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Poster for The Ballad of Crowfoot
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Released
1968 · FILM

The Ballad of Crowfoot

Directed by
Written by
Runtime
10 min
DocumentaryMusic

Synopsis

*The Ballad of Crowfoot*, released in 1968 and often cited as Canada’s first music video, was directed by Willie Dunn, a Mi’kmaq/Scottish folk singer and activist who was a member of the historic Indian Film Crew, the first all-Indigenous production unit at the National Film Board of Canada. The film offers a compelling examination of colonial betrayals, presented through a montage of archival images and a ballad composed by Dunn about Crowfoot, the 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy. As the Indian Film Crew’s inaugural release, *The Ballad of Crowfoot* was the first Indigenous-directed film produced at the NFB.

Credits

Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 1

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Scored by Willie Dunn

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