Inspired by my Film Teacher Al Razutis

 My film mentor from SFU Film Workshop wrote a great response to that large Rubber Duck In Ottawa for the Canadian 150 celebration: I posted this response to the 150 events on his page and here it is for a verbal TBT: LOL "Mr Razutis, the 150 year celebration of "Kanata's 150 year" Recognition, pat on the back events are nothing more than slick sellout propaganda games for the moronic culture, who feel that Canada is the "land of the caring and gracious people" If we had an indigenous naming ceremony it would an indigenous word translated as "land of the [not so] caring and gracious people" A land of people whose smug arrogant demeanor of standing up for what is right in the world doesn't seem to remember it's sordid treatment of all of the indigenous nations that were settled across this vast territory, the small pox blanket deaths, the 60s scoop inter-generation trauma, the ongoing Missing women problems, a current problematic missing women inquiry, water contamination, substance and alcohol abuse dependency issues due to systemic racism, residential school experiences which did not give them the life skills to live and grow in an extreme racist environment, where the historical real, the spectacle real, and the erotic real condemned the "Indian" since and after contact, the Vatican doctrines, and so and so on to the death of Native babies in foster care today. Nope, nothing to celebrate with the big Canada 150 Lie. As the white Indian I was during my days at the SFU Film Workshop and SFU "School for Contemporary Arts" in Burnaby, It was in my head back then that I had to do what ever it took to be just as good as the white man, to get ahead. Reserved, quiet, and looking to be acceptance in all the wrong places, Bad dudes, white girls, drugs and white artist parties, as I told the TRC event 2014, it was the arts and drugs that saved my life from the unknown submerged physical and sexual abuse I endured as a child when I walked the streets of their cities and towns. Play their game but better. It was not until meeting you that my mind was opened to my ideas as a young man, (By Leisure/by Penance), 86 at the Pitt , where performance Art opened up the black leakage in my mind. ( IT was an self examination into the excremental culture and the native man I think...IT was the colour pink in Penelope's Theatre playmaking class and Crawford's Acting/Directing Class where the sexual abuse blasted out into my memory, and my raging and anger in the theatre space scared the other students. and it was as well the Spirit Song Native Indian Theatre company that helped me accepted my native heritage and become part of the man I am today. But you sir, gave me that edge of the ideas that shape me today, along with David Rimmer. Not the other Hollywood Hallucination teachers as well as some of my other colleagues that stifled me, totally did not accept the original script of my final school film Crossings; because of one of my women characters, ( Some of character's words of an sexual encounter of a man traveling to Whistler) while going out with me was unacceptable, "And who was I to write from a woman's perspective" I took three women studies back then, because I wrote about six plays back then and wanted to represent women characters right. That did not matter to the feminists . Sorry Mr Al Razutis for going on my tangent A sort of a throwback Thursday moment with the brain instead of the dulling sense of the pictorial eye so to speak. And yes , the idiotic stupid, ridiculous Duck you write about, the money can go and help the less fortunate, the dispossessed, single mothers, that would be a good 150 year legacy instead of a Duck, sell out Native and non-native artists, and a moronic culture sucking on the tit of popular, trite, selfies, self indulgent digital signifiers of their boring existence in glass, plastic, particle wood and steel bubbles. Happy f@%#@%ken 150 nothing. Pic is me as a Davy Crockett Hollywood NDN - 1988 , where I made a bit or money which when into Crossings and my last semester at SFU. It was later the Oka Crisis which finally helped shaped my indigenous activist and artist voice with your teachings and Spirit Song that helped my earlier maniacal days as a student artist Thank you Mr Razutis for helping develop my film experiential value :-)