If you have been reading lately about Canadian actor Kaniehtiio Horn chances are its for one of her Indigenous roles say the Canadian Screen Award winning part of Tanis in Letterkenny the supernatural Deer Lady in Reservation Dogs or villain Feather Day in the just cancelled Rutherford Falls.
But one of the attractions for Horn of the movie Alice Darling which makes its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11 was that her character Tess was just a girl.
I remember at one point, I was like Is this character Indigenous?’ They were like whatever Horn said in a Zoom interview referring to producers Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott. And I was like Sweet OK cool. So I am just a chick.Its not that Horn is not proud of who she is and where she has from she still lives on the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal where she was raised. She plans to make a TV series about her mother, Kahentinetha Horn a former model who hjas known for her Indigenous activism including during the 1990 Oka Crisis a.k.a. the Kanesatake Resistance.
As a four year old Kaniehtiio had a frightening front-row view of the standoff between police soldiers and Mohawks resisting the expansion of a golf course onto sacred land near Oka Que. she was in the arms of her 14 year old sister Waneek who went on to become a gold medal winning water polo player and Olympian when violence broke out at the end of the siege and her sister was stabbed in the chest by a soldiers bayonet.
So yes Horn is well aware of the importance of Indigenous actors and characters on our screens .Every Indigenous person in entertainment right now is pushing things and we are at the forefront of representation she said but it was really nice to just play a girl and the actor nerd in me really liked these scenes where it was just dialogue figuring out what motivates these people she said about Alice Darling.
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