Latest news with #RedRiverResistance
CBC
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Our film uncovers over 140 years of lost stories from the incredible women who lived in the same house
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by direct ors Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt focuses on their film The Nest Julietta Singh: I've always had a fascination with the idea of home and with practices of homemaking. I grew up on Treaty 1 territory in central Winnipeg. I was the child of two immigrant parents. My mother was born in Ireland to a German-Jewish mother whose life was indelibly shaped by the Holocaust, and my father was a child survivor of the Partition of India, the lasting effects of which South Asians are still trying to untangle to this day. As a racialized child in a world that felt exceedingly white, where Indigenous struggle was visible and felt, I was keenly aware that I was not in any sense "at home." Now an immigrant myself who resides in the United States, "home" has remained a vexing idea, an ongoing crisis and a political promise. What I mean by this is that there are many ways of being at home, of reimagining home, that can reform our intimate, social and political lives. And it's from this place that I set out to make The Nest, an epically collaborative and cross-cultural experiment. In the winter of 2020, thick in the pandemic, I began to research the history of my childhood home, a place of intense filial struggle in my youth and a place my mother has lived in for over four decades. She purchased The Nest, a languishing beige brick mansion on the banks of the Assiniboine River, in 1980 for the cost of the land, against my father's wishes. She spent the rest of her life devoted to its restoration and preservation until, at age 80, while running the home as a bed and breakfast, she fell backwards down a flight of stairs to the third floor. Left partially paralyzed by the fall, her life in that grand colonial home would never be the same. The Nest began as a way of helping my mother say goodbye to the place by situating her amidst a world of other women whose lives had unfolded in the house. It was also a way of collaboratively reclaiming lost matriarchal histories, and of recreating my own conflicted relationship to the place through the process. Little did I imagine when I set out on the project that it would become a feature film. Nor could I have dreamed that it would become a history-altering undertaking that would challenge settler colonial narratives and tie me indelibly to Métis, Deaf and Japanese communities in Winnipeg, fundamentally changing my relationship to the city of my youth. Through archival research and gathering oral histories, I learned new and mind-blowing stories of the house's forgotten pasts: its ties to the Red River Resistance and the legendary Métis matriarch, Annie Bannatyne; its connection to the Manitoba School for the Deaf and Mary Ettie McDermid, the first Deaf teacher in Western Canada; and the quieter domestic legacies of girls and women like Mrs. Okazaki [the wife of consul-general Kumao Okazaki] and her daughter Masa, who lived in the house when it served as the Japanese Consulate of Manitoba. At the time of all these wild discoveries, I was taking pandemic walks with my filmmaker friend Chase and regaling him with my findings. At some point, he declared: "This is my next film project!" Not long after, we stumbled on a fallen bird's nest and took it as a green light from the universe. (The little cup nest still lives on my mantle.) As a writer, I was of course daunted by the prospect of diving headlong into a feature film. But I knew Chase's obsessive commitment to collaboration, and I had become deeply enmeshed with all the participating community members and felt there was something unequivocally visual about inviting communities back into the house to reimagine and reclaim their own lost histories. Chase Joynt: Yes, this walking story and my reaction to Julietta is very true! I knew immediately, and with great clarity, that her authorial vision and steadfast commitment to telling stories otherwise was fertile ground to build a film. From the earliest stages of project development, we committed to a constraint: to tell these 140-plus years of interlocking stories within the confines of a single space. Like all boundaries, extraordinary potential emerged from this frame. We began to explore how we could invest in architecture, production design, cinematography, wardrobe and music composition such that the audience could feel they were being transported through time, while also recognizing they were staying rooted in one place. Our approach extended far beyond the material to consider, more philosophically and experientially, how we are intimately stitched together in ways we are not taught to assume or anticipate. For me personally, The Nest offered an exciting departure from making films about trans life to thinking more capaciously about transness as a method of cinematic approach, one that can hold stories on thresholds which endeavour to communicate more than one position, time period or subjectivity simultaneously. For us collectively, the project began long before we went to camera and continues to transform long after the experiences translated onscreen. It is from this position, the potential for documentary to be understood as practice far beyond product, that we hope The Nest offers its most enduring imprint.
Calgary Herald
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
Gold rush: Calgarian, former firefighter Ross Pambrun hunts for lost gold in new reality series
Article content When it came to Red River Gold, Ross (Memphis) Pambrun did not have to hear many details of the pitch to sign on. Article content Article content The Calgary-based Metis storyteller, entrepreneur, musician and AI expert had worked with Southern Alberta Metis producer Saxon de Cocq before. Article content Pambrun knew him as someone who shared his enthusiasm for 'telling amazing stories of Indigenous challenges and social connection as we move forward.' De Cocq asked him if he was familiar with the story of the $2-million worth of British coins lost in 1870 during the Red River Resistance somewhere along the old Dawson trail in Manitoba. They were en route to fund a military force meant to put down Louis Riel and the Metis Resistance when they vanished. Article content Article content 'I said, 'Growing up, these were some of the stories my family was familiar with, and because of the world I'm in, I've done a little research. What are your thoughts?'' Pambrun said. 'He said, 'Do you want to search for lost gold in Manitoba?' I said, 'I'll have my bag packed in an hour.' It was amazing.' Article content Article content Soon, Pambrun and the producers had put together a small team of people who possess both expertise in their field and similarly cool nicknames. They include Ottawa-based metal detectorist Laurie (Goldie) Gagne and Manitoba Metis guide Bill (Moose) Marsh. The unscripted series, which debuts on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) on Monday, is part of a treasure-hunt trend in reality-TV. The common hallmark in many of these series is that usually no one ever finds what they are looking for. Article content Without giving away spoilers about what the team may unearth over the 13-episode series, Pambrun says the hunt is far from futile. Article content 'We always find treasures,' he says. 'Sometimes those treasures are proof of what's been happening in the community and they guide us. In this case, a lot of the history — the old weapons that we find, the jewelry and those tangible items that must have been so important for people who were pushing across the West — when we find those, it helps prove we are on the right track telling the story. My job is to find the gold, ultimately, whereas a lot of the other shows there is a tale of something that happened, but they don't even know what they are looking for. We actually have something that we know is confirmed to still be missing.' Article content Article content 'It's gotta be somewhere!' Pambrun says cheerfully in the trailer for the show. Article content The U.K.'s Royal Mint, in fact, still lists the gold as stolen or missing. As with many mysteries, there are varying theories of what happened to the gold, although they have yet to be proven. The team drive all-terrain vehicles down the rough and swampy Dawson Trail and use various generations of treasure-hunting technology — from metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar to sonar and remotely operated vehicles to search underwater — while consulting historical knowledge about the period. The team enlists various experts to give historical context to the hunt. That includes French-Canadian Metis artist Pierrette Sherwood, who is the director of the Dawson Trail Arts and Heritage Project; cultural anthropologist/archaeologist Mireille Lamontagne; and Roger Godard, who has travelled to the White Mouth River on the Dawson Road, which was the first road built by the federal government in 1868.
CBC
21-03-2025
- Business
- CBC
Hudson's Bay Company's role in colonization leaves some Indigenous people conflicted about its troubles
With the Hudson's Bay Company filing for creditor protection, some Indigenous people are reflecting on their relationship with the company whose history is tied to colonization in Canada. Fashion designer Stephanie Eagletail, from Tsuut'ina First Nation in southern Alberta, said she disliked the Hudson's Bay Company because of that. But after finding her grandfather's collection of capotes — jackets made with wool blankets — she started to incorporate the company's iconic point blankets into her designs. "I always asked him, "why do you wear a Hudson's Bay coat, after everything they've put our people through?" said Eagletail. "He said, 'to show them that we're still here, that we survived … a genocide.'" Point blankets were an important trade item in the early years of the company. They were seen as a form of currency, and were often used to construct jackets, also known as capotes. Stories exist within Indigenous communities that smallpox was spread by blankets from the company, but that has never been proven by historians. Amelia Fay, curator of the HBC Museum Collection at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, says the mere fact the company's trading posts brought European fur traders in contact with Indigenous communities was enough to spread smallpox. "Encounters with Europeans did spread smallpox, so it wasn't necessarily through the blankets," said Fay. Eagletail said when she makes her clothing using material from the wool blankets, she gets a kick out of cutting up the blanket and using them to make something that speaks to her culture and her family history. "For me, it's a form of decolonization and reclaiming my identity, like my late grandfather had mentioned, showing that we're still here today." In 2022, the Bay and the Chanie Wenjack Foundation launched the Blanket Fund, through which proceeds from the sale of the point blankets went to fund Indigenous cultural, artistic, and educational activities. Going forward, Eagletail hopes that the Blanket Fund can continue. The Hudson Bay company formed in 1670 — the oldest corporation in Canada — and played an important role in some of the major expansion events in Western Canada, including the Red River Resistance, and the selling of Rupert's Land, Fay said. Over its 355-year history, Fay said, the company has "weathered many storms," including recessions and pandemics but this storm feels different to her. "As a Canadian consumer… I've gone into the store, I've seen the decline," she said. Money owned to Indigenous office supplier With the company owing nearly $1-billion, one Indigenous supplier is worried it won't see money owed. Jason Thompson, owner and CEO of Superior Supplies Inc. in Thunder Bay, Ont., said he had an $80,000 contract for printer paper with HBC in September 2023. Superior Supplies was supposed to receive payment in 90 days. "As we were approaching the 90 day mark … that's when the ghosting and the lack of communication really started," said Thompson, who is from the Red River Indian Band. He said he was told that he'd receive payment by April 2024, but nearly a year later, his company has not received it. "My ultimate worry [is] we're never going to see a dime of this money," said Thompson. An Ontario judge gave HBC an extension of a week to undergo a full liquidation, or to be able to keep some stores afloat while it restructures the company.
