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On our film UNREPENTANT and its Deeper Message - A Personal Note from Kevin Annett, co-producer and writer
UNREPENTANT is many things, but for me it is a mirror, held up to my own Euro-Canadian culture and people. In the time left to us, we need to accept the image that stares back at us as what we have become. As I have so often done when presiding at the funeral of friends and others, I am counselling and speaking to the dying in this film: to the members of a collapsing culture whose ways are causing their own planetary self-destruction in the wake of their extermination of millions of indigenous people.
I hope the terrible irony of this situation will not be lost on the viewers of UNREPENTANT, conditioned as many of us "white" people are in the role of ruler, judge and ultimate "fixer" of any problem. The truth is, we have no solution to our own demise, any more than we can handily "heal" the genocidal horror we unleashed and still inflict on aboriginal people. For that horror has never been halted, but has turned back upon us in the unstoppable fury of global ecocide, and is devouring the air we breathe and the land we cling to.
In that sense, UNREPENTANT is not about setting anything right, ultimately, for it's much too late for that. Imagine a chapel filled with people come to mourn a dead stranger, only to discover that they are all about to die, and you will begin to sense the deeper meaning of this film.
Before he was killed by a landowner's death squad, a defrocked Guatemalan priest once led me through a refugee camp filled with sick and starving people. When I asked him what I could do to help them, he said,
"Nothing. Stop thinking you can help, and you may learn something."
I say the same to you, the viewers of UNREPENTANT.
Kevin Annett / Eagle Strong Voice
Occupied Coast Salish Territory
1 March, 2007
(For a trailer of UNREPENTANT and information how to order this film, see: www.hiddenfromhistory.org)
Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org ... ... and on this radio program: "Hidden from History", every Monday from 1-2 pm (PST) on CFRO 102.7 FM (www.coopradio.org) (Vancouver) |