STONEY NAKODA – Dogs are going missing from their homes in Morley.
It’s part of an ongoing problem in the community and a group of young Stoney Nakoda First Nation filmmakers is getting ready to showcase its most recent documentary highlighting the issue.
The documentary, Ahomapénî: Relations and Rez Dogs, started five years ago when two women, Amber Twoyoungmen and April Poucette, discovered their dog was missing. It wasn’t until after they had searched through the whole reserve that they looked online at an animal rescue shelter website and found their pet. The description devastated the women.
“It said something about ‘this dog is homeless and sad, and he’s lonely, found on Morley (reserve) and needs some love,’ ” said Jarrett Tymen, the film’s director.
That’s when Tymen decided the topic would be his next undertaking, and he asked the two women to join the Nakoda Audio Visual Club (A/V Club) and start filming.
The focus for the film, and the issue on the reserve, Tymen explained, is the misconception that all the dogs at large on the reserve are strays. Instead, Tymen said some of the dogs are owned, fed and cared for, though allowed to run freely, while other dogs are abandoned on the reserve by communities nearby. “It’s a mess,” said Tymen. “We want to educate people.”
Tashina Ear, an interviewer for the documentary, said the dogs that are abandoned on the reserve are the ones that are starving, left to scavenge for scraps of food and end up dying.
“It’s affecting us in a way where we are seeing these dogs most of the time dead on the road,” Ear said. “We see their remains there and that attracts other wild animals.”
The goal of their film is to help make non-Nation people aware of the cultural differences in the way dogs are cared for in Morley and to put an end to city-dwellers abandoning their pets on the reserve.
It’s one of the longest films the A/V CLUB has worked on, just under one hour long.
The film also features interviews with representatives from the Cochrane and Area Humane Society, which Tymen connected with after seeing the workers on the reserve multiple times and were offering education to Morley residents on spaying or neutering their dogs to help control the growing dog population.
There is no set date for the first showing of the documentary, but it will likely be next month in Morley. The group hopes to tour in film festivals afterwards.
“I want everybody to see the film, because we need to educate people on what’s going on in the reserve … they think they know, but they don’t,” said Tymen, adding that though there are good intentions from those trying to bring the dogs to animal shelters, it’s making problems worse for the owners.
“The other thing is we would like to show the world what’s different between their world and our world,” said Kes Lefthand, animator and post-production for the documentary. He emphasized the importance that it’s locals who tell the story rather than outsiders.
Lefthand said he saw a previous documentary about dogs in Morley, but because it was produced by non-Nation filmmakers, he thought the story was skewed.
“We know what’s happening. Give us a chance to tell stories rather than have a city person come do it for us.”
