In 2021, the National Film Board decided to become a political organization. It adopted a grand plan to hire based on identity, create new management roles focused on enforcing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), promote progressive concepts like intersectionality and reconstitute its policies around race. And reconstitute it did. That year, it began restricting the use of archival footage by race.
As part of its DEI overhaul, the film board instituted an “Indigenous Content Moratorium,” halting the “licensing of archives, excerpts and photos portraying Indigenous participants to clients who do not self-identify as Indigenous (First Nations, Inuit or Métis).” The policy, which the NFB described as “temporary,” applies to about 600 entries in the archive. An archive entry that contains mostly white people and only one Indigenous person would not be covered, however.
