Miles Morrisseau
ICT
Kaniehtiio Horn’s rage has fueled her work as an actor, director and writer.
Those who know her performances as the Deer Lady who can slice up villains with her antlers in “Reservation Dogs,” or her lead role as Ziggy in “Seeds” — her heart-ripping, skin-peeling directorial debut — will know that rage.
She knows it, too.
“It was something that I realized when I was editing the film the same time the Deer Lady episode of ‘Rez Dogs’ came out,” Horn, Kahnawake Mohawk, told ICT in recalling her reaction to seeing the episode. “I was literally on the couch in the editing suite, and this episode came out, and people were talking about it online and stuff. And I said to my editor, ‘I think I have a lot of rage inside of me.’”
It has served her well.
She has a string of memorable performances – not just Deer Lady and Ziggy – in television series, comedy films, horror movies, and science-fiction. She started with her first role in a television mini-series, “Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis,” about the bitter land dispute between the Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Quebec, Canada. She was there at the dispute as a four-year-old, with her mother and sister among the protestors.
She went on to other performances, twice winning Canadian Screen Awards for her work in “Letterkenny,” a television sitcom about a fictional rural Ontario community. And in 2024, she won a Directors Guild of Canada Award for her directing debut, “Seeds,” which continues to draw acclaim. She also wrote and starred in the film.
The Oka Crisis
The rage may have had its roots for her, as for many Indigenous Peoples in Canada, with the Oka Crisis.
In the summer of 1990, Horn would become part of the longest armed standoff between Indigenous people and the Canadian Army in the history of Canada. Horn was with her mother, Kahn-tineta, and her older sister, Waneek, and a group of mostly women along with armed members of the Warrior Society who had joined in the protest to defend Mohawk land in Kanesatake.
The nearby town of Oka was trying to expand a golf course resort by cutting down a stand of pine trees that held burial sites on land the Mohawks consider sacred. The road leading to the trees was blocked.
On the morning of July 11, 1990, the Quebec provincial police force, the Surete du Quebec, raided the small blockade with automatic weapons and tear gas in an attempt to crush the protest. The police force was met with armed resistance and they retreated. Soon, the entire community of Kanesatake was under siege, and an SQ officer, Cpl. Marcel Lemay, was killed in the raid.
The standoff would last 78 days, with the final weeks of the siege under the command of the Canadian Army, who had taken over from the provincial police. The Warriors, community members and supporters made their last stand in the community’s treatment center. On Sept. 26, the group would not accept surrender but, instead, left the center and started to walk home. In the chaos that followed, as soldiers scurried to arrest everyone, Horn’s sister, Waneek, was stabbed in the chest by a Canadian soldier’s bayonet. She screamed in pain as she was thrown to the ground holding 4-year-old Kaniehtiio in her arms — an image caught in a photograph that became a defining moment in the standoff.
Another famous photograph from the standoff also remains with Horn — an image that has been burned into the minds of almost everyone in Canada of a certain age, as it came to represent the Indigenous uprising. It’s a photograph of a fresh-faced Canadian soldier staring nose-to-nose with a Warrior whose face is covered with dark sunglasses and a camouflage bandana.
It was right out of central casting, and it couldn’t have been more clear to the mainstream public who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
Relying on warriors
As a child, Horn knew the good guys as well as the bad guys. She knew the man in the dark sunglasses and camouflage bandana was protecting her family, and she created the character, Bandit, her love interest in “Seeds,” in that image.
“In terms of Indigenous male figures, that’s what I saw as a 4-year-old. That’s what protected me, that’s what I saw. Those were the types of men that I saw,” Horn told ICT. “And so I found myself as I’ve grown up … gravitating towards that type of man. And so that’s kind of how I wrote [Bandit], how I even dressed him, in camo pants, some boots, a warrior T-shirt and a hat, driving a truck. That’s hot to me; that’s protection for me, too.”
In the scene where her Bandit finally takes responsibility for his actions, Horn said she wanted him to have his bandana covering his face like a warrior. “That was intentional,” she said. “Someone was like, ‘You should do a take with it off,’ and I was like, ‘No, this is the entire purpose.’”
“Seeds” is dubbed a horror comedy, though some viewers see the film as too much horror and don’t see the comedy. Others see it differently.
“I find it interesting that most Indigenous people, I’d say all Indigenous people who watch it, they get it,” she told ICT. “And then the non-Indigenous folk kind of just take it like a horror film. They just see it as a scary home-invasion film. But then Indigenous people, like, really see it as a comedy.”
A ‘fun ride’
If there was one major influence, she says it’s “Home Alone.”
“I didn’t intend to write this food sovereignty film. I intended to just make a fun movie,” she said, citing the Macaulay Culkin home-invasion movie was her inspiration. “My goal was just to make a movie that is not too long, that you can have a fun ride with as an audience member, and that I have fun making with my friends. And all these layered, important, political aspects of the film were unintentional.”
The food sovereignty storyline in “Seeds” is an important one that resonates with people involved or aware of that movement. Protection of Indigenous seeds from multi-national corporations is real, and for Horn, corn, beans and squash are the most sacred seeds for the Iroquois. The home invasion is an attempt to steal the seeds.
As a filmmaker, Horn did intend for different jokes, references and Easter eggs to hit Indigenous people and miss larger audiences, but it goes deeper than that.
“My whole approach to it was kind of like, mainstream is not going to get this, or if they do, they’ll get a certain layer,” she said. “But then there’s a deeper layer for Indigenous people across Turtle Island, and then there’s an even deeper layer for specifically Haudenosaunee people. And then there’s an even deeper layer for people from Khanawake.”
The late Graham Greene played an important role in “Seeds” as Ziggy’s spirit helper. It touches on his long career with a reference to his role as host and narrator of “Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science,” one of the first true-crime series and in high rotation on Canadian television.
There is also a nod to his 1991 film, “Clearcut.” which spoke to the Indigenous rage that was rising across Canada following the Oka Crisis. For his role in “Seeds,” Greene won best supporting actor in a comedy on March 26 at the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards.” He died on Sept. 1 in Ontario, Canada, at age 73.
‘Palpable’ rage
Horn’s next project is a documentary about her mother’s activism in the 1960s, when Kahn-Tineta Horn grabbed the nation’s intention in one of the most outrageous protests in Canadian history.
Kaniehtiio got a grant from the Indigenous Screen Office in Canada to produce a short film that she wrote 10 years ago about the incident in the 1960s, when her mother was 27 or 28 years old.
“It was an act of activism, radical activism,” Horn said. “She released all of these rats in the building of the Indian Affairs in Ottawa, Canada … in protest against all of these municipalities that were dumping all of their garbage and waste on my community in Kanawhake.”
Her sister, Waneek, would go on to win gold as a member of Team Canada in water polo at the 1999 Pan-American Games and would captain Canada’s water polo team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Waneek would also appear in the hockey comedy show, “Shoresy,” for which Kaniehtiio served as a producer.
Horn finds art among the rage.
“Everybody talks about Indigenous healing,” Horn told ICT. “And, yes, that is all very important — healing and connection and all of that stuff. But, how come we don’t really talk about rage? We have every right to be angry, and we have every right to get angry in the present moment. Every morning, when I wake up, there are things right in my face. I drive around my rez, there’s a … bridge in my face. There’s a highway through my community.”
The Mercier Bridge connects Kanawakhe to Montreal, and during the 1990 standoff, the bridge was blocked by Mohawk Warriors in solidarity with the people who were under siege in Kanesatake.
“There’s all kinds of things,” she said. “It’s constant, makes you mad, and that can overwhelm. I abused substances for many, many years, and now that I’ve found this outlet … I’ve become a mother, but I’ve also found this outlet to create things and channel that rage into something a lot more positive than abusing myself.”
She continued, “But I mean, Indigenous rage and female rage is a real … palpable thing that we have every right to express and explore in healthy ways.”
“Seeds” is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.