Sweetgrass and CFWE news briefs - Jan. 6, 2016

Challenging film shooting a
worthwhile experience

January 6, 2016.
When The Revenant opens nation-wide
on Friday, Conway Kootenay will be on screen as part of the Aboriginal cast.
The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed in southern Alberta, including
Morley, Canmore area, Drumheller badlands, Kananaskis country, and Bow Valley.
“It was the most demanding yet rewarding movie set I have ever been on,” said
Kootenay, who runs in a variety of circles which include rapper and
motivational speaker. “It took my stunt team a month and a half to shoot the
first six minutes of this epic film.” The challenge, he says, was that Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu wanted
natural light and only used a single camera. Scenes were rehearsed all day and
shot during the last hours of daylight. “But being able to stand beside
Leonardo DiCaprio while going over scenes, playing soccer with Will Poulter and
hanging out with Tom Hardy made the experience very memorable,” said Kootenay.

January 6, 2016. Native
Earth Performing Arts is beginning its Canada tour of Cliff Cardinal’s Huff with a stop at Calgary’s
International Festival of the Arts Jan. 19-22. Cardinal won the 2015 RBC
Tarragon Emerging Playwright prize and is considered one of the most exciting
new voices in Canadian theatre. Huff
is the wrenching, yet darkly comic, tale of Wind and his brothers, caught in a
torrent of solvent abuse and struggling to cope with the death of their mother.
Wind’s fantastic dream world bleeds into his haunting reality, as he’s preyed
on by the Trickster through the hallways at school, the abandoned motel he
loves more than home, and his own fragile psyche. Cardinal expertly portrays
more than a dozen characters in his captivating solo performance. After Calgary
and a stop at the Rubaboo Festival in Edmonton, the tour heads to another seven
cities across the country.

January 6, 2016.  Treaties 1-11 Gathering will take place
Jan. 20-21 at the Marriott River Cree Hotel and Conference Centre at Enoch
Cree Nation. The event will be hosted by the Cold Lake First Nation. Chiefs,
leaders, technicians and members of Treaties 1-11 will participate in the
event, which will continue the dialogue on and implementation of sovereignty
and jurisdiction over First Nations lands, water, resources and ancestral
territories.

January 5, 2016.
Nominees for the Alberta Women Entrepreneurs’ Celebration of Achievement award
have been announced and there are at least four Aboriginal women among them.
Nominated for the annual award, which pays “tribute to an exceptional woman
entrepreneur who has built a business in Alberta with significant impact on the
economy and the community,” are Alice Sawan, with Eagle Medic Service Ltd.;
Beatrice Floch and Janice Larocque, with Spirit Staffing and Consulting Inc.
(Edmonton); and, Dr. Phyllis Day Chief, with Advanced Water Technologies Inc.
(Lethbridge). The more than 70 nominees will gather at a reception Feb. 17 in
Edmonton.

January 5, 2015. The
University of Alberta has noted its three Rhodes Scholarship winners, including
Billy-Ray Belcourt of Driftpile First Nation, among its top 15 stories of 2015.
Belcourt is the first First Nations students from the university to win a
Rhodes Scholarship. He will be doing health-related work as he pursues either a
master of science or master of philosophy at Oxford in 2016. Belcourt plans to continue working towards improved health
for Indigenous people when he returns to Canada, with a focus on developing
culturally specific HIV prevention models. Other top stories for the U of A
include international headline grabbing Cepheus, a Texas hold-‘em computer
program developed by the Computer Poker Research Group; antibody supplement
created by Hoon Sunwoo to help those with celiac disease; and, the new species
of long-necked dinosaur discovered by U of A paleontologists from a skeleton in
China.