Truth and Reconciliation

Indian elders Roy Thomas, Garnet Agneconeb, Ralph Johnson, Alice Littledeer, Eulalia Michano and Delaney Sharpe recount their experiences in residential schools.

A pounding critique of Canada's colonial history, Kent Monkman's Sisters & Brothers draws parallels between the annihilation of the bison and the devastation inflicted by the residential school system. Once 75 million strong, wild bison were slaughtered almost to extinction by European settlers by the 1890s, both for their hides and as part of a larger policy to eliminate the main food source of the First Nations of the plains. Around the same time, residential schools were established to remove Aboriginal children from their families in order to assimilate them into mainstream Canadian society. The powwow-step rhythms of Tribe Called Red's "The Road" drive home the legacy of loss and pain inflicted by more than a century of abuse and neglect. Sisters & Brothers mourns the preventable deaths of thousands of Aboriginal children in residential schools while honouring the resiliency of Canada's First Peoples. Sisters & Brothers is part of Souvenir, a four-film series addressing Indigenous identity and representation by reworking material in the NFB's archives.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, First Nations people were a richly diversified, self-sufficient culture living in various areas of Canada. Much of that changed with the arrival of the first Europeans. Colonization is the action or process of settling and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area disconnecting them from the land, their history, their identity and their rights so that others benefit. It is a basic form of injustice, and has been condemned as a practice by the United Nations. In this new production from award-winning Métis filmmaker Matt LeMay, we explore the history and consequences of the Canadian Government attempting to assimilate Canada’s Indigenous population. We explore the Indian Act, the establishment of the Canadian Residential School system, broken treaty promises, and the 60’s scoop. This video will educate the viewer as to why so many of Canada’s First Nation communities face serious sociological and economic challenges.

A Common Experience is a poetic exploration of the multi-generational affects of Canada's Indian Residential School system. It is based on the personal trials of Aboriginal playwright Yvette Nolan.

At a special ceremony during the opening of the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg, Manitoba, seven Indigenous men in their fifties entered the stadium in war canoes. One of them held the Games torch. In 1967 when Winnipeg first hosted the Pan American Games, ten outstanding athletic teenage boys were chosen to run 800 kilometers over an ancient message route with the Games torch. When the runners arrived at the stadium, they were not allowed to enter with the torch. Instead, a non-Indigenous runner was given the honour. Thirty-two-years later, the province of Manitoba issued an official apology. Nine of the ten young men chosen for the 1967 Pan Am Games torch run were from residential schools. Niigaanibatowaad is about the segregation of the Indigenous athletes and the despair and abuse suffered in the school system. Niigaanibatowaad: FrontRunners is a story of survival, hope, reconciliation and a dream for a new beginning that transcends hatred and racism.

In Jesus' Name: Shattering the Silence of St. Anne's Residential School is a poignant all-Indigenous English and Cree-English collaborative documentary film that breaks long-held silences imposed upon children who were interned at the notoriously violent St. Anne's Residential School in Fort Albany First Nation, Ontario. First Nations children from all over the western James Bay region suffered isolation from family and community as well as physical, sexual, spiritual and cultural abuse at the hands of the Catholic Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Sisters of Charity. Some were abused by other students who had learned violent behaviours from their 'caregivers.' While Chief Wilton Littlechild imparts some of what he learned from his six years as a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, seven St. Anne's survivors publicly share their acutely emotional stories, some for the very first time. The film also brings to light how, in this era of truth and reconciliation, the Canadian government continues to try to silence knowledge of abuses that occurred at St. Anne's by withholding evidence from the survivors as they seek compensation for harms done to them when they were just children.