• GIINAWIND BAWAAJIGAN

    Featuring Songwriter Christa Couture & Author Cherie Dimaline
    Directed by Michelle St. John

    CHRISTA COUTURE sitting down

Amplify The Future

  • You don’t know if you have resilience unless you need to call on it, unless you are suffering. And then you discover the parts of you that come out to help you survive.

    Christa Couture

  • I was meeting these brilliant kids, and I was listening to them and I was realizing, you know, they had the language, they had the teachings, they were on the land, they had the stories, but they did not have the words that placed them as individuals or their communities in any sort of future.

    Cherie Demaline

Episode 12

Synopsis

Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous (mixed Cree and Scandinavian), queer, and a mom. Her seventh album Safe Harbour was released in 2020. Christa is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio and is currently the weekday after host on 106.5 elmnt fm in Toronto. In this episode, Christa sets out to create a new song that speaks to the harrowing journey the characters face in Cherie Dimaline’s award winning book The Marrow Thieves. Inspired by the theme of Indigenous resilience in the book and seeing that play out in the resilient Indigenous people around her she says, “You don’t know if you have resilience unless you need to call on it, unless you are suffering. And then you discover the parts of you that come out to help you survive.”

Métis writer and activist Cherie Dimaline features prominently in the episode reading excerpts from the book and explaining that it’s important to give Indigenous youth a vision of the future and a hopeful tomorrow. Part of the reason she wrote the book was to empower youth, she explains, “I wanted to build a world where they were absolutely everything. Where they were the heroes - where they were exactly what we needed to survive because I honestly believe that. They're heroes, we need them, we desperately need them.”

Part of being resilient is coming together as a community and creating things together so that all are unified and stronger for it.

The Team:
  • Director: Michelle St. John
  • Producer: Michelle St John
  • Producer: Jeremy Edwardes
  • Producer: Shane Belcourt
  • Executive Producer: Jim Compton
  • Executive Producer: R. Todd Ivey
  • Featuring: Christa Couture
  • Featuring: Cherie Dimaline
  • Cinematographer: Sean Stiller
  • Editor: Adam Phipps
  • Sound and score: Anthony Wallace




Exerpts

02 Feb 2018,Exerpt

Web Trailer

Cherie Dimaline reads from her award winning book The Marrow Thieves as Cree songwriter Christa Couture expresses why she made such a deep connection to this powerful work.

19 May 2018,Music Video

Rebuild

Watch the music video for Christa Couture’s song Rebuild. This music video was edited by Francis Laliberte.

  • mother and baby recording a song in studio
14 Jul 2018,Exerpt

Amplifier

Songwriter Christa Couture is accompanied by her producer Jim Bryson, as they walk through the songwriting and studio recording process for Rebuild.

  • CHRISTA COUTURE Songwriter



    Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer, and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous (mixed Cree and Scandinavian), queer, disabled, and a mom.

    Her seventh album Safe Harbour was released on Coax Records in 2020. As a writer and storyteller, her debut memoir How to Lose Everything published September 2020 with Douglas & McIntyre, she has been published in Room, Shameless, and Augur magazines, and on cbc.ca.

    In 2018, her CBC article and photos on disability and pregnancy went viral. Couture is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio and is currently the weekday after host on 106.5 elmnt fm in Toronto. Couture lived for many years in Vancouver, BC, but now calls Toronto home.

    WEBSITE
    woman standing in yellow outfit
  • Michelle St John Director



    Michelle St. John is a two-time Gemini Award winning actor, writer, singer, producer and director. As an actor, Michelle has appeared in Where the Spirit Lives, Smoke Signals, E.N.G. CBS’s Northern Exposure and more. Michelle was a Co-Founder of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, a Native women’s theatre company based in Toronto. For ten years, she and colleagues, Monique Mojica and Jani Lauzon created, produced and toured their original works, The Scrubbing Project, The Triple Truth and The Only Good Indian… across Turtle Island.

    As Co-Artistic Director of Red Diva, she has collaborated with playwright/director Marie Clements on several theatre, film and music productions including the The Edward Curtis Project, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian and acclaimed live productions of The Road Forward along with short films, Jesus Indian and Prison Chronicles.

    Michelle has recently joined forces with actor/writer Duane Murray and filmmaker Shane Belcourt to form a new production company called Wolfwalker Productions. Over the years working with Shane, she has produced several works including the short film, Apikiwiak, the documentary series Urban Native Girl, Heritage Minutes Naskumituwin & Chanie Wenjack and the feature film Red Rover. Their next feature film DUMBBELL is currently in development with Telefilm Canada. As director and producer, Michelle’s first documentary, Colonization Road has screened the world over and has garnered a Golden Sheaf Award from the Yorkton Film Festival and a Canadian Screen Award nomination for the Donald Brittain Award – Best Social/Political Documentary.

    IMDB
    michelle st john headshot

Rebuild was recorded at Woodshed Studio.

The Woodshed Studio is a discreet recording studio offering a casual yet professional environment for musical enlightenment located in downtown Toronto.

Address: Greektown, Toronto East End
Website: www.thewoodshedstudio.com
Filming locations: Another Story Book Shop, City of Toronto