To view the full film please visit vimeo.com/58408388
Identity is often revealed in the most perilous situations. In The Abenaki – People of the
Dawn, the first film in G. Scott MacLeod’s animated Canadian history series, it is Joe
Obomsawin’s intimate knowledge of the back roads and hidden trails on the frontiers
of Quebec and New England that narrowly saves a group of bootleggers from capture.
The escape also provides the impetus for his character’s powerful and deeply personal
retelling of the history of his people.
Huddled around a fire in a remote cabin, Obomsawin unfolds the tragic, improbable
and inspiring story of the Abenaki nation, reduced from 50,000 to some 1,500 over a
few hundred years of colonial settlement.
A collaboration between MacLeod and storyteller Mike Burns, from a story in Burns’
series The Water of Life, The Abenaki - People of the Dawn fuses traditional pencil
animation with new digital media to tell the harrowing tale of a people’s epic struggle
for survival.
