Banchi Hanuse’s new documentary starts out talking about the ooligan, a fish that swims through the Bella Coola.This year, as well as recent years, the ooligan are coming to the Bella Coola much later than usual, which Qwaxw notices. Qwaxw is a host for Nuxalk radio, speaking to his audience in both English and Nuxalk. Nuxalk is a Salish language with only seventeen fluent speakers. Episodes of his show, just like the documentary, transitions from the ooligan and connects the fish to other, sensitive topics. These topics include the biological terrorism that the Canadian crown inflicted on the people living in unceded territory. The documentary mixes animation and contemporaneous footage to capture a people still feeling colonialism’s effects. Ceremony is a showcase of Hanuse’s eye as a director as she shows both nature’s beauty as well as how humans try to control it.

What viewers can see in Ceremony is a polished version of what we see in other documentaries about the environment – landscapes. But as I wrote above, these landscapes contain stories – stories like the one Nuxalk has of spending time with his late father. Or another culture protector of the Nuxalk, Nuskmata, making a home in her ancestor’s land despite Canada’s false claims to it. There’s an earnest nature of the storytelling that one can see both through the cinema verite interviews as well as the animation. These segments depict moments like bears and the Nuxalk leaning on each other, or children walking up to majestic mountains. Nature, in these animation segments, look just as majestic as they do in real life, a constant presence for Indigenous people. This isn’t the first time that the ooligan temporarily disappeared, and just like then, the Nuxalk work to get them back.