“Dawnland” exposes practice of child removal and its effect on Native identity
Red Sun Press’s customers include people and organizations doing groundbreaking work. Jamaica Plain journalist, filmmaker, and producer Adam Mazo directs The Upstander Project, whose mission is to “help bystanders become upstanders,” especially among teachers and their students. Through original documentary films, related learning resources, and educator workshops, they challenge indifference to injustice and raise awareness of the need for “upstanders” who stand up, speak out, and take action to prevent/stop harm and transform situations where individuals or groups are mistreated.
Mazo co-directed/produced the award-winning 2018 film Dawnland, which was broadcast on PBS Independent Lens and has been screened at dozens of film festivals in the U.S. and internationally. This documentary exposes the history and ongoing impact of Indigenous child removal in the United States and the legacy of devastating emotional and physical harm experienced by many children who were mistreated by adults who tried to erase their cultural identity. It follows a historic investigation, as members of the first government-sanctioned truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in the United States gather testimony and bear witness to the devastating impact of the State of Maine’s child welfare practices on families in Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribal communities (collectively, the Wabanaki people).
For over two years, filmmakers follow Native and non-Native commissioners as they travel across the state in collaboration with Maine-Wabanaki REACH, an organization advances Wabanaki self-determination by strengthening the cultural, spiritual and physical well-being of Native people in Maine. As they partake in intimate, sacred moments of truth-telling and healing in contemporary Wabanaki communities, the TRC discovers that state power continues to be used to break up families, threatening the very existence of the Wabanaki people. The TRC ultimately determines that the state holds responsibility for cultural genocide.
Mazo, a white American Jew whose children are descended both from Holocaust survivors as well as from Jews who supported the Confederacy during the U.S. civil war, uses his professional career to combat injustice, focusing on genocide and white supremacy. He began creating teaching tools about genocide with the 2014 documentary Coexist, which chronicles participants in Rwanda’s government-mandated truth and reconciliation process.
As he attends Dawnland screenings, Mazo finds that non-Native U.S. audiences often respond by questioning why they were never taught the history, as recently as the 1970’s, of government agents forcing up to 25% of Native American children from their homes and placing them in non-Native foster care, adoptive homes, or boarding schools. He is also gratified to see Indigenous communities using the film to break the silence and shame around these experiences, realize that they are shared and systematic, and draw hope from the TRC process in Maine with an eye towards replicating it across Indian Country.
The promotional posters Red Sun is producing for Dawnland feature images and text specific to the local places where screenings (of which there have been hundreds) are held. These posters are intended to make visible the history and presence of Indigenous people in the many spaces where they exist, including in what are now urban settings. The posters, whose tagline is “You Are On Indigenous Land,” create awareness of the local tribes on whose traditional homelands we all walk. Mazo observes that they go on to have a life beyond publicity for Dawnland showings: being used for fundraising efforts and ending up in tribal and organizational offices and other community settings. His vision is for them to become as common a display of solidarity as “Immigrants Are Welcome Here” and “Black Lives Matter” signs.
Mazo continues on what he sees as the moral and political journey of non-Natives away from being occupiers and towards being neighbors of the people Indigenous to the places we call home. His aspiration for himself and fellow settlers is to move towards a better relationship with the place and people of the land we live on. To that end, he is currently working on a new short film, Bounty, which incorporates a staged reading by Penobscot tribal members of the 1755 scalp bounty proclamation issued by Spencer Phips, lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, against the Penobscot. The Phips Proclamation in Massachusetts was one of hundreds of similar documents recorded across the United States, offering financial rewards to settlers for the capture and killing of Native people – including women and children. Bounty the film will be associated with educational materials to be developed during this summer’s Upstander Academy, to be held in Boston. Mazo hopes that this new film sparks a larger discussion on which parts of Massachusetts history are part of the public narrative – potentially leading to genocide education being incorporated in the Old State House exhibits.
