Review : In My Blood It Runs by Maya Newell
Maya Newell’s latest documentary, In My Blood It Runs, paints a heartfelt, vivid, and frustrating portrait about the lives of Arrernte Aboriginals living in Alice Springs. Shot from the perspective -- and sometimes filmed by -- young healer Dujuan Hoosan, the audience is taken through a period of his adolescent life where running away from home, going out bush, and struggling with a classist and racist education system are very much a prevalent part of the eleven year old’s coming-of-age story.
In My Blood It Runs focuses on young Dujuan, a boy who addressed the United Nations in 2019 and speaks three different languages yet is considered to be a failure and a troublemaker in school. The film focuses on Dujuan’s frustrations on his massive disconnect with his strangely bicultural environment. The schools that Dujuan constantly bounces around to were created by Aboriginal elders for Aboriginal children and yet is run and managed by “white fellas” who don’t know how to properly communicate or teach young Aboriginal children about their heritage, culture, or language. Each day, the students get a measly thirty minutes to learn Arrernte, the language of their community. The white teachers gloss over the significance of Dreamscapes and reduce healing practices to nothing more than hoaxes or urban legends. Obviously, Dujuan’s difficulties in the classroom stem from a poorly managed and poorly funded education system rather than his immense intelligence. A posh British-inflected narration over black and white imagery of uniformed Aboriginal children from the movie states, "The children are being gently led towards our culture, so that in time, they will take their place in the Australian community, thinking as we do." Dujuan’s grandmother stated in response to this, “White people educate our kids in the way they want them to be educated. But I need them to speak their language so they can carry on their language. We want our kids to grow up learning in both ways.” In My Blood It Runs is a frustratingly emotional portrait of how a corrupted system can take the self-confidence and potential of a young, bright, black child and toss it aside without concern to the child’s or their families welfare.
The environment that Dujuan grows up in makes this carelessness for his learning potential, exponentially more dangerous. Independent and fiesty, young Dujuan makes it a habit of not coming home from school, instead favoring hanging out with his peers that consistently get into trouble. Every night, he has to be chased down by his mother and grandmother to prevent him from getting unfairly arrested and thrown into juvenile prison, an upsettingly common statistic for young children in that community. Dujuan’s young aunt has been in juvie more than a few times and tries to warn Dujuan of how barbaric the system truly is. “Even at this young age he is acutely aware of social injustice and the harsh treatment of Indigenous youth in the Northern Territory. After watching a harrowing Four Corners investigation into Indigenous youth incarceration, Hoosan’s aunt warns her nephew that going to juvenile prison means “you’re only going to end up in two places: a jail cell or a coffin” – a hell of a conversation to have with a 10-year-old.” Indeed, just by looking at the timelines of juvenile detention centers in the Northern Territories, the statistics are horrifying. 100% of all juvenile detainees are Aboriginal children, many of which have the same spirit as Dujuan. ABC’s Four Corners released a video in 2016 showing the abuse of Indigenous teenage prisoners. “The CCTV footage showing the restraint and spit-hooding of a boy and other grainy pictures of him being stripped and manhandled by guards, there was no hiding from the reality of the issue.” Even though this issue got national recognition and spurred on hearings, protest, and outrage, the circumstances have not improved all that much. Children like Dujuan are unfairly branded as high-risk and troubled and are most likely to be arrested and placed in juvie at least once in their lives. Dujuan’s mother mentioned that Dujuan himself has been in the back of a squad car at least four times already… and he’s only eleven years old.
However, whilst Dujuan is fighting against this systematic oppression, he has made it a point to get in touch with his Aboriginal heritage. Growing up around healers and other influential people in his community, Dujuan remains connected to his roots. He goes out bush with his family as often as they can get a car to drive them and spends time with his cousins learning Arrernte and practicing new healing techniques. However, his time spent in this environment is short-lived as the family must return to their house back in Alice Springs. The film beautifully depicts Dujuan’s love and deep understanding of his culture and how confusing it is for him to have to conform to the standard of the white people running his school and his community. In that community, people assume that he won’t amount to much. His teachers berate him, talk over him or at him, ignore his asks for help. Nobody ever talks to him and asks him what he needs or what he wants or why he acts out in the way that he does. And his frustrations make it exceedingly hard on his mother, a single mom raising a family of three children plus extended family. Dujuan is their family’s bright star and if he falls down a bad path, it continues the vicious cycle of Aboriginal people being stripped of their true identity and placed on a list of immeasurable statistics.
Maya Newell is no stranger to telling stories like Dujuan’s. “An award-winning Australian filmmaker with a focus on social impact documentary, [Maya’s] credits include short docs Richard, Two, and Growing Up Gayby, as well as the feature documentary Gayby Baby, which depicts the lives of children of single-sex parents, which premiered at HotDocs and screened at BFI London Film Festival and Doc NYC.” This story is a true underdog tale of a young boy struggling to find himself, a family torn apart by a broken system, and a heritage that is slowly being lost to history. The audience roots for Dujuan and his family to find their place in their community once more as leaders and not carry the label of a burden in their own neighborhood, but most of all we root for Dujuan’s happiness. The last few moments on screen are especially precious with Dujuan playing in the lake, practicing Aboriginal fire clearing techniques, laughing and having a good time, is the most hopeful imagery in the whole movie. A young child, having fun, assured in himself, and loved by those around him ready to take on whatever comes his way.
Maya states that there are two major ideas that she and the family onscreen want the audience to understand about First Nation families. One is “that [they] love [their] children. This is an embarrassingly radical idea in Australia and across the globe for First Nations parents.”
The second was that Aboriginals should have “agency over [their] own lives, and [they] want to be in control of [their] own solutions.” She reminds us to admire the agency of this child and appreciate his willingness to speak his truth. “In the closing line of the film Dujuan says, “I just want to be me, and what I mean by me is an Aborigine.” He wants to reclaim the space inside that has been and still is being colonized and is rightfully his—in his land, in his body, and in his spirit.”
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WORKS CITED
Buckmaster, Luke. “In My Blood It Runs Review – Quietly Masterful Portrait of Growing up Indigenous.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 Feb. 2020, www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/20/in-my-blood-it-runs-review-.
Davidson, Helen. “Timeline of Events in the Northern Territory's Juvenile Detention System.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 1 Aug. 2016, www.theguardian.com/global/2016/aug/01/timeline-events-northern-territory-juvenile-detention-system.
Meade, Amanda. “Abuse of Teenage Prisoners in NT Detention: How Four Corners Got the Story.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 26 July 2016, www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/26/abuse-of-teenage-prisoners-in-nt-detention-how-four-corners-got-the-story.
Stewart, Sophia. “Hot Docs 2019 Women Directors: Meet Maya Newell – ‘In My Blood It Runs.’” Women and Hollywood, 23 Apr. 2019, womenandhollywood.com/hot-docs-2019-women-directors-meet-maya-newell-in-my-blood-it-runs/.
York, Keva, and ABC Arts. “A 12yo Offers a Child's-Eye View of How the Education System Is Failing Indigenous Australians.” ABC News, 20 Feb. 2020, www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-21/in-my-blood-it-runs-documentary-by-maya-newell-review/11981484.