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Formal reflection on bias
- Course
- ENG4U
- Institution
- 12th Grade
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Whose perspectives are included in the documentary? Whose perspective is left out? If you wereto create this documentary and attempt to remain unbiased are there additional interviews or
perspectives would you want to include? Would there be any that you would remove? When
going through this documentary, I realized that the perspective was mainly focused on native
people who were living there before Canada was discovered. There were very few non-natives
who were given a chance to speak or even appear on camera. This made me feel like the speaker
was purposefully focusing on native people to show people his opinion. This is wrong, we
should see everyone’s opinions and decide for ourselves. The native people had a way of life
they used for generations. When non-native people came, the natives were not able to understand
the difficulty non-native people would have becuase of their activities. They continued to make
the non natives' life difficult instead. They did this by growing wild rice on nonnative people’s
ground, taking their culture very seriously and always trying to have everything their way.
Non-native people's perspective is left out, the speaker in this documentary is native and a lot of
people that were interviewed from this documentary are also native. They obviously know the
whole story and who the land belongs to because they have lived there since the beginning. This
issue is definitely a problem for the non natives who want to live life like the natives do. They
are not able to do so because natives are coming in their way of activities by spreading wild rice
everywhere. This prevents the non-natives from enjoying activities such as boating since all of
the lake is covered in wild rice. This documentary was filled with a lot of controversy,
perspectives and biases that made it really difficult for me to lean on one side. Throughout this
documentary you can find a lot of native people calling the lake their land. There was only one
person making wine that did not call the lake his land. He said that both people benefit from this
lake. I find it very unfair that most of this documentary was based on natives only, there were
only a few nonnatives who had an opportunity to speak. I would add more non-native people's
perspectives and remove some native ones. Doing this will help create a more fair situation when
it comes to speaking and controlling biases.
Near the end of the documentary James Whetung says, “These cameras are powerful tools and
you are affecting reality.” Considering this statement, do you agree with Whetung? Does the
presence of cameras affect truth, and is it possible for a documentary to ever present the “truth”?
No, I do not agree with Whetung. Most of this documentary was based on natives who believed
that the land belonged to them since they were there since the beginning. We also need to
understand the point of view of the non-natives. We can see that they are struggling with their
lives because natives take so much pride in their culture. They are harming the non-natives. No,
the presence of a camera does not affect the truth. The truth is the truth no matter how bad things
are. A person can fake who they are on camera to get people to lean on their side of the story.
The truth may not even be told sometimes since people want things their way. A documentary
could present the truth. This is only when people have knowledge about this topic and they know
the documentary is telling the truth. There will always be people who know about the topic. They
have their own perspectives and they know that the documentary created is lying. They will also
find and share solutions if people are willing to listen and change the situation. In this
documentary, the natives did not care about the non natives at all, this was the cause of all
problems.
Consider the conventions used in documentary filmmaking such as editing, camera angle, music,
interviews, and narrative. How are these used to shape the documentary? Do they in any way
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