A Salt Spring audience can take the first steps toward understanding an important cultural group in Canada by watching Lii Michif Niiyanaan: We Are Métis, a one-hour documentary that includes interviews with 20 contemporary Métis elders, artists, activists and scholars who share their perspectives on what it means to be Métis today.
The film makes its Salt Spring debut at the Salt Spring Public Library on Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m., and will be introduced by its writer and co-producer Christine Welsh, a 30-year Salt Spring resident.
Welsh, a Métis from Saskatchewan, has had a long career in documentary filmmaking, including as writer and producer of Finding Dawn (2006), one of the first films to call for action on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Other films include Women in the Shadows (1991), Keepers of the Fire (1994), Kuper Island: Return to the Healing Circle (1995) and The Story of the Coast Salish Knitters (2000).
Welsh said the new film was conceived in 2016, when she was still teaching in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria, along with Jeannine Carrière, a professor in the School of Social Work and the film’s executive producer.
“We were both older women who had come of age in a time of huge political and cultural awakening for our people,” said Welsh, “and in our time at UVic, we had, right up until I retired, really been dismayed by how little university students actually knew about Métis people, and I think that continues for the general Canadian population. So we wanted to create a film that would basically answer the question, ‘Who are the Métis?’ We envision the film as a teaching tool that would reach out to Canadians generally and answer that question.”
Almost 625,000 Canadians identified as Métis in the 2021 census.
Bringing Lii Michif Niiyanaan: We Are Métis to fruition took longer than first anticipated, largely due to the timing of the Covid pandemic, which meant they could not start filming until 2021, and even then things did not unfold as initially planned.
But Welsh credits a great team with the final result, which has achieved its original goal. Gregory Coyes, who is coordinator of the Indigenous Digital Filmmaking Program at Capilano University and an award-winning filmmaker Welsh has worked with before, is co-producer. He also co-directed the film with Madeline Ell, who is Welsh’s niece.
“All four of us had big roles to play in the making of the film, ” said Welsh, adding that one of the project’s gifts was being able to work with her niece.
“She’s also the narrator of the film, and in many ways, it felt like I was sort of handing off the baton to a new generation. So that was, for me, really, really cool.”
In choosing the interview subjects, Welsh, Coyes and Carrière contacted people they knew, almost all of them from the Prairies.
“We wanted to have a diversity of voices, so we reached out to a wide range of artists and writers and elders and community leaders from across our homeland, and asked them to participate.”
Lii Michif Niiyanaan: We Are Métis is Welsh’s last film.
“It’s been a huge gift and privilege to be able to tell those stories,” she said. “And now it’s time for a new generation to do that.”
Welsh said she wanted to show the film at the Salt Spring library.
“The library staff and board have made really strong efforts to increase the Indigenous presence in the library, and I’m appreciative of that, and so this is a way to express that appreciation.”