal monoculture, iconically represented by the Plains Indian Chief, while female diplomats and political activists were reinterpreted as sexualized Indian Princesses, or silenced as “squaw” drudges. Native democracy itself was destroyed by a system of wardship, that subordinated its people to a Euro-American Bureau of Indian Affairs which Kellogg slammed as a “school for sycophants.”
Chief Andy’s Boys’ Club
“If I did not believe enough of you remain staunch to our ancestral standards of truth, to stand the ugly facts that concern us now, I should not speak.” – Laura Kellogg
The most remarkable feature of Ron E. Scott’s Canadian drama Blackstone, apart from its blistering probing of Kellogg’s “ugly facts” of demoralization, is how closely it links gendered oppressions with other exploitations. Bad government is represented by the chuckling boys’ club of Band Chief Andy Fraser, who hold meetings at the Roxy Rolla strip club, joke about screwing each other’s wives, and dismiss female opponents with gendered slurs like “cow” and “bitch.” The takeover by Leona Stoney and Victor Merasty therefore represents not only a return to idealism, but to gender-balanced leadership. Blackstone explores the toxic legacy of abuse within Canada’s residential schools, in which Irish religious orders played a major role, replicating our own traumatic legacy of institutional abuse and even perpetuating linguicide and colonial stigma, despite their demoralizing impact in Ireland. “Falling under the spell” of priests in his residential school shaped Tom Fraser’s bitter resentments and resistance to taking responsibility, which he has passed on to his son, Chief Andy (who, my God, is such a better portrait of Charlie Haughey than the recent Irish biopic. Period end). Blackstone also acknowledges the crushing impact of mainstream Canada’s indifference to the “fucking waste of time” of “this Indian bullshit,” but suggests that renewal must ultimately come from within. Its villains have internalized the colonizer’s gaze to the point that they reflexively worry “this looks bad” rather than acknowledging and tackling problems, perhaps anticipating criticism of the show’s own negative portrayals.
Just as the exaggerated domestic dramas of soap operas and telenovelas offer their mainly female audiences an important forum for processing their own frustrations, so the condensed and intensified social problems of Blackstone‘s fictional reserve are not simply a negative distortion of reality, but a basis for developing discussion and self-advocacy. The series’ opening sets the tone: over confrontational images of teen drug-taking, an elder tells a creation story, evoking nostalgia for the “real Indian.” But the elder, Cecil Delaronde (Gordon Tootoosis), challenges the disconnect between theory and practice: “if you look around you, culture is on display every day. Family violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, incest, suicide, corruption… that’s our culture now.” The show’s English title grows out of black roots in Cree, embodying both continuity and linguicide. Connecting political sovereignty, mental sovereignty and bodily sovereignty, Blackstone centers women in its hopes for renewal. Stoney women are the community’s bedrock.
Carmen Moore as Leona
Chief Leona Stoney
“More schooling than usually falls to the lot of an Indian woman and more contact with Caucasian artificiality and insincerity have graduated me into what might be called a polite Indian, and the process, I sometimes think, has taken a lot out of me” – Laura Kellogg
Leona Stoney is the daughter of a deceased chief. After sobering up from youthful addictions, her father entrusted the nation’s treaty pipe to her, representing her duty to lead. Leona lives off-reserve and works in addiction counseling with urban kids that her white boyfriend, Chris, charmingly calls: “kids who are ready. Ones who’ve escaped Blackstone.” Chris voices the defeatism that Leona must confront inside herself. Like historical allotment schemes, Chris associates redemption with assimilation into the white mainstream and “escape” from an irredeemable culture. As Chief Andy’s wife, Debbie, snarks to Chris, “it’s not easy being a chief’s wife, is it?” the show implies that his patriarchal pride is as threatened by Leona’s leadership as his Euro-American culture. In herself, Leona embodies the recovery narrative that the reserve needs: she has taken responsibility for her actions, she has integrated respect for traditional culture with adaptable openness to modernity, and she has cultivated compassion.
Her off-reserve status and white boyfriend are repeatedly used to question her right to lead, but Cecil Delaronde, representing the community’s conscience, affirms “we do need someone like you. A healer, someone who’s been elsewhere.” Leona’s fictional chiefdom recalls Wilma Mankiller’s legacy (see The Cherokee Word For Water), though Leona is overwhelmed by a nightmare reserve combining issues from across Canada. Her status as an educated activist for territorial sovereignty, with one foot off the reserve, also echoes the relentless activism of Laura Kellogg, who once sarcastically described herself as “a product of almost every institution on the outside except the insane asylum and Tammany Hall.” Leona applies an addiction recovery narrative to self-government: “we can’t keep blaming Ottawa for all our problems, it’s a flawed system we have to navigate.” Faced with a revelation of child abuse, however, her defensive reaction is tragically typical: “I’ve known that man since we were kids,” before growing into a real ally for justice (sexual violence is a major theme, handled with refreshing emphasis on victim/survivor impact, though Scott’s filming of the strippers is predictably male-gazey). Leona’s struggle to keep faith with the reserve is embodied in her painfully personal struggle with her elder sister, Gail.
Michelle Thrush as Gail
Gail Stoney
“If the American Nation… charges to the Indian all the demoralization it has brought upon him as his inheritance, it has heaped upon him not only plunder and outrage but the stigma of inferiority.” – Laura Kellogg
Gail Stoney is a chronic alcoholic. Where Leona embodies the reserve’s recovery narrative, Gail is Blackstone: “it’s where I belong.” Gail is sharply intelligent, sarcastically cynical, fundamentally generous and warm-hearted, with a resilient will to live, but she is also a selfish addict who combines paranoia with deeply internalized negative self-image. Michelle Thrush’s raw performance adds layers with every episode, growing into the heart of the show (plus, I would watch Michelle Thrush read a laundry list). As Leona despairs of turning the reserve around, Cecil asks, “in your counseling experience, does an addict make a turnaround overnight?” By embodying the renewal of the reserve in the personal journey of an addict, Blackstone illustrates that the perseverance to withstand setbacks, and the fortitude to resist instant gratification, are key to the entire community’s recovery. It is Cecil who most empathizes with Gail’s solitary struggle for sovereignty over herself: “please do not self-destruct… if you look really deep inside, you will find that you have your father’s strength and determination. I know it,” implying that all of her father’s qualities as chief are equally needed in this personal struggle. Whenever Chief Leona approaches Gail with assumed superiority, she is resented and rejected. Conscious of her public image, she tries to censor Gail’s problems: “everybody is watching me right now, I need you to make an effort,” which only drives Gail to give up on herself: “I quit. Save you the embarrassment.”
In moments like this, Leona’s silencing and dismissive attitude to Gail almost echoes Chief Andy’s treatment of the entire reserve. Leona also struggles to take her own advice and forgive her alcoholic mother. Complexities like this elevate Blackstone above a simplistic battle between good and evil. The enemy is within, and right next door. Leona is urged to neglect Gail by sympathetic characters, because she has “bigger problems”. Yet, if a community is a collection of individuals, what problem can be bigger than any individual’s deepest crisis? As Leona is praised for her counseling skills, she says, “there’s a lot of need for it here. Our previous chief didn’t see it as a priority,” before the show cuts to Gail’s secret drinking, that Leona herself cannot see as a priority. As Gail collapses in a ditch, the song “I Won’t Be There For You” plays. Saving Gail requires nothing but the deepest love and solidarity, to believe that Gail is capable of saving herself. Gail demands that onlookers face her pain and loss, leaving the noose which hung her daughter, Natalie, to confront Andy “every time he drives by in his fancy truck.” As Leona counsels, over a montage that includes Gail’s hospitalization and Andy’s painful relationship to his father, “what we’re trying to do here is to locate that point of brokenness. Start to find a connection to ourselves again. So we can start to be who we were truly meant to be.” Keeping faith and believing in Gail’s potential is an emotionally bruising challenge, but it is the heart of the show’s opening season.
Roseanne Supernault as Natalie
Natalie Stoney
“They don’t know us; they don’t know what it means to be killed alive.” – Laura Kellogg
Natalie Stoney haunts Blackstone, as Laura Palmer haunts Twin Peaks. For her mother, Natalie represents the guilt of Gail’s neglect, as well as her own possible doom. Natalie’s ghost becomes the taunting voice of Gail’s negative self-image, as Tom Fraser will be for his son Andy, or as boyfriend Chris voices Leona’s urge to abandon Blackstone. For Leona herself, Natalie’s suicide is her catalyst to submit to the duty of leadership. Leona fights to challenge the social narrative that victims like Natalie are inevitably doomed: “they are not ghosts. They are children.” As a ghost, Natalie makes the trope of the “vanishing Indian” into a visible presence to be resisted. As played by Roseanne Supernault, star of Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes For Young Ghouls, Natalie is as smart, fundamentally sweet and sarcastic as her mother. Though rape was the catalyst for Natalie’s suicide, her filmed interview with Victor, before the rape, points to deeper issues. As Victor approaches, a drugged-out Natalie slurs “you wanna fuck me too?” already understanding sexual exploitation as her only value, or her inevitable treatment. When asked about her dreams for the future, she mumbles “what future?” Her rape was an unjustifiable assault on her bodily sovereignty, but her suicide is a choice to surrender that sovereignty, inspired by this internalized sense of futurelessness. Believing that any group is inevitably doomed, whether that belief is triumphalist or pitying, is an act of psychological violence against them. Chief Andy may try to appropriate Natalie’s silenced body, to point the finger at “victimization by an apathetic, indifferent administration in Ottawa” in his neverending search for funds, but on Blackstone, Natalie will speak for herself.
