Wilfred Buck

I guess you could say it started with sturgeon.

It was the summer of 2017. I was reading an article when I saw the word “sturgeon” and experienced what I’ve come to call a zap. (These happen rarely, every few years, like a bolt of fascination and urgency. I’ve learned to listen to them, as my most successful projects have started this way.) I’d heard of this ancient fish before, but it had never had this effect on me. A seed was planted…

Later that year, when a friend asked me to attend a panel on Indigenous star knowledge at the University of Toronto, I went. When a man from the Canada Science and Technology Museum mentioned the name “Wilfred Buck,” again, zap. I raced up to the presenter during the break: “Someone has to make a film on Wilfred Buck!”

When Wilfred and I spoke on the phone some weeks later, he told me he’d just finished writing his life story and that no one knew he’d written it except his wife and daughter. He said he’d email it to me. Later that day, I read the first page of his memoir, I Have Lived Four Lives:

I am Pawami niki titi cikiw, “He has Dreamed a Dream and Keeps it,” shortened to “Dream Keeper.”

What you are about to picture here is the artist painting a clean, biased, slightly sullied version of a truer reality. I put the best me on display. I crawl out of the darkness, into the light.

I am of the fresh-out-out-of-the-bush, partly civilized, colonized, displaced people. Trained and shamed by teachers, preachers, doctors, nurses, law enforcement, movie, radio and television to be a pill-popping, hard drinking, self-loathing, easily impressed, angry, non-conformist, maladjusted, disaffected youth of the “dirty-indian,” baby boomer generation.

By all rights, I am told, I should be dead six times over.
So here is the story of how I lived and how I died and how I lived again along with the dreams I have dreamed.

I was riveted. Seamlessly moving from past to present, heartbreaking to hilarious, it was searingly honest, playful and wise. Here was a beat poet, born on the land, torn from it and thrown into a society that said his people were backwards, knew nothing, and that his ancestors were in Hell. Like many others, he fell into a deep hole of addictions, street life and pain, hurting others as he had been hurt.

It was the story of colonialism, told from the inside. And not just the colonization of people and territory, but of the mind and spirit. Reading Wilfred’s words, I saw someone who’d been through the fire of what has broken countless Indigenous people, and survived. And who was now, with the help of his family and community, forging a path for others to heal and reconnect to the profound teachings of their ancestors through ceremony and star knowledge. In the film, we see 30-year-old archival footage of Wilfred on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s beloved science series The Nature of Things, already on this path:

We have to go back to the teachings of our ancestors, and we have to understand what they mean. Not just verbally, but also inside our spirit. What that actually means. It gives you a sense of belonging, and once you have a sense of belonging, you know you’re part of something. And that part of something is your responsibility—not to try to destroy that. Our Elders tell us that all things are sacred, life is sacred.

On the last page of Wilfred’s memoir is the story of Namew, the sturgeon. This Cree star constellation reminds us of the responsibilities of seven generations and beyond; that we are part of the continuity of knowledge through time, ensuring that the next generations have what they need to live a good life. The sturgeon is a long-lived fish that swam with the dinosaurs, a fish that has endured extinction events. It swims low in the rivers and lakes and carries lessons. Some say it can move between the worlds, above and below. Reading that, I knew I would be the filmmaker to make this film.

Colonization has taken a hatchet to the chain of knowledge our ancestors carried forward, but it didn’t sever it. And through the work of Wilfred and countless other Elders, knowledge keepers, teachers and oskapiwis (helpers), the knowledge is being transmitted again—no longer outlawed, ridiculed and diminished.

And while the film conveys Ininew (Cree) teachings, Indigenous teachings, there is much for anyone to learn about how to heal and how to come to new knowledge. What does it mean to open your mind, to not hive off “knowledge” as purely rational, separate from our lived experience, from the heart and spirit? Indigenous knowledge is based on millennia-long observations of the Earth and skies that provided guidance on how to navigate and live in balance. In a world drowning in data and information, we are starved for wisdom and perspective. The film asks us to ponder the question: What is missing when there is no ceremony?

When I set out to make this film, I thought I’d encounter a dialogue between Western and Indigenous perspectives on the stars and science. But what I found was that Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge have only just introduced themselves. And though there is a growing recognition of TEK (or Traditional Ecological Knowledge), the mainstream categorization of rational thought and quantifiable data as completely separate from other ways of knowing is a barrier. There may be a willingness to listen, but there remains a gulf in language and worldviews. I hope this film can be an invitation for that dialogue to begin.
My background
My Anishinaabe mother passed away at age 53 when I was just 19 years old, after a difficult life marked by many of the traumas that Wilfred also experienced. She was torn from her community and family at age 5, taken to residential school, and never had a chance to reconnect with her community or culture. She was deeply humane and artistic, with a sharp wit and intelligence. My life in many ways is dedicated to expressing and accomplishing what she never could.
My father was born in 1917 of mixed settler European heritage, a mechanical engineer by trade and a MENSA member whose hero was Einstein. A voracious reader, his curiosity about the world was his defining quality. He always carried a mechanical pencil and index cards in his shirt pocket, ready to record data, do some calculations, jot down a theory.
From the beginning, my work has been recognized for its innovation, tackling unusual, challenging or complex subjects through creative use of form to reach broad audiences. I’ve worked in documentary, fiction, animation, IMAX, virtual reality and installation. Another way of putting it is that I’m not one for staying in a lane. I follow my curiosity and artistic muse, as well as my sense of what will resonate at this time, choosing the best approach for each project.
It may sound grandiose, but I feel this is a life work. This story called me to weave together dramatic re-enactments and verité documentary with archival footage and poetic abstract scenes. I believe the way they sit together allows for something special: a film that can touch our hearts, our heads and our spirits.
Our Indigenous cultures value humility, community, Elders, listening and relationship to each other and the animate world around us, all the way to the stars. These quiet yet powerful teachings have a lot to offer a mainstream culture that values youth, confidence, volume, the individual, the self-made. Science is fueled by our curiosity to understand the world around us, to unpack the unknown a bit more. Wilfred also has this curiosity and fascination—he is a geek, an Elder, a teacher and sometimes a trickster. He is deeply committed to knowledge, the next generation and honouring his ancestors. And I committed to translating this to film.