Exploiting primal fear long a tool in forced assimilation By: Rebecca Chambers Posted: 1:56 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 27, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/09/2024 (525 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I miscalculated.

I picked a whimsical, spooky but ultimately wholesome film for family movie night recently and all three of my children ended up sobbing through the final credits.

To me, their sudden co-ordinated meltdown was unexpected and confusing. They’d seemed completely absorbed in the story until this point.

I quickly realized they’d felt very differently: they’d just been released from the most horrifying two hours of their lives. I had mistaken their petrification throughout the movie as rapt attention. Oops.

The movie that night was Coraline, which, admittedly, is engineered in a style evoking fairy tales of the past, designed to illustrate grave outcomes for disobedient children.

In the film, young Coraline is bored and disillusioned with her parents and her new home, and crawls through a portal into a world where she meets the “other mother” and the “other father.” They look nearly identical to her real parents, save for the black buttons covering their eyes, and are initially kinder and more exciting than her real parents.

Of course, just as Hansel and Gretel are lured into danger at the prospect of sweets, so Coraline is led to learn her “other” parents are not what they seem.

I immediately empathized with my boys: there is a scene in Disney’s Pinocchio that struck me the same way as a child, and still makes me deeply uneasy as an adult.

In Pinocchio’s quest to be a real boy, he falls in with some ne’er-do-well children and finds himself on “Pleasure Island,” smoking cigars and drinking ale. Alas, these naughty indulgences transform the boys into donkeys to be sold for profit, crying and begging for their mothers as they grotesquely change form.

The list of children’s movies using this type of device is long, and includes Bambi’s mother and Simba’s father. Many of us speak of scenes in these films as moments of childhood trauma and awakening. This is a fear unique to childhood: that everything we’ve known in our own small worlds could be ripped away.

This is a fear unique to childhood: that everything we’ve known in our own small worlds could be ripped away.

Fairy tales, of course, are written to control children, to scare them into behaving, to make them grateful for what they already have and less likely to stray from the path laid by their caregivers.

By stripping people of their ties to family and community, we activate this instinctual fear, an immediate and devastating threat to identity. This is the same terror that is also the primary method of control and assimilation of Indigenous people in Canada.

The fear and heartbreak brought about by systemic schemes to control Indigenous children’s behaviour and stifle their identity should provoke the same fear and grief in all of us, as do those scenes from the frightening films of our childhood.

Canada has come a long way, but we still have more to do to repair the damage and ease the trauma of a system designed to terrify young children in an effort to rebuild them as something they were not and did not want to be.

Canada has come a long way, but we still have more to do to repair the damage and ease the trauma of a system designed to terrify young children in an effort to rebuild them as something they were not and did not want to be.

Monday is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and Orange Shirt Day here in Manitoba. This year is the first time the day will be recognized as a provincial holiday here. The children in your life, like those in mine, may be asking questions, and these queries may seem difficult to answer.

But our children, like their ancestors, are strong and resilient, and they already know all about the injustice of separating families. They were raised on the same narratives we were. Our children possess a range of emotions we can honour by sharing the stories of our history and encouraging them to write their own.

If, on Sept. 30, you have the good fortune to interact with children, know that they are able to take part in these conversations about separation and trauma.

Even at a young age, they understand the essential injustice of removing kids from loving homes, and they understand what it is to experience lingering sensations of hurt due to traumatic episodes in their own lives.

Hold those children close, and walk beside them as they create the story of reunification and reconciliation we couldn’t write for them. Help them to understand their own strength.

Give them all the love and hugs generations of families were not allowed to give. Wrestle. Bake. Paint fingers and toenails. Relish their security.

Then perhaps snuggle down with some popcorn and stream a family movie.

In the spirit of our new day with family, make sure to emphasize not only the separation occurring in so many of the tales, but also, and importantly, the part where the family is made whole.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca