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Club Native

Directed by Tracey Deer
Canada, 2008 (documentary, 78 minutes, colour, English)
Club Native
Image: © National Film Board of Canada
Video (National Film Board of Canada) [English]

Film Description:
"Tracey Deer grew up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake with two very firm but unspoken rules drummed into her by the collective force of the community. These rules were very simple and they carried severe repercussions: 1) Do not marry a white person, 2) Do not have a child with a white person. The consequences of ignoring these rules were equally simple: 1) Lose all status as a Native person and, 2) Deny your unborn child their status as a Native person. The larger tragedy, of course, was that by breaking either of these rules, she would be depleting the growth of 'the Nation' and, by extension, betraying everyone she loved. In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Aboriginal identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve—characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line—she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering 'blood quantum' ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community."
-- National Film Board of Canada (source)

Film Credits (partial):
Written by: Tracey Deer
Produced by: Linda Ludwick, Christina Fon, Adam Symansky, Ernest Webb, Catherine Bainbridge, Ravida Din
Narrator: Tracey Deer
Cinematography: Jeff Dorn
Film Editing: Carl Freed
Production Company: Rezolution Pictures, National Film Board of Canada / Office national du film du Canada
(sources)

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