Dawnland by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip

REVIEWS 119 Rev. of Dawnland, Directed by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip. Independent Lens. Independent Films, 2018. By Martha Satz Heartbreaking Truth and Little Reconciliation This moving and informative documentary renders an account of Maine’s Wabanaki -State Truth and Reconciliation Commission, convened in 2012, whose task was to investigate the treatment of Native American children in the state of Maine from 1978 to 2012, to write a report, and to make recommendations. The work of the Commission is interspersed with poignant accounts of the treatment of the now-adult children forcibly taken from their parents, and of the parents whose children had been devastatingly ripped from them. To contrast with this historical experience, the movie also pictures present-day Native American ceremonies with multigenerational participants—most movingly, toddlers learning dances and rituals from their grandparents. The film makes obvious the brutal injustices of child removal, concluding as the Commission itself eventually does, that the white community perpetrated cultural genocide on the Native American community in this practice. The documentary reveals the intent of the dominant white culture to “rescue” Indigenous children from their “savagery” and to convert them to “civilization ,” defined as “white culture.” The Native American members of the Commission conclude that the actual product of the Commission’s investigation is to reveal the truth of the Native American experience and to heal some Native American participants by divulging their experiences, but the Commission ultimately can do little to produce reconciliation between the white members and the Native American members of its body. The film conveys for the viewer the stark, heart-rending truth of alienation, abuse, loneliness, and psychological destruction inflicted upon Indigenous children, their families, and their community by practices of child removal. The equal weight that the movie grants to present-day Indigenous cultural life renders the historic oppression of Native peoples even more palpable for the non-Native and Native viewer alike. Dawnland serves as an educational vehicle that conveys a grievous historical injustice less written about and taught than so many other historical human rights crimes, and the film is thus a useful tool in making them at least apparent. The Maine Wabanaki-State Truth and Reconciliation Commission took as its model the proceedings of a similar name that were initiated in South Africa after apartheid with the purpose of bringing about healing and justice. Both Commissions were conceived as a way for victims to tell their stories and for perpetrators to avoid prosecution. The Maine body also learned from a similar proceeding in 120 ADOPTION & CULTURE 8.1 Canada, at the end of which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a heartfelt apology for the harm that the Canadian government had inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Canada. When Paul LePage, the governor of Maine, established the Maine Wabanaki -State Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2012, with some trepidation he appointed to it his Secretary of State, Matthew Dunlap. The documentary makes clear that the appointment was intended to give the Commission political weight, though LePage feared that if the Commission used the g-word—genocide—this would result in a call for reparations, something he did not want. As the film points out, unlike circumstances that produced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in response to the highly public violences of apartheid, the Maine Wabanaki-State Truth and Reconciliation Commission convened in the context of covert violence. There had been no open conflict or public call to reconciliation ; in fact, the dominant culture was hardly aware—if aware at all—of the injustices and abuses that had been visited upon the Indigenous population. In its final report, issued in June of 2015, the Commission noted that one out of four Native American children were separated from their biological families and were placed either in non-Indigenous foster care, white-run boarding schools, or in white adoptive homes as a result of the view—sometimes stated and sometimes implicit—that Native American children would be better off growing up outside their Indigenous cultures. In these settings, as these now-adult children relate, their hair was cut, their language was forbidden, and their familial and cultural bonds were destroyed as they...

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