DonaldMorinFilms-du Tilmcom Creations

A Night's Work — Sacred Earth, One Song, One Story at a Time

Tonight I'm putting new work into the world. "Mary Crying for Our Missing Women" is now live on this channel — a song born in 2010 out on the land at Harrison River, BC, where I spent days in prayer, watching eagles, picking up feathers, thinking about Mother Mary and the unresolved grief of our missing women and children. That song is now woven into the sacred bundle of words given to me this year for my feature film, AS A KODEN: TALKING STORY — WHO IS YOUR NAME? (kihcihkaw askî / Sacred Earth).

I'm 70 years old now. I'm a residential school survivor — my step-siblings and I were apprehended from our mother, our hair was cut off, and we were separated. That history never left me, and it never stopped me. Everything I've made since — four decades of film, music, theatre, and performance — has been a way of answering it.

Tonight I also reached out to Global News Edmonton, who covered my story once before during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, to let them know where things stand now: still creating, still working to get AS A KODEN made, still asking the same hard question this project has always asked — what has happened to our women and children, and why are human beings treated as disposable in this society today?

The song is already reaching people. It's moved folks to start contributing toward finishing the film — proof this story matters beyond me.

This is the work. Local, national, and global — rooted in Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis tradition here in Alberta, and reaching outward through the connections this film carries, from the fur trade routes to Hawaiian sovereignty to the sacred circle of family.

Whether it is a brush, a chisel, a pen, a camera, a microphone, a guitar, or digital media — they are all tools in the hands of an artist. The work is done with reverence. Thy will be done.

— Donald Alfred Morin
Writer, Director & Musician
TILM.COM, The Indigenous Literacy Manufacturing Company https://www.gofundme.com/manage/as-a-kodentalking-storykihcihkaw-aski-acred-earth
Treaty 6 Territory / Edmonton

Duration:
3m 27s