I made a new video about a terrible years long experience of lateral violence. It’s pretty intense, about 20 min. I’m not submitting it for festivals so I’m making it available today online. Here it is:

I’m hoping we can start talking about lateral violence in our communities because this type of behaviour is not acceptable and not appropriate, especially not in a work environment and especially not from an employer. Being harassed and having people try to destroy my career over a book project that didn’t end in a good way, and then them taking that hate out into the community to gather a group of people to agree with destroying me is sick. I did not deserve it. It was WORSE than what the public saw. And I’m not going to hide it anymore.

These were real emails I received from someone whose name is redacted. The co-writer/co-director of [Production] saw these emails and still supported [Redacted]’s defamatory posts about me. I did get a lot of support from the community, but I also know a lot of people joined in. I did try to put in all the emails but something makes me think I may have missed one from [Redacted]. In the interest of fairness and understanding, I included the email I sent initially which snowballed into all of this.

Anyway, this video helped me process the whole thing. Reading those messages over and over while editing them into a video sort of helped me see it as a dark comedy (especially the line about “kinship”), although living it was horrific. I intend it as a living video document, in case further harassing emails come my way.

At the worst part of this experience my blood literally changed. I was in fight or flight mode and my blood thickened because my body was convinced I was going to be stabbed or shot to death. I was not, obviously. And my blood is back to normal. But this shit is serious, and I know I am not the only person with a folder of emails from this particular person.

This happens all over the Indigenous community. Intergenerational trauma from residential school has left some marks on people, and where they take that can be detrimental to the community. I’m not sure what happened in [Redacted]’s life to make them so vindictive. It’s unfortunate that there are multiple [Redacted]s in our communities and that many stories are being held close to the chest by people terrified by people who have influence/money/status. This isn’t right. I hope more people can stand up. Bullying involves the entire community, and stopping it involves the entire community too.

I’m grateful for Indigenous arts community members who listened to me, sent me info to protect myself, gave me money for legal fees, and generally stood by me. There are good people in our community who see this happening and don’t know how to stop it. If I had to give advice for someone seeing their friend(s) going through this, I would encourage you to reach out to them, which a lot of people did for me. It feels very isolating and scary to go through this, especially when so many people are afraid of the person and won’t speak up. And if this is happening to you, make sure you document as much as you can and have close people who know what is happening, before it bursts in a public situation with a particular narrative. Also, blocking can save your life. I blocked [Redacted] the first day this started, and many more people after, and I really don’t regret limiting access to me for my own safety. I know anyone can read this blog. But my personal selfies and dinner photos are not for laterally violent randos.

Anyway, side note is the guitar practice video was mostly just so there was something to see and hear. The story is in the words. But sometimes when I’m telling the dogs to knock it off it seems to fit. I’m not a great guitar player yet, but I wanted to show the imperfections in learning creative work, and the length of time it takes to start developing a skillset.

Criticism is not an attack. As people working in creative fields, we need to be able to negotiate and communicate difficult things during projects with people. It’s a desire to better the work, not to tell someone they are a shitty person. I’m much more cautious about who I work with now which is probably the best take away from this. The film and art world are workplaces too, and workplace bullying is unacceptable.