CBC MANITOBA: 100 MÉTIS PROJECT ASKS YOUTH WHAT THEIR IDENTITY MEANS

Winnipeg brother-sister duo Janelle and Jérémie Wookey aim to unite Métis youth online

CBC News · Posted: Feb 02, 2016 9:34 PM CT | Last Updated: February 3, 2016

Two Winnipeg filmmakers are asking 100 Métis youth to contribute 100 stories over the next 100 days about what their identity means to them and their families.

Siblings Janelle and Jérémie Wookey are asking Métis people ages 15 to 40 to record videos and upload them on a new website.

The filmmakers are creating a documentary about the process and the crowdsourced online videos are meant to serve as an archive for the Métis people as a whole, said Janelle Wookey.

"Hopefully it can serve as a portrait of who we are as Métis people today," said Wookey on Tuesday.

She found out about her own Métis heritage 10 years ago, until then her indigenous ancestry had been kept a secret in her family, she said.

"The whole idea of the project is really to get us all in one place and really hear each other out and try to get a better understanding of who we are," she said.  Janelle hopes the project will both define what being Métis means in 2016 and also shed some light on where the Métis people may be headed in the future.  "For us, there's a lot of potential in terms of what the Métis community has to offer the indigenous community as a whole [and] the Canadian community," said Janelle.

The idea for the project came from late Métis elder, Augustine Abraham, who the Wookeys interviewed. Abraham is the great niece of Louis Riel. "After she passed we went through some of our archives with her ... we had asked her a question about what was her wish for the future of the Métis people," said Janelle.

"Her answer calls on a unity amongst Métis youth," she said. Janelle and her brother designed their online project to give Métis young people a place to talk about their heritage in a way that's relevant, said Janelle. They hope it helps fulfil one of Abraham's last wishes for her people.