Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Photos by Jeff Harris

Above the northernmost tip of Lake Winnipeg, Norway House is a Cree First Nation community that works. It has a wonderful school system, local radio station, police, cultural groups, a language renewal program, music, dance and more. Traditional rituals are preserved, and young people are mentored by elders about their relationship with the land and their history. But — after 150 years under the Indian Act, with broken treaties, disease, death, and poverty; forced assimilation, mass incarceration, cultural genocide, residential schools, widespread discrimination, racism, rape and murder – this is a people that needs to be healed.

Our People Will Be Healed is the name of a new documentary that premiered at TIFF and is now showing at ImagineNative, Toronto’s Indigenous film festival. It is the work of master director Alanis Obomsawin, Canada’s doyenne of documentary filmmaking, who has recorded the lives and issues of First Nations in fifty films over fifty years.

I talked with Alanis on location at the National Film Board in Toronto during TIFF 17.

Our People will be Healed is playing at the ImagineNative Film Festival in Toronto on Saturday, 21 October 2017 at 3:00 pm at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.