An immersive new documentary about life in Alberta’s Siksika Nation reflects evolving attitudes towards Indigenous gender roles, identity and the importance of vulnerability. Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man filmmaker Sinakson Trevor Solway was recently awarded the prestigious Jean-Marc Vallée Discovery Award from the Directors Guild of Canada.
The 77-minute documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada had previously won the APTN Indigenous Spirit Award, the Audience Choice Award at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and honourable mention at the Calgary International Film Festival. It is now available for free streaming on NFB’s online platform.
Since leaving film school in 2012, Solway has created several short documentaries, directed television shows like horror/comedy anthology Tales from the Rez and founded the grassroots filmmaking society the Napi Collective. For Siksikakowan, Solway returned to his home community on Siksika Nation to explore what it means to be a Blackfoot man.
“All of my films have danced around the topic of masculinity and for this one I decided to fully explore it head on,” Solway told the Nation. “I have a great love of Siksika so this was a dream project to observe my community, always having my camera handy for those magical moments.”
Growing up in a family of cowboys, Solway said that as a sensitive kid he always moved through life differently than his brothers and cousins. These relationships nurtured over a lifetime bring a freewheeling intimacy to his portrayals of their daily lives, shot in a cinema vérité-style over four years.
While there are disarming moments when people question why a camera is there, Solway was pleasantly surprised at how open his subjects were to discuss their challenges and let themselves be witnessed authentically. Most were excited to participate. He attributes their trust in the process to the importance of narrative sovereignty.
“Indigenous creators owning our stories and being the ones with the camera, we come with this lived experience that you’d never be able to replicate,” asserted Solway. “If you’re not of that community, then by default you’re putting them in a costume and dressing it up through your own understanding of what Indigenous people are.”
Believing that a documentarian’s role is a commitment to unfiltered truth, Solway found the extensive shooting period necessary to allow the film’s interactions to present themselves naturally. He found the raw fly-on-the-wall approach took some unlearning of his formal training, with significant moments often only revealing themselves late in the editing process.
“When we’re staging or lighting an interview on the subject’s behalf, it becomes our own interpretation on what their life is,” Solway said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s out of focus and the camera’s shaky and everyone’s shouting around you – the point of the film is to capture real life.”
Through candid conversations, cultural activities and lingering looks at the vast Prairie landscape, Siksikakowan gently dissolves stereotypes as Blackfoot life unfolds like a dream. Some of its most potent moments are seen through child’s eyes, such as the pure joys of catching frogs by the river.
Children also navigate pressures to “cowboy up” in memorable scenes showing the pervasive influence of rodeo culture in the region. Viewers experience the visceral fear of a boy about to ride a bucking bull as all around him are yelling to hurry up. Solway suggested that bearing witness to those moments formed the essence of his film.
“When you feel that pressure, it does feel at that moment that you absolutely have to do it,” explained Solway. “I think that’s a lot of people’s experience in Siksika. That’s probably the inner dialogue in some of our men’s heads every day, this kind of harsh buck-up mentality because that’s the environment they grew up in.”
Solways sees these attitudes as reinforcing narratives of the strong and stoic warrior romanticized by popular culture. The Blackfoot were known as the “Lords of the Plains” because they fiercely protected their hunting grounds, following the immense migration of buffalo.
“Our image has been co-opted throughout history in Western films, sports logos and Halloween costumes,” Solway said. “I think a lot of young men growing up think they have to live up to this warrior figurehead who holds it all in and carries the weight for their Nation.”
Demonstrating there are many ways to be a man, the film spends time with radio DJs, basketball players, ceremonial drummers and local rappers. In post-screening dialogues, audiences have appreciated this nuanced depiction of regular people in the full spectrum of human experience as a breath of fresh air.
Between glimpses of powwows, hockey games, roping cattle and other life on the rez, title cards offer guiding questions such as “what are our people without the buffalo?” Blackfoot people were almost synonymous with buffalo, Solway noted, truly a way of life for not only food, shelter and clothing, but also spirituality.
Siksikakowan shows how men have adapted to modernity while retaining a connection to their land and ancestral spirit. While intergenerational traumas may have shaped expectations of a hardened masculinity, many of the men portrayed reveal themselves as sensitive, flawed and complex.
“Through them, we are reminded of a vital Blackfoot teaching: Ikkina’pitapiiyissinni (gentleness) lives at the heart of our fathers, brothers and sons,” Solway’s cousin, Kelsey No Runner, shared in the Calgary Guardian. “And in our collective healing, we have a responsibility to help the men in our lives reconnect to that part of themselves.”
Solway feels that younger generations are increasingly looking for answers in traditional teachings and ceremonies. He plans to make his next NFB documentary about the Blackfoot chicken dance that has become a mainstay of powwows, dismantling “beads and feathers tropes” to similarly humanize his people.
“We’re still shaking off the residue of residential school, almost making us afraid of our own ceremonies and spirituality,” said Solway. “It’s an exciting time for Indigenous cinema because we’re seeing where those things intersect, our storytelling and spirituality.”