The Canary Effect (2006)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Directors:

Robin Davey
Yellow Thunder Woman

Writer:

Robin Davey (writer)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

The Canary Effect takes an in depth look at the devastating effect that US policies have had on the indigenous people of America. |

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Racist "Documentary" Raises Suspicions

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I'm from the boondocks, but I seem to remember that Tribeca is not far from Ground Zero in New York City. Therefore, after viewing this film at my university as a junior, I am shocked to see it listed on IMDb as premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival not long before the fifth anniversary of 9-11. I do not recall any news stories two years ago about filmmakers being tarred and feathered in New York. Yet the main talking head in this doc is the infamous Ward Churchill, who was fired from his public university (quite a feat for a tenured prof) in the fall of 2001 after crowing that the terrorists "couldn't be all bad" since their sneak attack slaughtered so many soldiers, police and firemen!!

About half of this 63-minute "documentary" is devoted to a cartoon movie-within-a-movie, done in the style of an elementary school educational film from the 1950s or 1960s era. It is obvious the filmmakers either created this inflammatory exercise in racism themselves, or dubbed over some forgotten kiddie show.

The other half of this propaganda piece is a mishmash of lies, I-hate-Americanisms and non sequiturs, beginning a with misplaced effort to connect the canary-in-a-coal-mine metaphor to the movie's themes. The only real message trickles out toward the close, and involves taxpayer monetary reparations to the "Indians in good standing" that have survived decades of membership roll battles among the 304 federally-recognized clans of so-called "native Americans" (who are often much lighter-skinned than those purged, or the members of the hundreds of unrecognized clans which cannot afford the right political connections, such as multimillion dollar mouth-piece Jack Abramoff).

"Facts" included in THE CANARY EFFECT: --George H.W. Bush implemented a policy which sterilized 42 per cent of American Indian women. --"Native Americans" are 525 per cent more likely to be alcoholics than the rest of U.S. citizens. --George W. Bush waited 500 per cent longer to respond to a school shooting on the Red Lake reservation than he did to call Columbine H.S.

The filmmakers imply that all was sweetness and light in the western hemisphere prior to 1492. They never mention that there were NO "native Americans" except mammoths, grizzly bears and smaller non-bipeds until the most recent one per cent of one per cent of world history. They fail to recognize the multiple waves of Indo-European immigration that swept both coasts of the Americas multiple times between 15,000 years ago and now. Each group of newbies had to sink or swim on its own merits; might meant right. Some newcomers became king of the hill, some lost the battle but kept a horse in the war by passing survivors' genes along through interbreeding, and some losers were eaten (just as their counterparts who stayed home in Asia or Europe were during this time period). Those who wiped out the 111 inhabitants of Roanoke Island in Virginia probably felt no more remorse than the Basque who slew the last member of the Neanderthal species. It was survival of the fittest all the way. The main difference with the wave of 1492 and those of the ancestors of current "tribes" was that the industrial disparity was greater than ever before, and that the European's small pox germs trumped the "native American's" syphilis virus.

Sure, if the stream of immigration broached by Columbus had been delayed till 1972, a more enlightened generation of Indo-Europeans no doubt would have declared immediately that the "new" half of earth was to be a nature preserve for perpetuity, left totally untouched save for an occasional episode of SURVIVOR. But it's revisionism of the worst sort to couple anachronistic expectations of history's Dar-winners with a total white-washing of the defects that did in the dodos. The fact that our government recognizes 304 "official" clans, most of which have fractured themselves into warring factions even today, dispels THE CANARY EFFECT myth that there's a "them" and an "us." Whether our ancestors were Apache or Kenyan or Sioux or Welsh or Seminole or Hmong, the only way "we" can be separated into a bunch of disunited "them's" is for people like these filmmakers to amass one group's dirty linen while burying the other side's hatchets.

I did not rate this film a "7" because of its technical merit (it has none) or its unifying theme (again, missing in action). It did provoke my well-received senior thesis: the "7" is my way of saying thank you.