Toronto Premier
Fire of the Final Days
Carlton
Cinema
Toronto
Canada
Sept. 15/2017
7:30pm
Star Thrower / Meeting Bear
In The News
The Newtonian-Cartesian view was that the cosmos is essentially a big machine, and that science was separate from from the realm of the mind , consciousness, morality, societal rules, and religious rituals. As the Western world gained in living standards and concomitantly less religious, the scientific deterministic model became the new gospel. Then came Quantum mechanics and suddenly consciousness and the cosmos - which had parted paths way back with Aristotle - seem now not to be separate entities at all. I am convinced that Indigenous cultures - unrestrained by the orthodoxy of this deterministic model - have piercing details about our place in the practical calculus of existence, expressed through their old customs and beliefs. Desperately few remaining, many of them have been compromised by our lifestyle to various extents. The Earth’s language is spiritual and tenuous, a series of whispers and feelings. It is however also remarkably and shockingly incompatible with the codes and conventions embedded in the language of exploitation and commercialism. Many of us have completely forgotten that there ever was another language, another possibility. The title of this short documentary,"Fire of the Final Days" is a reference to the Seven Fires Prophecy of the Anishinaabeg people, who live in the Great Lakes region of North America. The prophesy states that there will be two paths for humanity, one that will incinerate the planet and one where we will once again live in harmony with the cosmos.
StarThrower Films was named in honour of the author Lauren Eisely. His short stories and poems have had a deep influence on the basic philosophic underpinnings of how I frame the world. Over the years I read his collection of short stories “Star Thrower” at least 7 times and each time I have felt more aware of the life around me, more intimately connected with the universe.
Nagish Kakewi Mahkwa is the Oji-Cree spirit name that Ralph Johnson gave me after a sweat ceremony one evening at his camp. I am honoured to be given this name (Meeting Bear), as it symbolizes what I am trying to achieve with my artwork. Meeting Bear Cine is an attempt to instill a sense of Cultural reciprocity between indigenous and western values, and maybe in a small way redefine the Wests relationship with the non-human universe.
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe. Loren Eiseley
Fire of the Final Days
in New York
