NameSake_ A filmed Journey towards Recognition, Reconciliation and Place

Roy L Hales /Cortes Currents - The radio version of this story opens with a short clip from the documentary NameSake in which Dr Evan Adams welcomes viewers to Tla-amin territory. Then he adds,  "A lot of people who live here now don't know us. They forget that all of this used to be ours, and that this city is still in our territory."  NameSake will be playing in the House of the Klahoose People, on Cortes Island, at 2 PM on Monday, June 29. It is about the Tla'amin People's connection to the ancestral village site that was taken away from them and renamed Powell River. Then they asked the city to change its name back to  Tiskʷat. The film was screened at Hot Docs in Toronto, the DOXA Festival in Vancouver and will be shown at the Victoria Film Festival this coming July. In this morning's interview we talk to Dr Evan Adams, who just welcomed you to Tla'amin territory, and Executive Producer Claudia Medina.  Claudia joined us during the second half of the interview. She is a qathat based filmmaker and editor, who works through her production company EnMedia. She has directed and edited for APTN and has been involved in this project from the onset.   Dr Evan Adams is a physician, currently serving with the First Nations  Health Authority and National Circle for Indigenous Medical. He's also an actor and one of the two Directors of NameSake. In the film, he guides viewers through history, memory and present conversation.   Cortes Currents: Tell me how NameSake came into being?  Dr Evan Adams: “The conversation between the city of Powell River and the Tla'amin Nation has been growing for a few decades. In fact, we thought we had quite an exemplary relationship. But then, when we started talking about our objections to the name Powell—would the city consider changing their name?—that started a series of meetings that were quite acrimonious.” “We were not ready for that kind of reaction, and we were not ready for that kind of negativity. People were yelling at us. We thought we were talking about a name change, but they were saying things like: ‘There’s no such thing as Indigenous knowledge. Those residential school graves are empty. Survivors are exaggerating.’ And lots of other really racist generalizations—racist rhetoric—that we didn’t know were going to be part of every single meeting. So we just started recording it.”