Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers

Birth Name: Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers

Place of Birth: Cardston, Alberta, Canada

Date of Birth: c. 1986

Ethnicity:
*Sami (father)
*Blackfoot First Nations (mother)

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a Canadian filmmaker, actor, producer, and curatorial assistant. She co-directed, co-wrote, and starred in, the film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, directed and wrote the documentary Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, and has starred in the films Blood Quantum and Night Raiders.

Her father, Bjarne Store-Jakobsen, who is from Norway, is Sami, and is a Sami rights activist and journalist. Her mother, Esther Tailfeathers, is a Canadian doctor, of Blackfoot First Nations descent, from the Kainai Nation. Her parents met at an indigenous rights conference in Australia. Elle-Máijá lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, and on Sapmi territory in Norway.

She advocates for issues affecting First Nations communities.

Source: http://elle-maija-tailfeathers.com

9 Responses

  1. nick says:

    Kainai First Nation/Blood Tribe should be specified, since ‘Blackfoot’ is a confederacy of 3 or 4 tribes

    • andrew says:

      @madman

      Her father Bjarne Store-Jakobsen is a Sami politician but…ethnically looks Norwegian.

      • madman says:

        Sami people don’t really look different enough for it to be obviously noticeable, I would say.

        • andrew says:

          Never been interested in the topic, but I alwais thought the Sami or Lapps were kinda Mongoloid people. Or perhaps nowadays there a few pure Sami.

          • passingtime85 says:

            Same, looking at old b&w photos of Laplanders it looks like they’re Europeans mixed with Inuits or Yakuts or some other nomad group from mongoloid stock.

          • andrew says:

            Some who identify as such look regular Scandinavian though.

          • passingtime85 says:

            Yeah, who knows what’s what though. We can see hundreds of old photos and they’re not necessarily representative of the thousands of Sami they we don’t get to see. Maybe that vaguely mongoloid look is more of a rarity than the photos reflect.

          • Oaken05 says:

            It’s definitely a cline. Depending on the community, some are more mixed with the East or West. Genetically, they are very much an isolate at their core, though, different from either the Finns or the Tungusic peoples to the east. But, they’ve assimilated a lot of those groups, too, so they show up in genetic research, too.

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