This week, an interview with Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas and Franklin Lopez about about the film currently in production via Amplifier Films, A Red Road To The West Bank: An Indigenous journey of resistance and solidarity. The conversation covers some about relationships between the people of occupied Palestine and Kanehsatà:ke in so-called Canada, histories of settler colonialism and resistance of it. Clifton and Franklin are attempting to raise $10000 CAD for the film.
Franklin also talks about his recently published kids book The mega-adventures of Koko Sisi & Kiki Pupu that he co-created with his son.
Links:
- Karistatsi Onienre: The Iron Snake (film by Clifton)
- Elsipogtog: No Fracking Way! (film by Clifton)
- Trouble #1: Killing The Black Snake (narrated by Clifton)
- Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom (Clifton contributed an essay)
- A 2011 interview with Franklin we conducted
- Franklin’s interview with Clifton on the Mi’kmaq Warrior Society and Oka
- Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, The Penultimate Speech of the Red Indian to the White Man
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Featured Track:
- L’enfant Sauvage by Gojira from L’enfant Sauvage
. … . ..
Transcription
Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas: I would just listen to what you’re saying about everything and I don’t want to be crass, but I’m going to be a little bit crass. It’s a question of chickens coming home to roost, what’s going on right now. I looked at the history, and it’s like 20-22, years of warfare in a 230 year existence. It’s very telling what’s going on and what the entity do we call the United States is really about. It shows itself. Right now, we’re looking at the death of capitalism, if you really want to look at it. We really are looking at the death of capitalism and when things die, they’re sometimes the most dangerous. Right now, there are two entities that are dying: Zionism and capitalism. They’re thrashing about and taking out everything they can before they go, because it’s a new world coming. Either it’s going to be in flames or ashes, or it’s going to be a new way to do things. But we have a lot of work as humans to do. We have a lot of work amongst ourselves to do, particularly in the centers of power. There’s a responsibility that we hold (we live in this continent. Even myself as Indigenous person, yourself as a non-Indigenous person) to stand up and do something.
Again, I go back on that whole Malcolm X thing. We know, it’s a case of chickens coming home to roost. You can only go around so long and take from so many and kill so many before it comes back to you. The biggest American export has always been a coup, and now it’s coming home. Now the chickens have come home to roost. I love that. I love that Malcolm X said that, because it’s very true what he said. We’re living in a very precarious time. It’s scary. I think about my friend Frank and his family. It’s scary for those little ones. What do they got to look forward to? Then again look at Palestine. Look at what’s going on. What kind of monsters are being created right now? You can only hurt people for so long before they’re going to be damaged beyond recognition, and they won’t care what they destroy, when they destroy it. That’s where we’re at right now.
I was reading an article in Haaretz from Israel, that they’re literally on the cusp of the civil war right now. In that country, in Israel itself, there’s a huge divide happening. Again it’s another case of the chickens coming home to roost. You can only do so much damage until it comes back to you. Everything comes back. Everything comes back. Look what happened to the Romans. Same difference.
TFSR: : Well, hopefully we have a long and peaceful collapse, I don’t know.
Clifton: Well, let’s hope right.
TFSR: Inshallah.
Clifton: If anything happens, I hope the three of us have the same concentration camp.
TFSR: That’s the most we can hope for.
Would you introduce yourselves to the audience with any names, pronouns, location or affiliations that you’d like to share for this chat?
Clifton: My name is Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas. I am from Kanesatake. I am of the Bear Clan, and I’m very happy to be here.
Franklin Lopez: And my name is Franklin Lopez. My pronouns are he him, and I’m originally from Borinquen, also known as Puerto Rico, a US colony. I’m based in so-called Montreal, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory and I’ve been making anarchist and anti-colonial films for over two decades. I was formerly with subMedia and now with Amplifier Films.
TFSR: Awesome. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Clifton, and it’s great to have you back, Franklin. It’s been years. So we’re here to speak to you about y’all’s upcoming film, “A Red Road to the West Bank.” Can you talk a bit about the histories in film and media making that you have, and the visions of the world that you bring to make media?
Clifton: Well for me, I want to share stories. It’s mostly what I want to do. I feel there’s a big gap in the storytelling of what’s going on, both for indigenous people in North America and indigenous people in other parts of the world. We need to be able to bridge that gap through film. I like to be able to tell their stories, in their on their way of telling it, not the way it’s been portrayed. Lately, I find there’s a lot of a lot of real negative implications when they talk about us and it’s not our voices being used.
Franklin: That was great, Clifton. I totally agree with Clifton. It’s great to tell stories and to challenge the narratives. That’s one of the main reasons why I make films. When I came up, I started to see that there was an anti-war movement after 9/11, and I was not seeing what was happening on the streets, but this amazing movement against the war was happening. There was a huge need to challenge that narrative. From that my work evolved to really have a huge focus on anti-capitalist struggles, and specifically anti-colonial struggles that intersect with anti-capitalist struggles. So the film that we’re making, “A Red Road to the West Bank”, is a natural extension of this. It’s about linking those struggles, not in the abstract, but through lived relationships.
Clifton: Moreover, I would say too, it’s about a challenge towards colonialism. That’s what we need to make this this film about. It’s not just an occurrence in one place. It’s a global problem and its ramifications are rearing its head in this age right now that we’re living in. We’re seeing the after effects of colonization and its devastating effects on the people who’ve been colonized. We just watch what’s happening in Gaza right now and that’s the ultimate form of colonization, the utter destruction of the people of Palestine.
TFSR: From some of the short audio clips and previews that you can see of the film that are available on the Amplifier website, you can see this story being told, connecting the global nature of Western imperialism, in particular colonialism, which I think is really powerful. So Franklin founded, ran and worked with subMedia for a number of years, had worked on Democracy Now, I think, has contributed to a number of other media projects that I can’t think of off the top of my head. But Clifton, do you have any prior filmmaking that you want to mention, or was this your first major venture into it?
Clifton: I’ve done about two or three other short films. Nothing as extensive and as at the level of what we’re doing right now. I have worked for a couple years, in media and independent media, working at Concordia, helping them set up CU TV at the time. That was a couple years back. I’m very interested in doing more media work. I’ve always been intrigued by it. Doing jobs working on film sets really gave me the desire to want to do more film. I also love film as a medium. I think that film is an important medium. It reaches so many people, and it has a power to it that you can’t match with any other medium. So I enjoy doing it a lot. I think it could be used in so many different ways. That was my experience going into it years ago when I started doing film work. Then meeting up with Frank later on and collaborating with him a bit on the interview side of things, and doing my own film stuff. I did some stuff with rock musicians. I used to interview a lot of people coming to the Montreal metal scene. I cut my teeth on that, but needed to do documentary because, again, there are thousands and thousands of stories that need to be told, that have not been told. That’s compelling me to do what I’m doing right now and pushing me towards talking about the subjects that nobody wants to talk about.
I’ve always enjoyed outsider subjects. That’s why I’m a metal head too because I’m an outsider. Being a colonized person I’m naturally an outsider, talking with other outsiders who are colonized and getting an inside with the outsiders. It sounds like a little twisted thing, but that’s important to understand that once you find other outsiders you can get into them and understand the story. A lot of times, when you talk with people who are colonized, you don’t even have to explain, because everybody understands naturally what’s happening. With film, in my experiences over the years, I find that film bridges a gap that other mediums don’t.
Franklin: Yeah, I just want to jump in real quick and say that I met Clifton a bunch of years ago, and I finally got to visit him in Kanehsatake. I think Clifton can speak more about this later, but Kanehsatake is a place that’s engrained in the imagination of people in Turtle Island and all over the world as a huge site of resistance. I interviewed him for my show “It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine from The Stimulator.” I did an interview with Clifton, if people want to go back to learn about the Warrior Society and what that was. And if people want a sort of Easter egg, the first episode of “Trouble” was hosted by Clifton wearing a mask. I think people should check that out, because it deals with a lot of things that we’re trying to talk about in our filmmaking. In a collaborative sense, I was in Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq community in New Brunswick, where there was a rebellion around fracking that was going to happen there. I happened to be there coincidentally when the police attacked and a bunch of cop cars were burned. It’s pretty incredible. Clifton took that footage and made a documentary about that struggle called “No Fracking Way” that people should check out as well.
TFSR: That was really amazing footage to go back to. And it’s really kind of off topic, but I’m excited to be speaking soon with someone who’s continuing to work with subMedia about InterRebellium, their new series that’s kind of in the vein of that.
Franklin: Oh I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I’m gonna go see the premiere in Montreal in a couple of weeks.
TFSR: So Clifton, what brought you to bring a camera to the West Bank, to Palestine in 2018? What relationships between communities and struggle in these places, Kanien’kéha:ka and Filasṭīn did you exsperience? What binds were you able to strengthen between those places, in those communities?
Clifton: Primarily, I have to go back to my interest in Palestine. My interest in Palestine goes back many decades, at least 30 years, and the struggles that they had to go through. When I went, I was approached by a group called Independent Jewish Voices out of Montreal, and they asked me if I’d be interested in going. They would help me fund raise, and they send me to Palestine. Naturally, if I decided I was going to go to Palestine, I was definitely going to go and bring my camera with me and film, because I was working prior to that. I was working with a Palestinian filmmaker by the name of Majdi El-Omari, working on his film, doing pre-production, production and post-production with him and getting connected with him. He was one of the people that facilitated my ability to go there. He was a professor at Dar al-Kalima University, which is an arts university in Bethlehem, and he invited me to that conference. Part of that paid for my stay there and the flight and everything else.
We fund raised with Independent Jewish voices, and were able to at least hammer out a ten day stay over there. I brought my camera because at the time, I thought I have to be there and have to document this for two reasons. One of the reasons I went there is on a personal note, my late aunt Lenora, was a very big evangelical Christian, and I had to honor her by bringing her picture to the Holy Land which she wanted to visit. She never got a chance to before she died. So that was part of tha trip. But more importantly, I wanted to document and show how Palestinians and indigenous people here were not different. I think I did a successful thing doing that. I wanted to put a more of a human face on people. I have a lot of people from Palestine just saying hello from Palestine. Every type of person I could meet who’s Palestinian, it was a chance to give them a face. Men, women, children. I really like that.
Originally my documentary was going to be called “Hello From Palestine,” but it ended up going to a different direction. Now, with all the stuff going on in Palestine, when I did film it, I went into a big depression afterwards. So it sat in a can for a while, until recent events lit a fire under my ass. Then I had to get it done. I gotta get this out there, because there’s a story to tell. There’s a very important story to tell too, and that’s the story that we’re discussing in the film.
TFSR: Can you give a working definition of settler colonialism for the audience?
Clifton: Definitely. Well, settler colonialism is explains itself, right? So you have people from another part of the world coming and settling a place, colonizing it, planting crops, building villages and taking over. In the process of doing that, they push out the indigenous populations that are there, in order to create a new settler state. That’s in a nutshell what settler colonialism is. Now. Where we go with it, with that, with settler colonialism, is that we have to add mythology to it. Mythology is important. It’s a vital aspect of settler colonialism. So I’m going to concentrate more on the United States, because in the US there’s a very huge mythos surrounding the creation and the colonization of America by Europeans. So it starts with the mythos of landing in Plymouth Rock, with the Mayflower, with the pilgrims. And then American Zionism kicks in, which is Manifest Destiny, after the first colonies are created, pushing westward and taking it over, because it’s God’s divine will.
The mythology is made when you talk about the so called Founding Fathers of that colonial project. That’s where the Americans go get mythological about it, and they do not consider the fact that they’ve only been in existence for about 220, some odd years. They’re not there since time immemorial. They don’t have that connection to the land. They realize that they did come off a boat at one point, but they don’t want to acknowledge it. It’s difficult when you’re working against this kind of ideology and this kind of mythology that people have been sucked into where they have no grasp, no knowledge of reality, of history, of where they’re from and what they’re about and why they’re there. Indigenous people, we’ve always remembered. We never forgot. We have no choice. This is our reality. We have to remember all the time. And that’s the thing that that settler colonialism does. It wants you to forget. It wants you to be erased.
Now, if you look here in North America, everything indigenous has been erased, it’s been removed. If you look in the United States, they went as far as having Indian removals. So it removed a lot of native peoples and renamed places. You see the same thing in Palestine, where you have absolute villages being totally destroyed, entirely destroyed, and parts being put onto it and erasing what they were. The names being changed, being altered to make them sound more Hebrew, and not Arabic or not Palestinian. You have the same processes happening over here. I think Gord Hill did a great job of explaining the levels of colonization, where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going. That was an important thing, because people misinterpret when I’m talking about the genocide that’s going on in Palestine vis-à-vis the genocide that happened here in the Americas. We’re talking about a gap of centuries between those two events. In that time, things have changed. The mechanisms of genocide have changed, the methods, the speed of it. But if you’re looking at what’s happened in Palestine, you can recognize that with the first 100 years of colonization in the Americas, it’s in that vein. It’s a process, and in Palestine it’s a little bit different. There are many similarities and there are differences at the same time. Whereas over here you had the violent period, then you had the oppression period, which continues to this day. Over there in Palestine, you have both going at the same time.
So you have the Palestinian population that lives in so called Israel, considered Israeli Arabs, they’re forced to speak Hebrew, forced to be more Israeli than Palestinian. We have the same process that happens with us. Our languages are taken away, our cultures are erased. Then we’re forced into assimilation model, to become Canadians or Americans. There is similarity but difference in that, they want us to become Canadian citizens or American citizens. Whereas in Palestine, not so much. They don’t really want you if you’re not from the Israeli majority and the Jewish supremacist part of that society. It’s eerily familiar.
Franklin: I just want to jump in because I sometimes think that a lot of the terminology that we use to describe concept, feels loaded. “Settler colonialism” is just one of those things that does a good job, but it’s useful to know where the word comes from. “Colonialism,” for instance, comes from this Spanish version of Christopher Columbus’ name. The last name is Colón. Christopher Columbus was the initiator of the colonization in this hemisphere. And settlers, to me, I think the best way to describe it is “squatters.” It’s the squatting of land that’s not yours. It’s this squatting of land by people who are better armed than you are. If people really want to bring this home, imagine if somebody who’s well armed just set up shop in your in your backyard, and eventually runs you out of your home and then erases the fact that you ever lived there. That’s one type of colonialism, but there are other types as well. For instance, the type of colonialism that Canada does all over the world, particularly with mining corporations. They basically go set up shop in a country, extract the resources, destroy the water tables, destroy the environment, break up indigenous movements or indigenous culture, and once they’re done with that, they get the hell out, and they move on to the next one, and etc. That’s it.
Clifton: It’s basically like the Borg in Star Trek. We will assimilate you, take over everything you have, build up the bigger, body of what it is! What I’ve always looked at with colonization as an extension of the Roman Empire. It’s no different. We’re still living in Rome.
TFSR: I think that there is something that predates–just to get a little weird historically–the Christianity that ended up becoming one of the engines for colonization throughout the world, centering out of Europe. It was a Roman Christianity. It was a Christianity that was tied directly to the Imperium and to the ideas of imperial rule, centralization of power, homogenization. So it’s not surprising that once it integrated into the Roman State, it’s continued emulating those same values and those same models and terminologies and everything. Even the church is based out of Rome. So I think it’s a really good point.
Clifton: It’s very Roman. It’s a very Roman world we’re living in. If you want to get down to the minutia of it, the lanes on our road are the same width as a Roman road. It’s exactly the width of two horses side by side. So we haven’t changed from that. We still do the road processes. We still do the colonization. Because if you really want to look, yeah, it might be named after Christopher Columbus, but it was the Romans who invented it. If you look at what Julius Caesar did to the Gauls, it’s the same as what’s happening to us, and even more, over what’s going on in Palestine. It’s literally a siege of their main cities, and a starvation of their population, and outright slaughter of them afterwards. Of course, there’s a need to humiliate your enemy afterwards. What you see happening right now in the current context of Gaza, there’s a need to humiliate the Palestinian prisoners. That’s directly tied into the Roman world again. You can blame Rome for everything, if you really want to be honest about it, because we’re still living in that. Particularly in America, the capitals are all Romanesque. They have Roman-style things. They want to be Rome. In fact, we even have gladiatorial fights still, called the UFC. It’s no different.
It’s funny, because I was watching a documentary about Muay Thai fighters. A Muay Thai fighter lives in the gym, and he lives right beside the roosters that they use for cock fighting. I just found it kind of odd how humans are, how we do things with each other. How does that relate to how we perceive the world? How do we use that to navigate how we deal with other people? I know I’m rambling right now. Sorry.
TFSR: Franklin, were you gonna kick in or you good?
Franklin: I just wanted to interject that I do blame the Romans forever, for everything.
TFSR: You hear that Caesar?
Clifton: I say “Fuck Caesar!”
[ all laughing ]
Franklin: You can’t say that on the radio, bro.
TFSR: I’ll bleep it. It’ll be good.
Will y’all talk about the framing by all wings of settler colonial States, of resistance–particularly by indigenous or other subjected peoples–as terrorism? And how working within this framework limits the horizons of settler self-abolition and liberation of the land and its peoples?
Clifton: Okay, let’s go into the American history again. The Boston Tea Party. Let’s look at that one. The British North America Act in the late 1700’s, established boundaries for the American colonies. It said to the Americans that you cannot pass the Appalachian Mountains to go west, because that’s what they called Indiana at the time, and it’s where the state of Indiana got its name. But the American colonists were not satisfied with that, because to them, “Why would we allow Indians to live in that land when we could take it from them like we did over here?” So one of the protests they did was they dressed up like Indians and threw tea in the harbor of Boston. It wasn’t about taxation without representation. It was about unmitigated settlerism. You have the same processes happening in Palestine when you have the ultra radical settlers doing the same thing, having their own little tea parties all the time. That was the impetus for the American Revolutionary War. The inability of settlers to steal more land was the actual impetus, not this excuse of taxation without representation. It’s a total lie. It was about the fact that American colonists wanted to steal more land. So you see the same thing happening in Palestine. I forget the name of the Israeli leader that was assassinated because he basically stopped settlers from settling in the West Bank. I forget his name. Was it Yitzhak Rabin?
TFSR: I think it was Rabin, yeah.
Clifton: Yes. So you see how violently they reacted to that fact that they wouldn’t allow settlerism. When they kicked the Israeli settlers out of Gaza, they had to use military units to force them out at gunpoint, fighting with them. That’s the same colonization that we have over here. We have settler colonialism all over the place in this country. The colonists are totally blind by it too, because at the end of the day, everybody needs to live. So even that guy who’s multiple generations of settlerism has passed, is living in a modern context right now, living off the proceeds of that colonization. He doesn’t care because he’s caring about his bills. He doesn’t care about why he’s there, and how he got there. That’s the magic of what we have in this society. What we have now is people don’t care until they’re forced to care. Israelis didn’t care either, until all this started happening over there, then they actually started caring about what’s going on in their country, you know.
Franklin: I think that the experience in Borinquen is exactly that. There was a pretty vibrant independence movement on the island and an anti-colonial movement to have Puerto Rico become independent from the United States, which I should name, was the second colonizer of the island. The FBI, essentially invented COINTELPRO to get rid of the anti-colonial movement, and label it terrorist. It was very successful at destroying it completely. Right now, the pro-independence movement on the island is fairly small. Only people who are really invested in academia, or people who are Puerto Rican expats in the United States, really know the history of what went down there. For most people, it’s been mostly erased. Now the process of colonization on the island is still ongoing. There’s a great fear that Puerto Rico is going to go the way of Hawai’i, where Americans are going to start buying up all the land and Puerto Ricans are just going to be sort of pushed aside. So, yeah, labeling anti-colonial movements as terrorist is a very effective way to get them out.
As your question put it, it doesn’t really give people any sort of material or information as to why or how they got there. Most people don’t really understand why there is a United States to begin with. Or even Puerto Rico, for example, that I am a process of settler colonialism. I’m part of that process. The people who were living there were fully exterminated by the Spanish and now the only thing left of the Taino are our parks, ceremonial parks, recreations, museum pieces, archaeological pieces, etc. Still the process of colonization is not done. It’s not consolidated. Not fully yet.
Clifton: I would add on to that too, on being a terrorist. Whenever you stand, it doesn’t matter how you stand. Armed or not, you’re a terrorist because you’re going against the narrative of the colonial state. We were considered terrorists in 1990, big time. We were called that when we’re not even citizens, which we’re not. We’ll never be citizens of the United States or Canada. I will forever be Kanien’kéha:ka. So Brian Mulroney was right when he called us uncitizens of Canada/US. We’re not. Canada/US were on top of us. That being said, the colonial project, it’s within their interest to do that. It’s like you said, it’s an easy way to demonize a population, to set the public against you. A lot of that stuff was done. I witnessed firsthand how that propaganda model works, watching it on the news unfold in front of my eyes every day in the 1990 crisis and subsequently. It didn’t end over there. It’s still going on to this present day, right now. So we find a lot of similarities with Palestine in that regard.
Again, with the creation of so called terrorists, whenever they react, it doesn’t matter how they react. If you recall, they always say, “Oh, they used violence,” but they didn’t use violence before in Gaza. One time in fact, they walked up to the fence, demanding their justice and they were gunned down. That was considered itself a terrorist act. Our people, included, when we do something in any peaceful way, it’s considered a terrorist act. In 1990 we peacefully occupied the pine forest, and we were brutally attacked by the SQ for that. It resulted in a 78 day standoff. That’s not the only incidence of that. You look across Canada, different indigenous groups do something peaceful, the hammer comes down on them real hard, and they’re considered terrorists at that point. Mind you, there is a little bit of a narrative change in Canada as of the last 20 years or so, but nonetheless, it’s very easy to put that label on us right away.
Clifton: For listeners that might not be aware that when you’re referring to 1990 you’re referring to what’s known as the Oka Crisis to some, right?
Yeah, let me explain that one. I live in an area northwest of Montreal called Kanehsatà:ke, and there’s a town where it’s kind of like were melded into each other, which is called Oka. It is the non-native settlement. Oka, initially in the 1950’s, opened up a golf course. In doing so, they surrounded our cemetery with a road for their entrance way, so that we couldn’t expand our cemetery any longer. We were stuck in that little area to bury our dead. They made a parking lot. They cut down part of the pine forest, which is a central part of our community. Even the name of our community is Kanehsatà:ke, which means a hill of sand. That hill of sand is where we planted those trees to keep the erosion from going into our village. That being said, we found out there were plans to exhume of the graves of our dead, put them in a common grave elsewhere, put a parking lot over the graveyard, cut down the trees and expand the nine hole golf course into 18 holes. That came out in 1988-89. We started to mobilize by 1990. In the spring of 1990, we decided to occupy the pine forest to keep any surveyors, any other construction workers out, to show that this wasn’t going to go through.
From March of 1990 until May of 1990, there was a lot of tension. In May of 1990 there was an attempt by the by the Quebec provincial police force, to enter and remove us from the pines. That failed and things went quiet again for a bit. Then it came to light in July that the municipality of Oka was going to put an injunction on people occupying the pine forest and that’s exactly what they did. They sent in the Sûreté du Québec, which is the Quebec provincial police with their tactical team, and they attacked us in the pines. Some of our men were armed, and we defended ourselves. We fought back, and what ended up happening that day, was one police officer was fatally shot. It’s still questionable about where the shot came from. That being said, a standoff ensued, and it lasted for 78 days, accumulating in the Canadian Army being deployed, and sending somewhere between 4-5,000 soldiers to Kanehsatà:ke to handle 40 Mohawks.
TFSR: Cool. Thank you for sharing that. I know that’s subMedia has some original footage and tells the story in some films. So I’ll make sure to link that also in the show notes. I think it’s fair to say that this film is a continuation of your strengthening ties with those resisting empires from within these two places, within so called Canada and within so called Israel. Are you still in contact with the folks that that you met during the filming of this? Now is a time of increased military and settler militia pogroms throughout the West Bank. Obviously we’ve been hearing about the war, but there’s increasing violence attending every moment of everyone’s days in occupied West Bank. So I wonder if you could talk about how those folks are and ways that you know to support them, besides letting their stories be told.
Clifton: Well, I’m in continuous contact with a lot of the people that I met over there. One in particular was a gentleman, (and I’ll keep him anonymous on this podcast for the time being but) he had a gift boutique just by Manger Square in Bethlehem. When I was filming that one day, he was trying to drum up sales, and he kept asking me to come into the shop. Politely I said “I’m filming. When I’m done, I’ll go see you.” So after I filmed, I went to go see him, and he’s asking me where I’m from, who I am, and as soon as I told him I was an indigenous person of Mohawk decent (I used the word Mohawk because they don’t understand the word Kanienkeha’ka). So I used that word and his eyes got big, and he looks at me and said, “Do you know, Mahmoud Darwish?” I said, “Yes.” He says “You’re a Red Indian?” I said, “Yeah, well if you want to look at it that way.” And he was totally enthralled by that. Everywhere I went in Palestine, it was the same thing. “Oh you’re a Red Indian like us.” That’s the welcoming I got. They were so happy that there was a Red Indian there because of what Mahmoud Darwish had done in this poem: “The Penultimate Speech of The ‘Red Indian’ to The White Man.” It’s an excellent poem, if you want to look at that to get context of colonization. But going on with this gentleman, when October 7th happened, by the time November came around, he had contacted me in desperation and told me “Listen, there’s no sales, there’s no tourists. Nobody’s allowed to travel here and my family is literally starving.” So I took it upon myself to try and find a way so that we can help him out.
What ultimately happened is that I was able to connect with somebody in my circle to have his products from his gift shop, brought to North America and sold, and help his family out in Bethlehem. We continue to do tha, working still with this gentleman. That’s one of the fulfilling and rewarding things that happened for me, to know that I facilitated helping that man and his family eat. Everyone was eating out of that gift shop and for them, no gifts at Christmas means no money year round. So I’m very proud to know that I did help them make a living and have some money to eat. I’m working on trying to get a pipeline of stuff from there to sell, to help them out. One of the things I wanted to do, was possibly open up a boutique for the man in Montreal, to sell his stuff over there. This is one of the ideas floating around but those are the dreams. You know, but that’s another story.
TFSR: Could you tell listeners about what to expect with the film, and sort of what this the story is? Like I mentioned before, that you were there with the cameras in 2018, you talked a little bit about some of the filming situations, but what can people expect to see when they when they see the film?
Clifton: What I’m trying to do is show what colonization is, and that the colonization in Palestine is no different than what happened here and what’s happening here. That’s the basis of what I’m trying to do with the film. If want to dissect the film a little more, I want to look at religion, how religion plays a role in that. For me, in our colonization, religion is a central figure in what happened to our people. It’s the vanguard before the invasion. As Gord Hill pointed out, it’s the tip of spear. The most divisive and the most dangerous thing that ever happened to our people is that religion being used against us. So that’s something I want to look at, and it’s one of the reasons why I went there to the epicenter of this Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition that comes out of that area, from that single city of Jerusalem/Al-Quds. I wanted to visit this place and check that out and understand why and where it came from. Moreover, I wanted to try and dissect what colonization is and some of the key factors in it, like the mythology making. I talk about Zionism, and also talk about American Zionism, which is manifest destiny. It’s the same thing. It’s just an American form of Zionism, and in the same vein, the same context. I want to look at how there is resistance on the part of the American public and the part of the American government to do and act differently, because they themselves are guilty of the same crime. So it’s hard for them to say one thing and do the other thing, even though they’re used to being hypocrites. But in this case, they have a hard time doing that. They have a hard time being critical of a country that’s just like them.
You know what? The funny part is that Israelis will point that out too. “Oh, you’re gonna give the land back to the Palestinians? Why don’t you give land back to Indians too while you’re at it”. They recognize what they are at the end of the day. They do deeply recognize what they are. That’s the main difference, I think, between the Israeli settlers and North American settlers. North American settlers feel as if they were spun from the earth as indigenous people, and they’re not. You know, they’re descendants of people who migrated from Europe. Then again, they try to make it sound as if we’re also immigrants in our own land, that we came from another place too. That’s the argument being used against us. They try and invent fictitious people. In Montreal and Quebec they have this whole invention of a conveniently disappeared people called the St. Lawrence Iroquois, who they say were the first people that met Jacques Cartier. But conveniently, these people no longer exist.
You have the same narrative in a way, in Palestine, where you had this defense: “Well, this is not really people from here. They’re part of what we call the Arab invasion.” They do the same thing with Mohawk people. They try to tell us that we’re not really from here, that we migrated from another place. There’s a lot of lot of similarities between that narrative and what’s going on here in North America with the narrative of colonization and the myth making of colonization. By and large, for this film I want to give voice, and that’s one of the reasons why Frank has Amplifier Films to give voice to the voiceless. I can see for myself, so that I know now about the experiences of Palestine and where do we sit in that. I’ve been told for a long time by Palestinians that we’re very similar. We have similar things. When I went there, whenever I bring Palestinians here to the reserve, to the community, they say “We feel at home.” Then when I went to Palestine, I could say the same. I felt at home. I can see the similarity, the familiarity of colonization in what’s going on over there.
TFSR: Thank you so much for that, Clifton. Franklin’s gonna give us the other details. Are there any places other than following Amplifier Films with this film specifically, are there places online that people can find your writings, or are you on the social media?
Clifton: No, I don’t. Just my YouTube channel. I have a couple films on there. I’m not really active online to do things. I’m doing mostly things with Frank. I don’t have the patience or the time to do the stuff online right now. At the moment, I’m closing up a business, so that’s my priority. Doing this film also. They’re both going in conjunction with each other. So yeah, I don’t have much really to share on that regard, unfortunately.
Franklin: Sorry to jump in. Clifton, you were part of a book on anarcho-Indigenism. I think the people who are part of the show will be interested in that. Maybe you can tell them about that?
TFSR: Thank you. Franklin,
Clifton: Yeah, I was interviewed for a book interview on Indigenism, and I touched on Palestine in the interview. It’s a book called Anarcho-Indigenism. That’s the book, right there. I’m one of the contributors to that, along with Gord Hill and a couple of other people.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I’ve seen this at the local bookstore.
Clifton: Cool. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for giving us the time to do this. I really appreciate it.
TFSR: It’s my pleasure, and thanks for taking the time. I’m excited for this film that you made possible. So thank you.
Clifton: I am too, because over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Frank’s work and also the pleasure of seeing his current edits and what he’s doing with the footage I took. I really appreciate what’s going on with it, because it’s an important story and I know in my heart that Frank’s the guy to do it. He’s excellent at what he does, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner to do it his project with.
TFSR: That’s true. Big brain, big heart.
Franklin: Oh, thanks, Papi. I owe you some money for that one.
Clifton: Just add it to the bill.
Franklin: He also did a film about the Énergie Est pipeline out here in Quebec as well. I’ll send you those when we hang up.
TFSR: How can listeners support this film, get tastes of it and keep up on its release? What sort of goals and timeframes are we talking about, to get “A Red Road to the West Bank” showing in our community spaces? Will you be trying to tour with it?
Franklin: Absolutely. When Clifton and I started on this project, we were just going to do a very short film, because he shot maybe a couple dozen hours of footage over there. But as we got talking about it, we’re thinking about doing something a lot more conceptual, using his trip to the West Bank as a starting off point. Now what we’d like to do is bring Palestinians to indigenous communities over here to close that loop, to have Palestinians visit places like Kanesatake and Six Nations and other Kanien’kéha:ka territories, and have some sharing of experiences on screen, but also do a lot more creative stuff with animation to visually explain the processes of colonization. We’re getting a lot more ambitious with the project. A few years ago, I worked on a feature film about the Wet’suwet’en resistance, and I learned a lot while doing that. Right now we’re at the process of developing the film. We’re trying to raise funds so that we can raise more funds. If that sounds weird, that’s really the best way that I can describe it. We want this film to be high quality. We also want it to have a lasting impact. Something that just doesn’t relate things that are happening now, but something that people can refer to for years to come, that becomes a useful document to explain colonization.
So people can go to amplifierfilms.ca/redroad, and they can see the trailer. On the website as well we have several shorts that we’re creating to give people a taste of the film. We want this to not just be a film that comes out one or two years after the beginning of production, but a film that is integral to what’s happening in the now. So obviously people are following what’s happening in Gaza. We want to continuously shine a light on what’s happening over there and see if we can help folks out there be as safe as they possibly can, and see if we can help stop Israel and their plans of destroying that territory. So we’re not just gonna sit on this and then show the film we want two years later. We want the film to be constantly out there and show the evolution as we make it. And yes, once we’re done, we plan to tour with it. What way that’s gonna look, we don’t know. At the moment, I’m not going to travel to United States, unfortunately, and neither is Clifton. But you know, by the time the film comes out, maybe the political situation would have changed and travel into the States might become a possibility again.
TFSR: Yeah, that collapse we were talking about might have occurred.
Franklin: Yeah. If I may since I’m here promoting stuff, a couple years ago, I co-wrote and illustrated a children’s book with my son called The Mega Adventures of Koko Sisi and Kiki Pupu. I think it’s a wonderful tool for keeping young kids off screens. The book is really good, if I say so myself, and it has an interesting recipe for some snacks that I think kids are gonna love.
TFSR: When you say keep them off the screens, you mean just because it’s going to be readable to the kids, and also adults can read it to the kids, and that sort of increases a sort of off screen engagement? Or does it have a bunch of activities in it other than the story and the recipes?
Franklin: No, I think what I’m getting at is a larger goal of mine. Really one of the reasons why I started mass producing the books, is just that my son doesn’t really have all of the same issues a lot of parents have with keeping the kids off their tablets or phones or watching television. Partly because we got him interested in books really early on. He’s a normal kid, he does play video games, he does watch TV and movies, but he also has a voracious appetite for books. This book, by the way, I just wrote it and illustrated it for him to give to him on his birthday, because it’s stories that we came up with together. When some friends saw it, they said “This is really good, Frank. You should print more copies and get it to people.” In a very short amount of time, I sold a bunch of them so I decided to go a little further and try to get it out there and really share with parents, the very simple thing of reading as a hobby for kids. It’s something that can be started even before kids actually know how to read, to really extract them from this reality of corporations, which just really want their undivided attention, and who are really creating a mental health crisis and all over the world, I should say.
TFSR: Can you talk about the accessibility of the book? Like what language is this translated into and how can people find it? I was seeing on the GoFundMe that there was a PDF of it, but if you’re trying to avoid screen time for your kid. That could be a good way to touch the story and be like, “Yes, I want more of this,” but where could people get physical copies?
Franklin: The name of the studio that created it is called papistudio.com and the book isn’t is there in Spanish, English and in French.
TFSR: Thank you so much for taking the time. I just had my coffee apparently. It’s always good to talk to you, and I really appreciate the love and the care that you put into how you share stories and how you try to engage people. It says a lot about the vision of the world that you have. So thanks for sharing.
Franklin: Oh, man, thank you so much. I mean, I love your radio show and so for me, it’s a super huge honor to be here. Even the fact that you’re over the radio. The airways just have such a huge spot in my heart, and I wish more people listened to the radio as well.
