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Barbara Wilson (1)
Barbara Wilson
Barbara Wilson, a Haida writer and educator from Skidegate, British Columbia, was the sole woman among the seven young trainees who formed the Indian Film Crew. Established in 1967, it was the NFB’s first Indigenous production unit. Wilson shares a director credit with three other IFC members—Roy Daniels, Willie Dunn and Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell—on These Are My People (1969), the first NFB film crafted entirely by an Indigenous crew. In 2014, as a master’s student at Simon Fraser University, she helped develop climate-change mitigation strategies for Haida Gwaii through a project funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
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These Are My People...Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell , Willie Dunn , … 1969 13 minReleased in 1969, These Are My People… was the first NFB film made entirely by an Indigenous crew. It was co-directed by Roy Daniels, Willie Dunn, Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell and Barbara Wilson—members of the Indian Film Crew (IFC), an all-Indigenous unit established in 1968 as part of Challenge for Change, a broader organizational initiative to use media to effect social change. One of the first Canadian documentaries to foreground an Indigenous perspective on the history of Indigenous–settler relations, it features Standing Arrow and Tom Porter, from the Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) community of Akwesasne, who discuss longhouse religion, culture, government and the impacts of settler arrival on their way of life.
