The theme of roots is ever-present in the work of documentary filmmaker Janine Windolph.
Roots tie Windolph’s family to their land, their Indigenous heritage, their ancestry, and one another. Through cataloguing the experiences of her kin, her intensely personal documentaries speak to the collective memory of Indigenous peoples. Film becomes her conduit for remembrance.
Having worked in filmmaking for almost two decades, Windolph is currently the director of Indigenous Arts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Born in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, she is also a member of Waswanipi Cree Nation, her maternal homeland.
Growing up in La Ronge, Windolph was raised in a hunting community. “I was taught that the land is living, and its own entity,” she says.
This intimate relationship with nature would shape the core of her identity, and eventually, her documentaries. “In each of my films, I’ve made sure that the land is its own character in that way,” she explains.
In her films, Windolph presents nature, and traditional Indigenous practices, in a cinema verité fashion. Activities such as fishing and foraging are recorded matter-of-factly. In her most recent production, Our Maternal Home (2023), the story’s flow is interspersed with meditative shots of rivers or swaying trees, while sounds of the landscape reverberate through the soundtrack. Windolph encourages her cinematographers and sound technicians to spend hours taking in B-roll and ambient noise. “We were thinking of land as just as important as we were thinking about the people in it,” she notes.
At age 11, Windolph moved to Saskatoon, an urban environment, where food came from the grocery store and parks equated to nature. She recalls that the representations of Indigenous people in the media didn’t reflect her own culture or upbringing. She discovered that the rules for survival had shifted, and that education was her path to success. To this day, she associates this transition with a sense of “disconnection.”
However, Windolph acknowledges that this move is part of a wider trend, of Indigenous diaspora. She points out that her own ancestors had spread across various territories. Her Native identity is not static, but kinetic. She continues to build bridges in different places, which could be called “home” to her. Even so, she feels a need to keep circling back and to return to Waswanipi, where land-based knowledge may be passed down.
As a youth, Windolph didn’t see a pathway to enter the movie industry, so she chose to study business. It was only later that she opted to pursue her childhood dream and learn about film. Her first focus was intergenerational trauma. Like many young artists, she was trying to establish what she wanted to achieve with her storytelling. As her time at film school was ending, an incident occurred, which marked a seismic shift in how she viewed her art – she became a mother.
Motherhood propelled Windolph to shift away from the theme of trauma and towards intergenerational healing. This attitude is reflected in First Stories – Life Givers: Honouring Our Elders and Children (2007). This short film covers the passing of her unborn daughter, after 21 weeks of pregnancy. Though the film stems from what many parents may consider an inconceivable tragedy, there is a sweetness to its delivery. The piece is defined by warm lighting, candles and gentle music.
Windolph explains that growing up, she’d learned that death was part of the natural cycle, and not to be feared. At a young age, her grandmother would take her to graveyards, and teach her to clean the graves. This activity became normal and peaceful. “When people do pass, they become your helpers, and people we call upon when we are in need.”
Rather than hiding from the pain of losing a child, Windolph opted to produce First Stories, which features her preparing a feast in tribute to her daughter. For her two teenage sons, she states, “I want them to know, they had a sister between them.”
She also pays tribute to Elders who have passed on. Paying respect to the dead persists in Our Maternal Home, where the family visits the graves of their relatives in Waswanipi. The sequences are calm, characterized by togetherness.
An extraordinary aspect of Windolph’s family background is that her grandmother, Caroline, suffered from an incident of amnesia, and subsequently lost her identity. The absence of memory caused her to become severed from her family, home and origins. Caroline was separated from her parents for over 20 years, reuniting with them during Windolph’s childhood. Her father, Windolph’s great-grandfather, purportedly never stopped searching for her.
In Our Maternal Home, Windolph wonders how her grandmother may have felt returning “home”, only to discover that her community had relocated. She recalls her grandmother as a loving woman, who did not discuss her past. It is an incident stranger than fiction – a maternal presence, with an internal void, stemming from missing information.
Perhaps this is the root of Windolph’s fascination with reconnection. She recalls that there was little discussion of familial legacy in her upbringing, especially of residential schools. “That silence that permeates families was quite potent in ours.” She became the historian of her family, discovering that there were “gaps on knowledge she could never fill.”
Nonetheless, Windolph became a collector of fragments – gathering stories, documents, photographs to piece together a portrait of her grandmother. Our Maternal Home is, indirectly, such a portrait. Her sons return to the place their great-grandmother came from – by paying tribute to her legacy, they restore her identity. “Even though they passed, we still care for them,” Windolph says, referring to her ancestors.
Vulnerable moments within Windolph’s family aren’t staged in her films but captured in candid fashion. She claims she had an internal struggle: wondering if such personal scenes were really meant for an audience. Ultimately, she concluded that these “honest moments” needed to be “put into the world.”
Windolph’s film projects require building relationships and fostering community. Stories aren’t instantaneously granted to her – it takes years for her to earn trust, to uncover the layers of her family’s past.
In her films, Windolph’s sons (Dawlari, 17, and Corwyn, 19) appear as recurring sources of inspiration, subjects and collaborators. Though the family currently lives in Banff, during the events of Our Maternal Home, they return to Waswanipi. They meet relatives, gather food and learn to live off the land. It is a story of homecoming, the passing on of knowledge, and the building of bridges.
Nourishment is a running theme in her work. “Food, family and ceremony are all interconnected,” Windolph claims. In the short film Stories Are in Our Bones (2019), her sons learn to fish. As they experience surviving on the land, they in turn educate the viewers about sustainable living.
Windolph explains that she felt a duty to connect her sons with the lifestyle she had grown up with. Such familial contacts, and traditional education, she considers vital to their identity. Documentaries became a way for her to capture this personal journey, one she felt many other families could connect with.
When it comes to target audience for her work, Windolph states, “This is for my kids.” She sees a value in capturing these stories for her sons, “as they become adults.”
As for upcoming projects, Windolph is collaborating in a documentary called Healing Hearts, about fathers reconnecting with their families. She is also pitching a new film to the NFB, about taking her children to experience trapline living. “I realized that the past, present and future were all interconnected in my storytelling,” she explains.