page_title: Tantoo Cardinal
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Tantoo Cardinal / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Hand Prints of Tantoo Cardinal, Aboriginal Walk of Honour, Edmonton AB
context_page_description: Tantoo Cardinal, CM is a Canadian film and television actress.
context_section_description: Cardinal has played roles in many notable films and television series, including Spirit Bay, Dances with Wolves, Black Robe, Legends of the Fall, Smoke Signals, Hold the Dark and North of 60. She was cast in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation mini-series By Way of the Stars with Gordon Tootoosis as The Cree Chief and Eric Schweig as Black Thunder.
  In 2009, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada "for her contributions to the growth and development of Aboriginal performing arts in Canada, as a screen and stage actress, and as a founding member of the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company".
  On August 23, 2011, Cardinal, Margot Kidder, and dozens of others were arrested while protesting the proposed extension of the Keystone Pipeline.
  In 2012, she performed the role of Regan in an all-aboriginal production of William Shakespeare's King Lear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, alongside a cast that also included August Schellenberg as Lear, Billy Merasty as Gloucester, Jani Lauzon in a dual role as Cordelia and the Fool, and Craig Lauzon as Kent.
  In 2017, she was named the winner of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement.
  In the 2018 film The Grizzlies, she plays a high school principal who is skeptical a first-time teacher can address social issues in the northwestern Nunavut  community of Kugluktuk.
caption: Hand print, Aboriginal Walk of Honour, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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