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Honor Thy Mother is a documentary tribute to the Aboriginal Canadian and Native American women who assimilated into a Filipino immigrant community on Bainbridge Island in the 1940s. In the film, their adult children describe their mothers鈥� lives and the struggle to claim their own Indipino identity鈥攂oth Indigenous and Filipino.

When Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, Washington, were forced from their homes and taken to concentration camps in 1942, they handed their farms over to immigrant Filipino workers to manage in their absence. In turn, the Filipino managers recruited Native people to help with the strawberry harvest that year. Young women were among those who came from Canada and other parts of the Pacific Northwest to work in the berry fields. Romance blossomed, and marriages between Filipino men and Indigenous women put down roots for the island鈥檚 Filipino American community.

But the circumstances that brought these couples together included the brutal dispossessions of colonialism. Some of the women were First Nations people from British Columbia, survivors of church-run residential schools with the cruel goal of 鈥渞emoving the Indian from the child.鈥� The Canadian government stole children as young as 5 from their families and put them in residential schools where they received 鈥渢he strap鈥� for speaking their Aboriginal languages rather than English.

The young women, some only in their mid-teens, showed strength and resourcefulness in traveling to Bainbridge Island in search of work and opportunity. But the lessons of cultural genocide were not left behind. Their adult children, now in their 60s and 70s, tell painful stories in about how their mothers learned to hide their cultural and racial identity. In one family, the children did not know their mother was Indigenous. In another, a son recalls, 鈥淲hen I first grew up, my mom said to not claim that I was Native American because there was such a negative feeling about Indians. So she told me, 鈥楧on鈥檛 say you鈥檙e Native. Tell them that you鈥檙e your dad鈥檚 culture, Filipino.鈥欌��

The double burden of racism from the dominant White culture and within the growing Filipino community was a hardship to both children and parents. One daughter says that her own mother, like about a dozen others in the group, did not have the coping skills to 鈥済o from one oppressive environment to another oppressive environment.鈥�

Eighty years on, only one of the first Aboriginal mothers of Bainbridge Island鈥檚 Filipino Indigenous community tells her own story in the film. The other women are present only in old photographs, poised in lovely moments of youthful fun that make the stories of trauma and loss all the more piercing.

As adults, the first Indipino children of Bainbridge Island worked through racism and intergenerational trauma to reconnect with their Indigenous relatives and heritage. They created new identities and a community that asserts and values both sides of their family history. In doing that, as in this film, they have indeed honored their mothers with honesty, emotional courage, and deep understanding.

Honor Thy Mother: The Untold Story of Aboriginal Mothers and their Indipino Children, Stourwater Pictures, 32 minutes. Produced and directed by Lucy Ostrander; photographed and edited by Don Sellers. Executive producer Gina Corpuz. The film is winning awards on the festival circuit and . Watch the trailer on .