Gallery 44 and imagineNATIVE present Janine Windolph’s Stories are in Our Bones (2019).
Filmmaker, educator, and community worker Janine Windolph left her Cree community in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, as a child, and for many years wasn’t sure she would ever return to the land that held her family’s stories and memories. However, the birth of her two sons led to a powerful desire to reconnect with her homeland and give the boys access to traditional knowledge, kinship, and ways of life, which are rooted in being on the land. In this layered short film, Janine and her mother, a residential school survivor, take the city-raised boys fishing—a healing process that offers teachings about themselves, their culture and their history. Through the act of connecting themselves and the children to the land, the women embody resistance, demonstrating how a seemingly simple act can be a form of decolonization and food sovereignty for current and future generations.
Re-presented 2 years later for the imagineNATIVE film festival, Gallery 44 has invited Windolph and her sons Corwyn and Dawalri to reflect on their experiences of the film in two commissioned pieces of writing. Read the writings here.
Janine Windolph is a filmmaker, educator, and storyteller who's currently working at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as Associate Director of Indigenous Arts. Windolph has also worked as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission story gatherer with her colleague Trudy Stewart, in particular hearing stories about the Regina Indian Industrial School (RIIS) that had operated just outside of Regina from 1891 to 1910. Windolph’s filmography includes, First Stories - Life Givers: Honouring Our Elders and Children (2007), Dancing the Space Inbetween (2015), and Stories are in our Bones (2020).
