Former laureate Amber Paquette tells Edmonton’s historic stories in latest documentary

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With her latest film, kayâseskamik ”The Ancient World,” Amber Paquette feels as though she’s written a love letter to Edmonton.

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Actually, let’s call that several love letters, all to various spots in the city that hold more history than most people know.

“We just don’t get to hear about some of those places being [5,000] to 8,000 years old, with over 600 generations worth of continuous occupation in one place,” says Paquette, multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and Edmonton’s 6th historian laureate. “That’s a very special and rare thing anywhere in the world, especially in urban centers.”

Part of an ongoing historical documentary project that Paquette and her team are working on under the title Miskamowin, which is the nehiyaw, or Cree, word for discovery, kayâseskamik digs deep into our shared history. Using reenactments, oral stories, animation and 3D maps, Paquette uncovers the stories that make up the area known to some as Edmonton, but for others as Amiskwaci and Waskahikan, or in English, Beaver Hills House. There’s Rossdale, of course, and other sites that have popped up due to media attention, but Paquette digs deeper.

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“One of them has a sense of immediacy, and that’s Mount Pleasant cemetery,” she notes. “That’s an active cemetery, and they recently cut about an eighth out of the hill. It’s one of the oldest places in the city. Historically, Edmonton is called the Two Hills, or nitsowaciy in Nehiyawewin, and Mount Pleasant is one of the hills.”

The other is Huntington Hill, which is now Huntington Hill Townhomes. From where Mount Pleasant now stands Indigenous peoples would have had a clear view of the terrain for kilometers around, including the now long gone Huntington Hill, which stood around Calgary Trail and Whitemud Drive. With these landmarks now gone, a kind of erasure has occurred; these are the facts that kayâseskamik aims to keep out there.

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“The film talks about those places, connecting our contemporary Indigenous peoples to those places in gaining awareness of what they are and what’s happening to them.”

Paquette notes that the erasure isn’t just of Indigenous history.

“These are settler places as much as they are Indigenous places,” she says. “It’s a shared, co-created experience, and all of us should be irked when these places are desecrated. Rossdale is a prime example. It’s a cemetery with 8,000 years of internment, but there are also really important people buried there who were settlers, some of whom founded Fort Edmonton. We don’t talk about them either because they were Catholic, but the people who came later were Protestant, and they didn’t want people to know this.”

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Paquette has now ended her terms as Historian Laureate — Cheryl Whiskeyjack and Omar Yaqub are new co-Laureates as of late May — but she’s continuing on with Miskamowin. She notes that they have the potential to launch as many installations as they want, but at the moment there are about 10 other stories planned and ready to go. Future episodes may not even be specifically about the Edmonton area; as she says, there are endless stories to tell in many other places.

More than a historian, Paquette considers herself an artist, and in particular a storyteller. It’s something that has informed her stint de ella as Historian Laureate, and it continues to be a guiding precept in her life de ella.

“Especially, as Nêhiyawak people, we believe that we come to the earth to become storytellers,” Paquette says. “That’s what we are. And it doesn’t matter if you’re doing that through a poem, film or painting, that is art, and that is creation. To create is an incredibly powerful gift. So it’s part of my responsibility to share that with my community so that we can all hopefully grow and learn from it.”

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The screening of kayâseskamik at the AGA has already sold out, but Paquette assures that there’ll be other chances to see it. The episode will be streamed free to the public at miskamowin.com as well as on YouTube. She encourages everyone to check it out, especially families and students.

“It’s really going to change everyone’s conception of the place that they live in.”

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Programming for National Indigenous Peoples Day at the AGA

June 21: Free screening of Beans by Director Tracy Deer, 1 p.m.

June 22: Reading the award-winning children’s book We are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom

June 23: Miskamowin: kayâseskamik ”The Ancient World” (sold out)