Film and Multi-Media Indigenous Production Company

Featuring the awe-inspiring grizzly bear, this episode explores its powerful ecological and cultural impacts. Ktunaxa community members highlight their spiritual connection to grizzlies by keeping the ecosystem in balance, tracking wildlife, and harvesting traditional medicine. They reflect on a decades-long court case to save sacred grizzly habitat -- Qat’muk -- from development. Meanwhile, in coastal British Columbia, Gits’iis Nation guardians in the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary watch a mother grizzly teach her adorable cubs to find food and avoid dangerous males.

Each December in Sts’ailes territory, Eagles make their annual return to Harrison River, where they spend the winter feasting on salmon before returning north to Alaska. Three members of the Charlie family guide our riverside visit with this majestic species while also searching for an ancient cliff-side pictograph demonstrating Sts’ailes’ deep historic connection the Eagle. On the other side of the country, in PEI, Aaron Waddell and Gerald MacDougall are on a quest to find and tag young eaglets, leading a workshop with Lennox Island and Abegweit First Nations’ community members.

Indigenous communities foster the rematriation of the Bison, rekindling the critical coexistence severed by colonisation, and the removal of both the bison and Indigenous peoples from their homelands. These efforts are supported by Elk Island National Park who are raising bison and returning them to the lands they once roamed in vast herds. Elk Island handlers now prepare a bison transfer to Kikino Métis Settlement. Meanwhile, the Kainai Blood Tribe revive their cultural traditions and grasslands, and honour the Buffalo Treaty’s anniversary, celebrating reconnection.

Female and male salmon complete arduous journeys from ocean to interior BC rivers to spawn. The Syilx Okanagan Nation Alliance collects eggs and milt in their Indigenous-led initiative to restore Okanagan Valley salmon. Meanwhile, on the Eastern shores of Labrador, Nunatukavut community members gear up for the salmon fishing season launch, a deep cultural tradition they fought hard to protect. Back in the Okanagan, as spring begins, young salmon raised over winter at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s hatchery are ready for release, bringing the joy of reconnection to the community.

In the Northwest Territories, Tłı̨chǫ Ekwǫ̀ Nàxoèhdee K'è monitors brave the Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto Ice Road to track barren ground caribou. Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge, they are studying the impacts of mining, climate change, and overharvesting on this once numerous and now threatened species – one vital to their traditional way of life. In Pessamit Territory, Quebec, Innu brothers Eric and Michel Kanapé guide young Land Guardians, sharing the spiritual connection between Innu and the Boreal Caribou now threatened by deforestation and habitat loss.

On a cross-Canada journey, we explore how beavers ecologically shape human and wildlife communities. To monitor their environmental impact, Curve Lake First Nation's Gary Pritchard samples eDNA. Meanwhile, at the Beaver Hills Biosphere near Edmonton, beavers are emerging from lodges in spring. A medicine walk through this habitat reveals the beaver’s importance to surrounding Nations. Finally, in Merritt, BC, Indigenous students at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology learn about translocation, releasing a “nuisance” beaver into a new wetland home. 

A Shawanaga First Nation research team in Ontario tracks and collars wolves to investigate which species of this enigmatic and shy predator are reestablishing in their territory following widespread persecution. At Springwater Provincial Park, an Anishinaabe elder also shares his traditional teachings about Ma’iingan. Meanwhile, in the Yukon, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in organize their annual Moosehide Gathering with the paleontology team bringing a special guest. Zhur, an ancient, fossilized wolf pup, is received with reverence, strengthening community connections.