Storytelling is at the core of who we are as a human species, as a creative tool bequeathed to us in order to help us make meaning of our existence. Using visual imagery and textual languages we have felt compelled to document our lives since time immemorial. All of the arts awaken who we can be in our holistic totality.
In recalling the words of the late Anishinaabe spiritual elder Art Solomon, one of his oft-spoken messages through the 1980s was to point out how often human beings have forgotten the original instructions from the Creator – to take care of each other and to value and protect all planetary life. We need stories to remind us. Stories inform, as well, what befalls us if and when we neglect these responsibilities.
Since early childhood, I always have wondered what makes people tick. As a child, I was a precocious reader, loving how stories in books could transport me into other worlds, as did occasional outings to the cinema. Removed not just physically from the sanitized spaces of suburbia, in the darkness of a movie house my mind and feelings also could be liberated to travel to other places through time. Seeds of inspiration were planted to mobilize my own innate inner creativity.
Providing creative resources to fuel a child’s imagination is the greatest gift we can give a child, to awaken the innate creativity that resides within every person. As an adult artist and writer, in one visit to a Grade 3 classroom, I invited the children to draw a picture of what friendship meant to each of them. I was inspired by the emotional depth and beauty that every single crayon drawing evoked, and humbled by the simple eloquence spoken by each child to describe their own unique images, when given an opportunity to express the most soulful quality within us – love for each other.
We know, of course, that the fuller story of a lived life includes sorrow, and even trauma. Such soul woundedness can obstruct and even distort a human being’s healthy functioning to lead them instead onto a destructive path for themselves and, sometimes as well, be projected onto others to cause harm.
Storytelling, therefore, is not limited to reading, watching and listening to other people’s stories yet, moreover, is about how we psychologically manage our own life story, and how we tell ourselves who we are as well as, most importantly, become fully conscious that the stories we tell ourselves are ones which we co-create. A key lesson to learn along life’s journey is that we have the power to change our own script in accordance with how we choose to make meaning of whatever has befallen us.
The person who taught me this poignant spiritual lesson was the late Everett Soop (1943-2001). Everett was a brilliant, yet sorely misunderstood and under-recognized, Blackfoot political cartoonist who lived with the affliction of muscular dystrophy.
When I met Everett in the late 1980s, he was in a wheelchair, his physical frailty obvious, yet countered by a fierce and feisty spirit. We developed a friendship, through correspondence in handwritten letters for seven years, plus regular phone calls, before I posed the question whether he was willing to trust me to produce a film story about his life. In his forthright style, Everett agreed, instructing me, emphatically, not to show him either as a victim or a role model. He wanted to present his own full and unvarnished truth, and I honoured his wishes. That was the genesis of Soop on Wheels, completed in 1998.
I had promised Everett that I would continue to show his film story, after he departed this earthly existence, to younger generations in order to pass on the many teachings that have as much relevance today as they initially did during Everett’s life. His story is multi-layered, with highlights of his own struggle to come to terms with living as a person with a physical disability, confront his demons, and as a truth teller extend his political and social insights about injustice to advocate on behalf of Indigenous people with disabilities. Everett’s story also shows a sampling of the true negative impacts of residential schools across generations of his own family.
That truth about the personal, cultural and, ultimately, intergenerational damage upon Indigenous peoples, caused by residential schools, in recent years is being attacked, discredited and undermined through the lies of residential school denialists. This ugly phenomenon ought to be investigated, and the stories they continue to produce must be exposed in regard to the broader agendas of these self-proclaimed experts.
Their example raises another key reality about the need to be vigilant about whose stories are influencing us. The fuller reality of the human condition is that stories not only have the power to transform personal consciousness about what is possible for the larger good. But, conversely, stories can become weapons when they are grounded in agendas to divide the human family, based on willful ignorance for self-serving ends.
Online CBC News stories in the summer of 2023 triggered my awareness of residential school denialism, and mobilized me to relaunch public awareness of Soop on Wheels through museum and subsequent university film screenings. Following the pandemic, I felt the imperative to collaborate on in person public events, to bring people together again – across cultures – to watch an inspiring story and participate in an audience discussion. We need to strengthen such communal gatherings again in real space and time, as essential alternatives to ingrained habits developed in recent decades among younger generations to co-create – often unconsciously – their own social divisiveness by individualized attention to isolated silos of data on their digital tools, which can influence limited and biased perspectives about the world and what is possible.
Three Ontario university screenings, to date, of my documentary film Soop on Wheels have informed me about the initiatives of these educational institutions which speak to the deeper and broader awareness exercised today on issues of accessibility and inclusiveness. Such initiatives equip learners to be helpers in co-creating a more enlightened human society through our interrelationships on a small and fragile planet.
The first university invitation followed upon one of two 2023 regional museum screenings, shown prior to The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC), recognized in recent years across Canada on September 30th. Several audience members came to the Grey Roots Museum screening from Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation.
One Anishinaabe woman in attendance afterwards invited me to present my film at the University of Waterloo that November, as the month usually designated as Indigenous Disability Awareness by many Canadian universities. Her role at that time was Associate Director for the Office of Indigenous Relations. The Office’s mandate is to advance the goals of the TRC Calls to Action, by collaborating in events on and off campus.
A Metis audience member there later offered to connect me with her previous alma mater, the University of Windsor, where I was invited to present my film the following March. A partnership was coordinated by its Accessibility Manager in the Office of Human Rights, Equity & Accessibility with the Turtle Island – Aboriginal Education Centre, to publicize the event across the campus.
In November of 2024, McMaster University, in Hamilton, coordinated a three-way partnership for the in-person screening event, spearheaded by the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Indigeneity in the Faculty of Science, in collaboration with the Indigenous Education Council (IEC) and the Accessibility Hub. Earlier in 2024, the IEC already had created a communications committee whose purpose was to advance Truth and Reconciliation year-round.
All of these events were attended by Indigenous Elders, who thanked me for enabling Everett Soop to speak his truth before his life ended. They also confirmed that the messages in his multi-layered story still need to be heard today. As a non-Indigenous woman, I was grateful and humbled by the positive reception everywhere to my film on Everett.
For I truly believe that for authentic reconciliation to happen, we all need to care and strive together across the identities that we humans choose, to remind ourselves what we hold in common as fellow human beings. Through practicing love and respect, we then are stronger together, and more effective, in challenging the divisive influences inflicted upon all of us in a social and political environment currently so fraught with hate and ignorance.
I highlight what I have witnessed as positive examples of educational programming, to illustrate how they challenge the right-wing extremist backlash against other universities across Canada who have developed similar programming, or are in the process of doing so. Such extremists actually are blaming the very programmes created in order to ensure inclusiveness as the causes of divisiveness. – a prime example how extremists twist the truth.
As a media professional I have devoted my life, as a journalist, documentary filmmaker and media literacy educator, to fight for social justice and against cultural racism. I weep at the plight of our society’s institutions today – particularly schools and the news media – and also threats upon the well-being of a longstanding multicultural society in which each and every child ought to feel safe in expressing their own identities, and where they, in turn, can learn to respect, enjoy and support the diverse expressions of the fuller human family.
Although we are in a period of societal regression, it is not the first time in human history, and the power to make different choices always is within us. The evolution of human consciousness always is possible when we activate our higher qualities of love, compassion, generosity, humility, grace, forgiveness, and more, and share experiences together at gatherings in real space and real time to learn and celebrate life.
Documentary films are one of the most powerful storytelling media today, appealing both to our minds and hearts and, in so doing, awaken our awareness sometimes in unexpected ways.
That is why I encourage more educators to support and use documentary films, whether long or short, including animated stories, at all grade levels, and older films too which – as my own film has proven – can still be relevant in expanding awareness about human complexity and human potential, and the very meaning of our existence.