Told-to Adaptations: Rabbit-Proof Fence , Whale Rider and The Lesser Blessed

• Main Author: Roberts, Gillian
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2023
• Subjects: Indian; New Zealand; Northwest Territories; Dogrib
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474483537.003.0007

This chapter conceptualises the ‘told-to adaptation,’ in which non-Indigenous filmmakers adapt authors is adapted the work of Indigenous writers, as in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), adapted by Australian director Phillip Noyce from Mardudjara writer Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara’s Stolen Generations memoir, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Whale Rider (2002), adapted by Pākehā director Niki Caro from the Māori writer Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider and The Lesser Blessed (2012), adapted by Ukrainian-Canadian director Anita Doron from the novel by Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) author Richard Van Camp. Rabbit-Proof Fence adapts the narrative of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s mother, aunt, and their cousin’s abduction by authorities from their community, taken to the Moore River Native Settlement from whence they escaped, returning home along the longest fence in the world. Whereas Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider retells a Māori Traditional Story, most of the adaptation’s crew was Pākehā; further, the film is a New Zealand-Germany coproduction, diverging, sometimes sharply, from Ihimaera’s unused screenplays. The Lesser Blessed narrates a Dogrib teenager’s experiences in the Northwest Territories in the aftermath of his abusive father’s traumatic death. The novel’s contextualisation of this violence through the legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools does not appear in the film.