June 9, 2010
Media contact: Anne Russell
Cell: 604-798-3709
Office: 604-795-2826
anne.russell@ufv.ca
Actress Tantoo Cardinal receives honorary doctorate from UFV
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| Tantoo Cardinal with her honorary degree, along with UFV chancellor Brian Minter (left) and UFV president Mark Evered. |
Storytelling comes naturally to actress
Tantoo Cardinal. Listening to stories told by people in her youth was an important way of learning about the world for the young girl growing up in northern Alberta.
When she reached adulthood, she felt pulled toward a more public form of storytelling: the life of a stage and screen actress.
Cardinal was part of the first generation of aboriginal actors to forge a sustained and successful career in the business. She’s been working steadily in the field since the mid-1970s, and has appeared in several high-profile films and TV productions, including
Dances With Wolves,
Legends of the Fall, and
The Englishman’s Boy.
In recognition of her long career dedicated to giving voice to the many stories of North American aboriginals, Cardinal is receiving an honorary degree from the University of the Fraser Valley this June.
As she is currently on set with her latest film, Cardinal will be accepting her degree virtually, through a video presentation at the June 10 morning convocation ceremony at UFV.
In some ways, Cardinal was in the right place at the right time to launch an acting career. Government regulations in the 1970s mandated broadcasters to include Canadian content in their schedules, opening up more opportunities for actors.
“I didn’t know much about acting, at least in the way of formal training, when I started out,” Cardinal recalls. “With the government mandating that Canadian stories be told, people started to say, ‘why not get native people to play native roles,’ and that opened the door for me and others. Once I started, I took to it like a duck to water. I really do consider it to be my path — I had a passion for it from the get-go.”
She began her acting career with a docudrama for the CBC and in productions for the Alberta Native Communications Society. She soon moved on to play larger roles in feature films.
Cardinal has worked in film or TV almost every year since the mid-1970s. If a project includes aboriginal characters, there’s a good chance you’ll see her in it.
She had key roles in
Smoke Signals, one of the first movies with an exclusively Aboriginal creative team;
500 Nations, an eight-part documentary on the Native Americans of North and Central America; and
Silent Tongue. Her other films include
Black Robe and
Loyalties. She has also appeared in TV shows such as
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and
North of 60.
To Cardinal, who is a Métis of Cree, Dene, and Nakota (as well as French and Ukranian) descent, acting is her way of contributing to society and addressing past and current injustices.
“I am not very impressed with how our people have been treated by the ‘immigrants’ to North America, or with the way we have been portrayed in the education system or society. I felt that I couldn’t join that dominant society, but I could do my part to set the story straight through my acting.”
She acknowledges that she’s been something of a pioneer and role model for aboriginal women actresses.
“When I was starting out, I couldn’t think of any native women actresses that I could point to and emulate, all I saw on the screen were white women painted brown, and I didn’t think that was right.”
Cardinal believes that infusing indigenous values into a dominant culture (one that she sees as largely constructed and controlled by white men) will benefit all.
“We — my mother’s people — are like an enzyme that can help make a healthier general society.”
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Tantoo Cardinal |
Although she points out that an actor’s life makes the top 10 list of stressful occupations along with air traffic controllers and bomb detonators because of all it uncertainties, she wouldn’t trade it for a more conventional path.
“It’s been a pretty exciting and adventurous career,” she notes. “There always something new on the horizon, more to explore, and more to learn. It’s been a school of life.”
She credits her upbringing within an indigenous tradition with engraining her with a storyteller’s world view.
“My faith and strength comes from the storytellers I was raised by,” she says. “Storytelling was a big part of our world and our means of survival. Where we lived we had to be handy — there was no corner store to save us, so we had to be innovative, alert, and think on our feet, and learn from the stories of our people. It’s how we were taught the important parts of our culture. We had to listen, watch, and really observe, and those skills have been very useful for me when it comes to character development.”
Cardinal has received a National Aboriginal Achievement award and the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian society. Now she can add an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of the Fraser Valley to the list.
“It’s wonderful to be receiving this honour from UFV,” she says. “It seems like a very community-oriented, arts-friendly, and accessible university. I come from a world where it was a very big deal when my aunt was the first in my family to finish high school. A lot of my people were intimidated by higher education, so it’s nice to see things changing.”
UFV has an “indigenizing the academy” process in place, an aboriginal resource centre, and several programs and courses with aboriginal content or focus.
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