Piikaniksaahko (Piikani Land) – The Story of Home

Colin Van Loon & James Monkman / Dana Dansereau / Canada, Greenland & United Kingdom

Piikaniksaahko (Piikani Land): The Story of Home is an immersive VR documentary that places viewers within a vast teepee on Alberta grasslands, welcomed by a sacred circle of Indigenous storytellers. A Blackfoot elder opens this ceremonial space, invoking ancestral presence as five profound narratives unfold across territorial boundaries.
Through hybrid performance-documentary, we witness a starlight tour survivor’s winter journey home—police abandonment transformed into ancestral resilience, with cast members embodying their inner dialogue as they run through snow toward safety. An Innuk woman’s love story spans Hans Island’s contested shores, her words scored by haunting vocal bowls as she navigates choosing between heart and homeland. An Okanagan mother recounts her urban exile and territorial return, accompanied by a clown dancer miming Coyote’s gift of Iinii (buffalo), celebrating her son’s growth within the ancestral embrace. A British descendant discovers their Coast Salish lineage and is welcomed home by the community in a profound act of reconciliation, both physically and spiritually, answering the longing for home.
Testimony weaves documentary realism with Indigenous performance traditions, creating Indigenous immersive visual sovereignty. Viewers navigate between territories and testimonies, co-creating with their gaze, always returning to the heart of a central teepee.

In a climactic ceremony, a giant eagle approaches. Within its gaze, generations of ancestors from many Indigen nations appear. The cast calls in unison: “Call your spirit home.”

Blending VR technology with Indigenous storytelling methodologies, Piikaniksaahko interrogates fundamental questions: What constitutes home? Where we reside, or something deeper like the blood of our Ancestors and the rivers running through our lands or ancestral, spiritual, eternal longing and calls? Beginning in Niitsitapi territory, it radiates globally, offering a vision of Indigenous belonging that transcends colonial boundaries.
This is a documentary as ceremony, technology as tradition, and invitation as transformation. Call your spirit home!

Five cast members support our interview subjects: two actors, a musician, a Blackfoot Elder and a clown dancer who acts as a
mime. As the project comes to a close, viewers are invited to call their spirit home.
This project aims to evoke understanding, compassion, connection and appreciation of our Indigenous homelands.