Denise Altvater of Sipayik had taken off her high heels and put on her slippers, after looking at all of the "great documentaries" that the film Dawnland was competing against for an Emmy Award at Lincoln Center in New York City on September 24. Altvater, who participated in the documentary film about the struggles to address the separating of Wabanaki children from their families in Maine, figured there was "no way we'd win." When Dawnland was announced as the winner for Outstanding Research at the 40th annual News and Documentary Awards, Altvater says, "It was the biggest shock I've ever had."
      Accepting the Emmy Award, Adam Mazo, the co‑director and producer of the film by the Boston-based Upstander Project, said, "Dawnland is a story for the Wabanaki people -- the people of the dawn land. Our film presents testimony from Wabanaki people who are being separated from their families, nations, tribes and communities by Euro‑American settlers like me. The greatest recognition belongs to the Wabanaki people who have lived that experience and showed immense courage in telling their stories or holding them in their hearts."
    Along with the Outstanding Research award, Dawnland composer Jennifer Kreisberg was nominated for Outstanding Music at the ceremony hosted by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In Dawnland, viewers witness Wabanaki people revealing their stories to a historic truth and reconciliation commission. The commission's headline finding is that cultural genocide persists in Maine because the child welfare system was removing Native children from their homes and tribes at an alarmingly high rate.
     Maine‑Wabanaki REACH created the truth and reconciliation commission, and both they and the community are at the heart of Dawnland. Wabanaki film participants and leaders from REACH, Altvater and her sister-in-law, Esther Anne, a Passamaquoddy who lives at Indian Island, joined the filmmakers on stage in accepting the award. Esther Anne said, "The recognition of Wabanaki people through Dawnland helps Maine‑Wabanaki REACH in our work to engage Wabanaki and non‑Native people in learning history, understanding intergenerational trauma and creating paths to healing."
     Dawnland co‑director Ben Pender‑Cudlip stated, "The award truly honors everybody who shared their stories with the truth and reconciliation commission. We want to uplift Maine‑Wabanaki REACH, who carry the responsibility of seeing through the TRC recommendations and working toward restoration to Wabanaki and non‑Native communities."
Esther Anne says she was "really pleased" that the film won in the category of research, noting that, among other findings, the filmmakers were able to locate two canisters of film showing the congressional hearings on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) from the 1970s that are the property of NBC.
     Maine‑Wabanaki REACH is a cross‑cultural collaboration that created and supported the Maine Wabanaki‑State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission. REACH is implementing the commission's recommendations and is focused on Wabanaki health, wellness, self‑determination and restorative justice.
     During the production of Dawnland, the filmmakers spent two years in and around Wabanaki communities, gathering more than 450 hours of footage and meeting tribal members and individuals affected by the state‑run foster care system.
     Altvater says that for her one of her hardest decisions in the truth and reconciliation process was to allow the filmmakers "to follow us." She notes that Native people are "always being researched," but she and other Wabanakis "felt it was important to record, so that other Native communities could duplicate our work." She points out that other tribes have had similar experiences with child welfare systems in their states.
     Dawnland has been shown many times throughout the U.S., and Altvater says the film "has provided educational and healing opportunities, not only in the state but the country." According to Dawnland impact producer Tracy Rector, a Choctaw/Seminole, the film is "being used in countless Native and non‑Native communities across the country, and is helping to support burgeoning truth and reconciliation processes in Minnesota, Michigan and Washington State."
     Altvater points out, "The film has opened up lots of hearts and minds in Maine about the negative impacts of colonization on indigenous people."

Improving the child welfare system
     In 1999, when it was clear that Maine was not following the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, a coalition of tribal and state child welfare departments was formed to improve the state's child welfare system. As part of that coalition, Altvater was involved during 2000 with the making of a film called Belonging about the issues concerning foster care in the state that was shown to 500 Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) workers who administer the child welfare system. As the only person who had been in foster care and who was a member of the coalition, she says, "I was the only one who had a story to tell."
     Her voice breaking with emotion, Altvater relates that her story of the foster care system begins when she was seven years old, which is when she and her five siblings were taken from their home while their mother was not there. "We didn't know why or where we were going," she says, or even who took them. She says it was part of a 10-year experiment by the Child Welfare League of America and the Bureau of Indian Affairs "to prove that Native children are better off in white homes."
     She says her experience in foster case "was a horror. The trauma was in being taken away from our home and our mom. It was the only place we knew as home. I couldn't see our mother for four years. I've been carrying that for my entire life."
     While the coalition conducted trainings with DHHS workers, she and others realized that "we needed to learn how to heal in order to impact how children are treated, so that what happened to me and many other children doesn't happen to future generations."
     They learned about truth and reconciliation projects in other places, and in 2013 Maine-Wabanaki REACH formed a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in Maine. During that process, Altvater recalls, "I had to tell my story over and over and over for two years. I found myself severely depressed and retraumatized myself. It took me through a journey of hell. I would not wish this on anyone." However, she says it was "so important for me to keep going, because silence doesn't work. Silence kills us."
     She was given space where "my voice was heard, and I wanted others to be given space, so they could heal from it." Telling the stories "would impact the state system of how they treated our children."
     "It's so important to do this. I hope people learn. It can help keep families together, so they don't have that trauma as children."
     The TRC process ended up interviewing 150 people, and Altvater says, "It was so heartbreaking listening to other Wabanaki people tell their stories. They're the ones who won the Emmy, with Ben [Pender‑Cudlip] and Adam [Mazo]."
     She says winning the Emmy was "a symbol that we did a good thing. The decision we made to have the TRC was a good decision." She hopes that those who have told their stories and struggled since they were taken from their homes as children see the Emmy Award. "This is to show us something tangible -- that the TRC still exists, in the movie and in the Emmy -- that it will always be there and never be forgotten."
     Esther Anne believes the award will help "keep in the spotlight" the efforts to uphold ICWA, which she notes is the gold standard for child welfare policies and is "always under attack." The taking of Native children from their parents and their tribes was "one of the most devastating strategies" in the effort by white people to "get rid of Native people" in order to obtain their land.
Esther Anne points out that Maine now has a child welfare policy that "honors the spirit of ICWA" so that child welfare case workers must make an active effort to prevent the breakup of a Native family. A tribal-state ICWA work group has been addressing the TRC's recommendations, with seven of the 14 recommendations focused on child welfare. The Emmy Award recognition will help in highlighting the work that REACH is now doing, so that "more seeds get planted for change," she says.