Wonder, stars, and hope, as filmmaker Lisa Jackson captures life and teachings of Wilfred Buck
With sweeping scope, documentary at VIFF Centre blends styles to track respected Indigenous astronomer’s journey
A sturgeon scene from Wilfred Buck.
The titular author and Indigenous astronomer in Wilfred Buck.
Wilfred Buck screens at VIFF Centre from May 17 to 25
ANISHINAABE FILMMAKER Lisa Jackson’s Wilfred Buck moves fluidly back and forth through time, telling the life story of the titular Cree astronomer. The new documentary goes from his childhood in Northern Manitoba to years lost to partying and drugs, and to the present, where he works as a renowned Indigenous astronomer and teacher. But woven in are other moments less constricted by time and space: mesmerizing microscopic imagery of meteorites, aurora borealis streaking green and purple across the night sky, and the recurring image of a ghostly sturgeon swimming through a galaxy of stars.
“I honestly think wonder and awe are just something that we need to make sure that we stay connected to,” Jackson tells Stir in a Zoom interview. “It’s a childhood habit, but it’s so easy to get disconnected from it. And I noticed that Wilfred is so connected to that sense of wonder….Our natural state, and the stars, the Northern Lights—all of that is a reminder of that connection.”
The mixture of styles and content in Wilfred Buck suits the subject matter. Buck’s personal trajectory, told in his 2021 memoir I Have Lived Four Lives, could have easily filled the documentary alone. It traces his childhood through the Sixties Scoop and overcoming addiction, homelessness, and incarceration through to becoming a keeper of Indigenous knowledge, consulting elders, and passing on ancient teachings about the stars that colonization tried to erase.
One particularly colourful section, read from his autobiography, says: “I am of the fresh-out-out-of-the-bush, partly civilized, colonized, displaced, confused, angry people. Trained and shamed by teachers, preachers, doctors, nurses, law enforcement, movie, radio and television to be a pill-popping, hard drinking, self-loathing, easily impressed, angry, non-conformist, maladjusted, disaffected youth of the ‘dirty-indian,’ baby-boomer generation.”
When Jackson was introduced to Buck’s work at an Indigenous astronomy presentation in 2017, she realized, however, that the “star guy”’s teachings also tap into something more ancient and cosmic. Take Namew, the sturgeon—a Cree star constellation that represents the continuity of knowledge through time, named for a creature that can move between worlds.
As the director of several acclaimed, genre-crossing and boundary-busting films, Jackson has the chops to take on such an ambitious and sweeping project. (Her many works include Transmissions, an immersive multimedia installation at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, and the interactive NFB virtual-reality piece Biidaaban: First Light.) As Jackson puts it in her director’s statement for Wilfred Buck, a coproduction of Door Number 3 Productions and the NFB: “I’m not one for staying in a lane. I follow my curiosity and artistic muse, as well as my sense of what will resonate at this time, choosing the best approach for each project.”
“I think this film calls on me to harness a lot of the different kinds of toolkits that I've developed over time,” Jackson reflects. “There was the sense of awe and wonder at the natural world and the cosmos, and the tiny and the large, and it was also about the trauma of colonialism and a very human look at how that manifests. It's also about the teachings and entirely different ways of knowing that are embedded within the language, which I've been very committed to including. These were things that I've concerned myself with over the course of my career. And I just felt like Wilfred’s story kind of contained all of that. So it was a really nice sandbox or playground to try and meld all of these things together.”
Some points in the movie’s ’70s scenes resemble an old, bellbottoms-filled rock ’n’ roll flick; others use both dramatic 16-mm film re-creations and archival home videos to conjure Buck’s past. And still others dive into archival materials to trace the unique and volatile history of The Pas, Manitoba, where Indigenous peoples were forced across the river by settlers.
Jackson also spent a lot of time in the northern boreal forests of Manitoba where Buck grew up, attending a Sun Dance ceremony and his mobile-planetarium events—and falling in love with the landscape that takes a central role in the film.
“It's not like being out here in Vancouver with incredible epic vistas; it’s a little more rugged and scrappier nature,” Jackson says. “There's nothing for me like the treeline up there. It has this really unique look with the jack pines. They’re kind of jaggedy, and I think there's such a rugged beauty out there.
“I wanted to make sure that we were always kind of grounded in the land itself,” she adds. “That's core to Wilfred. He had this incredible first five years being raised on the land, and that really lived within him and the teachings of his grandparents. That was an anchor, even though he went kind of crazy for a while in his life and was on that wild ride. He still had something within him that had been really instilled from a young age.”
Lisa Jackson. Photo by Emily Cooper
Jackson also spent a lot of time in the passenger seat next to Buck as he drove from place to place, footage that paid off as yet another thread in the documentary—displaying her subject’s keen sense of humour, his natural talents as a storyteller, and his ability (most of the time, anyway) to talk and drive at the same time.
“And you know, it turned out to be a perfect metaphor for what Wilfred does,” she adds of the scenes driving around in his car. “In his younger life, he talks about how much he was running away from things, always on the road running from trouble, and then now he’s always on the road, basically following his calling and helping people. So the road metaphor went from hitting the road to get away from things to hitting the road to move towards what he’s passionate about.”
The film’s unique mix of the astral and the personal has already attracted accolades. In one of the most moving screenings, Buck and his family joined Jackson at the premiere in Copenhagen. The film recently made the audience’s Top 5 at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and just scored an Honourable Mention for the 2024 Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Director at Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
For Jackson, whose own mother lived through the trauma of residential school and its aftereffects, the film offers hope.
“I have so much admiration for his honesty, his vulnerability, his sharing of the challenges of his story and the path he's walked,” she reflects. “I think that's what can be so helpful. It has been hard won for him and for all the people who walked the difficult road of being Indigenous in this country. When people have been down that hard road, not everybody comes through it, but when people like Wilfred, who have done the hard work to heal themselves and then to help others heal, it's genuinely helpful.” 
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