Tracey Deer

Tracey Penelope Tekahentakwa Deer (born February 28, 1978, Mohawk) is a screenwriter, film director and newspaper publisher based in Kahnawake, Quebec.

Deer has written and directed several award-winning documentaries for Rezolution Pictures, an Aboriginal-run film and television production company.

Tracey Deer was born in 1978 and grew up in a large, close-knit Mohawk family in Kahnawake, a reserve in Quebec, Canada that is south of the St. Lawrence River, across from Montreal.

She attended local schools: Karonhianhnonha School Elementary and Queen of Angels Academy.

Deer moved to the United States for college, attending Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

She graduated with a degree in film studies.

Deer's first Rezolution/NFB co-production explored the lives of three teenage girls from her reserve.

They faced the same decision as she had at their age: to move away and risk losing their rights as Mohawks, or stay and give up the possibilities offered by the outside world.

Set during the Oka crisis of 1990, which Deer lived through as an adolescent, it stars Kiawenti:io Tarbell (Mohawk), a young actress from Akwesasne.

Set during the Oka crisis of 1990, it features a young Mohawk girl nicknamed "Beans", played by Kiwaenti:io Tarbell of Akwesasne.

Mohawk Girls received the Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Award at the 2005 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

Deer co-directed One More River: The Deal that Split the Cree.

This won the Best Documentary Award at Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois and was nominated for Best Social/Political Documentary at the Gemini Awards.

Deer became the first Mohawk woman to win a Gemini Award, for Club Native, a documentary on Mohawk identity, community, and tribal blood quantum laws.

The film received the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Canada Award for best Canadian multi-cultural program, while Deer received another Gemini for best writing.

Club Native also received the award for Best Documentary at the Dreamspeakers Festival in Edmonton, the award for Best Canadian Film at the First Peoples' Festival, and the Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Documentary at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

The film was co-produced by Rezolution Pictures and the National Film Board of Canada.

A spin-off of a short she had directed in 2007, it explores the lives of four young Mohawk women at Kahnawake making their way in the 21st century, including looking for relationships.

In 2008, she was the first Mohawk woman to win a Gemini Award, for her documentary Club Native.

In 2009, Deer collaborated with Montreal writer Cynthia Knight on Crossing the Line, a live-action 3D short for Digital Nations.

Deer and Knight also worked together in 2009 on the comedy television pilot Escape Hatch.

This was an NFB and Aboriginal Peoples Television Network joint project, featuring Aboriginal talent at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Her TV series Mohawk Girls had five seasons from 2014 to 2017.

She also founded her own production company for independent short work.

In March 2021, Deer's dramatic film Beans was featured at the New York International Children's Film Festival.

In 2014 it was picked up as Mohawk Girls (the same as her documentary) and ran for five seasons.

Deer formed her own production company, Mohawk Princess Productions.

She wants to produce her own short fiction films.

Her drama film Beans was featured at the New York International Children's Film Festival in March 2021.

In 2014, Deer wrote and produced the first season of Mohawk Girls, adapted from her documentary of the same name.

Broadcast on CBC, the show follows the daily lives and struggles of four young women who live in Kahnawake.

The fifth and final season was to be completed in 2017.

In April 2017, The Globe and Mail reported that there were rumours that authorities on the First Nations Reserve where Deer lives, and where her hit show is set, had sent her an eviction notice.

The Kanahwake membership rules do not allow non-Natives, even spouses, to live on the Reserve.

Deer said the rumour was false.

In 2019, Deer joined the writing room for the third season of the television series Anne with an E, loosely based on the classic book Anne of Green Gables.

In that season the writers added an indigenous storyline and new characters.

Ka'kwet, a young Mi'kmaq girl, is played by Mohawk actress Kiawenti:io Tarbell.

She befriends Anne, and her family members are also part of the season.

Deer is married to a non-First Nations person.