Travelling College

PowWow at Duck Lake is a powerful short documentary showing Indigenous youth resistance and emerging voices that will continue to define the landscape of Indigenous cultural and political activism for the next generation. Members of the National Youth Council, including Duke Redbird and Harold Cardinal, have a powerful exchange with a hostile white priest about the failures of the education system in relation to Indigenous people. The group tackles issues including segregated residential schools, the denial of citizenship rights, loss of language, and mass incarceration, many of which persist or continue to be stumbling blocks in the relationship between Indigenous people and the Government of Canada today. This film was produced as part of Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN), a groundbreaking community-engaged documentary program run by the National Film Board from 1967 to 1980. The program pioneered participatory and experimental storytelling in film and video, with a focus on the perspectives of Indigenous and marginalized communities whose voices were rarely represented in the media landscape. In 1968, the Challenge for Change program established the "Indian Film Crew," marking the beginning of a movement of Indigenous filmmaking at the NFB and in Canada.

Released in 1969, These Are My People...was the first NFB film made entirely by an Indigenous crew. It was co-directed by Roy Daniels, Willie Dunn, Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell and Barbara Wilson - members of the Indian Film Crew (IFC), an all-Indigenous unit established in 1968 as part of Challenge for Change, a broader organizational initiative to use media to effect social change. One of the first Canadian documentaries to foreground an Indigenous perspective on the history of Indigenous/settler relations, it features Standing Arrow and Tom Porter, from the Kanien'kéhaka (Mohawk) community of Akwesasne, discussing Longhouse religion, culture, and government, and the impact of settler arrival on their way of life.

Released in 1968 and often referred to as Canada's first music video, The Ballad of Crowfoot was directed by Willie Dunn, a Mi'kmaq/Scottish folk singer and activist who was part of the historic Indian Film Crew, the first all-Indigenous production unit at the NFB. The film is a powerful look at colonial betrayals told through a striking montage of archival images and a ballad composed by Dunn himself about the legendary 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy. The IFC's inaugural release, Crowfoot was the first Indigenous-directed film to be made at the NFB.