Our perception of movies about indigenous peoples is often one of troubled worlds not our own, and rarely of generational tensions typical of our own lives – between parent and child or elders and grandchildren.

That view needs changing, because the search for generational identity often provides the stuff of great moviemaking, and provides a leitmotif in the indie film lineup at next month’s imagineNATIVE film and media arts festival in Toronto (Oct. 15-19).

The fest has booked a series of films by women in which the clash between indigenous peoples and the whites, between ancient folkways and modernity, is merely a backdrop for far starker and more revealing storylines about clashing generations.

The opening-night film, Janelle Wookey’s Mémère Métisse, is an endearing documentary about a granddaughter getting her grandmother to admit and accept their Métis identity, long a family secret.

Wookey says the film, comedic and historical in parts, came about after she became an on-air host at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a job that exposed family ghosts her grandmother long kept locked away.

‘My mémère [grandmother] is embarrassed about her Métis roots, and I was going to be the face of APTN. So I started thinking about how that might affect her,’ the filmmaker recalls.

Eventually, standing in front of 19th century Métis leader Louis Riel’s gravesite, Wookey’s grandmother admits to a Métis past buried under shame and embarrassment as she recalls being branded a ‘half-breed’ as a little girl.

Wookey insists her film is not elder-bashing. Paradoxically, the film flatters her grandmother by allowing the matriarch to find new meaning – in a world that would demean her heritage – by treating her as a human being born of emotion and frailty, and not just a stereotype.

Other films in the imagineNATIVE lineup similarly capture women’s journeys with their mothers into unexamined pasts.

‘These are films about courage, and all seem to be tied into a woman’s worry, and her courage to face something,’ notes imagineNATIVE executive director Danis Goulet.

For example, Georgina Lightning’s directorial debut Older Than America offers a suspense thriller in which a daughter’s haunting visions reveal atrocities – including electric shock treatment and other medical abuses – that her mother and others suffered as children attending a native Indian residential school.

Lightning, who left an Edmonton reservation to act in Hollywood in the early 1990s (making appearances on shows including The West Wing and Walker, Texas Ranger), says generational stories work well in aboriginal-themed movies because the white culture long aimed to erase the history, culture, and language of entire native communities in Canada and the U.S.

So it’s natural for young native characters to seek to trace their family roots to discover their own identity and voice.

Older Than America, which stars Lightning, Adam Beach, Tantoo Cardinal and Wes Studi, uncovers, through flashbacks, a priest’s plot to silence a mother speaking the truth about her residential school experience.

As in Mémère Métisse, the generational conflict in Older Than America is ultimately resolved within the framework of a mother-daughter relationship.

‘Mama, what did they do to you?’ the daughter asks her mother, as she begins to probe corruption and criminality by local politicians and Catholic priests.

ImagineNATIVE has also booked Before Tomorrow, the debut feature from Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu that earned the best first-feature trophy at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

The Inuit drama about a grandmother and her grandson left to battle for survival on a desolate island after an encounter with white explorers is more than a grand narrative about first contact with white society.

Similarly, another imaginative entrant, March Point by Tracy Rector, Annie Silverstein, Cody Cayou, Nick Clark and Travis Tom is more than a documentary about dirty oil.

The film follows three at-risk teenagers (Cayou, Clark and Tom) from the Swinomish reservation in Washington State investigating two oil refineries poisoning the food supply on the edge of their community, and underscores a narrative of youth finding their voice and identity.

The film grew out of the young men’s initial escape from drug treatment and the court system. Rector’s filmmaking collective provided seed money for the investigation into bio-toxins in local shellfish. The filmmakers learned camera and interview skills, and questioned local elders about the refineries’ toxic impact on their reserve’s eco-system and indigenous way of life.

Eventually, the three unlikely interrogators took their camera and questions to the corridors of power in Washington, DC.

We see the trio overwhelmed by their first meeting with a U.S. senator. A second rendezvous, with a more genial congressman, goes better.

‘There were a lot of smart people, and we didn’t fit in because we didn’t have suits on,’ Cody says at one point.

But as the film closes, Cody, Nick and Travis find acceptance from their elders, with whom they had previously been in conflict.

‘With camera in hand, they posed questions to their elders, who opened up so the boys could learn,’ Rector recalls.

‘They learned they’re caretakers and have an active voice to bring people’s attention to pollution and its effect,’ she adds.