The power of stories, told over many nights, over many years, through all the languages across the world, are encapsulated in an intimate story between a grandmother and her children’s children on a clear winter night in the tipi. The grandmother speaks of the spirit of story, the spirit that exists in everything, and that we are star people – our spirits descended from the stars, and one day they will return. That the interchange between worlds happens at the apex of the tipi, and that we are never alone; our ancestors are always with us.

A story of creation and connection to the world around us. Stories travel down from the stars, as a new child does, and then return to the stars as the old person telling the story lights sacred medicine. Through the story of creation (Wacask) and birth of a single baby (us) simultaneously, we understand not the physical creation of the Earth, but the creation of an Indigenous worldview through the stories which hold it.

This animated film is a cinematic linear output of a piece that was originally created for an immersive space within the Indigenous Peoples Experience in Fort Edmonton Park, Canada. The original film was custom designed to play across seventeen twenty foot high screens and on three traditionally crafted, human sized teepees.