Tantoo Cardinal was living just two blocks from the evacuation line during January’s Los Angeles wildfires. That was, she tells me, “the last straw.” She relocated temporarily to Alberta as the city burned, but the situation only cemented an earlier decision to make a move back to Canada following the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “It was just feeling a little shaky,” she says, as we catch up by phone from her home in Edmonton. “I was feeling it right away.”

Of Cree and Métis descent, Cardinal— arguably Canada’s most significant Indigenous actor—says she has never been particularly tied to one side of the border or the other, moving back and forth too many times to mention since first heading to L.A. following her breakthrough role in Anne Wheeler’s Canadian drama Loyalties in 1986. Read More.