Truth and reconciliation in action: docs that highlight the experiences of Indigenous people in Canada

What do we mean when we talk about Truth and Reconciliation? Storytellers and activists are advocating for change and these documentaries show the lived experiences of Indigenous people in Canada, highlighting truths and furthering the conversation about what reconciliation could look like.

Inendi

"Elders are the most vulnerable to this pandemic and they are our knowledge keepers." 

In Sarain Fox's Anishinaabe culture, women lead the family. Her auntie, Mary Bell, is the oldest surviving matriarch, and she holds the family's history: the stories, the trauma, the truth. Mary is a residential school survivor who worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document the stories of other survivors. 

The Indigenous way is to sit with elders while they live. And Fox's job, as the youngest in her family, is to document her auntie's stories before they are lost.

Becoming Nakuset

As a small child, Nakuset was taken from her home in Thompson, Manitoba and adopted into a Jewish family in Montreal. She was part of the Sixties Scoop, a generation of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families and communities throughout Canada, and adopted into settler homes.

Told through personal archives, Nakuset details the abuse and confusion she suffered as a child and chronicles how, along with the help of her Bubby (Jewish grandmother), she was able to reclaim her identity and become a powerful advocate for her people.

Voices Across the Water

When building a canoe, there is a moment when its true form is revealed — a hull drops into place, the elegant arc of a bow is defined. Similar moments sometimes occur in life, when a person finally discovers their true path. 

Voices Across the Water follows two master boat builders as they practice their art and find a way back to balance and healing. 

Twice Colonized

Aaju Peter is a force of nature. She is a renowned Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist who defends the human rights of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and a fierce protector of her ancestral lands. She works to bring her colonizers in both Canada and Denmark to justice and deploys her effusive spirit and illuminating wit to provoke self-examination and personal responsibility among Westerners for imposing their colonial ways.

In this inspiring, emotionally powerful documentary, the beautiful lens of director Lin Alluna journeys alongside an extraordinary human being as she plumbs through the social and personal wreckage of sanctioned white dominance to find the strength — within her abilities, her community, and her own vulnerabilities — to transform her hardships and painful experiences into something amazing that can inspire others who also struggle with the poisonous effects of colonialism.

Bimibatoo-Win: Where I Ran

Charlie Bittern is a residential school survivor from Berens River First Nations in Manitoba. In 1967, when he was 19 years old, the principal of Birtle Indian Residential School forced him to run 80 km through a brutal blizzard. It took almost nine hours.

55 years later, Bittern embarks on the same journey – but this time, he's surrounded by his family.

Bittern hopes that retracing his steps will help him heal from his experience, while spreading awareness for all residential school survivors and all the children who never made it home.

Spirit to Soar

Anishinaabekwe journalist Tanya Talaga travelled to Thunder Bay as a newspaper journalist covering a federal election. While there, she learned the story of the seven First Nations high school students who had died between 2000 and 2011.

Talaga was stunned to discover the deaths were barely covered in the local and national press. She had no doubt that if it had happened in Toronto or Vancouver, the media would have covered the story, and police and the government would have paid attention.

However, the students were First Nations youth, so different standards seemed to apply. Racism kills, especially when it presents as indifference.

In the wake of an inquest into the mysterious deaths of seven students in Thunder Bay, Ont., Talaga set out to create a documentary film examining what, if anything, has changed since the students died.

War for the Woods

For many Canadians, their introduction to clearcut logging came from news reports about the Clayoquot Sound protests back in 1993. Known as the "War in the Woods," some 12,000 people showed up on the remote west coast of Vancouver Island to join the blockades against logging companies.

While much of the area was spared, clearcutting, instead of more sustainable logging methods, remained the status quo elsewhere in B.C. and old growth forests have continued to fall. Today, precious little old growth remains, and First Nations and environmentalists are again taking a stand.

War for the Woods follows a new generation's campaign against logging that once again has captured the attention of Canadians, including Stephanie Kwetásel'wet Wood, a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh journalist living and writing in North Vancouver, who reports on Indigenous rights and the natural world.

Inside The Statue Wars 

Coming Oct 4

John A. Macdonald. Egerton Ryerson. Queen Victoria.

For some, they're among the great heroes and nation-builders of Canada. For many others, they're racist imperialists and criminals, and the statues that commemorate them should be pulled from their pedestals and purged from public spaces. 

Inside the Statue Wars delves into the heated battle over our public memorials and statues in Canada.