A Legacy of Connection

Remembering Trudy Stewart

By Evie Ruddy

Trudy Stewart holds a microphone and sits cross-legged on a grassy hill next to the Saskatchewan River Delta in Cumberland House. On this bright, windy summer day in 2013, two Indigenous girls from Nisto Awasisak Memorial School are practicing how to conduct a recorded interview, with Stewart as the subject. One of the students is lying on her stomach, propped up by her elbows, recording the interview with a pink-covered cell phone. The other student operates a DVCPro HD Panasonic camcorder. 

“You know,” says Stewart, speaking into the mic, her long, black hair blowing behind her shoulders, “I wasn’t lucky to live in a place like this where there’s lots of other First Nations people. I lived in a place where there wasn’t any other brown people.”

Originally from Flying Dust First Nation, Stewart was born in North Battleford and spent most of her childhood in a rural community in southwest Saskatchewan before moving to Regina. A ‘60s scoop survivor, Stewart was adopted at a time when child welfare authorities took, or “scooped,” Indigenous children from their families and placed them in foster homes to be adopted out. Even as an adult, Stewart knew very little about her birth family and the community into which she was born. When people would ask Stewart where she was from, she would simply say, “From up north.”  

Stewart was just beginning to understand her identity as a ‘60s scoop survivor – a theme she explored in her short documentary, From Up North – when she unexpectedly passed away in 2019 at the age of 46.

An award-winning filmmaker, community-builder, mentor, and activist, Stewart made significant contributions to both Indigenous cinema and processes of reconciliation. Through her films, she inspired greater understanding and awareness about the legacy of colonization, and honoured the victims and survivors of residential schools. 

“Trudy’s films are part of a larger fabric of change, not just in the film industry but in the world,” says Jason Ryle, former Artistic and Managing Director of imagineNATIVE. “Her works are important in the context of Indigenous film, but also in the context of the revolutionary change that we’re undergoing.”

In Stewart’s directorial debut, From Up North, she reflects on her experience as a Statement Gatherer for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a job that involved listening to and recording the experiences of hundreds of residential school survivors. The film also features the late Noel Starblanket sharing his experience in the residential school system. After listening to Starblanket’s heartbreaking story, Stewart wonders about her birth mother’s experiences, asking such unanswered questions as, “Which school did she go to? Was she abused?” Stewart realizes that the absence of these stories has affected her, and that she, too, is in need of healing.

“Prior to making From Up North, when anyone would ask Trudy about [being a ‘60s-scoop survivor], she would say, ‘Oh no, I wasn’t impacted,’ because she didn’t understand her impact,” says Janine Windolph, Stewart’s close friend and collaborator. “From Up North was, to me, one of the bravest films that she made, because she put herself in front of the camera, and she also let herself be vulnerable. If anybody knew Trudy like I did, they’d know that she really didn’t like being on camera. Any time we had to go in front of the camera, she would toss me in there. That was one thing we really loved about working together. We balanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses.” 

Windolph met Stewart while taking a photography course at the University of Regina in 2005. The only Indigenous women in the class, the two connected, and later bonded over similar interests. Both were single mothers pursuing a BFA in film production, and both were passionate about Indigenous storytelling.

After graduation, Windolph volunteered for mispon – an Indigenous film festival devoted to supporting Indigenous filmmakers and mentoring Indigenous youth. One day, Windolph received a message from Stewart.  

“You’re living the life!” she wrote. “How can I live this life, too?” 

Thinking back to that day, Windolph chuckles. “We used to laugh about that message,” she says. 

In her reply to Stewart, Windolph gently explained that volunteer arts administration isn’t as glamourous as one might think. “I would hope for you to have a paycheque, and to be able to live off this life,” replied Windolph.

The following year, mispon received funding to hire an administrative assistant, and Stewart was awarded the job. Eventually, Windolph and Stewart moved into leadership roles, with Windolph serving as president, and Stewart becoming the artistic director.  

“Through mispon, Trudy brought Indigenous voices to Saskatchewan from around the world, and put Regina on the map for storytelling,” Windolph says. “We really felt we weren’t the only voices that should be shared. We were always trying to bring in other Indigenous storytellers and help them have platforms, and to inform the bigger dialogue.” 

Through mispon, Stewart and Windolph partnered with performance artist Michele Sereda, and Halifax-based filmmaker Ann Verrall to mentor youth in northern Saskatchewan. The four artists travelled to the communities of La Ronge and Cumberland House, where they created short videos with students, who wrote, directed, performed in, and recorded the films.

“Trudy had a gentle way about her in terms of being with the kids and making space for them,” Verrall says. “She was able to teach without taking away anything from the students. She empowered the people she taught.”

Under Stewart’s leadership, mispon also showcased the work of emerging Indigenous filmmakers, including Candy Fox, who was in her third year of university when mispon began screening her films. 

“Aside from being an amazing individual and a talented artist, Trudy was a pillar of support in our community for up-and-coming filmmakers,” Fox says. “She was creating a sense of community here, and she was reaching beyond this community, too. It felt vast. Through her friendship, my world definitely opened up a little bit more.”

In 2016, Stewart invited Fox to participate in a Two-Spirit film collective with Leo Koziol, founder and director of the Wairoa Māori Film Festival in New Zealand, and Howard Adler, co-director and programmer of the Asinabka Film and Media Arts Festival in Ottawa. Although Stewart did not identify as Two Spirit, she felt it was important to help facilitate the creation of films by and for Two-Spirit people. mispon secured funding for the group to meet in Ottawa, Saskatchewan, and New Zealand, where Fox, Koziol, and Adler collaboratively created a series of short films, produced by Stewart. One of the shorts, Paskwâw Mostos Iskwêsis (Buffalo Girl) – an experimental film about a girl who falls in love with a female buffalo spirit – screened at Indigenous film festivals, and toured with Queer City Cinema’s, Qaleidoscope.

“Trudy taught me a lot about community and how to connect with others,” says Fox. “Just by watching her and the way she dealt with people, I learned a lot about how to carry myself as a filmmaker. People wanted to know Trudy, and they wanted to be her friend.”

One of Stewart’s friends, Bill Wall, a retired United Church minister, says people referred to Stewart “as a beautiful spirit.” 

“Trudy made an impact on the places she visited and the people she had contact with,” says Wall. “It was her personal presence that, I think, meant a lot to the people who got to know her, including myself.”

Wall met Stewart and Windolph in 2014 through their collaborative efforts to raise awareness about an unmarked cemetery in Regina. Located along a dusty, gravel road on the western edge of the city, the cemetery holds the bodies of nearly 40 children who had attended the Regina Indian Industrial School (RIIS) between 1891 and 1910. Windolph, Stewart, and Wall were members of the RIIS Commemorative Association, a non-profit organization that was devoted to honouring the children buried in the graveyard, and to ensuring the cemetery’s protection. 

“Regina conveniently forgot that there was a cemetery there,” says Wall. “When it became evident again that it was there, 100 years past, and nothing had been done to take care of it, Trudy was one of the people who made sure that it wasn’t going to be forgotten again.”

Stewart and Windolph created RIIS Media Project to produce films related to the Regina Indian Industrial School. Through this project, Stewart and Windolph wrote and directed RIIS From Amnesia, a documentary about the cemetery, narrated by Stewart and told through interviews with descendants of the school, church members, elders, and historians. The film screened at Indigenous film festivals in San Francisco, Chicago, and New Zealand, and continues to be a resource for churches, schools, and communities to educate people about the legacy of Canada’s residential schools.  

RIIS Media Project also produced Dancing the Space inBetween, a short dance film that honours the children buried in the cemetery. Conceived by Lacy Morin-Desjarlais and made in collaboration with performance artist Michele Sereda, the film was finalized only two days before both Morin-Desjarlais and Sereda were killed in a car collision in February 2015. Later that year, when Dancing the Space inBetween screened at imagineNATIVE and won a prize, Stewart was there to accept the award, and delivered an emotional speech.

It was, in part, because of Stewart’s and Windolph’s films, and the public awareness they raised, that the unmarked cemetery was finally preserved in September 2016. After years of lobbying the municipality and educating the public, the RIIS Commemorative Association successfully convinced Regina’s City Council to vote in favour of designating the cemetery a municipal heritage site. Not only has the cemetery been preserved, so, too, has the history of the Regina Indian Industrial School, the stories of the children buried there, and the memories of their descendants.

“Reconciliation was very important to Trudy,” says Windolph. “She felt that building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples was going to be the path to understanding and healing.”

“Her films really inhabit this important space in Indigenous cinema and have a responsibility to community,” adds Ryle. “Reciprocity is something that is such an important fundamental value, and I think, too, that is really a cornerstone of her legacy. People in her films are sharing their stories – often difficult, heartbreaking, emotional stories – and she responded with such tremendous care, generosity, and consideration for the people in her films. That tenderness of communicating really difficult subject matter was something really pronounced in her work.” 

Back on the grassy hill in Cumberland House, Stewart continues to answer the students’ questions, sharing details about her life, and wisdom.

“I don’t really regret too many things,” says Stewart, who goes on to explain that when she is faced with a decision, she asks herself one question: “Would I really regret this if I didn’t do it?” If the answer is yes, then she does it.

Verrall collected these recorded moments of Stewart mentoring youth in Cumberland House, and edited them into a memorial video after she passed away. The video beautifully captures Stewart’s love for filmmaking. In many of the scenes, Stewart is behind a camcorder, squinting one eye, looking into the camera with the other, and almost always smiling or laughing.

“Trudy was in the early stages of really coming into her own,” says Verrall. “She had a very strong voice that she was gaining more confidence in. I feel like if she hadn’t died, her next five years would have been remarkable, and we would have seen even more of a blossoming of Trudy. I think she would have been able to bring so much help into the troubled relationship that we have with Indigenous people. She already has, with all that she’s already done.” 

In the last year of her life, Stewart was working at her dream job as a programmer for imagineNATIVE, and had recently received funding to write and develop her first feature film – something she had long aspired to do.

“It was the same dream that I heard about in film school many, many years ago,” says Windolph.

Had Stewart lived to tell the story, her feature-length film would have been about her personal experience recovering from intimate partner violence, and the healing process that she and her ex-husband underwent to co-parent their two children, Josh and Cali, and eventually become friends.

“She really wanted people to understand the process of healing from domestic violence,” says Windolph. “For both of us, the hardest part was picking up the pieces of our lives after, and building it into something new. I think she built herself into a really strong, wonderful friend and beautiful mother, and a very important part of her community.”

Windolph says that Stewart’s son, Josh, has expressed interest in developing the film on behalf of his mother someday. 

“He wants to carry out that project, and, in time, will start working on it,” says Windolph. “So, I feel her legacy will still keep moving on through her family, and definitely through the community that will continue to share stories about her and build on her work.”

Evie Ruddy is a socially engaged, interdisciplinary artist, and PhD student in the Cultural Mediations program at Carleton University. They are also the Transgender Media Lab’s first PhD Fellow. Currently, they reside on Treaty 4 territory in Regina.