< Remembering the Children: The Red Deer Indian Industrial School>

FILM SELECTION “ARCTIC…UNTIL CALLED FOR”

For over 100 years, many of the Indigenous children of Canada were forcefully taken from their families and sent hundreds or thousands of kilometers away to Residential Schools whose purpose was to take away their language and culture and replace it with that of the European colonizers, often using abuse and neglect to achieve this goal.
The Red Deer Indian Industrial School, which operated from 1889 to 1919, was one of the most deadly Indigenous Residential Schools in Canada’s history. This film focuses on honouring the memory of the students who survived as well as those that died at the school whose bodies where never returned to their families. It also focuses on how this has affected generations of First Nations, Inuit and Metis through intergenerational trauma, but also how to move towards a brighter future of cultural revitalization and reconciliation through the eyes of the Indigenous filmmakers on their journey of discovery.