Award-winning book to become docudrama series

Métis/Cree filmmaker Barbara Todd Hager will be adapting the award-winning book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe to a three-part docudrama series titled On Distant Shores.

Todd Hager also owns Acimow Media, which she established in 2021. Acimow means “she tells her story,” in Cree.

The Indigenous-owned production company, based in Vancouver, specializes in the production of international Indigenous documentaries.

The book was optioned to the company by its author Caroline Dodds Pennock providing Todd Hager a certain amount of time to find financial support and a broadcaster for the series.

Todd Hager said she became interested in reaching out to Dodds Pennock after she read the book.

She travelled to Europe for other reasons but decided to reach out to Dodds Pennock directly rather than through an agent to see if she was interested in meeting up.

The two went for lunch and decided to move forward with the project.

“She agreed to having me direct the film and thought an Indigenous person director is the perfect choice for her,” Todd Hager said.

Dodds Pennock, a historian in the U.K., wrote the compelling story of how Aztec, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit, Iroquois and other Indigenous people from the Americas were taken to Europe during the early discovery of Turtle Island by European explorers.

“Truthfully, Barbara chose me,” Dodds Pennock said. “She came to me and said that she'd been reading the book and how excited she was about the stories that I've been telling and she's made documentaries before about Indigenous peoples travelling to Europe, although in a much later period with communities that she could interview and so on.

“It was incredibly exciting to be approached by an Indigenous-led production company because there are so few of those and it was really important to me to try and do justice to these stories.”

On Savage Shores includes a number of historical events surrounding travelers from 1492 and continuing into the early 20th century. Todd Hager chose to focus on three of these stories for the big screen, bringing the events surrounding the explorers and the Indigenous people they abducted.

“This is like history from the other side instead, from the European side, it’s like connecting Indigenous people to Europe,” said Todd Hager. “When they went over there and just like there’s some good stories and some pretty bad stories.”

Many of the abducted people died in Europe, while some survived but were permanently removed from their families, communities and cultural traditions.

“It’s all true stories,” said Dodds Pennock, senior lecturer in international history and department director at the University of Sheffield.

At the time she was researching the period of the Spanish invasion (of the Americas). “And, I started realizing that we hear an awful lot about Indigenous Europeans travelling west and very little about Indigenous people coming the other way,” she said. “The more I started looking out for these people the more I realized that were huge numbers of them.”

These histories of the people were taken from explorers Christopher Columbus, Jacques Cartier and Sir Walter Raleigh. They took place in Spain, France and England and will be highlighted in On Distant Shores.

“Jacques Cartier and Christopher Columbus, and these people that are kind of treated like they’re heroes and are celebrated explorers, actually had a very dark side which was abducting Native people and taking them to Europe,” said Todd Hager.

According to Dodds Pennock, this part of European history is rarely considered.

“People in Europe rarely think about Indigenous peoples as part of our history in a kind of local sense,” she said. “Also, I think people in the Americas rarely think about Indigenous peoples as transatlantic travelers in the popular imagination and so I realized that there was this much bigger history, this bigger story that became the book On Savage Shores.”

Now that Todd Hager has received the go-ahead, she will develop the script and treatment of how she envisions the docudrama. She will then take the package to broadcasters in Europe and Canada to obtain funding.

“I’ve already started pitching it to European broadcasters and there’s keen interest in Europe,” she said, adding one episode will be set in Spain, one in France and one in the U.K.

A goal is to get representatives from these countries to contribute to the funding and hopefully air the series.

She will also be presenting her package to Canadian producers to see if there is any interest in these companies licensing it.

This process is something very familiar to the award-winning producer, director and writer as she has produced four docuseries and many feature docs for APTN, CBC, CTV, CHUM, SBS/NITV, TELUS and many others.

In 2018 Todd Hager received the Canadian Leo Award for Best Documentary Series, Music Composer and Screenwriter for her eight-part docudrama The Untitled Story of the Americas Before Columbus, which was released in 2017.

“Our Indigenous stories are coming out,” Todd Hager added.