Titles include Willie Dunn’s The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968), the first film made at the NFB by an Indigenous director. Sometimes referred to as Canada’s first music video, this short is a powerful look at colonial betrayals told through a ballad composed by Dunn himself about the legendary 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief. Dunn was a well-known musician on Canada’s folk music scene and a member of the Indian Film Crew—an all-Indigenous film production unit formed at the NFB in 1967.
Willie Dunn, The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968).
Credit: This film was originally published on NFB.ca. COURTESY NFB.
Within the NFB’s Indigenous Cinema collection, visitors will find other groundbreaking IFC titles like Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell’s You Are on Indian Land (1969), a short documentary that resonated strongly with 1960s civil-rights activists and travelled widely across Canada and the United States, including a famous screening at Alcatraz during the occupation of the infamous prison by members of the American Indian Movement; and Willie Dunn and Martin Defalco’s smouldering documentary The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1970)—you’ll never think about the famous retailer in the same way again.
Visitors will also find several titles from legendary Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s considerable opus, including Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), her very first film, created with children attending a residential school in the northern Ontario town of Moose Factory; and landmark films such as Incident at Restigouche (1984), which documented two police raids on the Mi’kmaq community of Restigouche in the early 1980s, and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), Obomsawin’s feature documentary about the 1990 Oka standoff, which was shot over 78 days behind Kanien’kéhaka lines and provides a privileged insider perspective on the historic conflict. The film reverberated around the globe and made history at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it became the first documentary ever to win the Best Canadian Feature Award.
Alanis Obomsawin, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993).
Credit: This film was originally published on NFB.ca. COURTESY NFB.
The selection also includes other essential titles by leading Indigenous directors, like Foster Child (1987) and Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole (2003), both by the late Métis director Gil Cardinal; Hands of History (1994) by Loretta Todd; Two Worlds Colliding (2004) by Tasha Hubbard; If the Weather Permits (2003) by Elisapie Isaac; and Finding Dawn (2006) by Christine Welsh.
Gil Cardinal, Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole (2003).
Credit: This film was originally published on NFB.ca. COURTESY NFB.
Viewers can also explore recent titles like Nowhere Land (2015), by Inuk director Bonnie Ammaaq, winner of the Best Short Documentary award at imagineNATIVE in 2016; this river (2016), by celebrated Métis author Katherena Vermette and Erika MacPherson, which won Best Short Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2017; Haida filmmaker Christopher Auchter’s award-winning short Now Is the Time (2019); nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (2019), by award-winning filmmaker Tasha Hubbard; and The Lake Winnipeg Project (2021), a four-part documentary series by Anishinaabe/Cree director Kevin Settee.
Christopher Auchter, Now Is the Time (2019).
Credit: This film was originally published on NFB.ca. COURTESY NFB.
In creating this online destination, the NFB’s goal was to make it easier for audiences to find films that present Indigenous perspectives on Canadian realities. The site includes biographies for each of the directors and allows users to search for films by the nation/people of the director or the nation/people depicted in the film. The NFB’s educational team has also created curated playlists for different age levels.
The collection has been catalogued using the Indigenous Materials Classification Schema (IMCS) developed by Camille Callison (Tahltan Nation), Alissa Cherry and Keshav Mukunda, which was first implemented at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) Reference Library in 2015. Camille worked in collaboration with NFB Senior Librarian Katherine Kasirer to adapt the IMSC for the NFB collection.
The NFB is committed to redefining its relationship with Indigenous people. It aims to be an agent of change by continuing to pursue commitments first introduced in 2017 that seek to transform the NFB’s institutional culture, in terms of both creation and distribution, including the accessibility of works in Indigenous languages.
Films on NFB.ca are available to stream for free, depending on your location.
This story is part of the NFB Spotlight. View more content from the Spotlight here.
