First Contact

First Contact is a TV series that takes six average Canadians who have strong and mostly negative opinions about Indigenous people on a 28-day journey across Canada into Indigenous communities in Winnipeg, Nunavut, Alberta, Northern Ontario and BC.  The six participants meet a wide variety of Indigenous people who share their stories, history and information.  The journey is an inner journey for the participants as well as an outer one as their opinions and beliefs are challenged by their experiences that they feel in their bodies, hearts and minds.

The six participants

The show aired on APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) in September and is now available for viewing on its website.  The show is hosted and narrated by social justice activist George Stroumboulopoulos and is modeled after a show by the same name that was created in Australia in 2014.

Participants go on patrol in North Winnipeg to keep the neighbourhood safe.

The participants have experiences that range from patrolling North Winnipeg by night, going on a seal hunt, visiting Indigenous inmates in healing centres, dragging the Red River, learning about boiled water advisories that are thirty years old, going to a pow wow and other ceremonies and hearing about the effects of Indian Residential School from most of the people they meet.  

The participants go out onto the land with their Indigenous hosts.

Some of the participants were quick to change their attitudes as they took in the new information while others were slower and one appears to be unchanged after all of the experiences.  However, the show is about more than the journeys of six people.  These “average Canadians” reflect the attitudes of much of Canada and it is informative although at times infuriating to listen to their reactions when they experience a brand new reality.  There are also beautiful moments where individual participants connect with the story of an Indigenous person and it becomes just two people sharing.

Much of the show is of the two groups sitting around tables talking and listening to each other which is not what usually happens for most Canadians and yet this is an important part of the reconciliation process.  The producers of the series had trouble finding a station to air it because the major stations don’t want to tell this story.  However APTN and TVO agreed to show it and bring this important dialogue forward.

 You can check out the trailer here  and if you like it, watch the episodes and talk about what you learned with a friend!