A pair of award-winning Indigenous filmmakers teamed up to create a feature documentary that will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising will be screened for the first time on Sept. 10. A second showing of the film will be held on Sept. 11 at the prestigious festival, which is celebrating its 50th edition this year.
Métis filmmaker Shane Belcourt wrote and directed the film. Tanya Talaga, an acclaimed author and journalist from Fort William First Nation in northern Ontario, co-wrote and produced the doc.
Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising is about the 1974 First Nations’ land back occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ont. The protest eventually grew and spread to Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Violence erupted when police moved in to stop what had been a peaceful demonstration.
Belcourt, who was born in 1972, said he first heard about the Anicinabe Park events about 15 years ago when he was working on another project.
“I thought this was insane,” he said. “I didn’t know that this had happened. My dad was an Indigenous rights leader in that era, so it’s weird to just not have any recollection of it.”
There was some talk whether Belcourt could incorporate details about that Anicinabe Park event into a project at the time. But it didn’t pan out then.
“I thought that would make a great story one day,” he said. “This is a little bit of a forgotten piece of history and it was so well documented at the time.”
Fast forward several years and Belcourt said Talaga called him to say she was keen to turn one of her podcasts on Acininabe Park into a mini-series or feature film. Belcourt proposed a documentary.
“That’s how the project kind of came to be,” Belcourt said.
So why now, more than 50 years after the protest?
“It’s like a double-threaded kind of thing,” Belcourt said. “On the one hand there’s a very difficult and troubling lens, nothing new to our communities. You stand up. You organize. You try to fight for some sense of justice, some sort of peace, of space, like ‘get off of our toes’. So many communities have those stories and those moments, armed resistance or otherwise.
“And then they ultimately result in the chicanery and the slow movement of government malaise, and that ability of the Crown to just grind you down. We wanted to show that happened then and that really nothing has changed.”
Talaga said she first heard about the Anicinabe Park events while she was writing her second book, All Our Relations, published in 2018.
“I did the story as part of my podcast series,” she said. “And I knew that I wanted to do something a lot bigger with it. It had to be a documentary and so that’s where the idea for doing the doc came from.”
Talaga said a friend had previously introduced her to Belcourt.
“I had heard of Shane and, obviously, I’ve seen his films,” she said. “I’ve known about his work and thought it was fantastic and that he would have that look and style that we really needed to tell the story.”
Like Belcourt, Talaga is surprised many others don’t know about this story.
“I can’t believe that more people don’t know about Anicinabe Park, that it’s not in history books, that when it happened it wasn’t known,” she said.
“This is a story that our people need to know about and all First Nations people, all Canadiens need to know about the story. We have heroes. We have people that need to be celebrated.
“And I wanted to show our youth this story. I wanted to sort of scream it from the rooftops about this incredible group of young adults and youth who came together to try and change things.”
Like Belcourt, Talaga is disappointed not much progress has occurred in the past five decades.
“The kicker of the story is that it’s been 50 years and not too much has changed,” she said. “We still continue fighting. We are fighting for our rights and for our land.”
Talaga said there is a current lawsuit now involving three First Nations near Kenora who are suing to get property rights to the park.
“That shows you that the story has not gone away,” she said. “I should say the story hasn’t died. I mean, that we’re still fighting for the same issues. And I really hope that one day we’re going to get to a place in Canada where we don’t have to do this.”
Tickets for the film’s TIFF screenings are available at https://tiff.net/films/ni-naadamaadiz-red-power-rising
