Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant on the project and one of many Osage members who attended its Los Angeles premiere Monday, told THR he was “nervous about the release of the film; now that I’ve seen it, I have some strong opinions.
“As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” Cote said, referencing Lily Gladstone’s character in the movie. (Historical spoilers from the film ahead.) “Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart [played by Leonardo DiCaprio] and they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.”
He continued, “I think in the end, the question that you can be left with is: How long will you be complacent with racism? How long will you go along with something and not say something, not speak up, how long will you be complacent? I think that’s because this film isn’t made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage. For those that have been disenfranchised, they can relate, but for other countries that have their acts and their history of repression, this is an opportunity for them to ask themselves this question of morality, and that’s how I feel about this film.”
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Burned to the Ground: the Canadian village incinerated by record temperatures, June 8, 2023
The small village of Lytton in British Columbia hit the global media when it smashed Canada's highest temperature ever recorded in June 2021, at 49.6 degrees centigrade.
Two days later, the entire village had burned to the ground. In the ashes of their homes, this cohesive but diverse community which includes a majority of First Nations residents had to confront the realities of climate displacement by being relocated away from their ancestral lands. Through the stories of three main protagonists we find a community searching for answers while relying on a collective spirit to heal.
The Guardian
@allthecanadianpolitics
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Blood of the Condor (Yawar Mallku), (1969), film poster. (director: Jorge Sanjinés)
"Ignacio (Marcelino Yanahuaya), the proud chief of a tribe of Quechua natives in remote Andean Bolivia, discovers that his wife cannot bear children. Like the other women of their village, she has been secretly sterilized against her will at an obstetric clinic operated by a purportedly beneficial aid group from the United States, with the covert help of the Bolivian government. Ignacio gathers the men of his tribe to exact revenge and bring justice to his people."
The story, which was based on accounts by indigenous people to Jorge Sanjines, provoked a public outcry which led to a government investigation about the Peace Corps' actions in Bolivia, ending in their expulsion from the country.
Part of an interesting albeit slightly flawed review on IMDB:
"... Molly Geidel, author of, "Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties" found documents decades later clearly showing that the Bolivia Peace Corps director and volunteers with the agency, inserted IUDs in indigenous Aymara women at the time, despite not always having medical credentials and not being able to communicate well with the women.
So, it would seem that it wasn't the large-scale premeditated sterilization of a people that this film would have you believe (that is debatable), but none-the-less, an incredibly problematic policy practiced by the U.S. Peace Corps. It's not a long walk from nonconsensual contraception to accusations of population control. But the true story gets more complicated.
Long after this movie was released, a 2002 report by Peruvian Health Minister Fernando Carbone suggested that the president of neighboring Peru, all around asshole Alberto Fujimor, was involved in the forced sterilizations of up to 300,000 Quechua and Aymara women between 1996 and 2000 as part of a population control program called "Voluntary Surgical Contraception".
The United Nations and other international aid agencies supported this campaign, and yes, USAID provided funding and training for it. Whether these Western NGO's and Orgs were told that it was a voluntary family planning program (as the title suggested) or they knew it was a crime against humanity, I can't say.
The point is, the conspiracy theories this film uses to push its political agenda are based on either an eventual truth, or an ongoing truth that we simply don't have the full reportage of. So the movie's anger is prophetic or timely, but regardless, righteous."
Source:
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