news | Monday October 21, 2013

Similkameen Crossroads: A New NFB Release

Similkameen Crossroads explores an idyllic white church located on the Upper Similkameen Reserve and the long-used but still vast and majestic ranch land around it while confronting the conflicted position of the Church on First Nations reserves in Canada.

Artist Tyler Hagan, since obtaining his Métis citizenship, struggled to reconcile his suburban Christian upbringing with the blighted history of the church in Indigenous communities. This project is his expression of that journey.

His project quotes a story told by Harry Robinson, Okanagan storyteller, called “Twins: White and Indian” (from the book Nature Power), in which the white man and the native man originate in the world as brothers and are intended to share the knowledge of the world with one another from the beginning but fail to do so.

To experience this web-based photo essay (with sound), see http://crossroads.nfb.ca/#/crossroads.

Similkameen Crossroads was produced by Jennifer Moss, Dana Dansereau, and the National Film Board of Canada’s Digital Studio. The executive producer was Loc Dao. It is being shown during the imagineNATIVE 2013 festival in Toronto at Gallery 44 (401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120) from October 17 to November 23, 2013. (Also see the NFB press release.)