Tanya Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9. She is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the novel was also CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is also the author of the national bestseller All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. For more than 20 years she was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. Tanya Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories.
A little-known story of a youth-led Indigenous land reclamation in a northwestern Ontario park comes to light in Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising. For 38 days in 1974, 150 people took over Anicinabe Park in Kenora in protest over the ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people. Their issues included illegal land purchases, poor housing conditions, a lack of employment opportunities, and the failings of the Canadian federal government and the Department of Indian Affairs.
Led by the charismatic and eloquent Louie Cameron, leader of the Ojibway Warriors Society, the protest reached all the way to the nation’s capital and beyond—it even caught the eye of the American Indian Movement, whose members joined the cause.
Despite only having eight minutes of archival footage of the armed occupation to work with, director Shane Belcourt—collaborating with acclaimed author and journalist Tanya Talaga (TIFF ’24’s The Knowing) who also serves as co-writer and producer—crafts a captivating documentary that honours the legacy of the protest and identifies its ramifications down to the present day.
Utilizing an immersive set to welcome those who took part in the standoff for impactful present-day interviews and drawing on Cameron’s own unpublished manuscript about the events (read by his son), Belcourt foregrounds the voices of those who were there. The result is a timely and important film that celebrates the power and resilience of Indigenous people.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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