Unmapping the prairies

Tasha Hubbard looks back

By Carle Steel

The credits of Tasha Hubbard’s film Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up roll over an aerial shot of crops at the height of summer. It’s a beautiful sunny day. The fields are an even, Monsanto green, not a bite out of them. Original homestead boundaries flicker across our consciousness, then fade back into nothing, just one more shadow of the great forgetting on the Canadian grasslands. A mapping, an unmapping.

Hubbard is born of this place, a Cree woman, adopted as a child by a family of white farmers. When she first heard about the shooting of Colten Boushie, she was in the car with her son and nephew, who were giggling in the back seat. The suddenness of the death was shocking to her, she says in the film. “Our Cree beliefs tell us that our children don’t belong to us. They belong to themselves, but we are responsible for keeping them safe.” Hubbard says she always thought she could teach the boys how to protect themselves as they grew into men. Colten Boushie’s death made her realize she couldn’t. 

On the internet, the dehumanization had already begun: “In my mind, his only mistake was leaving witnesses,” read one tweet. “Shoot, Shovel, Shhhhhhh!” read another. News outlets quoted the RCMP’s statement that a theft on a farm had resulted in a death.

As an academic and researcher, Hubbard immediately saw Colten Boushie’s death as part of a continuum that began with the settling of the plains. “I started thinking of it in terms of this wider context of the prairies, of colonialism,” she says. “I was seeing the comments come out, the way Stanley’s family was treated, the way Colten’s family was treated.”

She thought of what this death would mean to her son and nephew if grown adults —  educated adults — were celebrating the death of a young Indigenous man. 

Her first impulse was to write about it. With encouragement from her family, what began as a blog post turned into the idea for a documentary.

Hubbard began filming at Gerald Stanley’s first court appearance. “Most people knew this was going to be big,” she says. “Did I know the twists and turns it would take? No, but that's documentary. What was going to happen in this incredibly charged atmosphere? You don't really know at the start. It's your best guess.”

At its centre, We Will Stand Up is a story of the death of a kind young man who loved horses. He was a spelling bee champion, beloved by his mother and his cousins and his friends. Then his murder, and the injustices to his family and his memory that followed. The film is also a history lesson, personal and political, told through scenes of trials from the past, and a peoples’ fight to survive. It is Hubbard’s own story, told lightly, in her own voice: This is what happened. This is what has always happened.

There is a symmetry to the scenes Hubbard shows us in this film, awful and beautiful at the same time: the hanging of eight men in the Battlefords in 1885, their families and communities rounded up and forced to watch. What else was Colten Boushie’s death than a kind of psychological warfare? The rage of the farmers at a gathering in the area, saying they would have shot him too; the RCMP as false mediator, the role it’s had from the beginning, to protect settlers’ property gained from the riches of stolen land. The Boushie family’s epic trek to Ottawa, then on to the United Nations, with his cousin Jade Tootoosis as the family’s brave and eloquent spokesperson. Hubbard’s own son and nephew, walking the broken grassland, its history smoothed away by a farmer’s crop. Visiting with members of her two families – birth and adopted. Her father will teach the boys about the meaning of justice in Cree culture. Her adoptive grandfather will teach the boys how to handle a rifle safely and to pick cans off a fence.

At the centre of the film rests the facts: Colten Boushie was shot in the back of his head at close range after he and three friends got stuck on a piece of Gerald Stanley’s land. 

It sounds like some of the kids were being jerks: jumping on a quad, running from an angry Gerald Stanley and his son. What followed, like so many deaths of Indigenous people in Saskatchewan, sounds like murder. 

But it isn’t, according to a jury. Here on the prairies, the kids were criminals, and the farmer was just protecting his stuff. That’s what you get for trespassing. The trial is a travesty, as is the treatment of the family and witnesses. 

The film is more than a simple recounting of facts, however devastating. “I didn't see this as the definitive text of something that happened,” Hubbard says. “The transcript is there, people are going to write about the trial.”

Hubbard says the film is more of the perspective of someone who is deeply of the prairies, who has had the experiences she’s had. “Also it’s the perspective of people we never hear from — a family who lost their loved one, who didn't set out to have this happen to them. But it did. Then we're told to trust a system that isn't set up for them.”  

The challenge was to find a way to make these layers cohesive. Over the months of making the film, she and her long-time producer, Bonnie Thompson, wrote out their notes on the three strands of the story and moved them around until they hit on a natural movement from one strand to the other. 

The connective tissue between the layers took the form of a simple animation showing Indigenous people being pushed off the land, the tracks of the people, the brutal Indian Agents and their army of mounted police, the predecessors to the RCMP. The animation is effective: a viewer may want to argue against the facts narrated by Hubbard, but there is no arguing with a story told so plainly over simple images of people in braids watching a hanging. 

“We’re taken into that world that the illustrator and the animators create. They’ve created this space for people to enter.” Hubbard says she needed the animation to tell that part of the history. It’s the power of the story that carries us into that space.

“We learn through reading and information provided to us, but the story is what gets into people’s bones, gets into their minds,” she says. As someone who has thought deeply about the context of an Indigenous present in the prairies, through her studies and her other documentaries, Hubbard goes straight for our bones.

Part art, part long-form journalism, We Will Stand Up has enjoyed a wide release in Canada, screening at film festivals and requested by governments, universities, and community groups. 

The word ‘activism’ has been used to describe the film and Hubbard’s work. While it’s largely used to dismiss people fighting against injustice, at its root, she says that activism is about activating something, about shifting things. “Most Indigenous documentary filmmakers, and a lot of others — what we hope to do is to shift things. Sometimes that can be a small shift in someone's thinking, and that’s great! I celebrate that as much as I celebrate anything else,” she says. “We can't stay on the same path that's been set. However the film contributes to a shift off that path that leads to continual dehumanization of people I love and care about — if that's activism I'm okay with that.”

“The tragedy is that not every family is able to speak in that way, or to have a documentary made about them. There are many families who find themselves in a similar situation and don't have a place to speak” Hubbard says. “That's one thing that Colten's family would say and reiterate throughout the process: ‘We're not just here for us.’”

And Hubbard’s own family?  

Early in the film, Hubbard tells us that her family has a motto: “This is our territory. We belong here, even if people try to make us think we don’t.” We Will Stand Up is a testament to that deep belonging.

As for her grandfather, Hubbard says that though he may not always know what she does in her films he supports her work. 

“Something I've always appreciated about my grandpa is that he has always recognized that things don't look the way it was agreed to,” she says. “My grandpa is not any different than the people who grew up with an education system that is designed to not tell that history. People say the education system is failing. No, it's working the way it's designed to work. Indigenous people are not meant to be taught about and understood. We’re all living in a time and place where the meaning and intent of the treaties were actively hidden. We’re living in a time of shredded documents and archive budgets being slashed. This is where we are.” 

Yet even now, her grandfather’s thinking can shift. “He’s 93. He can shift. So can we all.”

This article appeared in the Fall/Winter 2019 issue of Splice