‘Night Raiders’ Broaches Residential School Trauma through Dystopic Sci-Fi

Truth is stranger than fiction, or so the well-worn adage goes. But the truth can also be more painful — and sometimes fiction can be a productive way to grapple with this pain, as many writers and artists know.

It’s a dynamic that Cree-Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet applied to her latest film, the dystopic science-fiction thriller Night Raiders, set to screen at VIFF this weekend ahead of its national theatrical release on Oct. 8.

The year is 2043, and Canada and the United States are on the other side of a civil war that has birthed one North American nation state. While this state advertises itself as a benevolent protector of citizens and non-citizens alike — distributing food rations, offering free education programs — it is really anything but.

Carefully monitoring the population with menacing AI drones and a heavily militarized police presence, the government is more concerned with suppressing revolt than caring for its people. And one of its primary targets is children — specifically all children under 18, who must be legally registered in state-run “schools” (really cultural indoctrination and paramilitary training programs) when they turn five.

If this premise rings a bell of historical parallelism, it is intentional.

“I found there was a fatigue around talking about residential schools and other policies like them,” said Goulet in a phone interview ahead of the film’s Vancouver premiere. “Sometimes you get the sense that people just don’t want to know. Going into the future opens up the possibility of hitting your message harder — when you’re not constrained by realism, you can really say what you want to say loudly.”

But going into the future also allowed Goulet to grapple with an issue that still holds deep wells of pain for Indigenous communities.

“It offered a layer of protection,” said Goulet of working in the science fiction genre.

Filmed in a painterly palette of muted greys and blues, Night Raiders follows the story of Cree mother Niska (played by Vancouver-based actor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) who’s been on the run from the government for several years with her 11-year-old daughter, Waseese (newcomer Brooklyn Letexier-Hart). Both mother and daughter are self-sufficient, able to survive in the bush and subsist on little.

But when Waseese is gravely injured and they are forced into the city to seek help, Niska is faced with a heartbreaking decision: risk her daughter’s recovery or give her up to the education system where she can access proper medical care.

The film is a beautiful and propulsive thriller, and its emotional core rests on the relationship between a daughter and mother confronting the aching wound of separation. Tailfeathers and Letexier-Hart are both incandescent in their roles, supported by a primarily Indigenous cast (part of the film takes place in Cree) that includes Maori actors from New Zealand, where the film was co-produced.

Goulet took some time between Night Raiders’ Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and her arrival in Vancouver to speak with The Tyee about genre filmmaking, telling Indigenous stories onscreen, and the new wave of Indigenous films.

Tell me about the generative process behind this film. How long have you been working on it, and how did the idea come to you?

I started working on it probably around 2013. At the time I was working on my first genre short, called Wakening, so I had moved into the genre space and set a story in a near-dystopian future. There was something about the genre space that opened up a lot of exciting possibilities for me as a filmmaker. Previous to that I had only been working in drama; after Wakening, I just knew that I wanted to set Night Raiders in a near future as well, as a way of talking about the impact of colonial policies on Indigenous people. I spent many years writing it solo and then developing it along with producer Tara Woodbury, and we ended up shooting in 2019, in the year before the pandemic. Just as lockdown happened, we locked picture and finished up the film remotely.

You mention the exciting possibilities of telling a story like this as a genre film and using it as a vehicle to talk about colonialism. Could you expand on that more and tell me about those possibilities?

I think in a more fictionalized space, there’s something about that [setting] that offers a layer of protection when you’re telling a story that has impacted communities to such a profound extent. Residential schools were in place for seven generations of Indigenous families. The impacts of them are so profound that we see them across all aspects of our family lives, communities and nations. Going into the future just offered a layer of protection when tackling such a big topic that has so much gravity for our community.

And it also opens up possibilities to hit your message harder. When you’re not constrained by realism, you can really say what you want to say loudly. And to me that was the appeal of genre — because nobody can deny how hard you want to push something in a fictional world because it’s fiction. I found that there was a fatigue around talking about residential schools and other policies like them. Sometimes you get the sense that people just don’t want to know. I know that when I started writing [the film] in 2013, I felt that it was a reckoning that was essential for Canada to be having and to be talking about — and the fact that there was so much silence around it struck me.

And then, in 2015, as I was writing, that’s when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their findings, and finally there was more visibility. But this is just the start of a very important process that hopefully we will all engage in. To me it’s essential to the future of our country.

Were there any particular sources of inspiration — other filmmakers or films — that you turned to in making this film?

I definitely felt like Children of Men (by Alfonso Cuarón) was a touchstone, because it portrays a near future but also a world that feels very realistic. And it follows the emotional journey of a reluctant hero. I feel like Night Raiders definitely has a lot of those elements.

But I would say it’s almost like a marriage between the genre films that I grew up with and the activist documentaries that are the foundation of Indigenous cinema, beginning in the ’70s with filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin, who’s regarded as the grandmother of Indigenous cinema. The voice in her films and the push for social change — the activism that is alive in her documentaries — that’s all been a huge inspiration for me as a filmmaker. I feel like I take that ethos as inspiration and then apply it into the genre space.

Indigenous filmmaking is experiencing a blossoming of late, with Indigenous filmmakers garnering awards for films that not only document Indigenous traumas but also portray Indigenous creativity, spirituality and resilience. What are your thoughts on this moment, and the Canadian film industry’s recognition of it?

I think it’s a really important moment. We’re in the midst of an explosion of work of the like that we’ve never seen before. It’s a very exciting time. I feel like Night Raiders is situated within this wave, and it feels like a movement. But it’s a movement because it didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident — it happened because of decades of people advocating for change in the industry.

When I went to make Night Raiders, I approached a broadcaster and they sent me notes back from a reader. The reader sent very positive notes about the story and the characters, but then said, “I just don’t know if the allegory of residential schools works, because as a country we’ve moved on from that and priests are no longer harming Indigenous children.” So the question of the story was whether or not it was actually relevant. And that was in the very month that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was releasing its findings about residential schools, so that conversation hadn’t even really begun.

That’s just one tiny example of the barriers that Indigenous filmmakers are up against when [we] navigate the industry. But by the time that I went to make Night Raiders, I feel like the doors were really opening, and we were being embraced and had amazing support from Telefilm and [the Canada Media Fund] and from Ontario Creates. But I think that was because of people pushing for change and saying, repeatedly, that Indigenous people had to be empowered in key creative roles and also have agency over our own storytelling. So it’s a really important moment that we should definitely celebrate — and we want to push it forward and keep the momentum going — but it’s also important to acknowledge how many years we felt invisible, and that there are still many barriers to overcome.

What has been your experience so far of having audiences receive the film, and what is your hope that audiences will take away from it?

We’ve still really only had the first in-person screenings at TIFF, so I’m only seeing the responses online. But so far it’s been incredibly positive. And I think there is a hunger for stories like this. For Indigenous communities to see themselves and their realities reflected in this way has, I think, been really meaningful.

I actually screened [the film] in Saskatchewan ahead of TIFF for my Cree camp — which is a language revitalization camp that I go to every summer — and I was so floored and happy about the reaction. I felt so much that this was a labour of love and that I was ultimately creating it for them first. For me, for Indigenous communities to embrace it, is just really, really important. I hope they feel like it’s theirs.

And for broader audiences, I really hope it generates more understanding and empathy for the impact of these colonial policies on every aspect of Indigenous life. For far too long we’ve been up against misrepresentation of our people and our stories onscreen. I’ve always been driven to challenge those false narratives, so I hope that when people see [Night Raiders] they see a human story and relate to it in a universal way. And I hope they understand more about what [residential schools] did to families when they were fractured by these policies.