Research Cluster Speaker Series: Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence

This ls a free event, but registration is required. 

This event will include a film screening of Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence by filmmaker, Ali Kazimi. Following the film screening, audiences will have the opportunity to interact with the filmmaker in conversation with Professor John Borrows.

About the Film

A film to international critical acclaim traces Indigenous matriarchs of the Sinixt community who were declared “extinct” by the Indian Act and have been reviving community traditions and fighting for recognition to save an ancient burial ground in British Columbia/Slocan Valley. Documenting three decades of struggle by leaders and members of the Sinixt community, Kazimi—a Canadian citizen who emigrated from India in the early 1980s—also reflects on the challenges and complexities of his and other racialized immigrants’ own complicity with settler colonialism while engaging in anti-racist and anti-colonial activism through scholarship and art (102m, English, Snsəlxcín, 2022)

About Ali Kazimi

Ali Kazimi is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and media artist as well as a full professor in film production in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. His cross-cultural relational practice deals with race, migration, memory, and indigeneity from a South Asian diasporic point of view. His documentaries have been screened and broadcast nationally and internationally; they continue to be widely used in post-secondary institutions. Continuous Journey (2004), his multi-award-winning feature documentary, brought the little-known history of the arrival and turning away of the Komagata Maru in 1914 into public consciousness, and catalyzed academic research, artistic creation, and activism. Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence – his most recent feature documentary - premiered at the 2022 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. In 2019 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from the University of British Columbia.

About Professor John Borrows

John Borrows B.A., M.A., J.D., LL.M. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Osgoode Hall Law School), LL.D. (Hons., Dalhousie, York, SFU, Queen’s & Law Society of Ontario), D.H.L, (Toronto), F.R.S.C., O.C., is the Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto Law School. His publications include, Recovering Canada; The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Donald Smiley Award best book in Canadian Political Science, 2002), Canada's Indigenous Constitution (Canadian Law and Society Best Book Award 2011), Drawing Out Law: A Spirit's Guide (2010), Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism ((Donald Smiley Award best book in Canadian Political Science, 2016), The Right Relationship (with Michael Coyle, ed.), Resurgence and Reconciliation (with Michael Asch, Jim Tully, eds.), Law’s Indigenous Ethics (2020 Best subsequent Book Award from Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, 2020 W. Wes Pue Best book award from the Canadian Law and Society Association). He is the 2017 Killam Prize winner in Social Sciences and the 2019 Molson Prize Winner from the Canada Council for the Arts, the 2020 Governor General’s Innovation Award, and the 2021 Canadian Bar Association President’s Award winner. He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2020. John is a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario, Canada.

A reception will follow the event. 

If you are a person with a disability and require accommodation, please contact us at crimsl.communications@utoronto.ca and we will do our best to make appropriate arrangements.

We hope to see you then!