Tantoo Cardinal(I)

Learned Lakota for the Academy Award-winning film, Balla coi lupi (1990).

We had no TV where I grew up in my community in northern Canada, and the only images of native people that I was exposed to were my family and my relatives; these were wonderful and strong individuals whom I looked up to. It was only when I moved to Edmonton in Alberta in 1965, that I saw a different kind of image that was prevalent in Canadian society at that time, a negative image of native peoples as having no fixed address, and of being somehow 'lesser than.' Acting for me was a way to redress this imbalance; acting allows me to present a different kind of truth, to bring some light back into the stories of our history.