Atikamekw suns, the latest film from director Chloé Leriche, brings a historical injustice to the screen. A tragedy that occurred forty-seven years ago, killing five people from Manawan, in circumstances that have never been clarified. Forty-seven years, my whole life without response for the Atikamekw of Manawan.
In the room, some people seemed to have been adults in 1977, others certainly not yet born. I could recognize Françoise David, one of the film crew, one of my students who accompanied me in the field, in Manawan, among the Atikamekw, with whom I have been working for 20 years.
Not everyone knows yet that going to Manawan means taking an 84 km forest road, it means being squeezed by the wood transport trucks that pass you way too quickly, it also means discovering the complexity of the daily life of a community whose members build their lives on the ruins of policies of dispossession, assimilation and colonization.
Manawan faces a large water reservoir, Kempt Lake. The houses of the community light up with a new light on sunny days, struck by the dancing reflections of the lake water.
Streams and rivers are everywhere, like a network of infinite and tangled veins nourishing the life of Nitaskinan, the Atikamekw territory.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Chloé Leriche, director of the film Atikamekw sunand actors Jacques Newashish, Oshim Ottawa and Lise Yolande Awashish
In Manawan, as in other indigenous communities, we know mourning. The fatal accidents on this cursed road not yet paved, the suicides, the departure of the elders for their last great journey. Drownings, too. In Manawan, we know how to recognize the signs of death by drowning. We don’t believe, we know.
In Atikamekw suneverything is there: the unbearable disdain of the authorities, the ordinary racism of white people, the pain of the families, the anger too.
A lot of anger against this dehumanized system which manages to deny the very existence of the lives of people it is supposed to listen to and protect. This is the laying bare of life, naked life, life handed over to the power of a sovereign who has all power over it. The power to belittle, to discredit, not to hear, not to investigate, to kill.
But there is the power of the sun. In some indigenous oral traditions, it is said that Grandfather Sun met Grandmother Moon to give birth to the earth and human beings. Stories from the Atikamekw oral tradition and other first peoples tell of the creative, protective and healing power of the Sun.
In Atikamekw sunthe sun is the sovereign power of community solidarity, mourning rituals, family support, the link to the territory, laughter, in short, the resilience of a community, of a Nation, which faced this injustice by mobilizing to tell its story, of the courage of all these Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok people who do not play a role, but who live in this film the painful memory of the events, to be listened to, so that they can be heard .
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reference: www.lapresse.ca