The community gathered in downtown Montreal Tuesday for the opening of the 34th International First Peoples Festival.
The event, which runs until August 15 and is mainly at Place des Festivals, offers a varied program of music, theater, traditional arts and crafts, and film, beginning with a screening of the documentary “Yintah.”
“Yintah,” meaning “land”, by directors Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, and Michael Toledano, tells the tale of the Wet’suwet’en nation’s fight for sovereignty.
“One of the main motivations for making the film and for people to see it is so that they can learn our true Wetʼsuwetʼen history as well as current events, things that are still applicable from the beginning of colonization to today,” said Wickham.
“A lot of people when they think about things like residential school or the 60s scoop, missing and murdered Indigenous women, it’s been relegated to the past and we show within the film, throughout the film, those issues still very much at play and being exacerbated by the oil and gas industry and the devastation of our territory.”
Spanning over a decade, the film follows Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham as their nation reoccupies and protects their ancestral lands from the Canadian government and several of the largest fossil fuel companies on earth.
“What got me involved is in the beginning the people up in the tar sands, Indigenous folks came and visited our community and where our camp was and they were in tears telling us they have no moose, they have no more fish, they don’t have any of their way anymore because it got wiped out by tar sands. She said and if you permit Enbridge Inc. to come through here it’s going to triple the production and destroy our land even more,” said Freda Huson, protagonist.
Wickham adding, “My hope is that audiences that see “Yintah” walk away with a better understanding and an acceptance of Wetʼsuwetʼen law and the legitimacy of our sovereignty.”
Festival organizers hope the film and other works will help to promote indigenous creativity from the Americas and around the world.
“Presence Autochtones is a wonderful chance to have an empowering screening with a lot of folks who are allies and a lot of folks who are really able to spread the word around the film and the message of the film and the sort of lived experience of the main characters of the film,” said Bob Moore, producer.
“Understanding what’s happened from their perspective is something that I think is quite important for people to be able to identify with and then taking it out to a larger public as well is definitely an objective.”
Huson adding, “It’s not enough just for the Indigenous folks to stand up, everybody has to, every human being that lives here has to do something.”
Yintah will be available in theaters on August 16, in Montreal.
