Exploring Our Connectedness
“WARE ALL CONNECTED” is not just some hokey phrase spoken stoically by Indigenous people; it’s a fact.
In Returning Home (2021), Secwepemc film-maker Sean Stiller interweaves the struggles and displacement of residential school students with the dispossession of the local wild salmon. “This film is less about advocating for a cause and more about getting people to see that worldview and to understand it a bit,” explained Stiller. “It’s about what you can feel for even a couple of moments, that relationship to the land, why that community and that family would feel so emotional about the salmon run being non-existent. It’s not just recreation; it’s a part of who they are. If that can just be felt, for me that’s the gold standard.”
focuses on the family, we are introduced to her as she travels across Canada, sharing her story with young students in auditoriums about how attending St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School affected her growing up and into adulthood. Her story is infamous and widely known: In preparation for her first day of school, her grandmother took her shopping for a new outfit, which included a shiny orange shirt. When she arrived on her first day at school, they stripped everything away, including the orange shirt, and never gave it back to her. For her it was a heartbreaking realization of the callousness and trauma that she would begin to endure there, while instilling a sense of worthlessness and loneliness in her formative years. She still gets teary when she tells this story.
