Quote:
"I think for me making Suckerfish wasn't that I wanted to tell my personal story, which I didn't, at all. But it was that I saw that my mother was somebody who from the outside looked like a stereotype, you know, she had addiction issues, she wasn't very present during my upbringing. Making Suckerfish, for me, was a way to show who one person was behind all that difficulty and trauma, and how she was a loving mother. My first inspiration to do it was to try and bring a bigger, more compassionate view towards people who suffered through residential school and the kind of parenting that they've done afterwards. And when I made it, I thought it would be the only Native film that I would make because I didn't feel that I had a right to tell those stories. That changing had a lot to do with how Suckerfish was received and what happened after that."
-- Lisa Jackson

Source:
Tailfeathers, Elle-Máijá Apiniskim. "A Conversation with Helen Haig-Brown, Lisa Jackson, and Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, with Some Thoughts to Frame the Conversation." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Summer 2016). (p. 280)