Where the Spirit Lives: An Influential and Contentious Television Drama about Residential Schools

Where the Spirit Lives has been and remains the most watched fictional representation of an issue that haunts both Canada and the United States–the treatment of Aboriginal children in residential schools. Both countries instituted policies that took children from every province, state, and territory at the age of five or six from their parents in order to “assimilate” them into the dominant society. While working on an earlier television project, the children’s series, Spirit Bay, Keith Leckie, the film’s writer, heard stories of children being confined, punished for speaking their own language, of being stripped and forced to stand naked before the school. These stories led Leckie, a non-Native, to the conclusion “that these schools were the basis for drug and alcohol abuse, broken homes and for suicides. The statement had to be made: we destroyed their culture” (Scrivener 1989). Where the Spirit Lives is the result of Leckie’s interest in and concern about residential schools. But let us be clear: Where the Spirit Lives is a story told by the dominant culture for the dominant culture, and when the film was first broadcast in 1989, it immediately received both rave reviews and impassioned criticism. I am a middle-aged white woman from that dominant culture who by age, sex, and education is typical of the demographic who watches this kind of material (but of course atypical as a scholar and writer of books about Canadian television drama). I cannot and do not see the film in the same way as any aboriginal viewer might, but rather as a film intended to educate and entertain those who cared to watch a film about issues that were not then known to most of the viewers. A small and scattered set of responses from people from various First Nations will be mentioned later, but I would not presume to extrapolate from them to generalize about what the television drama might have meant to the people being represented by it. And in any case, such a generalization would presuppose a monolithic r esponse, one which does not exist. The Story within Where the Spirit Lives Leckie admits that before he worked on Spirit Bay, he used to think of the First Nations people as “shadow people or the stereotypes Hollywood has given us…. I had no idea of their culture, who they were, their history, their values, their strong religious beliefs” (O’Connor 1990). Ojibway playwright Drew Hayden Taylor reports that Leckie told him that “Most non-Natives aren’t even aware of this legalized kidnapping by the Government. It’s a part of Canadian history that has been conveniently forgotten. That’s why I wrote this story.” In another interview, Leckie said that he believes that residential schools were at the bottom of alcohol and drug abuse, the breakdown of the family unit, and the rate of Aboriginal suicide: “They left the school with a contempt for their own people yet they were totally unsuited for white society. But the most sinister thing is that those in control believed they were doing the right thing for people that a Catholic church report called ‘the little brown children of the prai rie'” (Smith 1989). Although the plot of Where the Spirit Lives is simple, the characters and issues are not. “Komi” is kidnapped (with her brother and other children), taken out of the mountains by bush plane, train, and truck to a school hundreds of miles away in the prairie, forbidden to speak her own language, renamed “Amelia,” half-starved, beaten, and locked in an attic. She runs away with her brother on foot and is recaptured. She is befriended by a homesick, naive young teacher, Kathleen Gwillimbury from Paradise, Cape Breton, who eventually consents to learn a bit of Komi’s language as fair exchange for Komi learning English. Kathleen sees her job as teaching the children to “read and write and have a wider understanding. Children are the same anywhere. They need love and patience and firm Christian guidance” (all quotations of dialogue verbatim, off air, from my private study copy of the video).