Across the Lake: A Multimedia Documentary Lecture

Across the Lake is available as a documentary lecture, keynote presentation, classroom program, and museum/community engagement event.

Across the Lake is a hybrid documentary project combining experimental nonfiction film, archival research, photography, maps, and live storytelling into a feature-length multimedia lecture. Expanding a short experimental documentary into a larger public presentation, the project brings together moving images, historical photographs, family archives, and Indigenous research to create an immersive form of documentary storytelling.

Rooted in multigenerational research, Across the Lake traces a family history shaped by borders, colonial histories, language, and changing understandings of citizenship and nationhood. Drawing from family photo albums, colonial archives, historical records, and place-based knowledge, the project creates a counter-narrative to dominant histories by examining how Indigenous families navigate and remember landscapes transformed by colonial boundaries.

Rather than presenting a comprehensive history of the Gunflint Trail, Across the Lake follows the intimate story of one family lineage as part of a larger network of Indigenous histories, relationships, and memories. The project considers personal archives as living documents; spaces where individual experience intersects with broader histories of land, migration, sovereignty, and belonging.

Through a combination of documentary filmmaking, Indigenous storytelling, archival research, and public scholarship, Across the Lake offers a unique format.

The documentary lecture invites viewers into a conversation about place, memory, and the ongoing effects of colonial borders through the combined languages of film, photography, maps, and storytelling.