Wapikoni: the adventure of a traveling recording studio with a reconciliation mission

Wapikoni mobile, the traveling studio organization that is now a UNESCO and CCUNESCO partner and expanding its activities throughout the world, originated in the Atikamekw village of Wemotaci in the Mauricie region of Quebec. It was there that filmmaker Manon Barbeau worked with Indigenous youth to make a feature film.

Her enthusiasm for these budding filmmakers and for the outwardly disparaged identity of their community gave birth to a wonderful project – that of training hundreds of Indigenous young people to create films and music in Wapikoni’s traveling studios.

A gleam in the filmmaker’s eye

The filmmaker first became aware of Indigenous issues during a trip to the community of Pessamit on Quebec’s North Shore, where she discovered “another reality ignored by the rest of the world.”

Determined to pursue reconciliation between Canada’s First Peoples and the rest of the Canadian population, she started to write the screenplay for a feature film. In 2002, the project was well underway in Wemotaci when it was suddenly dashed due to the unexpected death of a young woman called Wapikoni Awashish, a co-screenwriter on the film, with the result that Manon Barbeau decided to change direction.

She then set herself the goal that she is still pursuing today – of giving cameras and other film equipment to Indigenous youth and letting them tell their own stories.

The little trailer that could

Soon after it was founded in 2004 by the Council of the Atikamekw Nation and what is now the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Youth Network, Wapikoni put its first traveling studio on the road to offer youth in outlying Indigenous communities the equipment required for their film and music creations.

During its approximately 15 years of existence, Wapikoni has trained many Indigenous artists and inspired many careers. Some of its participants subsequently studied at the renowned Gobelins school of visual communication in Paris, and another, Jani Bellefleur, became the first Indigenous graduate of the prestigious Institut national de l’image et du son (INIS) in Montreal.

Melissa Mollen Dupuis, Wapikoni’s current president, is one of those Indigenous youth for whom the organization made a difference. By discovering Wapikoni, she found a network of artists, filmmakers and musicians from every background who came to lend a hand to youth in both urban and remote communities – to give young people an opportunity to express themselves about the things they care about through a medium that was a natural successor to their oral modes of transmission: video.