Have you streamed a documentary or film through UBC Library’s McIntyre Media subscription before? There are almost 200 videos that are Indigenous focused or produced on a variety of topics like art, language, education, and land use issues. Plus more! Below, we’ve rounded up 9 titles that are under 10 minutes long from on different topics.
The Gift is a film by Wanda Nanibush. Wanda Nanibush is an Anishnawbe-kwe curator, writer, and media artist. In The Gift, a young Nish mother dating a white woman receives a gift that uncovers the past of her favourite grandmother. It can help teach that often those who are closest to us are the ones we know very little about. A heart warming story of quiet acceptance and the importance of history.
Hope, a video by UBC Professor & Scotiabank Award winner Dana Claxton, examines the possibilities of reconciliation through repeated attempts to rebuild a broken bowl. Upon the first round of rebuilding, it works perfectly and then another try makes it more difficult. Her film considers geo-politics, earth democracy and cross-cultural repair.
Stolen, a film by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, examines the fact that Aboriginal women in Canada account for an incredibly overrepresented percentage of missing persons and murder statistics. Sheena, a lost teenager, is placed in a girl’s home. Seemingly forgotten and yearning for a life of freedom, she runs away, only to be picked up by a dangerous stranger. It is a sober commentary of missing Indigenous women.
Dancing with Northern Lights is a short film (just under 3 minutes) that features traditional dances of Canada’s First Nations people and the wondrous spectacle of northern lights as the inspiration for this coloured sand stop-motion animation by one of Canada’s most gifted animators.
Savage, written & directed by Lisa Jackson, is a Cree language short film with English subtitles that begins in in the 1950s, a native girl watches the countryside go by from the backseat of a car, but when the girl arrives at her destination, she undergoes a transformation that will turn the woman’s gentle voice into a howl of anger and pain. This film is one of many narrative looks at residential schools.
Oldest Tree in The World is a love song to the oldest sugar maple in the Ontario region, living just outside of Peterborough in Mark S. Burnham Provincial Park. A grandmother tree, one of our oldest living relations, has witnessed over 500 years of history.
A Look at the Life of Morgan Green is over 10 minutes, but it’s 11 minutes and 51 seconds, so we had to include it. Follow Morgan Green, a young Tsimshian artist from Vancouver, through her daily activities as she makes her art.
Locked Doors, by Anne Bowman with support from the Vancouver Art Gallery, Nothing About Us Without Us, and Gachet Gallery, is a song poem as that reflects upon Indigenous people in North America about who is in or out of North American life.
How To Steal A Canoe is a song telling on one hand telling the story of a young Nishnaabeg woman and an old Nishnaabeg man rescuing a canoe from a museum and returning it to the lake it was meant to be with, and on a deeper level, of stealing back the precious parts of us, that were always ours in the first place. With spoken lyrics by Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and an original score by Cree cellist & UBC Alumni Cris Derksen.