Barbara Bickel

Bearing Bloodlines: Ancestral Invocations

Collaborative Ritual Performance with Tannis Hugill & Barbara Bickel
with Gregory Wendt, Director of Photography & Editor

Premier Screenings and Talk Back will take place in 2026

April 10, Gabriola Island, BC - ticket sales begin March 18th
April 12, Vancouver, BC - tickets on sale now
May 3, International Virtual Screening

All ScreeningTickets on sale soon

A mystical, spirit-led indy film of ritual, storytelling, song and embodied trance facing a legacy of colonial ancestry. 

Ritual Performance Description

Pulsating
opaque blood carries
memory and spirit of
ancestors deep within

The project incorporates ritual, embodied trance, storytelling, and ancestral puppets to connect and reconcile with the creators’ colonial ancestors. It serves as an initiatory creative model for difficult personal and collective acts of reconciliation between settler descendants and their ancestors. Thus, it seeks to humbly take responsibility for the traumatic impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and their lands.

This ritual performance video is intended as a teaching, in particular for descendants of settlers disconnected from their own ancestors, and original lands. In our experience we learned that our traumas could be healed and supported by loving ancestors, when witnessed by ancestral guides, each other, and the audience. This can lead to a vibrant source of creation and peace-building uniting humans across time and space.

Held within the container of sacred space, we honour the presence of two larger- than-life handmade puppets, each representing an ancient ancestral guide. These inspirited guides witness their descendants. Aided by familial hand-crafted relics, such as shawls and doilies, Tannis and Barbara enter the realms of their ancestors through embodied trance. Their stories unfold.

Barbara Bickel and Tannis Hugill

Fall 2025 Update

From September 20th to the 25th, we entered a magical time-space during our actual video shoot, with master videographer Gregory Wendt and our generous support team, Diane Conrad, carol weaver, Joanie Wright, Odette Laramee, Janice Power and R. Michael Fisher. We are also grateful to Brenda Joy of the Gabriola Historical Museum who facilitated permission to work in the forest behind the museum.

Our Ancestors infused every moment. The weather was perfect and we were visited by Kingfisher, Ravens, Eagle, Seals and Stellar Seal Lions. On our Gabriola Island ferry ride home a pod of Orca’s crossed our path and Tannis saw a humpback whale on her return ferry to Vancouver. Whales are known as guides by the local Indigenous peoples. We take the whale visitations as a good omen as we now enter and are guided in the creative editing process supported by a strong foundation for the sacred, creative reconciliatory work we are doing.

Our work has been to radically trust in our hearts, minds and bodies that this magical, miraculous process is guided by our Ancestors, who in mysterious ways are demonstrating their commitment to support the crucial inter-generational healing this ritual performance video is intended to reveal. 

We are now in the editing and formation part of the project and will open with a screening at the Dance Centre in Vancouver in April 2026, also in the spring we will be shown by the Gabriola Historical Museum. Then we will show it on-line to reach a wider audience.

With gratitude for the ancestral healing guidance of Sidheag MacLeod, an Ancestral Lineage Restoration and Repair Arts Practitioner, and for the Original Contact Welcome from Elder David Laxiya, a Snuneymuxw First Nations Knowledge Keeper,