![]() Robinson gets emotional as she describes the experience of casting her own family members in moments of such pain, recognizing the power of being able to document ceremonies, Indigenous language and stories when only a few generations ago, such acts would have been considered illegal. She was able to cast her own son as the “lookout” in a scene depicting a family holding a potlatch ceremony with the Indian agent looming, and her own grandmother in one particularly moving scene where a young girl morphs into an elder in the blink of an eye, a “dedication to her story of surviving residential school.” To illuminate a history that she says has often been misrepresented, Robinson employs a mixture of archival footage, new interviews, and re-enactments of scenes in residential schools, of the ’60s Scoop, and of landmark political moments such as the Meech Lake Accords.įor Robinson, True Story is a project with profound personal meaning. It’s a tall order, but Robinson and crew, along with their narrator, actor Kaniehtiio Horn, manage to give a detailed, nuanced account of post-colonial Indigenous history in Canada. ‘It’s all Indigenous people telling the story from their point of view,’ says Dinae Robinson, director of the documentary True Story. In making True Story Part Two, Robinson and a five-person team travelled across the country starting in June, working on an accelerated timeline to squeeze nearly 150 years of history - starting with the implementation of the Indian Act in 1876 - into 90 minutes. Robinson was able to combine lessons from her formal education, cultural upbringing and film career to develop True Story, a project she feels is both necessary and urgent. ![]() ![]() She has written for the APTN/CBC series Taken, a true-crime series about the MMIWG epidemic, and is showrunner for the APTN series 7th Gen, focusing on young Indigenous leaders across the country. While forging her career in film, Robinson was compelled to get a degree in Indigenous studies from the University of Winnipeg. ![]() Later, through a CBC mentorship program for Indigenous storytellers, she met filmmaker Lisa Meeches, who also serves as an executive director on True Story. It was there that she met Gibson, who eventually would give Robinson her first professional writing opportunities. “I always wanted to be a storyteller,” she says.Īfter high school, she attended Winnipeg’s Academy of Broadcasting for Film and Television. Robinson, who grew up in Winnipeg’s south end, knew from a young age she wanted to work in film. Though she only began working on the True Story series last year, the production has been years in the making for the 37-year-old Robinson, a member of Swan Lake First Nation and the granddaughter of a residential school survivor. The first part of the documentary debuted on the History Channel last year the second, also produced by Eagle Vision, airs for the first time Saturday, timed to première on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as millions of Canadians reckon with the ongoing legacy of colonization and genocide against Indigenous Peoples. It’s all Indigenous people telling the story from their point of view.” “We don’t have any non-Indigenous voices talking about Indigenous people or their stories. “I think that what makes it different (from previous documentaries) is that it’s told strictly by Indigenous people,” says Robinson. To that end, Robinson and her co-writer Gibson, a co-owner of the Winnipeg-based production company Eagle Vision, made sure all the interviewees shaping that narrative - including local ones, such as University of Winnipeg history professor Karen Froman, two-spirit educator Albert McLeod, writer and scholar Tasha Spillett, and former national chief Phil Fontaine - were all Indigenous, too. Robinson, a Winnipeg-born Ojibwa filmmaker, and her producing partners Rebecca Gibson, Kyle Irving and Lisa Meeches were so committed to that ideal that they named the film True Story, a titular promise of an authentic, unvarnished narrative, closely examining the relationships between Indigenous people, settlers and the land they share. With her newest documentary, Dinae Robinson set out to accomplish a seemingly simple task that has nonetheless escaped generations of filmmakers in Canada: to tell the truth about Indigenous history on this land. Free Press 101: How we practise journalism.
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