For 38 days in 1974, a group of indigenous activists staged an occupation at Anicinabe Park near Kenora, Ontario. Though little known now, the Ojibway Warriors’ protest over the ongoing mistreatment of First Nations peoples helped spark a wider movement in Canada and the U.S. Together with co-writer Tanya Talaga – who first learned of the stand at Anicinabe Park while researching her book All My Relations —  director Shane Belcourt (TKARONTO, KCFF08) casts a new light on these extraordinary events and their wider effects and repercussions. In so doing, he draws a line between the circumstances that inspired the late Louis Cameron, the protest’s charismatic leader, with issues and problems that persist today. A galvanizing story of resistance and resilience, Belcourt’s documentary brings this chapter of history straight into the present.

These screenings will be accompanied by an extended Q&A with writer/producer Tanya Talaga.

Director: Shane Belcourt

Language: English, Anishinaabemowin with English subtitles

Runtime: 90 minutes

Content warning: Police violence, discussion of self-harm, violence against Indigenous Peoples

Tanya Talaga, writer/producer

Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.
For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen’s Park. She’s been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism and been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year.

Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so.

Talaga heads up Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts. She holds an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.

Scott Rutherford, historian

Bio coming soon.