Expansive doc explores extraordinary life of star teacher By: Randall King Posted: 5:12 PM CDT Thursday, Jun. 20, 2024

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Some might think Winnipeg-based Cree astronomer Wilfred Buck came to the sciences by accident.

Others might say his journey was written in the stars.

Buck’s story is told in Toronto-based Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson’s feature documentary Wilfred Buck, a funny, sad and ultimately inspiring look at Buck’s extraordinary life.

The film — which includes present-day footage, archival material and cinematic re-enactments — follows Buck from his humble beginnings in Opaskwayak Cree Nation in the vicinity of The Pas to his current status as an in-demand speaker and educator, taking his lessons from education centres, such as Harvard, to remote reserves, where Buck employs an inflatable planetarium to educate kids about the cosmos.

It’s a film that reveals a lot, an achievement in itself, since Buck, 69, impresses as a private, retiring man, even in the midst of the film’s North American première at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto in April.

Speaking with a reporter in a conference room at the National Film Board’s office in downtown Toronto, the film’s subject is steadfastly modest. Even he seems surprised at some of the history he lays bare in the film.

“It was difficult. There’s a lot of emotions that I didn’t realize I still had pent up,” he says.

Buck has particularly hard feelings about the so-called ’60s Scoop, which saw the government cruelly removing Indigenous children from their families and spreading them all over the continent, a particularly devastating aspect of Buck’s family history.

“The ’60s scoop was a pretty massive thing. I’m just one person, from one family, and I lost seven siblings to the ’60s Scoop. They were sent all over the place and I never saw them,” he says.

In his 2021 memoir, I Have Lived Four Lives, Buck recalls that he was on his way to his mother’s house but lingered in the woods after encountering a wolf. That wildlife encounter delayed his arrival, meaning he was spared when an agent unexpectedly came by and took his siblings.

“I remember seeing my sister. The last time I saw her, she was four years old. And the next time I saw her, she was 40 and I didn’t know who she was,” he says.

“She showed up at my door in The Pas. She came from the States where she was adopted out. They told her all her life that her mother was dead.

“That’s what my mother was told too, that all these kids were dead. She didn’t go looking for them, she just got drunk and stayed drunk. And she died on the streets of Winnipeg from that trauma.”

Buck himself came close to meeting that same fate, spending some time homeless in Vancouver, but was saved by helpful elders who sent him on an unexpected path as a “star teacher,” a path he took seemingly by accident.

“I initially wanted to be a social worker when I got off the streets. After I graduated Grade 12, I was told by my teachers that I should go to university, and right away I thought I should be a social worker,” he says.

Buck recalls going to a room filled with about 200 applicants for University of Manitoba’s social work program, which only had 16 spots available.

“So much for my social work career,” he says, smiling. “So I was walking down the hall and I came across this other room for bachelor of education (applicants).

“And there were 12 people in there. And how many places were available? Sixteen. So I ended up in education.”

High marks in math and science took Buck on the path to a new program that integrated sciences with Indigenous teachings.

“They said: You have free rein because nobody’s done it before,” Buck says.

Elders advised him that “one of the best ways you can get students interested in science is to take them outside at night and look at the sky.

It made so much sense.

“A lot of reserves are pretty isolated. So let’s go outside at night … and there it is. Everything seemed to fall into place. Nothing that happens is a coincidence,” he says.

Finding the balance between Buck’s tragic upbringing and his current mission was a deliberate choice by director Jackson.

“As a filmmaker, I’m always conscious that there’s a tendency in the mainstream to either say all these horrible things happened and you were victimized by all this stuff, or we’re going to revere all the cultural things and admire all that stuff, and they don’t tend to live together in the same space,” she says.

“I wanted this film to have both of those. I’ve done that in a lot of my work, where I want to acknowledge the traumas and also the strengths and the power of Wilfred’s culture and what the star teachings hold.”

The documentary Wilfred Buck opens at Cinematheque Friday with a special free screening, featuring an introduction by Wilfred Buck and Lisa Jackson followed by a Q&A moderated by Justin Bear L’Arrivee.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com