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by Angelo Muredda Following the encore screening of Banchi Hanuse’s Ceremony at this year’s Hot Docs, an audience member chimed in to remark that as a Palestinian woman who has seen her share of colonial aggression, she was struck by how similar the tools and logics of different settler states are when it comes to treating contested territory as unoccupied and without history, thus perfect for relocation. Perhaps even more striking than that observation–or the moderator’s decision to thank the audience member for her comment but quickly punt to the next one without letting the filmmaker and her cast of Nuxalk creators and activists respond–is Hanuse’s documentation of the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have responded to those familiar efforts to stamp out their civilizations, from keeping the language alive through their own alternative schools to broadcasting their culture on community radio to documenting their own histories and staging ritual performances of their traditions. Winner of the festival’s DGC Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary, Ceremony is an evocative, engaging, and refreshingly talking-head and infographic-free film about how the Nuxalk Nation finds hope for resistance and renewal through these deliberate practices in the face of the broader nation-state’s violent, centuries-long effort to fold them into the Canadian colonial project.
Insofar as the nontraditional nonfiction essay has a single thesis, it’s conveyed in an archival interview that one of its subjects–fisheries manager, biologist, and Nuxalk citizen Megan Moody–conducts with her activist father about the mysterious disappearance of the ooligan, a smelt that was for a long time the primary trade engine of the now economically depressed residents of the Bella Coola village in the central coast of British Columbia. “If the butler didn’t do it,” he quizzically asks her of the fish’s decimated population (which not coincidentally seems to line up with successive waves of European settlements to Canada), “who did it?” The question of who made the ooligan vanish becomes the animating structural force of Ceremony, which follows a number of community members on their freewheeling expeditions into their family histories, allowing them to steer the course of the investigation rather than imposing a top-down structure.
The film’s varied ensemble cast includes Moody, who, with her researcher brother Jason, is tracking the fish’s strategic retreat down the coast in hopes of restoring the ecosystem that once allowed them to thrive on their territory. Another party to this mystery is local activist Nuskmata, a land defender enmeshed in a legal battle with the provincial government over her adult son’s newly built home on contested Crown land–meaning, non-reserved public land on unceded Indigenous territory that the government insists is under its authority. In addition to her activism on this front, Nuskmata probes the BC Archives, charting the ooligan’s dwindling numbers. She also combs through early colonial correspondence with historian Tom Swanky, who accuses administrators like former British Columbia Governor James Douglas of deliberately spreading smallpox through the longhouses of her ancestors to systematically wipe out any resistance to the European settlements to follow. The chief point of contact between all of Hanuse’s guides through Nuxalk country is Qwaxw, the honey-voiced host of CKNN-FM, or Nuxalk Radio, an independent station that promotes Nuxalk culture and music, heard here in both diegetic and non-diegetic contexts throughout the film.
The easygoing, unruffled, and erudite Qwaxw becomes not just a strong point of identification for the viewer, with his amiable tour of his family’s grease camp (where he remembers the unique voice and cookery skills of his deceased father), but a compelling authorial stand-in for Hanuse as well. His low-key effort to fill his radio show with a chorus of Nuxalk voices mirrors Hanuse’s polyvocal approach to bringing such a diverse community to life. The occasional animated sequences depicting the Nation’s old traditions don’t really hold a candle to the footage of culture-protectors like Qwaxw and Nuskmata leading ceremonies to help the younger generation get in touch with their communal past and carry their culture forward. And if the answer to the whodunnit is about as basic as you’d expect–the ooligan, it turns out, don’t like their habitat being disrupted by a colonial remodel any more than their human kin on the same lands do–the journey to that reveal is nevertheless pleasantly digressive and moving, a portrait of cultural continuity as the most trenchant form of anti-colonial resistance. When Nuskmata stands her ground on the home she’s building with her son in the face of a 120-day injunction from the province, telling her infant granddaughter that the work they’re doing is “building the village that you will be raised in,” you feel her efforts reflected in the film, whose solid construction affords its subjects their own narrative sovereignty on Indigenous cultural territory.
