What Treaty 6 Means to Us

For us, it didn’t feel like enough to just add a land acknowledgment to our e-mail signature. As a company, we wanted to dive deeper into what it means for us to live and work in this territory. We also wanted to articulate what this means for us going forward and how we will participate in reconciliation.

We would like to start by acknowledging that we have our lives, and a livelihood that sustains us, because of the generosity of the original peoples of this land, and their willingness to share through signing Treaty Six and welcoming us to their homelands.

We are very grateful for this shared land – for the river, for the river banks, for the natural beauty it offers us. We are grateful for the soil, water, air, and plants that allowed our parents and grandparents to make a living as farmers. We have had our happiest times in nature, and we desire a deeper connection with and more respect for the earth.

We feel a deep regret for colonial repression, miscommunication, and misunderstanding.

We acknowledge and honour the patience Cree, Métis, Dene, Saulteux, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda people have with us, as we are learning to remedy some of the things we have done, and not done, in the past and recently. We respect Métis and First Nations peoples’ kindness and generosity towards us.

We don’t know what the “right” steps are to reconciliation, but here is what we’ve decided to practice:

• We commit to communicating in respectful ways with Indigenous people and communities.
• We will work collaboratively with Indigenous people, and share what we have with them, whether that is income or experience or skills.
• We do not tell a story when it is not ours to tell. As non-Indigenous film professionals, we do our part ethically to support Indigenous people and communities when they share their stories.
• We know there is a lot of learning to do, and we are doing our own, and hoping to help others do theirs. We try to be a touchstone and touchpoint to make connections with people.

This acknowledgement was developed in collaboration with Grow Solutions.

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