Natosapi

Natosapi is a documentary short I made over the course of a year for Old Sun Community College on Siksika Nation, marking the college's 55th anniversary and the 35th anniversary of its Post-Secondary Student Support Program.

At its heart it is a film about a single building and what it was made to do. The brick building was raised in 1929 and operated as an Anglican residential school into the late 1960s. In 1971, Siksika Nation took over its administration and reopened it as Old Sun Community College. The quiet milestone at the center of the film is this: the building has now stood as a college longer than it ever operated as a residential school. As one of the college's longtime staff puts it on camera, it has become a place that gives Siksika culture back, in the very place it was once taken away.

The name Natosapi belongs to Chief Old Sun himself, and carries a sense of gaining insight, of seeing clearly. It felt like the right lens for a film about looking back in order to move forward.

Natosapi is built from voices across generations. Herman Yellow Old Woman, the resident Elder at Old Sun and a deeply respected community leader, a member of the Horn Society who leads a drumming group, opens the film in Blackfoot, with English subtitles, reflecting on what the college has meant to the community since it first opened its doors.

From there the film moves through the people who built and carried the institution: college leadership who have been there for decades and can speak to both the founding era and the college today, and founding-era staff who helped raise it from the ground up through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Their memories meet the present in the words of students and younger staff, who talk about reclaiming Blackfoot identity, language, and pride through their education.

The residential school history is acknowledged honestly, but it is not the emotional center of the film. It is the context that makes the resilience mean something. Natosapi is deliberately forward-looking: a celebration of a community that turned an institution of loss into one of learning, and of an education that hands language and identity back to the next generation.

This was a solo production, roughly a year in the making. I conducted every interview, shot every frame, and edited the entire film myself. That meant sitting down with longtime staff and leadership for extended one-on-one conversations, some running close to an hour, and recording a bilingual Blackfoot-and-English narration with Herman Yellow Old Woman.

A few choices shaped how it feels. Under the Elder's English narration, I layered his Blackfoot delivery at a low volume, like a background echo, so you hear the authenticity of him speaking in his own language without needing to read five minutes of subtitles. For the college's origins I took a single historical black-and-white photograph and brought it to life with a slow push-in and a film-grain treatment, done by hand rather than with generative AI, because the imagery needed to stay honest and archival, not synthetic.

To ground the story in place, I flew original drone footage across Siksika Nation and Treaty 7 land, including Blackfoot Crossing on the Bow River, where Treaty 7 was signed in 1877. The whole film was cut in DaVinci Resolve.