Much like Hal and Joanne McLeod's fitness breaks for ParticipAction, Canada's hokey Heritage Minutes are embedded in the collective unconscious of most Canadian millennials. From Laura Secord's harrowing journey to warn the Mohawk about an impending American attack to those adorable little Irish orphans who desperately wanted to keep their Catholic names, the educational vignettes were overwhelmingly cheesy and presented a uniformly whitewashed version of our Canadian history.
In recent years there's been a desire to modernize the shorts and revisit the parts of our past that Heritage Minutes often glossed over. For this year's Black History Month Historica Canada created a video documenting Viola Desmond's fight against segregation in 1940s Halifax.
And today, in honour of National Aboriginal Day, they just released a powerful, heartbreaking video scripted by Indigenous author Joseph Boyden of The Orenda fame.
