Photo courtesy of Howard J. Davis.

She strolls softly through a deserted modern-day Montreal. Her outfit—and the way she seems to float through the streets—indicate her lack of connection to this modern scene. This is Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a slave “owned” by François Poulin of Montreal in the early 1730s.

Canadian filmmaker Howard J. Davis uses his film C’est Moi as an ethereal glimpse of a person swallowed by history’s tendency to whitewash and provide attention only for those it deems worthy. Though short at its eight-minute run time, C’est Moi provides enough information on Angélique’s story to encourage questioning our preconceived notions of Canada’s history—including its often inherent yet frequently overlooked racial discrimination.

It is rare to see films on a Canadian event that highlight important historical figures of colour. We are used to hearing stories of racial disparity and dissension from our neighbours to the south, but as Davis helpfully reminds us, Canada’s history is far from the clean version that is often portrayed.

Davis takes a symbolic approach to the telling of Angélique’s story. The majority of the film is dedicated to watching her, played by actor Jenny Brizard, glide through Montreal. The film then incorporates a text-based description of her story, where the key points are highlighted by evocative imagery and music. Here is where we learn of the fire Angélique was accused of starting, and the price she had to pay. Davis wanted this project to be a starting point for Canadians to look at the country differently. “We see Canada as a haven away from slavery,” he says. “As Canadians, we go, ‘Oh, no, it didn’t happen up here.’ But it did.” It is not often that stories of residential schools and internment camps get the attention they deserve.

Davis notes that, near where he resides in Niagara-onthe-Lake, houses still stand that once kept slaves. He adds that New France had many slaves, yet we don’t hear about it. The remnants from some of Canada’s most horrific moments are still very much around.

Davis is deeply invested in his subject matter—as a person of mixed race, he has been interested in race-related stories for many years, beginning in his time at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Marginalized stories are often front-of-mind for Davis, with a special interest in stories about female figures as well, stemming from his “desire to tell more stories of people who are subjects of oppression who aren’t at the forefront of our history.”

This push toward uncovering hidden stories can be seen increasingly in the mainstream media, especially in Hollywood films from the past year. Hidden Figures, the historical drama that tells the story of the Black women who were integral in launching John Glenn—the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth—into space, is similar to C’est Moi in this respect. Davis points to some of the other films this year that focus on telling race-centric stories, such as Moonlight, Fences, and Loving. These stories have long been desperate to be told, and Hidden Figures’s success at the box office is proof that there are people ready to see them.

C’est Moi attempts to take an objective look at a snapshot in history, presenting the discovered facts and leaving interpretation up to the audience. With this impartiality, Davis makes clear his goal of uncovering stories and allowing them to speak for themselves, rather than to use his platform to preach.

As for his hopes for this film, Davis only wants for his subject matter to be discovered. Currently, the short film is set to be screened at film festivals in Florida, California, and New Jersey. While he is overjoyed at the American response, Davis hopes some of the many Canadian film festivals will show it as well so that the message of the film can come through to those who are living directly after the generations that actually perpetrated it.

As Canadians, we need to forgo the tendency not to confront the conflict that has happened in our midst because it makes us uncomfortable, and instead face it.

As Davis explains: “The whole point is starting a dialogue and recognizing our accountability to uncover the truth.”

Unfortunately, far too many horror movies seem to revisit the U.S. slave era or North American colonization—a.k.a. the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Though a historical context in a horror film can be beneficial—and intelligent—in a lot of ways, I find these two backdrops lazy at best and racist at worst.

Amityville Horror is one of the most recognized horror movies that uses the suffering of Indigenous people as an origin story for its hauntings. The house is haunted, apparently, because it was built on stolen land—more specifically an “Indian burial ground.” The term alone is problematic, relying on the mistake of the original ignorant dudebro Christopher Columbus—yes, let’s name a people based on someone’s inability to read a map! Worse, though, is the common storyline: “We’re white people on stolen land, but please don’t haunt us because that’s so mean!” When you watch these movies, you don’t like these spirits tormenting the protagonists, usually a wholesome American family. In one of the Amityville films (there are a lot, by the way), the story behind the haunting is that a white man used the house to torture Indigenous peoples. So, therefore, a negative presence manifested.

But here’s the thing, films like Amityville Horror or The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, which is based around the ghosts of the underground railroad from America’s slavery era, forget a key thing: you don’t have to add ghosts or ghouls to make slavery or colonization scary. They already are scary. They are the most terrifying parts of our history, especially because their remnants are still ever present today via the entrenched systemic inequality in our society and government institutions.

By adding monsters and demonic presences into the mix, we trivialize the injustices of the past and assert the misconception that it’s just that, the past. The ghosts of slavery and colonization are not rattling cupboards and ghouls in the basement. We have real horrors of inequality today: police brutality (think of what’s happening in Ferguson); racialized poverty; the legacy of residential schools; discrimination within social services, and on and on.

Take Skeleton Key —the ghosts are a malevolent black couple, who, to avoid being lynched, used voodoo to swap their spirits with two white children. So when the lynching occurs, it’s still happening to black bodies, only two white children are inside;  the “evil” black couple gets away with it. I’m astonished  this movie was even produced. The lynching of black people is, needless to say, a horrific and disgusting practice; these were innocent people brutalized by white supremacist mobs. Who wouldn’t want to escape that? The entire film also pushes the stereotype of the African voodoo queen who uses black magic to inflict terror upon others. These are exactly the kind of stereotypes that contribute to the dehumanization of black people, Indigenous people, and other racialized folks, and therefore act as justifications to the disproportionate violence they face in their lives.

It reminds me of an episode from Buffy The Vampire Slayer where spirits of Indigenous men rise from the grave and begin attacking Buffy and her friends. And as you watch this episode, you cheer for Buffy, Xander, and Willow to save the day and vanquish the evil spirits, without realizing that these are the spirits of people who had their land stolen, their people murdered, and who underwent forcible assimilation. So who’s really the bad guy here?

Next week I look at heteronormativity and horror. Where all the gay people in scary movies?

When Canadians read or heard disclosures about how Nike footwear was being produced in Vietnamese sweatshops by people who work for next to nothing in appalling conditions and at an inhuman pace, we were outraged enough to join an international clamour to force the company to deal only with responsible and ethical contractors.

And when news reports reached Canada about how Wal-Mart sourced much of its cheap merchandise from China, where it is often produced under even worse conditions than Nike footwear used to be in Vietnam, we also demanded that the world’s largest retailer be more scrupulous in choosing suppliers.

But go to any newsstand in Canada and choose a Canadian magazine at random, and chances are excellent that you will have fresh evidence of a cynical, widespread scheme to apply the methods of the sweatshop to young, vulnerable people who are so desperate to join the ranks of the employed that they will actually compete with one another for the opportunity to work for free.

What’s especially repugnant about this to me, a journalist, is that magazines, which should be exposing such ugly, shoddy practices, are gleefully embracing unpaid internships to cut costs and increase profits, and are proud of it.

Lynn Cunningham, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University who has tracked the spread of unpaid internships since the early 1990s, says that most magazines across Canada have such programs, and that not paying people to work has spread to broadcasting and to some community newspapers which do not have labour unions and collective agreements.

These unpaid arrangements began in magazines in the United States during the last recession and, like a plague (think of it as “Cash Cow Disease”), soon spread to Canada. In no time, some of the most successful magazines in Canada, including Toronto Life, Saturday Night, Flare, Vancouver and many others were generously offering to let young, unemployed would-be journalists hang out, fetch coffee, check facts, suck up to editors and, if they were very, very lucky, maybe even write a story or two which would be published under their byline.

(Many small magazines, like this one, offer unpaid internships not to generate large profits, but because they genuinely have no money. Such magazines are often a labour of love, and many have no paid staff at all.)

It’s probably not surprising that other magazine departments have been inspired to emulate some of Canada’s most celebrated editors. Cunningham observes that at some places, it’s now possible for the truly gullible or desperate to serve as unpaid “circulation interns.”

I think we condone the sleazy practices of large magazines in the mistaken belief that they are, at worst, akin to being victimless crimes (hey, it’s kids from affluent families who are willingly working for free, after all).

But that, of course, means that less affluent kids are more at risk than ever of being squeezed entirely out of a vast and important segment of our mass media.

Cunningham also notes that by embracing unpaid internships, editors are training publishers “to believe that editorial people will work for free.” It’s a notion that many publishers are all too willing to believe, and to act upon.

I don’t think you, the reader, should have to put up with this. Magazines, remember, are extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable to pressure, properly applied.

Let me suggest that you make inquiries immediately about whether magazines you read employ unpaid interns. If they do, make note of advertisers in these magazines and inform the advertisers that you intend to boycott their products if they insist on doing business with publishers who engage in practices that would not be condoned, even in most parts of the Third World.

And find out whether your favourite magazines are receiving money from the federal slush fund supposedly set up to help publishers weather the onslaught of competition from the south, which never happened. Write to the feds, and demand that they withdraw such support from any magazines that don’t pay their people.

Finally, get in touch with the editors and publishers themselves. I doubt that it would make a damn bit of difference, but it’s the right thing to do.