Everlasting is a film from the CCA’s 2023-2024 Indigenous Land Restitution Research Creation Fellow, multidisciplinary Haudenosaunee artist Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers. This experimental short film—a research-creation blending documentary and archival research in the cinema verité format—follows the place-keeping power of unbroken ties to territory through local seed saving and hide tanning initiatives. These ways of being and doing refuse settler-partitions of land and city—disrupting urban and reservation partitions—and more broadly the constructed forms of settler-geographies. Interlacing past-present-future across the backdrop of a shape-shifting metropolis, Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land is affirmed beyond the past—as everlasting.

The CCA thanks the Indigenous Screen Office for their generous support of this project.

Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers is a designer, pedagogue, and multi-media artist whose work reflects the interconnected relationship of land-body sovereignty. Nurturing her creative practice through land-based pedagogy and arts-based visual storytelling, her work has been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca and featured in public art events in Montréal, such as Festival TransAmériques and Festival Phenomena. Amanda’s co-directed short documentary-futurisms film, Our Ways (2022), has screened in Toronto, Ōtāku, Montréal, and London. A budding hide tanner, Amanda is a member of the Buckskin Babes Urban Moose Hide Tanning Collective producing fish skin leather and bone tools amongst honing other land-based skills. She has completed her first artist residency at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity’s inaugural Hide Tanning & Parfleche Residency in the fall of 2024. She is the CCA’s 2023-2024 Land Restitution Research-Creation Fellow.