Klatsassin readapts two stories that are at least vaguely familiar to anybody living in a colonised country and/or to cinephiles. Set in the forests of Canada’s Cariboo Mountains, the work focuses on the hostility between the Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin, Athapascan-speaking Indigenous people of British Columbia) and encroaching settlers. Klatsassin takes its title from a Tsilhqot’in chief whose name literally translated means ‘we do not know his name’. In 1864, Klatsassin led an insurgency that killed fourteen people in one day. Initially, he evaded capture but was eventually lured by the Governor with tobacco which he interpreted as a peace offering. When Klatsassin appeared to negotiate a treaty to end what he considered a war, he was taken prisoner, tried for murder, and hanged. The branching narrative commences immediately after this historical moment.
Klatsassin also directly references Akira Kurosawa’s seminal film Rashomon (1950); renowned for its exploration of the subjective nature of truth, the film presents multiple, contradicting accounts of a murder. In both films, two men trying to find shelter from bad weather discuss the details of a recent incident. We gradually piece together more details, or edits, about the events. Another man asks to hear the story. There is a trial in which various witnesses recount their version of the same event. The characters try to piece together a sequence of events and determine the truth, but there is no established truth.
Many of Kurosawa’s films have been re-made into Westerns: Seven Samurai (1954), a tribute to the widescreen Westerns of John Ford, was the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960); Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune (1961) was re-made into the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio