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Created by Saskatchewan-born Cree/Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet, Night Raiders depicts the intergenerational trauma of Indigenous displacement through the lens of science-fiction. The series picks up in the year 2043, where children are taken from their families and placed in a state-run institution that brainwashes them to forget their former lives. While the film is fictional, Goulet rooted its premise in truth. Established in the 1880s and run throughout the 20th century, Canada’s residential school system separated Indigenous families, forced children to unlearn their culture and abused those who refused to submit. Night Raiders follows Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) in her quest to get her daughter Wasesse (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) back, so she joins a vigilante group and discovers a larger purpose.
In an interview with CBR, Goulet explained how she wove history, allegory and Cree culture into Night Raiders. She discussed the true power of Wasesse in the film and shared what she hopes younger Indigenous audiences will take away from the sci-fi film.
CBR: Night Raiders is such a deeply personal film that you’ve spent so much time creating and working on. What’s one thing that you wish more people would ask about the film that you would love to talk about?
Oh, that’s a really interesting question. I’ve had so many questions now, under the sun, but I just did a discussion here at the Hawaii International Film Festival with a professor. He wrote an essay and he said it was kinship that saved Wasesse. In other words, her relations, and there was something so beautiful about that idea that I don’t think I get asked about quite enough, but the importance of community and relationality. Now in COVID times, I think all of us understand how desperately we need each other. We need to be together. We need interaction, and we see how much pain and fracturing is caused by the fact that we can’t gather or be with our families as much as we want — or however that manifests for people.
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful point. We see Niska on her journey experience that too, but in a different way. We see her really struggling with the individual — she wants her daughter now — and then the collective — the community she finds. She has to decide how she fits in this world that is really pushing her in one direction. When you were writing that conflict, what was something that was important to you to come across on screen?
Niska is so interesting as a character because you could think that, as soon as she comes into that group of people — they’re not just any people, they’re her people, not that she’s met this particular group before — but that they would naturally be supportive of her. She’s been in survival mode for so many years. I think, in survival mode, sometimes you can only extend yourself as far as yourself. Because they’ve been together for so long, it’s like that’s the sphere in which she thinks about — her and Wasesse — and the idea of letting in anybody else actually, in that mode, feels like a burden. It asks you to trust other people, which she doesn’t do. I think she’s created a tight circle for herself. That circle is exactly one person big, and that’s her daughter. She’s very driven to protect the circle that she’s fought so hard for. But I always knew that her mission and journey and the Night Raiders’ mission would converge.
But it had to be — some of the obstacles that she faces, and often she’s her own obstacle — her journey towards understanding that she is worthy of community. If she can find it in herself to trust and rely on other people, that will only pay off and create something that has always been missing for her. We do need community. We do need families. We need to be able to trust people and to love people and share in that. I love the ending when there’s that shot and everybody is there. That ending shot for me is about the way she’s being held up at that moment. Suddenly she has come home. It comes full circle in many ways.
When I spoke with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, she mentioned that your father, Dr. Keith Goulet, was on set to advise the use of Cree language in Night Raiders. How did you two decide on which dialect to use? What was it like having your dad on set for the film?
I work with my dad on everything.
For me, it always starts in the development process because I’m not a Cree speaker — at least, not fluent. I’m a learner. But he is a fluent Cree speaker. It’s his first language and so he thinks in a different way. That is incredibly valuable in Indigenous storytelling. It allows me to talk to him about philosophy, about concepts, about things that might weave themselves into the story. So I sit down with him and go through a development process that is just about concepts in the language or thought or perspectives or ideas about things. It’s super conceptual. Then, when it comes time to actually execute it, he’s involved in all kinds of things like translation, or just thinking about things in a different way or supporting people in the language.
I definitely asked him things like, “What dialect should we shoot in?” There are many different Cree dialects. He gave a beautiful answer. The way he thinks about it is, in real life, when Cree folks get together, they may speak different dialects, but they all just speak their own and they understand each other. You don’t actually have to standardize it. You can just let people speak their own. So the speakers in the film spoke in the Plains Cree (ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ) dialect, so that’s the one that we ended up using, but that was by virtue of who we cast. If we would have cast a Woods Cree (ᓃᐦᐃᖬᐑᐏᐣ) speaker, I would have said that they could speak their own dialect as well. My dad also speaks a different dialect than what was spoken in the film. He also appeared on screen as the Elder in the camp teaching Crete to the kids. So it was a nice, cute little cameo.
For Wasesse’s character, what was something that happily surprised you when you were working with Brooklyn on set?
Oh, gosh, let me see. I found that she was really intuitive and confident and curious. In some ways, she was so much was like Wasesse, which is someone that had a kind of openness. I also loved how much she was playful. That’s so important when we make anything, but especially in the film space. I really like to think of just creating a sandbox for us all to play in, because the actors need to feel like that they have the freedom to explore. I think she really had that naturally. She was also a little bit of a prankster on set. She would play all kinds of games with people. There was this one game where you would try to drop a potato into someone’s pocket and see how many get in before they noticed. [laughs] We had a lot of fun together.
In Night Raiders, there’s also a fantastical element to Wasesse’s character. I read in prior interviews that you wanted to steer clear of the “magical Indian trope” that’s used in Western films in a horrible way. When you were deciding how you wanted to use and show magic, what did you want to stay true to?
Yeah, that’s such a great question. The way that I felt was the pathway through it was just to portray the culture as honestly as I could. So in our cultures, we have so many stories; there are so many prophecies. One of the things when I was doing research, I went to Standing Rock. Of course, that’s the Lakota’s territory, so it’s not Cree, but they had this beautiful prophecy about the Black Snake, which was this huge creature that went across the land and looked like a black snake. The modern interpretation of that was the pipeline.
I thought that was such a beautiful image and way of thinking about the stories that are in our communities. So I made up all of that stuff — there’s the story in the film that is kind of prophetic. I felt like that is expressed in our cultures in a very real way. To me, it was about keeping it grounded. At the end, when there is something fantastical that happens that it’s just presented as real.
To me, my interpretation of it is that it wasn’t magic. It was actually communication. So in the Cree language, there’s a way to break down animate and inanimate and rocks are referred to in the language as animate. So they’re referred to as alive. So I was thinking about the worldview, and that if rocks or could be seen as alive then the things that we make rocks into which our machines could also be seen as alive. Because of Wasesse’s natural openness, she doesn’t regard them any differently than she would regard animals.
At the beginning of the film, we see her communicating with animals, which is a real-life skill set that many Indigenous people have — like my uncles can call moose like nobody’s business. That’s a form of communication. A lot of times it’s used for hunting, but in this case, I imagined that she extended her communication skills to call birds and to the machines as well.
The film ends with such a lovely image of resilience and hope. What do you hope audiences will take away from Night Raiders — especially younger generations?
For the Indigenous community — well, for my Cree and Métis communities back home, but for the broader Indigenous nations too — I hope that when folks watch it, they feel like it belongs to them because I made it for them. I feel like it’s incumbent upon me — well, at least I feel this way — to give hope, to pass on hope, because we have actually been through incredibly horrific experiences. I wanted to talk about the impact of what these colonial policies have done to all aspects of Indigenous life. But I also wanted to show the love, the humor, the resilience, the perseverance, and all of these things that are so beautiful that should be celebrated. I hope people feel that when they watch the film as well.
Night Raiders debuts in theaters, Digital and VOD on Nov. 19.
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