Miraculously, documentary subject Wilfred Buck managed to evade the horrors of the ’60s Scoop after he was diverted by a wolf on his way to visit his family. This shifting path changed his trajectory, and Wilfred eventually became a community leader through science and ceremony. That said, the new eponymous NFB feature focuses neither on the ’60s Scoop or the scourge of Residential Schools but on the overall resilience of a nation of people represented by titular Cree elder Buck. Lisa Jackson has created a beautiful and economic documentary, an unconventional narrative thought poem that uses the various characteristics of community in front of the lens to express the story.
Wilfred Buck, a sweet-faced man with a welcoming demeanour, tell us about a sturgeon who appears in the night sky as a temporal representation of the Cree Nation. Seen in the cluster of thirteen stars are the sturgeon’s nose, centre and tail—the figurative future, present, and past—and within this celestial embodiment, seven stars that represent generations in Buck’s own community. The documentary cleverly follows the same trajectory as the main sturgeon’s anatomy: examining Buck’s past, present-day, and his ongoing growth and work. It focuses on how he and other elders think their people can properly heal, and be the authority on their lives, their land, and their future.
The Cree Nation do not have arbitrary separations between storytelling, art, spirituality, land, science, education, history, family and community, and director Lisa Jackson manages to honour that advanced way of life by pulling together a film that is part spoken-word poem, part archival thought piece, and part constellation capture. One that is both educational and spiritual (much like her community), and one that combines these many facets instead of dividing them. She fearlessly pushes against the conventions of documentary filmmaking to blend all of these parts into the continuum the community thrives on. Through that purposeful and thoughtful filmmaking, Wilfred Buck serves as a marked resistance to the continued colonization of a people.
Audiences are welcomed to experience the story of displacement, and to acknowledge the palpable generational trauma that has followed Buck, the ancestral astronomer, his entire life. We witness his struggle to keep going, to connect with what was taken from him, and to restore purpose, integrity, and dreams to the nation through a kaleidoscope of images. Buck himself would not describe the trauma as loss, but as a dormancy that halted the forward momentum of his nation.
Buck is known to his people as “He has dreamt a dream and keeps it,” and along with his study of the stars, the cultural importance of building and experiencing the sweat lodge, and his belief that science is a dream in its beginnings, he shows that the waking life and dreams of a person and their culture are not separate when describing the philosophy of the many attributes that make up his collective. Wilfred Buck was successfully pieced together as a representation of those very philosophies.
Jackson refrains from using Buck’s struggle to survive during injustice, racism, classism, colonialism and cruelty to manipulate the viewer into feeling, which would’ve been the easy choice. Instead, the filmmaker takes a bold route, capturing truth and allowing us to listen and see the information not with contrived bells and whistles, but with honesty and care. It is the lack of misplaced ego in this film, and the humbling of the viewer, that allows the focus to remain on what happened—and is still happening—to our fellow human beings as they try to rebuild, stay alive, endure, and never slumber again.
Wilfred Buck is streaming now on Crave.
