2024 |
Documentary“We have to really look at the historical framework that led us to this point. The founding fathers of this country were thieves and murderers. Their mandate was to annihilate us. And they couldn’t do it, so they trained us to annihilate ourselves and that’s where we are today.”
”Yintah” is yet another documentary that is so severely underseen that it hurts. This is a phenomenal film. It’s educational, it’s beautiful, it’s utterly devastating and tragic. But it’s also immensely inspiring and I have such a deep and profound admiration for all the people and brave activists in this. There are multiple moments in this where my eyes couldn’t stay dry.
This is not just a documentary about an oil pipeline. That alone would be bad enough, but it’s so much more. It’s about a centuries long genocide. It’s about the systemic and calculated oppression, exploitation, criminalization, disrespecting, murder and ultimately extermination of a whole people.
It’s about western imperialist and capitalist practice and the immense strength and unrelenting resilience of the native people who stand up against the injustices they have faced for generations. They stand agains a massive corporate beast that sees them not as the humans they are and that doesn’t recognize the basic respect, dignity and right to self-determination they deserve - not only as humans, but as the people who are indigenous to the land and have lived there for generations, long before the european invaders arrived and plundered their lands and started to systematically murder them in pursuit of their genocidal settler-colonialist ‘manifest destiny’. They stand agains a capitalist system only interested in profit. A system that doesn’t mind literally spending tens of billions of dollars more to go through with their exploitative, profit-oriented and genocidal plans. A system that they say serves the people but then not only ignores but brutally suppresses the voices of not only the people that are directly affected, but widespread protests throughout the entire country. Protests that managed to effectively shut down parts of canada’s economy. Protests that only fucking stopped/slowed-down because a fucking pandemic came along.
And this documentary again shows whose side the pigs are on. It’s the side of capital, profit, corporations and rich parasites.
Also, this reminded me of 1999s “pickAxe”, as they deal with very similar issues. That one is a lot more white, but a very interesting watch I couldn’t recommend more.
