What are you Learning

Regina vs. Kikkik

Tonia asks me in an email what am I learning. She probably knows me as well as anyone, that I will be trying to learn something on any give day.

“What are you learning is the question she might ask me if the two of us were getting together to spend an evening going somewhere, doing something social, like attending a lecturers or spontaneously going off to a concert. Those were the old days that I loved, the ones where someone would give me a ticket at the last moment and then I would have to find a last moment partner.

In COVID-19 times, I have been spending many hours learning, mostly about Inuit Law and Film, from Rebecca and her class of eight law students. Right now we're looking at the film Kikkik. I have viewed the film previously. Yet again, last night, Rebecca. and movie night since there is always something new to learn from the film, or in her case, something she wants to refresh in her mind.

In class today, the students talked about it about their preliminary reactions to the film.

I didn't think the film had a strong ending, but I attributed that to being so tired from the issues raised, that I have always been out of energy to really engage with the end of the film -- even though it is only 59 minutes long. So today I decided to just take that last 12 minutes and watch it over and over again, this time with a pen and pencil and with my finger on the pause button, getting the names of the elders written down: Ukkaanaaq and Mukjugnik. I spent quite a bit of time on the names, just trying to say the names so that they'll run off the tip of my tongue.

As I watch over and over, I put the video on hold and I quickly drew a sketch of each of the elders so I can could get their features in my mind and also to give me a visual reminder of what I was doing on that page.

I also write down the dialogue.

I've always thought the foundational question that drove Elisapee, (Kikkik’s daughter) the circumstances around the death of her father and sister, “Why didn’t my mother tell me about this trial?” She does pose that question.

But on this viewing I had a different experience when she was talking to the elders on their return to their original home. The three children and two elders walk that land seeing the following: the old Department of Transport station which was abandoned a few years after they were forcibly removed from the land, an old fuel can they used to light fires, the spot where the government bull-dozed their winter supply of meat into the ground, the lake where a plane sats ready to take them a new home without their consent.

Previously I hadn’t found the same interest in the close-up on people's faces and on listening to the timbre of their voices as they cried. And I don’t think I was so attentive to their joyous voices either, for example, one elder said who had just been flown to that old spot said, “I am overjoyed to be in this place where I was mistreated. I am glad to be back under happy circumstances, not hungry or afraid. When we were moved, starvation began.”

Kiki said at one point I need to understand what it is I need to forgive. I try to parse this statement. I don’t linger on the word forgiveness. Instead, I think about the words, I need to understand what it is. I tried to make a list of it. What is it?

. Their tents were bulldozed to the ground. Their winter supply of meat was buried. They were loaded on planes and relocated – 3 different times. They were put in a place where they would starve to death. Hunting was so bad she didn’t have clothes for her two youngest children. Her brother-in-law had killed her husband and was now threatening her life.

Rebecca closes the class by talking about the film theory of who is the subject position of this film. Because I get emotional at the end of this film, I must be putting myself in the subject position of the Elders.

When the class is over, I get a long discussion with the professor. I like how the students call her professor. Sometimes I try to call her professor.

“Professor?”

She just smiles and says, yes, sometimes my students call me that.

Some of the students said they'd never heard of this case. Rebecca and I discussed for a while what the important Canadian legal cases are. The ones all of us should have at the tip of our tongues. I try to make a case for how many of them, the average Canadian would know. I am always trying to make lists and for some reason, this list seems to be important to me right now.

She starts, the Persons Case. For some reason that makes me laugh. Yes. First establish that women are persons. Then she says, the Morgentaler case. Yes, establish women have control over their own bodies. Kikkik comes next. For me it shines a spotlight on mothering as a category. I add to the list, “The Pickton case, though I don’t like to say his name.” Rebecca wonders I which place on the list I will the Colten Boushie Case and the Tina LaFontaine Case the Reena Virk Case, the classic case of bullying.

I wonder if I still had kids at home, when I would begin talking to them about these cases or at the very least, the human rights violations behind these cases.

A little later in the evening, though it is already late in the day when the class end, and when we sit down to play a game of AZul: Summer Pavilion, a note comes into Rebecca’s email box. The law librarian has sent her a link to a version of Kikkik that is 1 ½ hours long instead of 59 minutes. Rebecca clicks on the link and we watch the movie again. This time there are other voices describing it, the categories that Elisapee might identity to figure out what it is she must forgive. I have to add people who worked for the RCMP who were not advised of their union rights, government personal raping women multiple times, women having to leave their small families to clean the homes of settler people, and the sad thing is that I didn’t have to have a pen and paper by my side. I can remember all of this.

And though I don’t have her name at hand, in the movie, the wife of the Indigenous RCMP officer is on my mind still. She doesn’t appear in the shorter version of the film. I have watched her ringing her hands as he is talking, watching her hands busy crocheting while other discussion are going on (the crotchet needle and thread like a metaphor, adding one stitch at a time), and then when she talks to Elisapee about everything her mother shared with her, we get a description of blood on Ootek’s forehead, of the call to a second child for a sharper knife, of the visit to Halo’s cave to report the murder and then Kikkik’s ability to say those words to her sister-in-law, of the care-giving done by the friend to Kikkik’s son while Kikkik was in an igloo prison behind the RCMP station for a month. I can only imagine how much Kikkik and her friend had talked to each other, for her friends description is vivid and long.

Well, there you have it, Tonia. Things I have been thinking about and learning. I don’t know when to introduce these ideas to children. Duncan is finding them hard to hear and he is in his second year of college.

Arta