Returning Home

Wild Films ~ Returning Home

Tuesday, November 29, 2022 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
  • Library Hall
Winner! Best Living with Wildlife film at the 2022 International Wildlife Film Festival ... a story about Native culture, salmon, healing people and healing nature

Canada’s Indian residential school legacy and the decimation of wild pacific salmon stem from a common story: a world where relationships are severed in the service of power, where people become detached from one another and the complex webs of interdependence. Among the Secwépemc in British Columbia, one such story is Phyllis Jack-Webstad, a residential school survivor whose experiences inspired the Orange Shirt Day movement. Returning Home follows Phyllis on a nation-wide education tour, while her family struggles to heal multigenerational wounds at home in Secwépemc territory. In the midst of a global pandemic and the lowest salmon run in Canadian history, the film also explores the absence of salmon along the upper Fraser River, and how a multi-year fishing moratorium is tearing at the fabric of Secwépemc communities. By observing the trauma experienced by Phyllis and her family, Returning Home holds a mirror to the trauma experienced by the natural world, too. For the Secwépemc, healing people and healing the natural world are one and the same.

Run Time: 

72 min.
IWFF2022

WILD FILMS AT THE LIBRARY is a free series of award-winning international wildlife films selected from the International Wildlife Film Festival. The International Wildlife Film Festival was established in 1977 in Missoula, Montana with a mission to promote awareness, knowledge and understanding of wildlife, habitat, people and nature through excellence in film, television and other media.