Leaving Beringia

The origins of the first people in the Americas is one of the greatest mysteries of modern times. Some people claim the ancestors of today’s Indigenous people walked here across an ancient land bridge that once connected Asia and North America until about 13,000 years ago. Others say they paddled here by canoe along the Pacific coastline, then dispersed to every corner of the Americas more than 20,000 years ago. Indigenous people in every part of the Americas have origin stories that describe how their ancestors came from the sky, the water or the land below. There’s one thing that all of these concepts of arrival have in common - they all begin with a journey. 

In the feature documentary Leaving Beringia, Métis Cree filmmaker Barbara Todd Hager embarks on a life-changing journey to eight of the oldest Indigenous archaeological sites in North and South America, where she’ll discover that studying ancient tools is not the only way to uncover the ways of life of her ancestors. Filmed on location at sites that were once occupied tens of thousands of years ago, her ground-breaking conversations with Indigenous knowledge keepers and culturally aligned archaeologists will reveal a compelling new narrative of the first people of the Americas drawn from origin stories and Indigenous ways of knowing.