Film & Stage
Landmark
Chief Dan George
1899 – 1981
Chief of the Tsleil-Waututh, actor, poet and author
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Canada Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A hereditary chief who became an actor in his sixties and used the platform to say things about Canada that nobody in a film had said before.
Geswanouth Slahoot, known as Dan George, was chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation on Burrard Inlet from 1951 to 1963. He worked as a longshoreman, a logger and a school bus driver, and did not act professionally until he was sixty.
He took a part in the CBC series Cariboo Country and then, at seventy-one, played Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — the first Indigenous North American nominated in an acting category — and won the New York Film Critics award. He played Lone Watie in The Outlaw Josey Wales.
The work that mattered most in Canada was not a film. Asked to speak at a centennial celebration at Empire Stadium in Vancouver in 1967, before a crowd of thirty-two thousand expecting something ceremonial, he delivered the Lament for Confederation: a hundred years of Canada described from the other side, the forests taken, the children taken, the language forbidden, ending with a determination that his people would climb back. It was broadcast, and it is one of the few speeches in Canadian public life that is still recited.
He published two books of writing, My Heart Soars and My Spirit Soars, and refused throughout to play parts written as caricature — which in the westerns of that period meant turning down a great deal of work.
He took a part in the CBC series Cariboo Country and then, at seventy-one, played Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — the first Indigenous North American nominated in an acting category — and won the New York Film Critics award. He played Lone Watie in The Outlaw Josey Wales.
The work that mattered most in Canada was not a film. Asked to speak at a centennial celebration at Empire Stadium in Vancouver in 1967, before a crowd of thirty-two thousand expecting something ceremonial, he delivered the Lament for Confederation: a hundred years of Canada described from the other side, the forests taken, the children taken, the language forbidden, ending with a determination that his people would climb back. It was broadcast, and it is one of the few speeches in Canadian public life that is still recited.
He published two books of writing, My Heart Soars and My Spirit Soars, and refused throughout to play parts written as caricature — which in the westerns of that period meant turning down a great deal of work.
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