Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for expressions of racism
Take a Drink: for expressions of defiance
Take a Drink: whenever you see the police
Take a Drink: for press conferences
Do a Shot: whenever Residential Schools and the horrors that occurred there come up
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
While TIFF is the most expansive of the major film festivals, it’s perhaps never acknowledged enough how much it also focuses on and boosts Canadian stories and filmmakers.
Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising recounts the lead-up to and circumstances of the armed stand-off between Canadian law enforcement and the Ojibway Warriors Society, who occupied Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario for 38 days in the summer of 1974. This was the first Indigenous “land back” protest in North America, and it was just the beginning, as the movement led by Louis Cameron goes all the way to Parliament Hill.
A Toast
In telling this story, filmmaker Shane Belcourt draws on a lot of interesting primary material from Louis Cameron’s own manuscript, but also lots of other sources that make clear how long these people had been suffering under the bootheels of the government and surrounding society. Cameron’s childhood Residential School experience including getting tied to a hockey net and having kids taking slap shots at him. When they weren’t trying hard enough, the priest himself took a shot and broke his nose. So, it’s not so hard to see what inspired this fight for him.
Despite that slightly crooked nose, Cameron certainly cut a striking figure as a man his community and people could rally around. Understood but ignored mercury pollution from an upstream factory removing their water and fishing rights was also a galvanizing factor. These people had had enough, and were ready to die for what they believed in. “We only have a 50% chance of making it to 28 years old…” sure does put the dangers of resistance in a different perspective.
And while Cameron and his movement’s success proved fleeting at the time, it’s clear this story is far from over, demonstrated by his son’s direct involvement in the telling of it, and the closing minutes replete with footage showing how the movement has never stopped and continues the struggle to this day.
Beer Two
This may well be a factor of finishing the workprint I was given to view, but the voiceover that’s in the Anishinaabe language is unsubtitled. I can absolutely see this as a creative choice, but if it is, it’s unquestionably one that shuts out wide swathes of audience who are otherwise very much engaged with this story and this history.
Verdict
Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising tells of an essential history in the ongoing fight for indigenous rights in Canada.
