Inuk filmmaker hits National Film Board with human rights complaint

Stephen Agluvak Puskas, a young Inuk filmmaker living in Montreal, has launched a human rights complaint against one of Canada’s most revered cultural institutions, the National Film Board, alleging systemic racism and breaches of his equal employment rights.

He filed the complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission this past August.

But with the help of the well-known Quebec human rights activist Fo Niemi, executive director of the Montreal-based Centre for Research–Action on Race Relations, he’s decided to go public now.

“This is not something I am doing lightly. It’s been a really tough decision to make. I feel that I really need to live up to my own values and stand up for myself when I feel mistreated or exploited,” Puskas told Nunatsiaq News.

In their own news release, CRARR said Puskas suffered a “deplorable experience,” and they accused the NFB of “multiple failures” in providing him with the basic conditions for “integration and success.”

The NFB hired Puskas to work as an associate producer intern from October 2017 to June 2018, and as a contract associate producer from July 2018 until October 2018.

During the nine-month internship, he was assigned to work with the much-celebrated Abenaki filmmaker, Alanis Obomsawin, on various film projects, as well as a separate documentary project involving four films by Inuit artists to be produced in Nunatsiavut.

That internship experience was supposed to provide Puskas with tools for use in pursuing better employment.

But Puskas says that’s not how it worked out.

Few associate producer duties

He said the NFB did not give him training, orientation or proper introductions to other staff members, and that he was marginalized and isolated.

“I felt like I was downgraded from the beginning,” Puskas said.

For example, the job advertisement said the internship involved helping Obomsawin with her various film projects.

But when he got there, he was not assigned the duties of an associate producer and received no training in that area, Puskas said.

Instead, he found himself performing the duties of a personal assistant: checking emails, printing emails, helping write email responses and keeping track of her scheduling.

Puskas said this was not what he had been expecting to do, and that he had expected the NFB would train him to be an associate producer.

Supervisors laughed at him

So he brought that up with two supervisors in January 2018.

“At which point, my supervisors both laughed, and one of them said to me, that’s not possible,” Puskas said.

After that he found himself doing “residual work”: tasks that other employees didn’t want to do.

During his second stint, as a contractor hired to work for the NFB as an associate producer from July 2018 to October, he says conditions worsened.

His complaint alleges he shared an office with a non-Indigenous associate producer who received more guidance than him, and that he often felt “tokenized.”

The second contract was less than three months and three weeks long. That caused him to lose his supplementary health insurance, a benefit for which a contract term of four months is required.

He also said that instead of being given production work, he was asked to do “cultural consulting” on a First Nations project—even though he is not of First Nations descent.

Puskas, 36, grew up in Yellowknife and is of Inuit descent, with family roots in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut, where he has many relatives.

“That’s why I felt that, regrettably, I have reached the position where I feel that I have to go through the human rights commission in order for my experiences, my grievances to be respected,” Puskas said.

Complaint seeks structural reforms at NFB

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has jurisdiction over federal government entities and federally regulated private companies.

Puskas said the commission has written to him to say they accept his complaint and has also offered to resolve it through mediation, a process that Puskas said he is willing to undergo.

In a statement, the NFB said they acknowledge that Puskas has filed a complaint against them with the commission.

“The NFB takes these allegations very seriously and is committed to a non-discriminatory working environment,” the NFB’s director of communications and public affairs, Lily Robert, said in a statement emailed to Nunatsiaq News.

“Given that the complaint process before the Commission is ongoing, the NFB will not make any further comment at this time,” Robert said.

In addition to “material and moral damages,” Puskas also seeks “systemic remedies” from the NFB, the CRARR news release says.

They include the following:

• Offering cultural awareness workshops to people working on film projects in line with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to action number 57, which says all federal departments should educate their employees on the history of Indigenous peoples.

• The integration of internships under the supervision and responsibility of the NFB’s human resources department, especially for Indigenous employees.

• Setting up an independent and representative task force to review and improve implementation of the three-year Indigenous Action Plan that the National Film Board first announced in June 2017, and report on that NFB action plan annually for the next four years. That plan was the NFB’s response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was intended to address long-standing concerns expressed by Indigenous creators.

Puskas also said he believes the NFB should set up an Indigenous production department.

That’s because the vast majority of producers at the NFB with the power over what films to produce and what films not to produce right now are non-Indigenous.

“That means we don’t have the agency to decide which stories we can tell and which stories we don’t,” he said.

SUMMARY OF COMPLAINT OF SYS… by NunatsiaqNews on Scribd