Indigenous-led projects are landing hits and winning awards. How are they making inroads?

CBC

4 hours ago

Cody Lightning is far from alone.
First of all, the Edmonton-based creator is surrounded by fellow community members on the set of Smudge the Blades, his upcoming film about hockey, growing up and Indigenous identity.
But he's also part of a wave of new Indigenous talent — a raft of creators crafting a host of projects that, Lightning said, is unlike anything he's seen in his 30 years in the industry.
"Throughout my adolescent years and teenage years, it was roles that I auditioned for, that were presented to me. And I adapted to that — to someone else's story," he said. "There was, like, one project per year that everyone knew about — everyone was trying to be on those projects. And now we're making our own."
Alongside his upcoming film, there are projects running the gamut — from Reservation Dogs, the series about four Indigenous teenagers in Oklahoma that aired for three seasons on FX, to Rutherford Falls, the Michael Greyeyes-starring comedy written by Indigenous comedian Jana Schmieding.
And then there are this year's Canadian Screen Awards-nominated titles North of North, Don't Even and Bones of Crows.
Those projects are paired with Indigenous talent stepping in front of the camera, from Season 4 of True Detective, to Indigenous stars in series Dark Winds, American Primeval and Alaska Daily.
Perhaps most notable is Lily Gladstone, who became the first Indigenous woman to be nominated for a best actress Academy Award — and the first to win a Golden Globe — for her turn in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.
As to why we're seeing the swell now, Indigenous filmmaker and actor Jennifer Podemski said there are multiple reasons.
The first could be historically laid groundwork. As Podemski has spoken about in the past, Indigenous-led productions often included mentorship programs, designed to train up-and-coming Indigenous creators to be ready to launch their own careers.
That, she said, has paired with a shifted lens from decision-makers. Specifically, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, studios changed how they looked for talent.
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"When people are casting for movies, they're more inclined to question ... 'Am I on the right side of history here, or am I perpetuating harmful narratives?'" Podemski said of the shift following Floyd's murder.
"People became a little bit more aware of the steps that they were taking, and that's why we were seeing more Indigenous people on screen, maybe, where we wouldn't otherwise have seen them."
Centralized source of funding
As for the shift behind the camera and north of the border, Podemski credits that more to executive changes — specifically to the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO), which was created in 2017-18. While it began as an advocacy group, in 2021, the ISO began receiving federal funding earmarked for distribution to any Indigenous-led production headed to the screen.
Kristy Assu, its director of funding programs, said that outreach has been furthered now that the ISO receives permanent government funding — including about $65 million to be distributed over the next five years. And starting this year, the ISO will administer the Canadian Media Fund's Indigenous Program, which allocates roughly $10 million annually to Indigenous-led productions.
That sets up the ISO as a centralized source of funding for Indigenous creators in Canada, which has never happened before, Assu said. As a filmmaker herself, she said the change helps to break down systemic obstacles in the industry: While the Canadian Media Fund's Indigenous Program existed previously, there was "very little to access" — even more so for emerging, unestablished filmmakers, she said.
"I think that's why we're seeing this huge surge in [Indigenous] filmmakers," Assu said. "Because there's access to funding now, there's support. People can make a living on being a creative in this industry."
As well, with Indigenous people allocating the funding themselves, rather than through an intermediary organization, a more central issue emerges: narrative sovereignty.
The term refers to a group able to choose how it's represented — and in a larger sense determine how it's perceived by society at large. That has been an especially entrenched issue in this country; the very concept and word "documentary" was first coined by National Film Board of Canada founder John Grierson in his review of American filmmaker Robert Flaherty's 1926 movie Moana.
Both that film and his earlier Inuit-focused Nanook of the North — widely considered to be the first commercially successful documentary — used Indigenous people as their subjects.
Particularly in Nanook, Flaherty's work has come under increasing scrutiny for staged scenes and general inaccuracies, with its widespread success continuing to reinforce romanticized and stereotypical aspects of a people who were unable to establish their own identity through film.
'Cost of carelessness'
"Because of filmmakers like Flaherty, we've seen the damage wrought by policies built on visual misrepresentation, salvage ethnography, and the lines of ownership that become purposefully blurred by others extracting our own images," Indigenous filmmaker Adam Piron wrote for the International Documentary Association about Nanook.
"For Indigenous artists, there's an added weight to engaging with the moving image because we know the cost of carelessness."
An entrenched and inaccurate depiction of Indigenous people and their stories, Lightning said, led to decades of period pieces he described as "leathers and feathers" — productions that utilized pop culture ideas of various Indigenous groups, while barring those people from input into how their stories should actually be told.
At the same time, there has been consistent pushback, such as Toronto-born Indigenous actor D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who starred in Reservation Dogs, attending the 2024 Emmy Awards with a red handprint on his face. The makeup was intended to bring attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women, and, according to the organization Native Hope, "the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis."
Lightning said that rebellious streak has only increased in recent years. "I want our younger generations in this industry to push boundaries, make people feel a little uncomfortable at times," he said. "That's good. I'm looking forward to that. Those are the filmmakers I wanna see."
And while territorial sovereignty — the ability to decide on laws within proscribed borders — is a topic often touched on for Indigenous people in Canada, Podemski said the right and ability to control how, and which, stories are told about them is also of huge importance.
As an example, she told the story of how just the day before, a passport agent made an offhand complaint about her getting "stuff for free" after seeing her Indigenous status card — a discriminatory response that a 2022 study by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs found 99 per cent of Indigenous respondents had experienced.
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Podemski said she spent the next 20 minutes speaking about that stereotype to the agent, who said apologetically that she simply hadn't heard the historical context before.
"Afterwards I thought, 'You know what? This is why I do what I do,'" Podemski said. "Because if we take up space on the screen, and if we help people to understand a little bit more about who we are in our own communities and in our own experiences, then maybe they won't write us off as easily as they do."