In 1967, Winnipeg hosts the Pan American Games and 10 teenage boys are chosen to run 800 kilometres with the games torch. Nine of the young men are from residential schools. When the runners arrive at the stadium, they are not allowed to enter with the torch. Instead, a non-Aboriginal runner is given the honour. Thirty-two years later, the province of Manitoba issues an official apology. At a special ceremony during the opening of the 1999 Pan-Am Games in Winnipeg, seven First Nations men in their fifties enter the stadium in war canoes. Niigaanibatowaad is about the segregation of the First Nations athletes and the despair and abuse suffered by First Nations Children in the residential school system.