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Tasha Hubbard, filmmaker, director, writer, professor (born in 1973 in Saskatoon, SK). Tasha Hubbard is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Hubbard has directed several documentaries for the National Film Board focused on Indigenous rights in Canada. Her documentaries have covered subjects such as the death of Colten Boushie, the Sixties Scoop and Starlight Tours, which came to public attention in Saskatoon when police officers were charged with driving Indigenous men to the city limits and leaving them to freeze at night. Hubbard’s work has won a Gemini and Canadian Screen Award and has further been recognized with awards from Hot Docs, DOXA and the Calgary International Film Festival. Hubbard also serves on the Indigenous Advisory Council of the National Film Board. She is from Peepeekisis First Nation in Treaty Four Territory. She also has ties to the Thunderchild First Nation in Treaty Six Territory (see also First Nations in Saskatchewan).
Early Life & Education
Tasha Hubbard was born Carrie Alaine Pinay in Saskatoon in the spring of 1973. She was adopted at the age of three months by a couple from Avonlea, Saskatchewan. Hubbard was one of the children put up for adoption through what is commonly known as the Sixties Scoop. The system, in effect from the 1950s through the 1980s, took children out of Indigenous communities in situations where the provincial government felt doing so would be advantageous to the child, and put them either in foster care or up for adoption. Hubbard was adopted through the Saskatchewan Adopt Indian Métis (AIM) program. Though Hubbard notes she was lucky in having been adopted by a loving family, most Indigenous children were not as fortunate. Some were adopted to be used as a source of free labour. Some adoptees reported being sexually or physically abused. In most cases, social workers and adoptive or foster families had little to no knowledge of Indigenous cultures. As a result, key aspects of Indigenous cultures were not transferred from one generation to the next. Hubbard’s firsthand experience of the Sixties Scoop inspired her documentary on the subject, Birth of a Family, which is about four siblings meeting for the first time in adulthood.
At the age of 14, Hubbard’s adoptive mother asked her if she would like to meet her birth mother. Within two years, Hubbard had met both of her biological parents. Her biological father is Cree, and her biological mother is Cree and Saulteaux (see also Anishinaabe).
Hubbard has ten biological siblings, all of whom are younger than her. She met the first of them when she was 16 and the last when she was 22.
The multigenerational effects of the loss of culture caused by the policies of cultural genocide such as the residential schools or the Sixties Scoop can be illustrated by Hubbard’s experience in attempting to pass down her Cree language to her son. Though it is customary for mothers to be the first teachers to their children, particularly when it comes to language, she felt she wasn’t up to the task of fulfilling her child’s wish that she teach him Cree.
Both of Hubbard’s biological parents, as well as her biological mother’s parents and grandparents, were sent to residential schools.
Hubbard is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Arts and Science, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1994 and a Master of Arts in 2006. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Indigenous Literature and prose fiction from the University of Calgary in 2016.
Film Career
Tasha Hubbard’s first solo writing and directing project was Two Worlds Colliding, produced by the National Film Board. It premiered at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in 2004. The documentary concerned the Saskatoon police’s infamous “Starlight Tours” and subsequent freezing deaths of Indigenous people, predominantly men. The film won the Canada Award presented at the 2005 Gemini Awards (now Canada Screen Award).
Hubbard’s experience as a survivor of the Sixties Scoop laid the foundation for her 2017 feature-length documentary Birth of a Family, which recounts four siblings separated at birth reuniting as adults for the first time. It premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival that year. The film won the Moon Jury prize at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, as well as the Audience Favourite award at the Edmonton International Film Festival.
In 2019, Hubbard directed nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up which explores the death of Colten Boushie (see Gerald Stanley Case). It won the best Canadian feature documentary award at the 2019 edition of Hot Docs and the Director's Guild of Canada’s Discovery Award the same year. It was also the first film by an Indigenous filmmaker to open the Hot Docs film festival. The film won two awards at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival that year, including the Sun Jury Award and the Audience Choice Award for feature film. It also won the Special Jury Prize for Social Justice at the 2019 edition of the Calgary International Film Festival. At the 2020 edition of the Canadian Screen Awards, the film won the Ted Rogers Best Feature Length Documentary Award.
Hubbard’s 2024 film Singing Back the Buffalo is a feature-length documentary on the effort to rematriate buffalo to the plains of the North American interior. Rematriation is a concept put forward by Stó:lō academic and author Lee Maracle and describes restoring lands and cultures in a way that recognizes connections and values, particularly related to Indigenous cultures and laws. Buffalo, also known as bison, are a sacred animal to many Indigenous peoples and were a key source of food and clothing for thousands of years. While Indigenous peoples lived in relative equilibrium with North America’s once massive buffalo herds, the animal was nearly hunted to extinction in the 19th century. Hubbard’s documentary follows the cross-border effort of Indigenous communities and scientists to reintroduce buffalo to the lands they once ruled. The project built off Hubbard’s academic interest in the buffalo and the relationship with Indigenous societies. The film was nominated for Best Canadian Documentary and won the Audience Award for Canadian Documentary Feature at the Calgary International Film Festival in 2024. The film won the 2025 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival Documentary Feature Award in honour of famed documentarian Alanis Obomsawin. It also won the Special Jury Mention Nigel Moore Award at the 2024 edition of DOXA.
Academic Career
Tasha Hubbard is an associate professor at the University of Alberta. She is part of the Faculty of Native Studies as well as the Department of English and Film. She was formerly an assistant professor of Indigenous literature and media at the University of Saskatchewan. Her academic interests have focused on Indigenous efforts to return buffalo to the land as well as Indigenous film in North America more broadly. Since 2015, Hubbard has been working to support the Buffalo Treaty, a cross-border treaty between Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States that supports the restoration of buffalo to their traditional lands. She is also one of the founding directors of the International Buffalo Relations Institute.
