Aired on PBS-TV's "POV," Maya Newell's documentary gives a long-overdue voice to the dispossessed aboriginal people of Australia, to the point of sometimes putting the camera directly into the hands of its protagonist, ten-year-old Dujuan. He lives with his mother near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, in a semi-dilapidated housing community for the original aborigine tribes—previous generations of whom were left scarred by a heartless government policy of removing the children from their parents and villages, placing them with white households and giving them white educations.
Now there is at least a token effort to teach Dujuan and his classmates' ancestral ways, but even a white teacher admits she doesn't quite comprehend "Dreamtime" and other aborigine concepts she's trying to talk about. Dujuan is a habitually poor student, often truant and in trouble with the law. His failure to cooperate may mean his mother will lose her welfare checks and may have to surrender Dujuan to social services as she did to a previous son; it certainly jeopardizes her dream to send Dujuan to another, more tradition-affirming school that educates aboriginal kids in their native language. Dujuan says he is proud of his heritage and wants to perpetuate it for future generations—though whether his resistance is a form of precocious political rebellion or just delinquency is a real question mark.
A sign of hope, in the end, is intervention by another branch of his family, one who remains close to the "bush" life and cosmology (Second Amendment fans should note the elder who says the reason their clan did not lose their children to seizure by the Australian government was that grandfather owned guns and was willing to use them). A strong addition to collections dealing with indigenous peoples, with a particular sidelight on education issues. Aud: J, H, C, P.