Monday, April 19, 2010

"Reel Injun," a documentary

A few weeks back I saw an ad on CBC for their show, The Passionate Eye, which would be airing a version of Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond's documentary, Reel Injun, described as follows:

Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world. Reel Injun takes an entertaining and insightful look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through the history of cinema (from http://www.reelinjunthemovie.com).

I missed the CBC airing (March 28th), but I watched the version posted on their website. I thought it was excellent! Now I want to see the whole thing, on the big screen! Unfortunately, it played @Tinseltown in February, well before I was aware of the film. So I joined their facebook group, and I'm waiting for more dates in Vancouver :(

Today I received a facebook email from that group, announcing 4 showings across Canada this week, as well as dates in Ottawa in May. I thought I'd share that information in solidarity with indigenous peoples across the globe.

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Greetings, Reel Injun-ites!

I just wanted to let you know about 4 big Reel Injun screenings happening this week across Canada.

First up is Port Alberni, BC where we will be playing at 7PM on Wednesday, April 21st at the Capitol Theatre.

Also on April 21st we are playing the Victoria Event Centre in Victoria, BC as part of Open Cinema's 7th Season Finale. Reel Injun director Neil Diamond will be doing an introduction via Skype, so be sure to check it out! Doors open at 5:30, show starts at 7:00.

On April 22nd @ 12:10PM we are playing Toronto's Sheppard Grande Cinema 7 as part of the annual Sprockets: Toronto International Film Festival For Children

Our final big screening this week is also on April 22nd in Halifax, NS for the Viewfinders: International Film Festival For Youth. Showtime is 12:00PM. This screening is extra special, because Neil Diamond will attend the screening and perform a Q+A! Be sure to ditch work, school or whatever else to see Neil in the flesh!

In other big Reel Injun news we have booked 2 dates at the ByTowne Theatre in Ottawa. Join as May 12th and 13th @ 4:30PM for two very special screenings in the Nation's capital! A good showing will help us out a bunch, so make sure you don't miss it!

Be sure to check out our official website: http://www.reelinjunthemovie.com

and to follow us on twitter @reelinjun

Thanks so much for all your support and interest,

One love,

Justin

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Also, here's the trailer:



And now back to your regularly scheduled programming :)

Saturday, April 17, 2010

in other news...

...family news...

I'm feeling a little more settled in my newly expanded family these last few months. Granted, it's not all smooth sailing, but my stepson and I are starting to connect a little more than we initially did. That was when he moved from Kelowna to live with us, back in August, less than a month before his dad an I got married and only 2 weeks before school started and I officially entered my BSW program.

We had a bit of a rough patch over Spring Break in March. I took my stepson to stay with his mom in Kelowna for a weekend, and he was pretty cranky for a week after. He also had a virus that hung around for just over a week, which didn't help. And then his mom and her husband and their toddler and baby came to Vancouver over the Easter weekend, so he spent 24 hours with them, and he was crabby for another week following. But lately he's been wanting me to pin him down and tickle him. He's not always one for physical contact with me, he can be surly about it, like I'm intentionally hurting him if I give him a playful poke. This creating attachment from nothing with a 7 year old is not an easy task!

Other than our struggles to develop our attachment bond, I've had the joy of having to explain another person's poor parenting choice to my stepson's community. While he was in Kelowna over Spring Break, he told his mom he'd like to have blue hair. So she bleached his brown hair and dyed it bright green (using blue dye - the colour didn't come out quite right). Can I repeat, she bleached a barely 7 year old's hair!!! Sure, there's no lasting physical damage to the kid, but, come on! Why would that be considered appropriate? Then, over Easter weekend, she brought me the extra blue dye so I could touch it up!!  His mom isn't the most mentally stable, and is a little touchy. As well, there's no generosity in her relationship with my husband; he is incompetent and unworthy in her eyes. I haven't had the words to respond to this in a tactful way, so I've just bit my tongue. But I'm embarrassed!

On a more positive note, I put my family on the list for SelfDesign for next fall, a distributed learning school that is unschooling-friendly. I looked through some of the profiles of the learning consultants (teachers), and can see myself working with several from the Vancouver/Lower Mainland area alone  :)

The kids are excited. I am, too! But I'm also a little scared...

Friday, April 16, 2010

my prof wants me to enter my paper in a writing competition!

I wrote and anti-racist critique of Avatar for my Anti-Racist and Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice class. It was a 12 to 13 page research paper, and the assignment was very open to interpretation, as long as I included a section on implications for social work practice. My instructor commented that my paper was a nuanced, multi-layered analysis, and she'd like me to consider submitting it to the competition. Yay!!

I posted an update on Facebook about this, and 3 of my fellow students, as well as an old high school friend who is also an academic, are interested in reading it! I'm excited and honoured and... overwhelmed... The paper was a first draft. I didn't re-read it or edit it a bit before submitting it 2 days late... in some ways I feel I don't deserve the recognition because I didn't to it the "right way"... methinks we need a little more deschooling around this joint! I couldn't even graciously accept my instructor's compliment! I'm also thinking it's time to take a Landmark seminar... get a bit more aligned to 'what's so' rather than my fantasy or interpretation about how it should look :)

So, once again, yay me!!

Sunday, April 11, 2010

modern colonial oppression

I haven't been posting much lately, this has been a very difficult semester for me :) I've been out in the community on practicum, and have found the experience to be overwhelming... not to mention the lack of finances being overwhelming - I haven't been able to do any paid work this semester, and I'm really feeling it, anxiety-wise.

Regardless, it's been a fascinating and rewarding semester, academically. I took a course on anti-racist social work practice and a course on community development, where my group was involved with an event marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. I've learned a lot about white privilege, and the unseen effects of subtle, unconscious racism in entertainment media. I developed an anti-racist critique of the movie Avatar which I was privileged to present at the event, and for which I received much praise from a few professors!

Overall, I've really developed my critical ideas about race and racism, as well as about oppression in general (racial discrimination being only one face of oppression). I've been studying these critical theories for several semesters, now, but each time I engage with them, my understanding (and outrage) deepens.

I recently saw this article about the lack of anyone considered "Israeli" in the state of Israel - people are classified as either Jewish or Arab, unless the Rabbinate  decide you're not Jewish enough, then you'll be classified by your nationality of emigration. A liguistics professor from an Israeli university is challenging this in court.

This is so interesting that I'm going to post the text of the article here:


Citizens Classed as Jewish or Arab Nationals

by Jonathan Cook / April 6th, 2010

A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as “Israelis”, a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self- declared status as a Jewish state.

Israel refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel”, the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish nation”, meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.

Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalisation, access to land and employment.

Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of “Arab” nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment.

The interior ministry has adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or ethnic terms, with “Jewish” and “Arab” being the main categories.

The group’s legal case is being heard by the supreme court after a district judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing the state’s position that there is no Israeli nation.

The head of the campaign for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor, said: “It is absurd that Israel, which recognises dozens of different nationalities, refuses to recognise the one nationality it is supposed to represent.”

The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to “undermine the state’s infrastructure” — a presumed reference to laws and official institutions that ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in Israel.

Mr Ornan, 86, said that denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin of state- sanctioned discrimination against the Arab population.

“There are even two laws — the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs — that determine how you belong to the state,” he said. “What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”

Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had resorted to creating national groups with no legal recognition outside Israel, such as “Arab” or “unknown”, to avoid recognising an Israeli nationality.

In official documents most Israelis are classified as “Jewish” or “Arab”, but immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000 arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically registered according to their country of origin.

“Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as “Jewish” or “Christian”,” said Mr Ornan.

The professor, who lives close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the interior ministry refused to change his nationality to “Israeli” in 2000. An online petition declaring “I am an Israeli” has attracted several thousand signatures.

Mr Ornan has been joined in his action by 20 other public figures, including former government minister Shulamit Aloni. Several members have been registered with unusual nationalities such as “Russian”, “Buddhist”, “Georgian” and “Burmese”.

Two Arabs are party to the case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be allowed to live in one of several hundred communities in Israel open only to Jews.

Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the parliament, said the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens.

“The State of Israel cannot recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”

International Zionist organisations representing the diaspora, such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, are given in Israeli law a special, quasi-governmental role, especially in relation to immigration and control over large areas of Israeli territory for the settlement of Jews only.

Mr Ornan said the lack of a common nationality violated Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which says the state will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex”.

Indications of nationality on ID cards carried by Israelis made it easy for officials to discriminate against Arab citizens, he added.

The government has countered that the nationality section on ID cards was phased out from 2000 — after the interior ministry, which was run by a religious party at the time, objected to a court order requiring it to identify non-Orthodox Jews as “Jewish” on the cards.

However, Mr Ornan said any official could instantly tell if he was looking at the card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the IDs of Jews was given according to the Hebrew calendar. In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included the grandfather’s name.

“Flash your ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which ‘clan’ you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to ‘handle your kind’,” Mr Ornan said.

The distinction between Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on interior ministry records used to make important decisions about personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on entirely sectarian terms.

Only Israelis from the same religious group, for example, are allowed to marry inside Israel — otherwise they are forced to wed abroad — and cemeteries are separated according to religious belonging.

Some of those who have joined the campaign complain that it has damaged their business interests. One Druze member, Carmel Wahaba, said he had lost the chance to establish an import-export company in France because officials there refused to accept documents stating his nationality as “Druze” rather than “Israeli”.

The group also said it hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign border officials.

B Michael, a commentator for Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, has observed: “We are all Israeli nationals — but only abroad.”

The campaign, however, is likely to face an uphill struggle in the courts.

A similar legal suit brought by a Tel Aviv psychologist, George Tamrin, failed in 1970. Shimon Agranat, head of the supreme court at the time, ruled: “There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people. … The Jewish people is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of diaspora Jewries.”

That view was echoed by the district court in 2008 when it heard Mr Ornan’s case.

The judges in the supreme court, which held the first appeal hearing last month, indicated that they too were likely to be unsympathetic. Justice Uzi Fogelman said: “The question is whether or not the court is the right place to solve this problem.”
Two quotes I'd like to re-iterate are:
“What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”
and:
"the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens." 

Oy