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Notes -
I think one of the strangest instances of a woke injection into a film/story just occurred and it seems to be flying under the radar. FULL SPOILERS AHEAD for Under the Bridge, a Hulu murder mystery show that’s based on a non-fiction book of the same name. For what it’s worth, I thought the show was pretty good despite what I’m writing here.
In real life, Rebecca Godfrey wrote the Under the Bridge non-fiction book. In the Hulu show, Rebecca Godfrey is a character portrayed by Riley Keough. Godfrey (speaking about her character henceforth) was born in Vancouver Island in Canada, moved to New York to start a writing career, and then at the start of the show, she moved back to Vancouver Island temporarily in the late 1990s to write a new book on her hometown.
But soon after moving back, 14 year old Reena Virk is murdered seemingly by a group of her friends. The story is so shocking and intriguing that Godfrey begins investigating the crime independently to write about it. In addition to talking to a bunch of the kids involved, Godfrey reconnects with Cam Bentland, a local police officer investigating the murder. Cam is a Native American who was adopted by white parents, and Cam is also implied to be Godfrey’s ex girlfriend. They soon rekindle their romantic relationship and begin using each other to get different informational angles on the case.
Most of the show consists of uncovering what happened with the murders, and for the sake of this post, I don’t need to go into it. Basically, a group of very troubled girls (aged 14-16) got pissed off at one of their own and decided to beat the shit out of her. Then one girl and another guy took it way too far and murdered her.
Godfrey becomes a key media player in the very high-profile case. She works both with and against the police to push the kids in different ways, and at one point, she passionately argues for the innocence of one of the main accused kids. Meanwhile, Cam eventually discovers that she was adopted by her white parents through the Adopt Indian Métis, in which the government encouraged white parents to adopt Native American orphans. Cam feels disgusted by the revelation, disgusted with her parents for being involved and never telling her, and disgusted with herself for being a cop, so she leaves the police force and decides to try to connect with her real family.
To reiterate, this is based on a true story. Reena Virk really was brutally murdered by her friends, and Rebecca Godfrey really did write a book about the murder. So it might surprise you to learn that in real life:
Rebecca Godfrey had no direct involvement in the murder investigations. She wrote her book after everything occurred.
Cam Bentland, the Native America cop, was entirely invented by the show.
By extension, Godfrey’s lesbian romance with Cam was entirely invented.
I have no in depth knowledge of Godfrey, but she was married to a man, and I haven’t seen any evidence that she was a lesbian or bisexual.
While there really were some heinous laws regarding Natives in Canada, none of that stuff had anything to do with the murder of Reena Virk or the Under the Bridge book.
Godfrey presumably approved of televised adaptation of the show, but she died at the beginning of its production, so it’s unclear if she approved of any of these additions to the real story
Discussion points:
If Godfrey wasn’t aware of these changes, then Hulu’s writers portrayed a presumable straight woman as a lesbian/bi woman in a fictionalized account of her. Is that a step too far in wokeness for the average media consumer?
Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
Maybe this is too broad or vague, but is it disrespectful in some sense to take a real tragic story in which most of the participants are still alive and use it to prop up unrelated woke narratives? I’m not meaning this in an obviously baity or culture war-y way. I mean, does calling that “disrespectful” make any sense? Is the concept of respecting true stories in this sense valid?
The view of natives by educated liberals was very different at the time. Now people think of them like wood elves with a sacred culture. At the time they were viewed more as backwards illiterate hillbillies who needed to be brought into the modern era.
So there were no foster homes in native areas. If a child needed to be put into the system they were shipped off to a city and adopted. This was before birth control pills so young mothers having children they couldn't take care of was more common.
There's still a lot of debate about how aggressive social workers should be, so I'm sure it is easy to find cases where the child should have stayed in the home.
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There apparently was encourage adoption by white parents back in the 60's which was later called the 60's scoop. I tried to parse the article about why the kids were taken (eg was it from abusive or neglectful families?), but the article states it was just to place indigenous kids with white families to raise them with white culture. The article also makes reference to a program in the 50's when children were taken from single mothers to place with families.
Similar policies happened in Australia until the 1970's leading to what is now referred to as the Stolen Generations. Even though anyone involved in decision making on the policy is either long since retired or dead and the federal government issued a formal apology in 2008, it keeps being brought up in media by the usual issue motivated groups as an example of modern day racism. What is ignored though is the high endemic rates of child abuse, sexual abuse and neglect that are rife in indigenous communities even to this day.
I've always wanted to see a detailed side-by-side analysis of life outcomes for the 'stolen generation' versus those who remained in remote communities. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the stolen generations actually benefited from the transaction
I agree that it would be interesting to see a detailed analysis like that and I realize you aren't saying large QOL improvements would be exculpatory ... but reading your comment made me think about discussions about progressive indoctrination in US schools.
It's plausible that learning progressive manners and beliefs will give children a substantial leg up, socio-economically. Depending on events, graduates of the Evanston, IL public schools system might be on average, better-positioned than those from, say, the Florida suburbs in the US of 2045. But I don't think many parents resisting leftward changes to their public schools would be impressed by that.
The analogy is quarter-baked, but just contemplating it weakens my openness to arguments that material improvements can justify inter-generational dispossession (for lack of a better term)
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Weren't a lot of them half-caste? Seems to complicate things- would they have been treated as full community members had they stayed, or would they have been discriminated against? I'm sure it varied from community to community. Did they have an IQ advantage over their coethnics, or were the white men who impregnated aboriginal women an example of not sending our best? Etc, etc.
IIRC this was part of the justification for removing them from the communities after some bad headlines around treatment of half-caste children
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It's hard to judge - the stats that we have generally compare members of the Stolen Generations (in Australia) typically compare them either to non-Aboriginal people of the same cohort, or to other Aboriginal people in general, rather than to members of remote communities.
These statistics suggest that an SGer is on average worse off than the median Aboriginal - but as you say, SGers were specifically selected from among the worst-off Aboriginals. Is an SGer better or worse off than they would have been had they not been removed? That's the question we don't have an answer for. AIHW's full 2018 report is here. From page 74 on they show that SGers were worse off than 'the reference group', but the reference group is Aboriginal people in general, not remote communities. We have some stats on health in remote communities here and here, but cross-referencing those is more work than I'm up for at the moment. Suffice to say that we know remote communities are significantly worse off.
Yeah the Aboriginal statistics are pretty inherently tainted by the amount of 1/16th suburban Sydneysiders who get meshed in with the residents of Meekatharra. I did a year in Darwin and until you've been out there it's hard to really understand what the situation on the ground is like with the remote populations.
I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences. What’s the situation like on the ground?
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It's precisely because they benefited they can be enough of a fixture in the culture to make a fuss. The kids who got adopted can use the education and stability they got from it to make a fuss about how it robbed them of their culture. While those who got to experience the culture first hand probably just died of alcohol poisoning or are trying to forget they ever grew up on the rez.
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