Today is National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada. A day that is meant for the recognition of the Survivors of Canada’s residential school system, their families and their communities and the abuses that happened as a result. The last residential school closed in Canada in 1996, which coincidentally was the year I graduated from High School, and as a person with a reasonable amount of indigenous ancestry I could very well have gone to that school in a different lifetime.

Movies have a unique way to tell stories of different cultures. They involve both visuals and sounds and can place a lot up on the screen for people to see, also they have an advantage over theatre plays in they are filmed and distributed so they can reach a much wider audience in theatres across the land (or during film festivals). Creators from many different art forms contribute to a movie’s final product so you can possibly view many aspects of a particular cultural story from writing and acting, to hair and costume design, music, there is a lot to sink into and experience here. I have learned so much about different culture and heard so many important stories because of movies, expanded my world view and at the same time delved deep into sadness and joy and everything in between. I seek these out because it is important to me to try and understand more and I have thus been rewarded greatly for my effort.

Given it is a bit of a weighty topic this week I am trying to keep it to a minimum and less humour than I usually infuse into my writing (bad humour is still humour by definition), so getting to the point: What is a movie featuring indigenous representation do you think is worth mentioning? I have spent some time grappling with what I wanted to mention here (I started writing this 3 weeks ago), but I think I want to mention Dance Me Outside. It’s a bit of a mess of a movie to be sure (all Bruce Macdonald movies seem to be to some extent), but it is dealing with messy subjects and kind of works because of it. As an Eastern Canadian growing up in the 80s and 90s it was possibly one of, if not the first movie I watched dealing with life on a reservation and one of my earlier screen representations of natives outside of old Westerns and The Beachcombers.