BAD RIVER — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

When you hear the name “Bad River Band,” if you have no association or history with Native Americans (like me), you might easily mistake it for a classic rock band. Except this is Bad, not Little River Band, and it’s “Bad River” as in Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Today I learned that a “band” is a smaller group, of varying size, within a tribe—and, there seems to be a whole lot of nuance to this, and how it is defined, that requires a breadth of understanding that certainly surpasses the parameters of a movie review.

Suffice it to say that Bad River Band is a very organized group in Wisconsin, with their own U.S. government website, detailing both their status as a federally recognized tribe of the Ojibwe (as they are mostly known in Canada) or Chippewa (as they are mostly known in the U.S.), and their long fight against “Line 5,” an oil pipeline by Canadian company Enbridge, which runs oil through much of the U.S. around the Great Lakes. This includes Minnesota, both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, and Wisconsin, although “Line 5” specifically refers to its route from Superior, Wisconsin (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior), under the Straits of Mackinac (the narrow waterway separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron), then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to oil refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. Specifically for the purposes of this documentary feature film, Bad River, it runs straight through the Bad River Reservation, which is located in Northern Wisconsin on the southwestern shores of Lake Superior.

There is indeed a literal river of the same name in this location, through which Line 5 runs, threatening an inevitable oil spill, the alteration of the river’s route, and then spilling its contamination into Lake Superior. You can read a three-page handout online about Bad River’s lawsuit against Enbridge over Line 5, which, honestly, might do a better job at spreading awareness of this clearly vital issue, than this serviceable documentary feature about it will. It can be argued that documentaries have greater reach than, say, printed materials, but how many of you have even heard of this film? Well, all of you reading this have now, but that’s not going to put much of a bump in the number of people who watch the movie. It helps spread awareness, at least.

And sometimes there’s just an unfortunate difference in the presentation of urgent information in print versus a visual medium. For much of Bad River the film, I failed to connect, not because of the content but because of its presentation: rapid-fire editing meant to seem “snappy” but coming across as rushed; drone shots of Bad River with quick fast-forward zooms. It felt a little too much like I was watching a standard-issue reality show like The Bachelor or Below Deck, which felt a little incongruous.

Much of Bad River quite rightly focuses on centuries of Native American resistance, but specifically contextualized in the history of Bad River Band, including the all-too common stories of genocide and forced assimilation into Christian culture, including literally stealing children and placing them into Catholic schools, where they were often horribly abused. I’m not proud to admit that I found myself thinking: we know this history already, have been told about it many times, what’s different about this story? But, then I caught myself: the fact that these shameful histories bear repeating never diminishes, and serves as a reminder of the generational trauma that undergirds their resistance today. Side note: this is a great example of how Canada, often lionized as the country with a greater moral compass than the U.S., has a history no better than ours when it comes to this stuff—and they are just a callous in their treatment of Indigenous peoples today, if it serves such interests as a corporation’s bottom line.

A very large number of Bad River Band people are interviewed for this film, which greatly personalizes it, on both a collective and individual level. By the end, I did find myself deeply moved, with this film’s novel approach to closing scenes: we see each person’s answer to the question of what they would say to their descendants, many generations from now. The answers vary greatly but have a common through line of love and hope, and if you look at it from the point of view of those descendants they’re speaking to, it’s a literalization of being spoken to by your ancestors. I can’t deny a pretty cynical outlook, myself—both the U.S. and Canada’s histories of relations with Indigenous people, clear to the present day, doesn’t exactly bode well. But that doesn’t lessen the need for resistance, and if nothing else, this film is but one example of a multi-pronged, years-long strategy.

Overall: B