Alanis Obomsawin - The Vision of A Native Filmmaker PDF

r a n dolph lewis
Alanis
Obomsawin
The Vision of a Native Filmmaker
1
2
3
4 Alanis Obomsawin
5
6
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [-1], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 1
15
———
16
* 448.59999
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20
21
[-1], (1)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-2], (2)
13
14
Lines: 16
15 American Indian Lives
———
16 editorial board 0.0080
17 ———
18 General Editor
Normal P
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
19 * PgEnds: P
University of Illinois at Chicago (emerita)
20
21 Kimberly Blaeser
[-2], (2)
22 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
23 Brenda J. Child
24 University of Minnesota
25
R. David Edmunds
26
University of Texas at Dallas
27
28 Clara Sue Kidwell
29 University of Oklahoma
30 Daniel F. Littlefield
31 University of Arkansas
32
Tsianina Lomawaima
33
University of Arizona
34
35 Gerald Vizenor
36 University of New Mexico
1
2
3
4
5
6
Alanis
7
8
9
Obomsawin
10
11 The Vision of a Native Filmmaker
12 [-3], (3)
13
14
Lines: 95 to
15
randolph lewis ———
16
* 170.303pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20
21
[-3], (3)
22
23 University of Nebraska Press
24 Lincoln & London
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-4], (4)
13
14
Lines: 16
15
———
16
0.852p
17 ———
18 © 2006 by the Board of Regents
Normal P
of the University of Nebraska
19 All rights reserved * PgEnds: P
20 Manufactured in the
21 United States of America
[-4], (4)
22 䡬
⬁
23 Library of Congress Cataloging-
24 in-Publication Data
25 Lewis, Randolph, 1966–
Alanis Obomsawin : the vision of a
26
native filmmaker / Randolph Lewis.
27 p. cm.—(American Indian lives)
28 Includes bibliographical references and index.
29 isbn-13: 978-0-8032-2963-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn-10: 0-8032-2963-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
30 isbn-13: 978-0-8032-8045-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
31 isbn-10: 0-8032-8045-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
32 1. Obomsawin, Alanis—Criticism
and interpretation.
33
I. Title. II. Series.
34 pn1998.3.o24 2006
35 791.4302'33092–dc22
36 2005026933
1
2
3
4 Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box
5 that separates the dreamer from the dreaming. It was as
6 if we were stolen, put into a bag carried on the back of
7 a whiteman who pretends to own the earth and the sky.
8 In the sack were all the people of the world. We fought
9 until there was a hole in the bag.
10 Joy Harjo, “A Postcolonial Tale”
11
12 [-5], (5)
13 In the end it is all a question of human relationships.
14 Robert Flaherty Lines: 239 to
15
———
16
* 305.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20
21
[-5], (5)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-6], (6)
13
14
Lines: 27
15
———
16
0.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[-6], (6)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 contents
5
6
7
8
9 List of Illustrations viii
10 Preface xi
11
12 1. Abenaki Beginnings 1 [-7], (7)
13 2. Early Films 36
14 3. A Gendered Gaze? 70
Lines: 277 to
15 4. Documentary on the Middle Ground 88
———
16 5. Why Documentary? 122
* 163.17064
17 6. Cinema of Sovereignty 156 ———
18 Conclusion 195 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20 Appendix A: Filmography 207
21 Appendix B: Native Documentaries 215
[-7], (7)
22 Notes 219
23 Bibliography 241
24 Index 255
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 illustrations
5
6
7
8
9 1. Obomsawin in 1971 xxi
10 2. Obomsawin at a celebration
11 in Odanak, 1969 4
12 [-8], (8)
3. Portrait of the filmmaker, circa 1970 23
13 4. Obomsawin, 1971 25
14
5. Obomsawin singing onstage Lines: 33
15
in Montreal, 1976 27 ———
16
6. Obomsawin interviewed on Canadian * 28.171
17 ———
television, circa 1966 29
18 Normal P
19 7. Obomsawin at the National Film
PgEnds:
20 Board, circa 1975 33
21 8. Obomsawin during the making of
[-8], (8)
22 L’Ilawat educational kit, circa 1975 34
23 9. Obomsawin at a conference on
24 education, circa 1971 35
25 10. Publicity photo from
26 Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) 37
27 11. Obomsawin in 1967 during the
28 production of Christmas at
29
Moose Factory (1971) 39
30
12. Incident at Restigouche (1984) 49
31
13. Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary
32
of a Métis Child (1986) 54
33
34 14. No Address (1988) 56
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 15. Obomsawin performing traditional
10 Abenaki stories and songs, circa 1970 61
11 16. Obomsawin in 1983 during the
12 [-9], (9)
shooting of Richard Cardinal (1986) 71
13
17. Obomsawin during the shooting of
14
Mother of Many Children (1977) 86 Lines: 408 to
15
18. Obomsawin sleeping behind the ———
16
barricades while making Kanehsatake: * 42.83105p
17 ———
18 270 Years of Resistance (1993) 94
Normal Page
19 19. Across the razor wire in Kanehsatake:
* PgEnds: Page
20 270 Years of Resistance (1993) 100
21 20. My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995) 112
[-9], (9)
22 21. Randy “Spudwrench” Horne in
23 Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man (1997) 113
24 22. Mohawk families running a gauntlet of
25 rocks, bottles, and racist epithets in
26 Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000) 115
27 23. Native activists confront armed soldiers
28
in Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000) 116
29
24. Mi’kmaq women with lobster traps in
30
Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002) 166
31
25. Mi’kmaq roadblock in Our
32
33 Nationhood (2003) 170
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-10], (10
13
14
Lines: 41
15
———
16
0.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[-10], (10
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 preface
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-11], (11)
13
14
Lines: 419 to
15 I got off a plane in Montreal a few years ago, hopped into a taxi with
———
16 too many notebooks and not enough luggage under my arm, and
0.0pt PgV
17 asked the driver to take me to the offices of the National Film Board ———
18 (nfb). With a pensive frown and an old-world twist of his mustache, Normal Page
19 he put the car into gear and adjusted the mirror to give me a glance. PgEnds: TEX
20 Not a few seconds passed before he was compelled to ask why I was
21 going there? The Film Board? On a sunny day? It didn’t seem like very
[-11], (11)
22 much fun for an American tourist to visit a sprawling bureaucratic
23 maze so far from the cafés and sights of Vieux-Montréal.
24 I laughed and explained that I was meeting a filmmaker named
25 Alanis Obomsawin. Because documentary filmmakers tend to labor
26 under a shroud of semiobscurity, I was prepared to add that she was
27 an important Abenaki filmmaker who had been at the nfb since the
28 1960s and had made more than twenty films, some of them classics. I
29 assumed I would have to throw out a few film titles like Kanehsatake
30 and Rocks at Whisky Trench to evoke a glimmer of recognition, at least
31 after an awkward pause in which I would begin to wonder about the
32 relevance of what I do for a living. But I had no such need.
33 “Mademoiselle Alanis!” he exclaimed with delight, his voice thick
34 with a French Canadian accent as he wove through the light mid-
35 morning traffic. “Oui . . . I watched one of her documentaries on
36 television last night.”
xii PREFACE
1 “Really?” It seemed so improbable—Obomsawin’s films had al-

2 most never appeared on television in the United States.
3 “Oh yes,” he said, grinning in appreciation. “Ah . . . Mademoiselle
4 Alanis . . . Elle est magnifique!”
5 At that moment my suspicion was confirmed: Alanis Obomsawin
6 was not the usual documentary filmmaker. In the few years since
7 this exchange with the taxi driver, it has come to seem emblematic
8 of how she is regarded by those who know her work. Other sto-
9 ries come to mind: The student photographer who saw Obomsawin
10 shooting footage behind the razor wire at Oka and was inspired to
11 become a documentary filmmaker. The soft-spoken Métis woman,
12 hardly out of college, who glowed whenever her cinematic mentor [-12], (12
13 walked into the room. The prominent Native artist who gushed about
14 how Obomsawin had cleared a path for subsequent generations of
Lines: 45
15 indigenous mediamakers. The list goes on for quite some time before
———
16 a dissenting word is heard, and even then it is muted in nature.
0.0pt P
17 Indeed, by virtue of her myriad accomplishments and lofty reputa- ———
18 tion, Obomsawin could be considered the grande dame of Canadian Normal P
19 documentary filmmaking, if not the Canadian film industry in gen- PgEnds:
20 eral. Still one of Canada’s most distinguished filmmakers at the age
21 of seventy-two, she has made almost two dozen documentaries about
[-12], (12
22 the lives and struggles of Native people in North America. All these
23 films have their roots in her childhood experiences on the Abenaki
24 reserve called Odanak and in French Canadian towns such as Three
25 Rivers, where she spent her difficult adolescence. Then as now, cre-
26 ativity was her salvation. After a stint as a fashion model, she found
27 widespread acclaim as a traditional Abenaki singer and storyteller on
28 the folk circuits of the early 1960s. With friends such as the novelist
29 and songwriter Leonard Cohen, she became a fixture in bohemian
30 Montreal until her Native activism prompted the nfb to hire her as a
31 consultant in 1967.
32 Within a few years of joining the nfb, she seized an opportunity to
33 direct her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), a study of life
34 in a small northern settlement based solely on children’s drawings.
35 From that point forward, her career at the nfb blossomed, and she
36 added one of the first Native voices to the complacent Canadian
PREFACE xiii
1 media landscape. Over the following decades, she has produced ti-
2 tles such as Mother of Many Children (1977), Incident at Restigouche
3 (1984), Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986),
4 No Address (1988), and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993),
5 one of four films she made about her seventy-eight days behind the
6 barricades in the armed standoff known as the Oka crisis. Although
7 she has not received the audience she deserves in the United States, her
8 films have won numerous awards at film festivals in Canada, Europe,
9 and Asia, and Kanehsatake was shown on Japanese television to an
10 estimated audience of eighteen million. All her films have appeared
11 on Canadian television and in hundreds of schools and universities.
12 Few would dispute her stature as one of the leading figures in [-13], (13)
13 indigenous filmmaking in the world—save, perhaps, Merata Mita
14 in New Zealand, no one has been as successful and influential over
Lines: 470 to
15 the past decades. Obomsawin was one of the first Native filmmakers
———
16 inside the gated community of cinema, however it is defined, as well
0.0pt PgV
17 as the first Native staff filmmaker at the prestigious nfb, perhaps ———
18 the greatest center of documentary production in the history of the Normal Page
19 medium. Since breaking the barrier that kept Native people from the PgEnds: TEX
20 power of the mass media, she has become one of the most prolific
21 and interesting documentary filmmakers of any age or background in
[-13], (13)
22 North America. With a reputation that extends well beyond Canada’s
23 borders, she has been the subject of interviews and film retrospec-
24 tives from Auckland to Barcelona. Somewhat to my surprise, then,
25 is the fact that this book is the first one about this extraordinary
26 filmmaker—even more perplexing that it is the first book about any
27 indigenous filmmaker. How can this be true in the era of blossoming
28 indigenous media? In the era of Smoke Signals and Atanarjuat: The
29 Fast Runner?
30 I can understand this lacuna in the United States. Despite honored
31 appearances at Sundance and various American universities, Obom-
32 sawin remains little known within a self-satisfied nation for whom
33 its northern neighbor seems to exist primarily for stand-up comedy
34 punch lines and rustic beer advertisements. Add to that the enduring
35 metaphysics of Indian hating, and the result is a terminal neglect of
36 all things Native in the United States, unless routed through dusty
xiv PREFACE
1 Costnerian operas or Michael Eisner’s animated minions. If colorful,

2 soft-focus Indians are always welcome in the European American
3 imagination, real Native people, especially those with inconvenient
4 desires and sharp-edged politics like Obomsawin, are not.
5 The absence of a book on Obomsawin, or any other First Nations’
6 filmmaker, is more difficult to understand in the Canadian context.
7 In recent decades, Canada has gained a reputation—perhaps not
8 fully deserved, as Obomsawin’s films make clear—for casting a more
9 sympathetic eye on its indigenous inhabitants. On a personal level, I
10 know that driving north and crossing the border from Washington
11 State into British Columbia has brought this home to me. Moving
12 north through the Northwestern United States, one finds that the Na- [-14], (14
13 tive presence is muted in general and utterly silent on state and federal
14 property along the main highway. Then, when passing into Canada
Lines: 47
15 on the way to Vancouver, the first thing one sees is a totem pole
———
16 and other symbols of a strong First Nations presence, even on federal
0.0pt P
17 land. Because such symbolic moments are not uncommon, American ———
18 tourists such as myself are often surprised by how enlightened Canada Normal P
19 appears in regard to its indigenous peoples, almost seeming to have PgEnds:
20 an appreciation for Native cultures that is rarely found in its southern
21 neighbor, not even in havens for Native fetishism like Sedona or Santa
[-14], (14
22 Fe. In view of this general state of affairs above the Forty-ninth Par-
23 allel as well as Obomsawin’s prominence in the Canadian media, it is
24 harder to understand her relative absence in Canadian film studies,
25 unless one remembers the nature of that particular subfield. “Given
26 the fragmented, and underdeveloped, state of Canadian film studies,”
27 Zuzana Pick has observed, “the contributions of Native filmmakers
28 have yet to be documented.”1 Yet the literature on Canadian cinema,
29 like that on indigenous media, has been growing the last few years,
30 enough so that it was, I suspect, just a matter of time before a disser-
31 tation or book like this one came along. After all, Canadian writers
32 jump-started the serious interest in Obomsawin’s work in the 1980s
33 and 1990s, producing a few articles that illuminated the path I would
34 take in this longer study.
35 Indeed, years before I began to contemplate this book, Canadian
36 scholars working in film studies had made a strong case for Obom-
PREFACE xv
1 sawin’s significance. Jerry White praised her as “a true social film-

2 maker” whose work is “among the most vibrant and organically po-
3 litical in Canadian cinema.”2 In another outstanding article, Zuzana
4 Pick claimed that Obomsawin’s films “constitute a compelling and
5 politically important contribution to a family album where the sto-
6 ries of First Nations people in Canada are told, where their setbacks
7 and victories are recorded with anger, compassion, and respect.” Not-
8 ing the impact of Obomsawin’s efforts, Pick added that the filmmaker
9 “has been successful in altering common perceptions. . . . [H]er films
10 have fundamentally altered the way in which the cause of First Peoples
11 has been communicated to non-Native Canadians.”3 In a similar vein,
12 when Obomsawin was awarded the Governor General’s Visual and [-15], (15)
13 Media Arts Award in 2001, a Native writer celebrated, in a brief but
14 thoughtful article, how much her “sensitive, intimate, and poignant”
Lines: 486 to
15 documentaries have “changed perceptions of Native peoples.”4
———
16 Observers in the United States have not been entirely blind to
0.0pt PgV
17 Obomsawin’s accomplishment. One of the few exceptions has been ———
18 Bird Runningwater, who, as the programmer for the Native Amer- Normal Page
19 ican Initiatives at the Sundance Film Institute, has gone on record PgEnds: TEX
20 about the importance of her cinematic project. “If you look at the
21 history of the Native image in film, the vast majority of it has been
[-15], (15)
22 created without the consent and most often without the control of
23 the Native person whose image is being taken and utilized in media,”
24 Runningwater has said. “I really believe Alanis is using a medium to
25 provide a voice and a story for a lot of people who historically have
26 not had that opportunity.”5
27 Despite these moments of acclaim, Obomsawin has not yet re-
28 ceived the attention that she deserves in the United States or even in
29 Canada, and this may be a symptom of her commitment to docu-
30 mentary film, not exactly the most glamorous of métiers. The success
31 of Smoke Signals, Atanarjuat, and a handful of other fiction films
32 notwithstanding, nonfiction has been the medium of choice for Na-
33 tive filmmakers in general and Native women filmmakers in particu-
34 lar. Since the late 1960s Native filmmakers have produced dozens of
35 documentaries, creating a significant body of nonfiction work that
36 has never received the critical attention paid to Native literature, bas-
xvi PREFACE
1 ketry, painting, and sculpture—all of which might seem in synch with

2 the cultural traditionalism to which non-Native scholars have often
3 been attracted, even to the detriment of understanding new facets of
4 indigenous artistry and culture. I hope that this book will be useful to
5 scholars and Native communities because it offers the first in-depth
6 look at a key figure in the development of indigenous media across
7 the United States and Canada. I want to show that Native cinema
8 is more than Smoke Signals—that it possesses an unacknowledged
9 history going back to the 1960s, one with Alanis Obomsawin at its
10 center. Yet, even within the small world of “indigenous mediamakers,”
11 Native women have been slighted. For instance, the respected Hopi
12 director Victor Masayesva bills himself as the first Native filmmaker, [-16], (16
13 despite the fact that he was many years behind Obomsawin.
14 At the most personal level, I hope that my research will give Obom-
Lines: 49
15 sawin the credit that is her due. In an old-fashioned sense, then, this
———
16 book is an exercise in feminist canon busting that should prompt
0.0pt P
17 readers to wonder why this woman has been ignored while new books ———
18 on Ford and Hitchcock crowd onto library shelves with every pass- Normal P
19 ing week. I want to celebrate the new points of view that her work PgEnds:
20 brings to the cinema, and I hope to capture in prose something of
21 Obomsawin’s unique cinematic vision. Studies like this one can, I
[-16], (16
22 think, reveal how Native cinema has become as vital and interesting
23 as traditional art forms that have received far more attention and
24 resources. I don’t mean to have the last word. There is always more
25 to be said about an artist of Obomsawin’s caliber, and I hope that
26 this book will continue the conversation about her work until the
27 next scholar takes an interest. The same is true for other indigenous
28 mediamakers across North America: so many of them deserve the
29 careful appreciation that has been afforded visual artists with Euro-
30 pean roots.
31
32 Let me say a few words about the shape of the book so that the reader
33 knows what to expect. Although I have used the wildly disparate
34 writings of Patricia Zimmermann, John Grierson, Richard White, Eva
35 Garroutte, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Leonard Cohen to make sense
36 of one of the great unheralded careers in nonfiction cinema, the
PREFACE xvii
1 book follows a rather traditional chronological sequence. Here in the

2 preface, I describe the goals of the book and the motivations behind
3 it. I also introduce the notion of Other Visions, which alludes, not
4 just to other accounts of the past, but also to the pernicious process
5 of cultural “Othering” that Obomsawin has fought against. Much of
6 this is yet to come.
7 Then, in chapter 1, “Abenaki Beginnings,” I examine the formative
8 influences that brought Obomsawin to the screen, providing the first
9 careful look at her difficult experiences on the Abenaki reserve at
10 Odanak, before she found success as a model, singer, and traditional
11 storyteller in the early 1960s. I make creative use of her friend Leonard
12 Cohen’s fiction in order to glimpse something of her adolescence. [-17], (17)
13 Chapter 2, “Early Films,” explores Amisk (1977), Mother of Many
14 Children (1977), and Obomsawin’s other half-forgotten films from
Lines: 502 to
15 the 1970s and 1980s, using them to explore the emerging thematic
———
16 preoccupations of the filmmaker: the vulnerability of Native chil-
0.0pt PgV
17 dren; the importance of pan-tribal solidarity; and the continuing ———
18 toll of Native-white conflict on First Nations. In addition, I attempt Normal Page
19 to demonstrate that her filmmaking practice has deep roots in the PgEnds: TEX
20 Abenaki oral tradition in which Obomsawin was raised.
21 Chapter 3, “A Gendered Gaze?” considers what Obomsawin was
[-17], (17)
22 bringing to the screen in addition to a Native storytelling aesthetic
23 during her first two decades of filmmaking. So much attention has
24 focused on her groundbreaking role as a Native filmmaker that it is
25 tempting to overlook the specific nature of her accomplishment, as
26 if being “first” and “most prolific” were prizes enough. This chapter
27 attempts to tease out the nuances of her vision in one crucial area: the
28 gendered position of her filmmaking and how it relates to aboriginal
29 women filmmakers, not just in North America, but also in other
30 settler-states such as Australia and New Zealand.
31 Chapter 4,“Documentary on the Middle Ground,”gives an account
32 of Obomsawin’s seventy-eight days behind the razor wire at Oka, one
33 of the great unacknowledged acts of courage in the documentary
34 tradition. After showing the importance of Native filmmakers as wit-
35 nesses in moments of political crisis, I examine the four films about
36 the Oka crisis that occupied Obomsawin’s creative energies in the
xviii PREFACE
1 1990s, using them to make some larger points about her media prac-
2 tice. Transposing ideas that have been influential in history and an-
3 thropology, I show how Obomsawin has functioned as a cultural bro-
4 ker between Native and white on the “middle ground” of the Cana-
5 dian mass media and discuss the reasons why documentary might
6 provide an ideal meeting place between contemporary cultures—
7 something I explore at greater length in the following chapter.
8 Chapter 5, “Why Documentary?” asks a deceptively simple ques-
9 tion. In these pages, I hope to show why Obomsawin has relied exclu-
10 sively on nonfiction to share what she calls the voice of the people and
11 explore why Native filmmakers in general have turned to documen-
12 tary. Moving beyond issues related to indigenous media, I then engage [-18], (18
13 Mario Vargas Llosa’s recent “Why Literature?” to show how common
14 assumptions about literature’s role in transmitting ennobling human
Lines: 51
15 values might also apply to documentary cinema as practiced by film-
———
16 makers such as Obomsawin.
0.0pt P
17 Chapter 6,“Cinema of Sovereignty,” provides the first examination ———
18 of Obomsawin’s most recent work, exploring two documentaries, Is Normal P
19 the Crown at War with Us? (2002) and Our Nationhood (2003), that PgEnds:
20 deal with bitter disputes over the natural resources of First Nations. In
21 this final chapter I set out the notion of a cinema of sovereignty to de-
[-18], (18
22 scribe the representational strategies that Obomsawin has developed
23 for Native people.
24 In the conclusion I provide some thoughts on the state of indige-
25 nous media in 2006, before considering Obomsawin’s future projects
26 (such as a film on Abenaki history), her place in the current Abenaki
27 renaissance, her influence on various Native filmmakers who have
28 benefited from her pathbreaking career, and the wider significance
29 of projects such as hers in the current media environment. The book
30 ends with a bibliography, two filmographies, and information about
31 how to obtain the films under discussion.
32
33 More than hubris would suggest that the timing is right for this
34 project: indigenous media is a topic of increasing interest, not just
35 to First Nations hoping to convey their concerns to the world, but
36 also to the film studies, American studies, Native American studies,
PREFACE xix
1 and visual anthropology communities. Several books have appeared

2 in the past five years on Native American film specifically, but they
3 tend to focus on fiction film rather than the much larger arena of
4 Native American documentary expression—and certainly none have
5 highlighted questions of gender, documentary per se, and the larger
6 mediascape as I intend to do. One very partial exception was Beverley
7 Singer’s Wiping the War Paint off the Lens. For those who do not know
8 it, let me say that Singer’s brief book, along with Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s
9 Celluloid Indians, is a good starting place for anyone interested in
10 Native film.
11 I would like to think that I am well positioned to pick up where
12 Singer and Kilpatrick left off because, in addition to having written [-19], (19)
13 about Native artists such as Leon Polk Smith, I see my research on
14 indigenous media as a natural extension of my Emile de Antonio.
Lines: 534 to
15 An outsider artist working to create an alternative, cinematic history
———
16 of the United States, Emile de Antonio (1919–89) was often on a
0.0pt PgV
17 track parallel to those of Obomsawin and other Native filmmakers ———
18 struggling to bring tribal points of view to the larger public. Both de Normal Page
19 Antonio and Obomsawin’s films represent acts of resistance against PgEnds: TEX
20 the homogenizing effects of the global media, which have little left
21 very little space for unauthorized points of view. Both provided in-
[-19], (19)
22 dependent thinking in their cinema—an increasingly rare quality as
23 independent film has become a sloppy moniker that covers some art
24 and a lot of junk. Nowadays, low-grade emulations of Hollywood
25 product have appropriated the term as an honorific for no reason
26 other than taking cash from somewhat smaller corporate entities
27 or in somewhat smaller quantities. Sadly, true independent visions
28 have become a rare commodity even in nonfiction cinema, where the
29 “documentary conscience” once thrived in opposition to the abuses
30 of the state and private enterprise. Perhaps the unprecedented suc-
31 cess of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) will help reinvigorate
32 this part of the documentary tradition, although I fear that that film
33 will remain the exception that proves the rule (of Fox, abc, cnbc,
34 etc.)—after all, mounting pressure has been brought to bear against
35 the public articulation of dissent in the past two decades. The media
36 theorist Patricia Zimmerman cites “arts defunding, public television
xx PREFACE
1 retrenchments, attacks against cultural difference, and conservative

2 assaults against interventionist public discourses” as the factors that
3 have gnawed away at the public space where documentary thrives. 6
4 Thankfully, working well beneath the radar of those who had never
5 paid much attention to documentary before the media frenzy at-
6 tached to Fahrenheit 9/11, Native filmmakers like Obomsawin have
7 been giving life to this endangered species called independent docu-
8 mentary, restoring public space for something more than sound bites
9 and slogans, and offering thoughtful counterpoints to the meretri-
10 cious wares of the global media. Unlike the craven producers who
11 abuse the term in order to sell their film into an attractive niche
12 market or even the programmers at the not so Independent Film [-20], (20
13 Channel, Obomsawin is a real independent in spirit and practice, an
14 ironic fact given her position inside a government institution. Some-
Lines: 53
15 how, from within the bureaucratic confines of the nfb (and in many
———
16 ways because of her place there), Obomsawin has shot back at the ho-
0.0pt P
17 mogenizing narratives of nation and carved oppositional practices ———
18 into Western mediascapes. Somehow she has found independence Normal P
19 where others might have found dependence and despair. * PgEnds:
20 Geoff Pevere has claimed that writing about Canadian cinema in-
21 volves “stepping into the very heart of the country’s conflicted soul.”7
[-20], (20
22 I have not dared to probe into the essence of nationhood above the
23 Forty-ninth Parallel, preferring to leave such inquiries to writers with
24 the depth of knowledge that comes only from long experience. As a
25 U.S. citizen who has never lived north of Brooklyn (and even then
26 as a baby no less!), I can look into such matters only as a spectator
27 and, perhaps, only when accompanied by the likes of Obomsawin,
28 a thoughtful person who has stared into the grim paradoxes of the
29 Canadian soul, sometimes against her will, for seventy-something
30 years. I see as much as she is willing to share in conversations and on-
31 screen, although I try to look around the edges as much as possible,
32 hoping to glimpse the fundamental processes at work.
33 Up front, I promised modest aspirations for this book. Now I
34 have to backtrack somewhat to give this project one more frame,
35 one that will, I hope, not seem absurdly gilded and ostentatious: I
36 want the book to make a contribution to the emerging scholarship
xxi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [-21], (21)
13
14
Lines: 543 to
15
———
16
0.232pt P
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20
21
[-21], (21)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36 figure 1. Obomsawin in 1971. Courtesy of the filmmaker.
xxii PREFACE
1 on documentary expression now growing within American studies,

2 media studies, and elsewhere. In exploring the politics and poetics
3 of Obomsawin’s documentary practice, I touch on larger questions
4 about media and society such as: What can indigenous documen-
5 tarians teach us about carving out a democratic space for difference,
6 for dissent, in the postmodern mediascape? And what can we learn
7 about how to tell complex, critical nonfiction stories, about repre-
8 senting other North American “realities” that enable us to create a
9 democracy based on justice, equality, and inclusivity?
10 Answering these kinds of questions is more than intellectual cu-
11 riosity. Despite the best efforts of Obomsawin and others like her
12 and even the anomalous success of Michael Moore, we have lost sight [-22], (22
13 of what it means to have a vibrant and independent documentary
14 culture in the United States and, to some extent, in Canada as well,
Lines: 56
15 even though the wrong kind of documentary is everywhere we look
———
16 today. With the ascendancy of television “reality programming” such
0.0pt P
17 as Joe Millionaire, Survivor, or Big Brother, we are living through an ———
18 era that thrusts the pseudoreal in our face at every turn, and in the Normal P
19 years to come documentary expression will become even more im- PgEnds:
20 portant in shaping our vision of North American “reality” as well as
21 other realities—personal, local, tribal, national. And understanding
[-22], (22
22 this documentary expression, critiquing it, re-creating it, as scholars,
23 students, and citizens, will be essential to making our way through the
24 wilderness of dissent. In the spirit of great Abenaki outdoorsmen like
25 her father, Alanis Obomsawin provides an ideal guide for examining
26 this bitterly contested ground.
27 Skeptical observers might ask what importance a single filmmaker
28 could have to the grim panoply of big media corporatism and of-
29 ficial distortion. I would like to think that Obomsawin embodies
30 alternative media practices that could have a broader significance for
31 sustaining democratic values across cultural boundaries. I have high
32 hopes for what I call a cinema of sovereignty, a forum where cross-
33 cultural communication can occur without one of the parties being
34 ignored, silenced, distorted, Othered. As the media theorist John Fiske
35 has suggested, cross-cultural communication is becoming ever more
36 important for a peaceful planet, and we must ensure that the less
PREFACE xxiii
1 powerful culture in the equation is able to represent itself, rather

2 than being the mere object of representation. 8 Whenever possible,
3 we must learn to listen to difference without exoticization, to witness
4 it without objectification. Obomsawin has done this exceedingly well.
5 This ability to listen in peace, to contemplate what is being said,
6 is more than a luxury in the new century. More than most of us
7 realize, the electronic media have become the essential mechanism
8 for a global process of measuring our common ground with people
9 far from home, literally and metaphorically, and making judgments
10 about who they are to us, however those fields might be defined. In-
11 digenous filmmakers working to reinscribe the image of the Native in
12 [-23], (23)
the Western imagination (as well as in various tribal imaginations) are
13 just one example of this process. So often stereotyped and exploited
14
by mainstream media, Native peoples have shown how cultural and Lines: 590 to
15
political self-determination is intertwined with representational self- ———
16
determination—representational sovereignty, as I call it in the final 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
chapter. The Hopi documentarian Victor Masayesva has said that
18 Normal Page
indigenous media offer a journey for “tribal people to consider and
19 PgEnds: TEX
reflect on the White man’s most seductive and reductive invention
20
for conception and representation which we have today: film and
21
television.”9 I would suggest that it goes well beyond what Masayesva [-23], (23)
22
describes, that it may offer a path toward a degree of cultural and
23
24 political autonomy that few indigenous people have known in the
25 past century.
26 Several decades ago, Tillie Olson opened her classic Silences with a
27 dedication to “our silenced people, century after century their beings
28 consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human
29 life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—
30 anonymous, refused respect, recognition; lost.”10 I loathe the idea of
31 creative lives lost or neglected, and, in the case of someone as gifted
32 as Obomsawin, the shame is twofold: we have as much to gain as she
33 from the act of recognition. Without question, Obomsawin is one
34 of the relatively few figures that can be discerned in the long fog of
35 cultural invisibility that has engulfed First Nations people and their
36 artistry, like indigenous people almost everywhere. She is a portal
xxiv PREFACE
1 to something more than mere stereotype, as I hope this book will

2 demonstrate.
3
4 I turn first to the acknowledgments when I pick up a new academic
5 book—it is often the one place where a personal voice intrudes on
6 the official tone of the overeducated, the tone that conveys a great
7 distance covered, reams of pages scanned, infinite angles pondered,
8 but not, usually, a beating pulse. So it is with some relief that I spill
9 out some acknowledgments of my own, both of the conventional and
10 of the unconventional sort.
11 In the first category go the notes of appreciation. To scholars across
12 the United States who have informed and encouraged my thinking [-24], (24
13 through their words or writing—Bill Stott, Bill Nichols, Doug Kellner,
14 Ari Kelman, Norman Stolzoff, Jason Jackson, Patricia Zimmermann,
Lines: 60
15 Thomas Waugh, Alice Nash, and many more. To my colleagues in
———
16 the Honors College of the University of Oklahoma as well as the
0.0pt P
17 Film and Video Studies Program, where the ebullient Andy Horton ———
18 and other faculty members have offered continuing support of my Normal P
19 work. To the scholars, staff, and friends of the School of American PgEnds:
20 Research, most especially Kehaulani Kauanui, Gerald Vizenor, James
21 Brooks, Cam Cox, Nancy Owen Lewis, James Faris, Lawrence Co-
[-24], (24
22 hen, Jessica Cattelino, and others who challenged my thinking on
23 this topic during my nine months as a research associate there. To
24 Veronique de Silva and the other wonderful people at the National
25 Film Board in Montreal. To Jerry White and Jacquelyn Kilpatrick,
26 who reviewed the manuscript for the University of Nebraska Press
27 and helped me strengthen my arguments. And, finally, to the loves
28 of my life, Circe Sturm and our daughter, young Miranda Sophia,
29 who give me reasons to hope for a brighter future. What little I know
30 about Native American studies comes from talking with Circe and
31 people to whom she has introduced me over the years, whether in
32 Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Davis, California, or Santa Fe, New Mexico.
33 Yet it goes without saying that none of this project’s foibles were due
34 to her—I am quite able to cook up such things on my own.
35 In the second category go the less obvious sort of acknowledg-
36 ments, the ones that reveal where I’m coming from and how I got
PREFACE xxv
1 there, where I fulfill the inevitable curiosity of the reader, where

2 Abenaki speakers may wonder: Awani gi ya? Who are you? Is he Indian?
3 The short answer is no. I am pure interloper on Native ground—
4 there’s no getting around that, even if the long answer has its hems
5 and haws. Basically, I share with Carol Kalafatic the feeling that “my
6 family hasn’t told all the stories that would make my autobiography
7 possible” and have no clue what has been half erased from our ge-
8 nealogical charts in fits of Southern shame (although I have some
9 suspicions). 11 I can only go off lived experience and family narratives
10 to stake this claim: I am most likely the result of rank strangers on
11 the continent, some now happily ensconced in various postcolonial
12 contexts between New Jersey, Texas, and California, others still blun- [-25], (25)
13 dering in circles as if the proverbial boat were rocking over their
14 shoulder (put me in the latter camp out of solidarity with the un-
Lines: 610 to
15 consciously deracinated). For my father’s parents, the longshoreman
———
16 and the maid who immigrated illegally from Liverpool and Glasgow
0.0pt PgV
17 in the 1930s, the boat was quite literal. For my mother’s parents, the ———
18 illiterate logger and the kindly mother of twelve living deep behind Normal Page
19 the pine curtain of East Texas, the boat had long since receded from PgEnds: TEX
20 view—nine generations of Southern living tends to do that to white
21 folks, who are generally eager to forget their relatively recent arrival
[-25], (25)
22 and sometimes invisible dispossession of Native people in the name
23 of something (often quite risible) called civilization.
24 Fortunately, blood and history do not an ideology make, at least
25 not in every solitary case. As much as a maneuver of disavowal is
26 possible, I would like to imagine that I’m not from here, save birth
27 and culture and public school indoctrination and what now passes
28 for community bonds under the present military-industrial regime.
29 In this regard I am eager to fabricate a space for post-American and
30 post-Canadian musings, in the sense that these terms have stood
31 for exclusivist projects of subjugation and manipulation. I hope to
32 explore this emerging space for cultural critique through the lens of
33 Obomsawin, who has been expanding it into the cinema for thirty
34 years, and to do so without glossing over the white/male privilege
35 that follows me into cafés, parking lots, classrooms. I cop to that.
36 So why are we here? Well, in lieu of a clichéd statement of posi-
xxvi PREFACE
1 tionality, whose tropes I have already exploited to decent effect, I can

2 at least explain something about the motivation behind this project
3 (which, in some cases, is more important than roots). In writing as
4 an interloper on Native ground, the best compensation I can offer
5 is a hopeful spirit, a blend of critique and cautious optimism, that
6 infuses the project at hand. If it is not presumptuous, I want to share
7 Marianette Jaimes-Guerrero’s belief that “a more inclusive Indige-
8 nous movement is opening to the human spirit,” especially in the
9 classrooms of our high schools, colleges, and universities. 12 If this
10 book helps educators bring Obomsawin’s decolonizing perspective
11 into the classroom as a companion to her films and helps students
12 appreciate what she is doing, I will have accomplished something. [-26], (26
13 I claim no reward in terms of bank account for this book, perhaps
14 no great sacrifice in the semisolvent world of academic publishing,
Lines: 61
15 but something nonetheless. For this reason, I have assigned all author
———
16 royalties to the small Film and Video Studies Library at the University
* 67.580
17 of Oklahoma, where the large and diverse Native student population ———
18 has produced too few filmmakers thus far. I have asked that the money Normal P
19 be used to purchase the work of Native filmmakers such as Obom- * PgEnds: P
20 sawin, which can inspire the next generation of indigenous artists
21 and activists.
[-26], (26
22 For me the real compensation is personal—getting to know Ala-
23 nis, getting to learn new cinema tricks, hanging out with the sleek
24 cinemarobothèque at the Montreal nfb, home to a well-oiled research
25 assistant who never complains about fetching another film for pro-
26 fessorial amusement. Writing this book has been pleasure enough. It
27 has given me time to explore work I consider fascinating and under-
28 appreciated and to do so with the modest desire of sharing it with new
29 audiences, fully aware that, after pointing folks in the right direction,
30 I can recede from view and let Obomsawin’s other visions startle and
31 illuminate in ways to which my prose can only allude.
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
7
8 Abenaki Beginnings
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [1], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 5
15 Canada became a royal colony of France in 1663. Here
———
16 come the troops led by le marquis de Tracy, lieutenant-
general of the armies of the king, here they come march-
0.0pt PgV
17 ———
18 ing through the snow, twelve hundred tall men, the fa- Normal Page
19 mous regiment de Carignan. The news travels down the PgEnds: TEX
20 icy banks of the Mohawk: the King of France has touched
21 the map with his white finger.
[1], (1)
22 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
23
24 The last thing they wanted was an Indian to document
25 anything. Alanis Obomsawin
26
27 Early Years
28 Alanis Obomsawin does not know the exact place of her birth, only
29 that she was born somewhere near Lebanon, New Hampshire, on
30 August 31, 1932, and that, when she was an infant, she slipped into
31 a deep coma that neither her parents nor the local doctor could
32 explain. As the illness drained the life out of her, the doctor threw up
33 his hands in frustration and warned the family not to touch the sick
34 child. Death would not have been a surprising outcome to parents
35 who had lost two boys and two girls, none of whom had survived
36 their first year. 1
2 ABENAKI BEGINNINGS
1 Yet the story is far from over: in a scene that seems ripped from the
2 pages of mythology, an old Abenaki woman flings open the door and
3 dashes inside, grabbing the ailing child in a thick woolen blanket,
4 and then evaporating into the night. Frightened and worried, the
5 parents huddle together and discuss what is happening, deciding at
6 last that they must respect the mysterious actions of a tribal elder,
7 who, as they later learn, has taken their daughter north to a small
8 shack on the Abenaki reserve not far from Montreal. “She kept me
9 for six months,” Obomsawin marvels. “Nobody knows what she did
10 to me, but I survived.”2 It would not be the last time Obomsawin
11 defied expectations.
12 Reunited with her parents for at least part of her tender years, [2], (2)
13 Obomsawin grew up an only child on the tribal reserve at Odanak,
14 speaking Western Abenaki as her first language. 3 A small tribe with
Lines: 57
15 only a handful of fluent speakers today, the Abenakis have never been
———
16 the object of the obsessive attention that social scientists have directed
0.0pt P
17 toward certain tribes located on the plains or in the desert South- ———
18 west. Even within New England, their powerful Iroquois neighbors Normal P
19 tended to overshadow the Abenaki, leaving these so-called people PgEnds:
20 of the sunrise to live without much fanfare on lands in present-day
21 Vermont and New Hampshire as well as north across the Canadian
[2], (2)
22 border toward Montreal. For centuries they had resided in the great
23 interior of New England, fishing and hunting in the Champlain Val-
24 ley, the Green Mountains, the Connecticut River valley, the White
25 Mountains, and the Merrimack River valley. Much of their lands
26 were thickly treed with white pine, red spruce, northern hardwoods,
27 and hemlock, and wild animals were abundant—moose, deer, wolves,
28 black bear, muskrat, mink, raccoon, foxes, and skunk. Hunting these
29 animals would remain central to their lives well into the twentieth
30 century, owing in no small measure to the cold climate. Most of
31 their land was covered with snow for four or five months each year,
32 leaving a short growing season of 140 days, which did not encourage
33 the sort of farming practiced by their tribal neighbors to the south. 4
34 The traditional homeland would remain important to Obomsawin
35 throughout her life, even as it seemed to disappear under her feet:
36 “Long ago when our people, the Woban-aki, lived on our land in
ABENAKI BEGINNINGS 3
1 what is now called Vermont, a woman was washing clothes in the

2 river. There came a beaver, who sat on a rock. He began to sing, ‘I see
3 you Woban-aki losing your land . . .’ The woman ran to the village
4 and told the others. They did not believe her. But it really happened.
5 When the English came, they took all of our land and called it New
6 England.”5
7 For Abenakis, these moments of loss would continue long after the
8 initial contact with French and English colonists. As a small child in
9 the 1930s, Obomsawin grew up during a period in which the tradi-
10 tional Abenaki ways of life were being transformed, challenged, and
11 regulated. Even though she spoke the language, lived in an Abenaki
12 village and, later on, an official reserve, and bore a distinguished [3], (3)
13 Abenaki name, she lacked federal recognition. Like many Abenaki
14 people, she fell between the cracks in the Canadian bureaucracy for
Lines: 59 to
15 Indian affairs, which disenfranchised many tribal citizens who went
———
16 south into the United States for a period of time without making
0.0pt PgV
17 extraordinary efforts to preserve their “band status” north of the ———
18 border. It was one of many arbitrary rulings about who could claim Normal Page
19 official Abenaki status in the eyes of the Canadian government, whose PgEnds: TEX
20 policies also included such strange notions as an insistence on patri-
21 lineal descent—for much of the twentieth century, only those whose
[3], (3)
22 fathers had Abenaki blood were eligible for band status. 6 If such
23 official discourses of indigeneity were painful reminders of colonial
24 power in their midst, Abenaki families like the Obomsawins went
25 ahead with their lives, often in very traditional Abenaki terms, in full
26 awareness of who they were regardless of government edicts. “I never
27 had any rights,” Obomsawin complained later. “I never knew that
28 story—registered or not registered—all I knew was that I was Indian,
29 and that was that.”7
30 Like many Abenaki men before him, Obomsawin’s father was a
31 hunting and fishing guide, in his case laboring for wealthy whites who
32 owned a private lake and hunting lodge in the province of Quebec.
33 Seventy investors from the United States and Canada purchased the
34 lake and brought in men like her father to guide, cook, and maintain
35 the elaborate lodge, which was like “a small hotel with big fireplaces,”
36 as she recalled. 8 When her father was working, the family did not
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [4], (4)
13
14
Lines: 77
15
———
16
-1.008p
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[4], (4)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35 figure 2. Obomsawin at a celebration in Odanak in 1969.
36 Courtesy of the filmmaker.
1 have much opportunity to see him, getting to spend only a few days
2 visiting with him at the lake before having to return to the reserve.
3 This was not an unusual situation for an Abenaki family at this time.
4 During the 1920s and 1930s, men in the tribe turned their backwoods
5 prowess into modest commercial enterprises, earning a reputation as
6 the best outdoor guides that wealthy white sportsmen could hire. Yet
7 preserving their traditional ways was a challenge in this tumultuous
8 period in the life of the tribe. In the years between the world wars,
9 even more than in previous decades, cultural continuity mixed with
10 sudden transformation for the Abenakis. “If the tarpaper shack and
11 Winchester rifle replaced the wigwam and bow, the time and place
12 of deer camp and the respect for the game remained unchanged,” [5], (5)
13 the Abenaki scholar Frederick Matthew Wiseman has written, and
14 “stories from the Indian past and lessons about how to navigate on the
Lines: 77 to
15 river and lake were repeated over flickering campfires.”9 Obomsawin
———
16 seems to support this observation: even today, she can recall the sights,
0.0pt PgV
17 sounds, and smells of traditional Abenaki life from her childhood in ———
18 the 1930s. “In those days everybody made baskets and canoes,” she Normal Page
19 recalls. “They worked with the wood from many trees—especially PgEnds: TEX
20 the ash, spruce, birch, and pine—and sweet grass was an important
21 part of everyone’s daily life.” As she remembers, every house on the
[5], (5)
22 reserve had the fragrance of sweetgrass and ash splints curling and
23 drying from the ceiling. 10
24 Despite such picturesque scenes, the years between the wars were
25 a dangerous time for Abenakis in New Hampshire and Vermont,
26 far more so than for their brethren across the border in Canada.
27 Although affluent American whites had long enjoyed the rich hunt-
28 ing on Abenaki lands and the healing properties of their medicine
29 springs, they were now looking at their guides and healers through a
30 disturbing new lens of white ethnonationalism and eugenics. 11 Many
31 had decided that northern New England offered the last pure spot of
32 genuine Americana, even if this belief conflicted with the presence
33 of thousands of dark-skinned residents in the forests and valleys of
34 New Hampshire and Vermont. The latter state, in particular, became
35 the “great white hope” of New England, a mythical preserve of white
36 Yankee virtue, which encouraged some observers to wish away the
1 Native presence. For example, the popular writer Dorothy Canfield

2 Fisher depicted Vermont as a “no-man’s land without permanent
3 Indian residents.”12
4 Even worse than this burgeoning racist discourse were new govern-
5 ment policies that affected the Abenaki. In an atmosphere in which
6 the Ku Klux Klan was active across New England, the state of Vermont
7 began its “Eugenics Survey” under the guidance of Professor Henry
8 Perkins of the University of Vermont. State officials screened rural
9 families for “bad” genetic traits, with the result that many Abenaki
10 children were taken from their parents. As late as 2001, Wiseman
11 could note that the theft of children and “the hatred emanating from
12 the burning cross and Ku Klux Klan rallies” were still alive in the [6], (6)
13 memories of Abenaki elders. 13
14 Despite this general atmosphere of racism, some whites continued
Lines: 79
15 the old relationships with the Native inhabitants of New England.
———
16 Obomsawin recalls that her parents could make traditional medicine
0.0pt P
17 to cure sicknesses and that this knowledge was prized in the informal ———
18 economy extending well beyond the Abenaki community. “It was Normal P
19 against the law,” she recalls,“so it was an underground kind of thing.” PgEnds:
20 In some ways, working in traditional healing was akin to running
21 a speakeasy, especially after her mother became known for helping
[6], (6)
22 people pass kidney stones. Strange white customers would show up
23 at the door, frightened about a surgical procedure that Western med-
24 icine demanded, and nervously ask her mother if “you savages have
25 medicine?” Her mother would give them a bottle of something, tell
26 them to come back in several days, and often “their last trip would
27 be with the bag of stones,” the filmmaker remembers with a chuckle.
28 Her mother stored them in old tomato soup cans, which Obomsawin
29 played with as a young girl. 14
30 If the Abenaki people were useful sources of medicinal information
31 for local whites, this did little to protect them from the ill will of state
32 and federal legislators across New England. The nadir for the tribe,
33 at least in the modern period, came in 1931, when “An Act for Hu-
34 man Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization” was passed in Congress, 15
35 resulting in the not-so-voluntary sterilization of over two hundred
36 Abenaki women, a significant portion of the small tribe. In a climate
1 of terror and shame, some Abenaki families chose to forsake their her-
2 itage and pass into the most plausible white ethnic group they could
3 manage. “The safest ethnic refuge during the 1930s,” Wiseman has
4 written,“was the French Canadian community, since they shared our
5 religion, economic status, and other social and geographical traits.”16
6 Rather than attempting to pass into some form of whiteness (which
7 their appearance probably made impossible), Obomsawin’s mother
8 and father decided to pack up and leave Lebanon, New Hampshire,
9 for Odanak, the Abenaki reserve in Canada, following a pattern of
10 border-crossing that had long characterized Abenaki life. Obomsawin
11 was just six months old, having spent most of that time in the hands
12 of the Abenaki elder who saved her life, and now her family was [7], (7)
13 joining her north of the Forty-ninth Parallel.
14 Founded on the St. Francois River not far from Sorel, Quebec,
Lines: 85 to
15 in the early eighteenth century, Odanak quickly became the largest
———
16 Abenaki settlement in what was then New France, and by the 1930s it
0.0pt PgV
17 was a well-established tribal reserve. Although Obomsawin’s parents ———
18 were reunited with their infant daughter in Odanak, the family did Normal Page
19 not live under one roof: Obomsawin lived with her mother’s sister PgEnds: TEX
20 Jesse Benedict and her husband, Levi, who had six other children with
21 whom she spent long pleasant hours playing outside, even in the dead
[7], (7)
22 of winter. She has never said why she was not living with her parents
23 for much of her childhood, but, because her father was struggling
24 with tuberculosis, he may not have been able to care for her. We do
25 know something about her time in her aunt’s house. Aunt Jesse kept
26 a garden and fruit trees, which meant there was no shortage of food,
27 one sign of the resourcefulness that sustained Jesse on the reserve
28 when the Indian Act of 1876 required her to forfeit Native status for
29 marrying a white man. 17
30 Other kin in Odanak also left their mark on the young Obom-
31 sawin. “In my early years,” she reports, “I was very fortunate to have
32 two good friends, my aunt Alanis and an old man, Théo, my mother’s
33 cousin.”18 Her aunt showed her how to make baskets, while Théophile
34 Panadis taught her the old ways of the Western Abenaki, including the
35 songs and stories that would become a central part of her later work.
36 A fluent speaker of his language, the retired woodsman was one of
1 the most conservative traditionalists in the tribe. Panadis was such a

2 treasure-house of cultural knowledge that scholars began seeking him
3 out in the 1920s, regarding him, along with two other family mem-
4 bers, Ambriose Obomsawin and Siegfroid Robert Obomsawin, as the
5 best source for information about the Western Abenaki. 19 Between
6 Panadis and her Aunt Alanis, the young Obomsawin had a wealth of
7 traditional knowledge at her fingertips, something she appreciates to
8 this day. “Those two people gave me something special and strong,”
9 she remembers. “It was the best time.”20
10 The good times did not last for long. In 1941, when Obomsawin was
11 nine, her family left the reserve and moved to Three Rivers, a French-
12 speaking town just up the river. “That’s when the trouble began,” she [8], (8)
13 remembers. No other Native people lived in the town, and she was
14 forced to learn French as quickly as she could. “I attended a French
Lines: 89
15 school in the town’s slums,” she says. “That’s when they told me that I
———
16 was poor, that I was dirty, that we were savages.”21 The French Catholic
0.0pt P
17 children seemed unable to see the merits of a real Abenaki girl in ———
18 their midst, even though, at the very same time, another Native girl Normal P
19 from a neighboring tribe, the saintly Mohawk Kateri Tekakwitha, was PgEnds:
20 becoming the object of intense fascination, even adoration, among
21 North American Catholics. In 1940, Tekakwitha’s devotees prepared
[8], (8)
22 an elaborate dossier that summarized the reasons in favor of her
23 ultimate canonization, writing in terms that reveal the gender and
24 racial biases that Obomsawin had to confront as an Abenaki girl.
25 In describing Tekakwitha’s devotion to Christ, the dossier paints the
26 Iroquois as a “warlike” people, whose “savage girls” are “foolish and
27 very fond of beads” even at the age of eight. After noting the rarity
28 of Tekakwitha’s “unsullied purity” and “love of virginity” among her
29 peers, the dossier praises this “Servant of God” as a “genuine redskin,
30 the first of that great and sorely tried human family to be presented
31 to the Sacred Congregation of Rites as a candidate for the honors of
32 the altar.”22
33 If the white schoolchildren in Three Rivers could believe that
34 Tekakwitha had been a “small wild olive-tree . . . growing so well
35 that it would bear beautiful fruit,”23 most were unable to extend their
36 sympathetic vision to the world around them, where present-day
1 Native girls like Obomsawin sat in their churches and classrooms.

2 Indeed, the early 1940s were a difficult time to be Native in general and
3 Abenaki in particular. As a small, fragile population on the Canadian
4 border that most European Americans had forgotten or would have
5 preferred to forget, the Abenakis were never the first choice of dime
6 novelists or Hollywood producers looking for “Injuns” to populate
7 their reactionary fables. In some ways this neglect throughout the first
8 half of the twentieth century had been a blessing. Given the treatment
9 of Native peoples in popular culture even until quite recent decades,
10 the Abenakis were better off without the attention of the screenwrit-
11 ers and directors responsible for films such as The Massacre (D. W.
12 Griffith, 1913), The Vanishing American (George B. Seitz, 1925), Drums [9], (9)
13 along the Mohawk (John Ford, 1939), and Allegheny Uprising (William
14 A. Seiter, 1939). 24 Their good fortune, such as it was, was shattered in
Lines: 93 to
15 1940, when Obomsawin was an impressionable eight-year-old.
———
16
0.0pt PgV
17 Hollywood Abenakis ———
18 As Hitler’s tanks raced across Europe and Japanese pilots trained for Normal Page
19 their raid on Pearl Harbor, mgm studios set its sights on an older foe, PgEnds: TEX
20 one whose on-screen defeat would remind European Americans of
21 their ability to crush even the most bloodthirsty enemies of progress
[9], (9)
22 and civilization. Only months before the Nazi and Japanese armies
23 were confirmed as the new “savage” Other on which European Amer-
24 icans must set their sights, Hollywood turned its Technicolor gaze
25 on the original Other, focusing in particular on a small tribe that
26 had escaped its notice in the past. In the popular Northwest Passage
27 (1940), the Abenaki people became the sudden target of one of the
28 most racist films ever released. If less notorious than nasty screeds
29 like Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) or The Searchers (John
30 Ford, 1956), Northwest Passage deserves recognition as their ideologi-
31 cal equivalent as well as a black mark on the career of its director, the
32 erstwhile progressive King Vidor.
33 Northwest Passage starred Spencer Tracy as the colonial military
34 leader Robert Rogers (1731–95), whose “Rangers” had burned Obom-
35 sawin’s childhood home, the Abenaki settlement of Odanak, in 1759.
36 During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Rogers’s men were supposed
1 to serve as faux Indians after most of the real ones sided with the
2 French, but, instead of mastering the art of woodlands warfare and
3 passing stealthily into symbolic redness, most of them were no match
4 for the highly skilled French marines or Native warriors who engaged
5 them in the forests of New England. That Rogers ever became an
6 Anglo-American hero is a tribute to the power of cultural mytholo-
7 gies to displace and dominate the historical record. As one historian
8 has tartly observed: “What Rogers lacked as an irregular, he made
9 up as self-publicist.”25 In London in the mid- 1760s, his boastful and
10 inaccurate Journals became a literary sensation, obscuring the real
11 facts of his “adventures” with self-aggrandizing half-truths that did
12 not quite conceal the grim realities on which they were based. Here [10], (10
13 is how Rogers described the fateful morning of October 4, 1759, one
14 of the seminal dates in the historical imagination of Obomsawin and
Lines: 10
15 many other Abenakis: “At half hour before sunrise I surprised the
———
16 town when they were all fast asleep, on the right, left, and center,
0.0pt P
17 which was done with so much alacrity by both the officers and men ———
18 that the enemy had not time to recover themselves, or take arms for Normal P
19 their own defense, till they were chiefly destroyed except some few of PgEnds:
20 them who took to the water. About forty of my people pursued them,
21 who destroyed such as attempted to make their escape that way, and
[10], (10
22 sunk both them and their boats. A little after sunrise I set fire to all
23 their houses except three in which there was corn that I reserved for
24 the use of the party. The fire consumed many of the Indians who had
25 concealed themselves in the cellars and lofts of their houses.”26
26 Somehow, this massacre of semi- and noncombatants became a
27 defining event for Anglo-American culture in both the United States
28 and Canada, and, over the centuries, as Rogers was wrapped in layer
29 after layer of hagiographic gauze, he became an ideal subject for
30 a Technicolor epic. Yet, because Hollywood producers do not read
31 obscure primary documents, Rogers’s leap to cinematic prominence
32 required the intermediate step of Kenneth Roberts’s best-selling 1936
33 novel Northwest Passage. In crafting his “historical” narrative of the
34 raid, Roberts expended little effort in disentangling Roger’s mélange
35 of fact and fancy, but this did not keep the book from being treated as a
36 factual account. As the novel sat atop the best-seller list for almost two
1 years, the Atlantic Monthly exclaimed that it was “a great historical

2 document, which historians will acclaim,” while the New Republic
3 endorsed its vision of the past for “anyone interested in the making
4 of the nation,” including, rather sadistically,“present-day Indians.”27 I
5 could not find a single contemporary reviewer who expressed concern
6 about the treatment of Abenaki people in the book. 28
7 Despite the unsavory nature of Roberts’s narrative, mgm was quick
8 to capitalize on the success of his novel, lining up a respected direc-
9 tor (Vidor) and an A-list star (Tracy) to begin production in 1939.
10 Ignoring the quest for a “northwest passage” that consumed much of
11 the novel, the film version focused on the raid on Odanak and the
12 glorification of Major Rogers. In a green-fringed Robin Hood getup [11], (11)
13 that would supposedly let him pass as “Indian” in the cold forests of
14 New England, Spencer Tracy’s Rogers is one in a long line of white
Lines: 103 to
15 protagonists who is even more Native than the Natives. One of his
———
16 men brags: “The smartest Indian alive can’t think half as much like an
0.0pt PgV
17 Indian like Major Rogers can.” However, the filmmakers’ judgment ———
18 about “Indian thinking” seems clouded when Abenakis are depicted Normal Page
19 with an absurd trampoline-sized drum on which the major struts PgEnds: TEX
20 while giving a triumphal speech. The movie is filled with such freakish
21 inaccuracies, yet one aspect of the original event does filter through
[11], (11)
22 even the lens of Hollywood: the brutality of the raid, even in a film
23 with a celebratory point of view, still seems far from heroic.
24 Northwest Passage is one of those rare texts in which everything
25 is laid bare unintentionally, thereby allowing the secret history of
26 colonialism to seep through the celluloid and compete for recognition
27 with the “official version” that the filmmakers intended to honor. In
28 other words, the text is easily inverted from its normative mode. For
29 example, the film is drenched with extreme expressions of bloodlust
30 on the part of the colonists that seem like warrior machismo in one
31 light and mental illness in another. Explaining to new recruits that
32 his men eat like kings when prowling the north woods in their green
33 stockings, Major Rogers declares: “Of course, now or then they have
34 to stop eating to kill an Indian or two.” Perversely, one of his men
35 even manages to combine the two activities, wrapping the head of a
36 slaughtered Abenaki warrior in a leather bag and then gnawing on
1 pieces of it to curb his hunger. He even shares bits of the head with
2 fellow Rangers (who, to be fair, do not realize what he is feeding them
3 until later).
4 Perhaps because of the cannibalism and several scenes of or-
5 giastic killing inflicted on Abenaki people, Northwest Passage takes
6 great pains to legitimize their slaughter through didactic speeches
7 and asides that must have been especially hurtful to Native young-
8 sters of Obomsawin’s generation. In explaining the need for attack-
9 ing Odanak to his military superiors, Major Rogers reminds them
10 how the Abenakis had “hacked and murdered us, burned homes,
11 stolen women, brained babies, scalped strangers, and roasted offi-
12 cers over slow fires.” Throughout the film, Native people in general [12], (12
13 are described alternately as “dirty,” “red hellions,” “red skunks,” and
14 “weasels” fit for being “burned alive” or “skinned” if “their pelts were
Lines: 10
15 worth it,” but the Abenakis are singled out for special opprobrium,
———
16 suggesting to audiences that somehow the Abenakis are the ultimate
0.0pt P
17 enemy. In several melodramatic speeches, the audience is told that ———
18 the Abenakis had flayed and dismembered captured officers, even Normal P
19 pulling out their ribs one by one while the tortured men’s hearts PgEnds:
20 still beat and then “playing ball” with their heads. The unpleasant
21 dismemberment fetish runs throughout Northwest Passage, as the
[12], (12
22 director returned over and over to the vast quantities of white scalps
23 that the Abenakis had supposedly taken, including one scene of over
24 “seven hundred scalps” blowing in the wind near their wigwams just
25 before the raid on their village.
26 For audiences in the early 1940s, I suspect that this alleged bar-
27 barism would provide a symbolic link between “historical” Abenaki
28 violence and contemporary fascist aggression overseas, one that is
29 more than a product of my overheated imagination or presentist
30 orientation to the past. As the film scholar Jacquelyn Kilpatrick has
31 pointed out, when Northwest Passage was released in the United States,
32 the Department of Secondary Teachers of the National Education
33 Association recommended it for classroom use because “the success
34 of this hardy band of early pioneers symbolizes our own struggles
35 against bitter enemies in the modern world.” Another teacher’s guide
36 endorsed the film for illuminating everything from geography to
1 art (one of the Rangers painted and killed Abenakis), claiming that,
2 through the “fine assortment of types” among the minor charac-
3 ters, “we glimpse early American characteristics of which we are
4 rightly proud.”29 Presumably, this “fine assortment” did not include
5 the Ranger who descends into cannibalism, as the guide made no
6 mention of him.
7 In a recent book, the Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac writes that
8 he saw Northwest Passage as a young boy in upstate New York and
9 still remembers the trauma of hearing some of the final words of the
10 film. “Sir, I have the honor to report that the Abenakis are destroyed,”
11 Major Rogers tells his delighted superiors. While the rest of the au-
12 dience cheered these words, young Bruchac sat silent in the theater, [13], (13)
13 suddenly fearful. “That movie had made me afraid,” he said. The con-
14 nection between Bruchac and Obomsawin is more than tribal. The
Lines: 111 to
15 filmmaker grew up a few hours north across the Canadian border
———
16 from the best-selling writer, whose Abenaki family name, Bowman,
0.0pt PgV
17 is an Anglicized version of Obomsawin, making them distant rela- ———
18 tives. 30 For both of them, the popularity of Northwest Passage suggests Normal Page
19 a great deal about the general culture of Indian hating in which they PgEnds: TEX
20 grew up as well as the specific degradation of Abenaki culture that
21 they were forced to witness around them in the 1940s. It is no won-
[13], (13)
22 der that both would devote their lives to getting Native perspectives
23 into wider consideration, whether through writing, as in Bruchac’s
24 case, or through cinema, story, and song, as in Obomsawin’s. “In
25 hindsight, we can easily say that the native people of North America
26 were oppressed by three major forces,” Chief Leonard George, a First
27 Nations leader, recently said. “These were the government, religion,
28 and Hollywood.”31 For Alanis Obomsawin in particular, her creative
29 work would be a constant rebuke to the first and last of these forces,
30 government oppression and Hollywood distortion, undercutting the
31 Abenaki people.
32
33 Beautiful Losers
34 Obomsawin had other challenges in her preteen years aside from the
35 Abenaki bashing that Northwest Passage promoted. Because of her
36 family’s cultural isolation and meager income, her life was already
1 filled with uncertainties when in 1944, after several agonizing years in

2 and out of the sanatorium, working odd jobs when he could manage,
3 her father succumbed to tuberculosis. On her 1988 album Bush Lady,
4 she sings an Abenaki song called “Nzi Waldam” that seems to reflect
5 her situation at this upsetting time in her youth. The song is about a
6 young girl who hides in a ravine during Rogers’s raid on Odanak, an
7 event taught to generations of Canadian schoolchildren as a moment
8 of military heroism much like what was presented in Northwest Pas-
9 sage. Although popular culture had for centuries romanticized the
10 raid, the young Obomsawin also knew the tale from another source,
11 Théophile Panadis, a living link to the historical event. Abenakis who
12 were alive at the time of the raid has passed their stories to Panadis’s [14], (14
13 grandmother (born in 1830), who then passed them to Panadis and he,
14 eventually, to young Obomsawin. Nonnative historians used to doubt
Lines: 12
15 the accuracy of such oral transmission, but an ethnohistorian writing
———
16 in the 1960s noted that among the Abenaki such stories “seemed to
0.0pt P
17 have been passed on by an aged person carefully and deliberately ———
18 training young children until some of them knew the old stories ver- Normal P
19 batim, as an American child of my generation might know The Night PgEnds:
20 Before Christmas.”32 In this sense, only three long generations—in
21 fact, just three human voices—separated Obomsawin from a searing
[14], (14
22 event in the mid-eighteenth century, which may explain why it seems
23 so alive in her music.
24 Returning to the decimated village after the raid, the girl in Obom-
25 sawin’s song looks around and then cries out:
26
I am lonesome
27
Where are my friends?
28
Where are the trees?
29
Odanak is gone.
30
31 Odanak was not gone forever, not in 1759, and not for young Obom-
32 sawin, although the world of her childhood was shaken by violence
33 and loss. Soon after her father’s death, she endured another traumatic
34 experience that would affect her as much as the absence of her par-
35 ent. “I remember the exact change,” she says, thinking back almost six
36 decades to the beginning of her dark times at Three Rivers. Having
1 started school late, she was the tallest in her class but was beaten up
2 almost every day. After her father’s death she vowed that it would
3 stop. One night she sat alone at home, thinking about the teacher,
4 Mlle Réault, a stern woman who grabbed her arm and dug long red
5 fingernails into her flesh, who talked to the white children about
6 “savages” committing “massacres” throughout Canadian history, and
7 who glorified events like Rogers’s raid on Odanak. “I was the lone tall
8 savage at the back of the classroom,” Obomsawin wrote sardonically.
9 “When I grew older, the same people who had beaten me up for years
10 and years started flirting with me. It was strange. It took me a long
11 time to lose the hate.”33
12 Fighting back was the key to her transformation, a lesson that [15], (15)
13 would echo throughout her later work as a filmmaker and storyteller.
14 She remembers how she responded to racial slurs: “I never believed
Lines: 146 to
15 what I was told I was. I knew that there was a lot of wrong there. Every
———
16 time I tried to do something they would tell me,‘Oh you can’t do this,
0.0pt PgV
17 you’re an Indian!’ The more they said that to me, the more I said,‘Well ———
18 I am going to do that anyway.’ I was just a fighter. I just wanted to Normal Page
19 make changes.”34 She was tired of hiding her face behind her textbook PgEnds: TEX
20 when the children glared at her during history lessons; she was tired
21 of children ganging up on her when she came onto the playground
[15], (15)
22 for recess; she was tired of planning secret routes to get home without
23 being followed, taunted, and struck. Suddenly one night, she fixed on
24 a plan: she would watch the entire classroom of thirty-two children
25 and pounce on the first one who turned around in hate, planning to
26 make an example that the others would not forget.
27 “It seems to me I had eyes all around my head when I went back
28 that day,” she remembers. When her classmates launched into their
29 inevitable harassment, she leaped on the first girl who locked eyes
30 with her, grabbing and punching while the nun watched in mute as-
31 tonishment. “I had her on the floor and she got so nervous she peed,”
32 Obomsawin recalls, “and the nun was so shocked she didn’t react.”
33 Nobody reacted even though the white girl was screaming. With the
34 child at her feet and the nun frozen at the chalkboard, Obomsawin
35 stood up, glared at the class, and demanded: “Who’s next?” All of
36 them turned back to their studies, seeming intimidated by the tall
1 Abenaki girl in the back row. “I made my stand there,” Obomsawin

2 remembers, telling the story like she had told it many times,“but then
3 there were many places that I had to make my stand.”35
4 Another place was the schoolyard, where she tried out her new
5 strategy of resistance. Over and over she had heard the taunt of
6 sauvagesse while standing on the edge of the games that the white
7 children played. Emboldened by her outburst in the classroom, she
8 positioned herself with her back flat against the brick wall so that
9 no one could sneak behind her and waited for someone to call her
10 “dirty savage.” She counted the insults . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .
11 four . . . She knew that five was an arbitrary number, but she had de-
12 cided that “when they say it five times I’m really going to get mad.” As [16], (16
13 soon as a white girl uttered the fifth insult, Obomsawin said: “Come
14 closer, I can’t hear you. Can you repeat that?” When the girl foolishly
Lines: 15
15 obliged, Obomsawin struck her with her fist. “It was like plugging
———
16 an iron in the wall,” she remembers. “I would get so mad, I’m telling
0.0pt P
17 you, so mad. Five times, and then the fight would start.” Even after ———
18 this second eruption against the intolerance of her peers, she faced Normal P
19 the same old taunts on the way home, although the beatings started PgEnds:
20 to taper off. “I was very skinny,” she says. “I wasn’t a big girl, but that
21 is how I got them to stop beating me.”36
[16], (16
22 Today, when asked about her childhood and the suppression of
23 her most basic rights, Obomsawin tells her interviewers a few rep-
24 resentative stories. When pressed for more than what she normally
25 provides, she pulls back, saying: “I don’t like to talk about that time
26 because it was very bad.” Perhaps we can glimpse something of her
27 adolescent experience through creative refraction, through the wild
28 lens of her friend Leonard Cohen’s imagination. Like Obomsawin,
29 Cohen, a Jewish bohemian, was a cultural outsider in white Christian
30 Canada. After he switched from writing celebrated novels and poetry
31 in 1966, just before Obomsawin began her turn from singing to film-
32 making, he morphed into a counterculture icon the likes of which
33 Canada had never seen. Emerging as something along the lines of
34 the Bob Dylan/Jack Kerouac of the Great White North, he received
35 international attention for his morose, half-spoken love songs such
36 as “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne.” Although his songs have a
1 lyrical richness that seems out of place in contemporary popular

2 music, it is in his creative writing, not his songs, that we can find
3 traces of Obomsawin.
4 In more ways than one, Obomsawin’s childhood memories were
5 at the root of Cohen’s most important novel, Beautiful Losers (1966).
6 Born in 1934, just two years after Obomsawin, into a traditional Jewish
7 family in Montreal, Cohen had gone to prestigious McGill Univer-
8 sity, formed a county-western band called the Buckskin Boys, and
9 then won major awards for his poetry and prose with works carry-
10 ing titles such as Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Flowers for
11 Hitler (1964). A glamorously brooding figure often seen in a cape and
12 [17], (17)
beret, Cohen was intertwined with half of Montreal’s sizable milieu
13 of artists and intellectuals, earning a reputation as a “lover of women
14
and eternal hipster . . . the Rock and Roll Lord Byron.”37 He knew Lines: 154 to
15
Obomsawin quite well during this period, well enough to spend a ———
16
fair amount of time at her apartment. On one occasion he noticed 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
an old book about Kateri Tekakwitha, that seventeenth-century “lily
18 Normal Page
of the Mohawk” who, as noted earlier, was the first Native woman se-
19 PgEnds: TEX
lected for beatification en route to sainthood in the Catholic Church.
20
Taking Obomsawin’s copy of the rare book with him on a trip to
21
Greece, Cohen used it as an important source for Beautiful Losers, [17], (17)
22
along with a farmer’s almanac, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha,
23
24 and, I believe, conversations with Obomsawin. 38
25 The last is an angle on Beautiful Losers that has not been explored,
26 in part, I suspect, because it does not reflect Obomsawin without the
27 distortion that novelists find necessary to execute their own idiosyn-
28 cratic visions. The alterations were so great that, when Obomsawin
29 is asked in interviews if she served as Cohen’s inspiration for fleshing
30 out the dead saint, the subject of the narrator’s agonized musings
31 over redemption, Obomsawin’s cryptic response is to laugh and say,
32 “You’ll have to ask Leonard,”39 which might obscure the fact that her
33 connections to the Tekakwitha character are slight. Granted, Cohen
34 seems to have used her stories about the town of Three Rivers, where
35 Tekakwitha’s mother had been baptized and educated: “a lousy town
36 for an Indian girl,” Cohen writes, explaining in an aside that he had
1 just been told this by “a young Abénaqui who went to school there.”40
2 But this is small piece of the puzzle.
3 The novel is stocked with telling references to Abenaki life that
4 seem to have come from Obomsawin, although Cohen has never said
5 as much, even in the guise of his narrator, an unnamed anthropolo-
6 gist who is an “authority on the A——s, a tribe I have no intention
7 of disgracing by my interest” (bl, 4). Much is kept confidential in
8 Beautiful Losers, yet much is revealed if one looks in the right di-
9 rection. Rather than the saintly Mohawk with whom Obomsawin is
10 sometimes linked, it is the narrator’s twenty-something wife, Edith,
11 who was, the narrator “confesses,” an “A——” (bl, 20), with whom
12 she has far more in common. Confusion between the two female [18], (18
13 characters that Cohen has imagined is understandable: he spins be-
14 tween them with jump-cut velocity, describing historical facts about
Lines: 15
15 the seventeenth-century saint in one sentence, then imploring Edith
———
16 to kiss him in the next (bl, 96). Yet much more of Obomsawin’s
0.0pt P
17 influence is apparent in Edith than in the dead saint on whom the ———
18 narrator is fixated. While interviewers never fail to mention the film- Normal P
19 maker’s striking looks, Tekakwitha is described as “not pretty.” Edith, PgEnds:
20 on the other hand, was a “lovely” modern women with hair “black,
21 long and smooth” and eyes with a “solid depthless of black that gave
[18], (18
22 nothing away (except once or twice), like those sunglasses made of
23 mirrors” (bl, 23). Cohen paints Edith as young, stylish, and living in
24 Montreal—just as Obomsawin was when Cohen met her and began
25 taking mental notes for Beautiful Losers, his obsessive rumination
26 over the twisted threads of Indian and white histories.
27 I think that the connections between Edith and Obomsawin are
28 more than appearance. Just as Obomsawin lost her father at the age of
29 twelve and was educated in an abusive setting, Edith was described as
30 a “beautiful thirteen-year-old Indian orphan living with foster Indian
31 parents. . . . She had been abused by schoolmates who didn’t think
32 she was Christian” (bl, 58). Just as Obomsawin and other Native girls
33 in the 1940s were brutalized with taunts of sauvagesse, so was Edith
34 in the novel. Just as Obomsawin would work as a swimsuit model
35 when barely out of her teens, Edith possessed a sexuality that did
36 not go unnoticed by the local French Canadian men. In his novel,
1 Cohen imagines the Native female body as a symbol of cultural and

2 political conquest in his surreal allegory of intercultural violence.
3 In describing the kind of violence that Edith was forced to endure,
4 Cohen seems to have drawn on stories that Obomsawin told him
5 about a painful period of her youth, the one she refuses to discuss in
6 interviews except to say “I don’t like to talk about that time.” Cohen
7 fills in the blank with archetypical moments of violent exploitation,
8 horrific events that unfold while French Canadian men “laughed and
9 called her sauvagesse, ha ha!” (bl, 60).
10 Such abuse may not be the literal story of Obomsawin, which,
11 given her silence about this unhappy period in her youth, I have
12 neither the ability nor the right to record here. I can find the “truth” [19], (19)
13 of her tale in the pages of her old newspaper interviews no more than
14 Cohen’s narrator can find the truth of his so-called Mohawk saint of
Lines: 162 to
15 the seventeenth century. “I have been writing these true happenings
———
16 for some time now,” he complains to the reader of the novel, with the
0.0pt PgV
17 narrative careening between gruesome details of imperial conquest ———
18 and sordid adventures in 1960s Montreal bohemia.“Am I any closer to Normal Page
19 Kateri Tekakwitha?” he asks in despair, before answering his question PgEnds: TEX
20 with metaphor: “The sky is very foreign. I do not think I will ever
21 tarry with the stars” (bl, 95).
[19], (19)
22 Likewise, I am modest in my aims, all too aware of the elusive
23 nature of biographical reckoning. Still, I can look for the telling re-
24 fraction, the place where something of Obomsawin appears in the
25 fun-house mirror of Cohen’s imagination. I suggest that he pulled
26 something from his conversations and intimacies with Obomsawin
27 that runs parallel with, and perhaps even intersects, the biographical
28 truth of her early life—and, if not her, then certainly more than a few
29 Native women of her generation. I turn to the symbolic truth of Beau-
30 tiful Losers when I cannot (and should not) access the literal truth
31 of Obomsawin’s life in a difficult period, about which the practiced
32 storyteller falls strangely silent. My intention is this: that the tenor of
33 the story, as well as certain details, provide a rough sense of her past,
34 something formative in her worldview, something that sheds light
35 on her later work as a filmmaker. So I return to her novelist friend
36 and share his bitter musings. “Who can track the subtle mechanics of
1 the Collective Will to which we all contribute?” he asks in assessing

2 the ways in which local whites had discriminated against Native girls
3 like Edith (bl, 60). At one point, Cohen’s narrator speculates on the
4 origins of this “Collective Will” to oppress the racialized Other in
5 the form of innocent Native girls like Edith and puts the blame on
6 something larger than individual hatred: “French Canadian school-
7 books do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the
8 Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church’s victory over
9 the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Quebec are mutilated
10 and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the
11 saplings” (bl, 58).
12 All of white Canada is responsible for the mistreatment of this [20], (20
13 Abenaki girl, Cohen suggests, just as it bears responsibility for the
14 long-term violence against Native people. “O Tongue of the Nation!
Lines: 16
15 Why don’t you speak for yourself?” the narrator asks, holding up
———
16 the white male racists as representative figures from the dominant
0.0pt P
17 culture, as case studies in understanding the mechanics of a more ———
18 sustained onslaught. 41 In one episode that Edith must endure, her Normal P
19 abusers are bent on fulfilling the destructive “Collective Law” of white PgEnds:
20 Canadians rather than obeying the “Natural Law they felt” in the
21 presence of Indian innocence, and Edith can do nothing more than
[20], (20
22 cry out to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha for a salvation that does not come.
23 As if in response to her psychic wounds and those of other Native
24 girls, Cohen infuses the book with a desire “to hammer a beautiful
25 colored bruise on the whole American monolith. . . . I want History
26 to jump on Canada’s spine with sharp skates. . . . I want two hundred
27 million to know that everything can be different, any old different”
28 (bl, 187).
29 Although Obomsawin’s influence on this classic novel, and the
30 ways in which it embodies aspects of her sentiments and experiences,
31 has never been delineated, I have to reiterate a fundamental point:
32 Cohen’s creative process was too messy to allow for simple links to the
33 lives of his friends. With an ample supply of pep pills and hashish,
34 he wrote twenty hours a day to create a novel that his publisher
35 described as “a love story, a Black Mass, a monument, a satire, a
36 prayer, a shriek, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless
1 affront, an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract,

2 an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance—in short a
3 disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty.”All this appeared
4 on the original dust jacket and might have seemed an odd way to sell
5 a novel were it not such an accurate appraisal of its contents. Cohen’s
6 book unfolds in as many directions as Joyce’s Ulysses, yet at its center
7 is always a question of repression, both political and personal, and
8 the subjugation of historical memory, both of which would become
9 great themes in Obomsawin’s films.
10 On the question of history, Cohen asks how French Canadians
11 could feel loyalty to the English, who had “conquered and humiliated
12 them” (bl, 7). At a heated political rally in mid-1960s Montreal, a [21], (21)
13 Quebecois filmmaker from the National Film Board (nfb), wearing
14 his “violent leather jacket,” gives a speech to a crowd chanting “Give
Lines: 170 to
15 us back our History! The English have stolen our history” (bl, 118).
———
16 The imaginary filmmaker exhorts the crowd into a nationalist frenzy.
0.0pt PgV
17 “History decrees that there are Losers and Winners,” he tells them. ———
18 “History cares nothing for cases, History only cares whose Turn it is” Normal Page
19 (bl, 119). In her own work at the nfb just a few years later, Obom- PgEnds: TEX
20 sawin would take a less aggressive posture toward the power of the
21 Canadian state, but it would be no less firm in the resistance it of-
[21], (21)
22 fered. Ultimately, her stance would prove far more intelligible to the
23 thousands of white Canadians living outside the bohemian quarters
24 of Montreal, the thousands who would ignore scabrous novels like
25 Beautiful Losers yet watch her films for their first Native impression of
26 their collective history and culture. Her desire to teach, even reform,
27 the white Other from a position of compassion, just like the tenacity
28 of her resistance, was the product of her youthful experiences. “I
29 have a drive,” she says, “from every bit of memory I have from my
30 childhood.”42
31 As Obomsawin grew older into adolescence, the grim scenes of
32 her youth were repeated in new forms that would shape her mature
33 thinking as an artist. “You watch the drinking, the people sleeping
34 on the sidewalks, being abused, and you hear the language,” she said,
35 remembering a ragged sidewalk where Native faces were twisted with
36 alcoholism. “It’s a snake pit.” She had long been aware of the oppres-
1 sion shadowing her people and wondered how she could escape the
2 stereotypical fate that Canadian society seemed to reserve for Native
3 women. “How much can you take and how long do you go on until
4 you finally believe what they’re telling you: that you’re no good, that
5 your parents are no good, that your language is no good, that you
6 don’t have a culture, that you don’t belong?” She had seen her parents
7 drinking themselves into a terrible state, and she had experienced her
8 own moments of looking into a mirror with despair. She understood
9 the pain that drives the drinking and the alley fights, the turmoil
10 and the self-doubt that ruined the lives she would later encounter in
11 making films about Native homelessness and substance abuse.“There
12 was a time in my life when I was told that’s where I should be,” she [22], (22
13 recalls, before emphasizing her struggle not to succumb to this fate,
14 not to fall into the easy traps for poor Native women growing up
Lines: 17
15 in 1940s Canada. Success, however, could not mean separation: she
———
16 never wanted to isolate herself from the problems besetting Native
0.0pt P
17 peoples at the time or to sever her ties to vulnerable communities. ———
18 Instead, she developed the sympathetic eye of a social worker and Normal P
19 a deeply held view that “they’re not separate from me” that would PgEnds:
20 propel her throughout her later film career. 43
21
[22], (22
22 Performance
23 This sensitive view of the world was taking root in her teens, but
24 Obomsawin was not immune to the effects of living in the midst of a
25 hostile dominant society: “As I grew older I was always made to feel
26 that I should be selling myself, or that I should be someone’s maid,
27 but I always found a way to fight back.”44 On Bush Lady, she mocks
28 the white male voice that tried to achieve her objectification: “Hey
29 bush lady / Look at her! / Isn’t she beautiful? / Yeah. / She’s my lady.
30 / She’s all mine.” She dedicated the song to “all my sisters who live in
31 despair in the skid rows of North America,” the sort of women she
32 would document in her 1988 film No Address.
33 Obomsawin knew something about objectification on a personal
34 level: as young as age fifteen, she began finding work as a model in
35 Quebec and Montreal. At first it was occasional work, requiring her
36 to take other jobs such as one in a Three Rivers dry cleaners where she
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [23], (23)
13
14
Lines: 193 to
15
———
16
figure 3. Portrait of the filmmaker, ca. 1970. Courtesy of the filmmaker. 0.41199pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 befriended local children: “There were a lot of poor children of the PgEnds: TEX
20 quartier who would come around because I would sit on the steps and
21 tell them stories.”45 A few years later, modeling took her to Florida,
[23], (23)
22 where a two-week trip turned into two years working for a company
23 called Catalina Bathing Suits, whose salesmen needed “mannequins,”
24 as Obomsawin puts it, to present their lines of swimwear to depart-
25 ment store representatives. 46 Because the money was not enough to
26 live on, she took a second job as a nanny in the home of a local family.
27 Working with these children had a side benefit that made the Florida
28 experience worthwhile: by her early twenties, she had learned English
29 from reading to the children in her care. It was her third language
30 after Abenaki and French, and it was the one that she would use for
31 most of her film career.
32 After her experience in swimwear, Obomsawin returned to Canada
33 and took up residence in cosmopolitan Montreal for the first time.
34 If Odanak was not more than an hour’s drive to the east, it was a far
35 different world than the one she was entering. By the late 1950s, Mon-
36 treal was nurturing a small renaissance of oddball creativity that was
1 pushing a larger cultural transformation soon to sweep Canadian cul-

2 ture, a so-called Quiet Revolution against the conservative strictures
3 of Catholic teachings in education, women’s rights, and other issues
4 that had made the late 1940s and the 1950s into a grand noirceur (great
5 darkness) of repressed conformity. 47 Kicking back against this dark-
6 ness with youthful optimism, Obomsawin found herself immersed
7 in a talented milieu with the likes of Leonard Cohen, the sculptor
8 Mort Rosengarten, the graphic artist Vitorio, the filmmaker Derek
9 May, the photographer John Max, and an assortment of other black
10 turtlenecked characters with something provocative to say. “They
11 were very cultured people,” she remembers, “and I learned a lot from
12 them, their way of being.”48 Her friends were at the core of Mon- [24], (24
13 treal’s bohemian scene, whittling away hours in hipster hangouts
14 like the Bistro and the Swiss Hut, arguing about how to reinvent
Lines: 19
15 the world, or at least the slice they could glimpse out the window,
———
16 where the pressing blandness of mainstream Canadian life swirled
0.0pt P
17 like never-ending winter. To her friends, Obomsawin was a welcome ———
18 relief from this cultural snow-blind. “With her glistening eyes and Normal P
19 jet-black braids,” one journalist wrote, “Obomsawin cut a striking * PgEnds:
20 figure around town, singing and telling stories at parties and coffee
21 houses.”49
[24], (24
22 Singing was the key to the next stage in her life. With stage fright
23 limiting her performances to parties and other small occasions where
24 there were sympathetic ears in the audience, she had never planned to
25 sing for anyone aside from friends. Yet, by the end of the fifties, she was
26 becoming known around Montreal as a singer of beautiful songs in
27 Abenaki, French, and English. Then, in 1960, she received a call from
28 a promoter associated with Folkways Records in New York City, who
29 asked her to perform traditional Abenaki songs in a major production
30 entitled Canadiana for Manhattan’s Town Hall. The invitation came
31 as a shock, and she responded with a firm no, but the promoter kept
32 calling until she relented. For someone who had sung only for friends
33 at parties, the big night was a terror. “It was hard getting up on that
34 stage,” she said, remembering that she was so nervous she thought
35 she might faint. Her mother was in the audience watching as she
36 walked to the center of the stage, opened her mouth, and made not
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [25], (25)
13
14
Lines: 205 to
15
———
16
-0.508pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
20
21
[25], (25)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36 figure 4. Obomsawin in 1971. Courtesy of the filmmaker.
1 even a whisper for a painfully long moment. “You know on stage a

2 minute is like an hour?” she has asked, seeming amazed that she was
3 able to find her voice and finish her performance. 50 Afterward there
4 was a riot of applause, but it was not enough to spark her interest
5 in facing down stomach-churning stage fright on future occasions.
6 However, as the praise kept pouring in, she soon changed her mind.
7 Her performance had caused such a sensation that she began getting
8 calls from all over North America and Europe, asking her to sing at
9 colleges, schools, and folk festivals, and she eventually relented. 51
10 Obomsawin was now a professional singer, touring across Canada
11 with a growing set of traditional songs and stories. It was a good life,
12 although it did not free her from the demeaning attitudes that she [26], (26
13 had endured as a child—no doubt, her performances were tinged
14 with exoticism in the minds of many white Canadians. When she
Lines: 22
15 sang at the Guelph Spring Festival in the early 1960s, the local paper
———
16 covered her appearance in a way that revealed the kind of attitudes
0.0pt P
17 that she was confronting in mainstream Canada. In a patronizing ———
18 article, the male staff writer describes a “very attractive woman with Normal P
19 a rich, melodious voice filled with feeling.” After gushing about her PgEnds:
20 singing and storytelling ability as well as her “charming” stage pres-
21 ence, he shares some comforting news with white Canadian readers:
[26], (26
22 her “folk-lore stories illustrated the legends and history of her peo-
23 ple, while pointing out regardless how materially poor the Indian
24 people may be, they are never unhappy.” Echoing what is heard in
25 white descriptions of African American performers of the nineteenth
26 century (and beyond), the writer searches for reassuring signs of this
27 happiness in the face of the oppressed, noting in addition to her
28 stereotypical Native beauty and “timidness” that “each of her songs
29 was punctuated with a warm, enveloping smile.”52
30 The journalist would have fallen out of his chair had he learned the
31 truth: beneath this smile was a cultural critique (if one too subtle for
32 him to detect). Obomsawin designed her performances to subvert
33 the stereotypical views of Native people, and she alternated songs
34 with stories to make sure that her points were clear. Feeling like
35 a “walking museum,” she told stories about her tribal history and
36 about the animal world, the latter being of special importance to the
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [27], (27)
13
14
Lines: 241 to
15
———
16
-28.508pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
20
21
[27], (27)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34 figure 5. Obomsawin singing onstage in Montreal in 1976. Still from Amisk
35 (1977). © 1976 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Photo-
36 graph used with the permission of the National Film Board of Canada.
1 lifelong vegetarian. Performing in schools for both white and Native

2 children, she began to find her voice as a teacher, often using her
3 animal stories to explain Native ethics. “Animals have sorrow just
4 like human beings,” she said in many performances before teeming
5 crowds of eight-year-olds, before explaining that hunting could be
6 done with respect, as she had seen her father and other Abenakis
7 approach creatures in the woods and rivers. “I explain[ed] to them
8 about the skin and hair and how everything from an animal must be
9 used,” she recalled, “so [they] will develop an understanding that our
10 people’s lives are very different from what they hear.”53
11 Even as she was touring Canadian schools, universities, and con-
12 cert halls, Obomsawin was considering other means to convey her [28], (28
13 message of cross-cultural understanding, but she would never give
14 up her self-identification as a singer. “No matter what I do, I will
Lines: 24
15 always sing,” she said much later. “It’s what I do in film, but in a
———
16 different form.”54 As tiring as it was, touring across Canada had a
0.0pt P
17 long-term benefit for her: in learning how to tell stories about Native ———
18 life to a diverse audience, she was getting a foundation that would Normal P
19 serve her well as a documentary filmmaker. Her performances also PgEnds:
20 brought her to the attention of the nfb, one of the most prestigious
21 institutions of its kind in the world and the place that would be her
[28], (28
22 creative home for decades to come.
23
24 Joining the nfb
25 Obomsawin almost backed into her job at the nfb, which in the
26 1960s was not the sort of place that a Native woman would expect
27 to join, especially not in the prestigious role of staff filmmaker. A
28 documentary would change all that, although it was not one that she
29 made. Several years before she was putting together her own films, she
30 appeared on the other side of the camera, as the star of a documentary
31 called Alanis! a half-hour black-and-white film that aired on the cbc
32 in a prime-time slot in 1966. This profile of a young Abenaki singer
33 with an evident passion for Native rights caught the eye of several
34 producers working for the nfb, one of whom was Robert Verrall. “We
35 were about to make a film on a remote Indian reserve and felt clueless
36 about how to proceed,” recalls Verrall, a key player in the development
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [29], (29)
13
14
Lines: 259 to
15 figure 6. Obomsawin interviewed on Canadian television about the pro-
———
16 posed canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, ca. 1966. Courtesy of the film-
-0.41002p
17 maker. ———
18 Normal Page
19 of the nfb. Along with another colleague, Joe Koenig, he sensed that PgEnds: TEX
20 Obomsawin was someone who might be able to help. Setting up a
21 meeting, the producers solicited her advice on making documentaries
[29], (29)
22 about Native people. Obomsawin replied with characteristic candor:
23 “Well, I’ve seen Film Board films dealing with Aboriginal people, and
24 we never hear the [Native] people speak.” Impressed, Verrall asked
25 her to join the ranks of the nfb. “She could have been a jet setter,”
26 he later said. “There’s no doubt, if she had wanted to go in that
27 direction, she would have found the support for it [based on her
28 talents and charm]. But her commitment to her people was so real
29 and so genuine.”55 In 1967 she accepted his offer and came to work
30 at the nfb, an ideal place for someone who wanted to shape public
31 discourse in Canada, even if it was far from a welcoming home for a
32 Native woman with strong political views. The Canadian government
33 had created the board in 1939 under the guidance of an influential
34 Scotsman named John Grierson, whose charge was to “make and
35 distribute films designed to help Canadians in all parts of Canada
36 to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in
1 other parts.”56 The reality of the institution had never matched its
2 high-minded rhetoric, especially when it came to Native issues.
3 Almost from the moment of its founding in 1939, the nfb aimed its
4 collective lens at the Native people of Canada, producing in the 1940s
5 and 1950s such films as NorthWest Frontier (1942), Totems (1944),
6 Caribou Hunters (1951), and Land of the Long Day (1952). Until the
7 launching of Native-dominated Studio D in 1991, as Marie de Rosa has
8 pointed out, nfb films on Native issues were the exclusive province
9 of non-Native filmmakers, who had racked up more than a hundred
10 titles on the subject. Obomsawin would become the great exception,
11 the lone staff filmmaker with a First Nations background until Gil
12 Cardinal joined the ranks in the 1980s. 57 [30], (30
13 Things were difficult at first for Obomsawin, as they would have
14 been for almost any Native person in the same situation. In 1967, the
Lines: 25
15 year that she joined the board, the nfb produced a handful of films for
———
16 the Department of Indian Affairs, which one might expect to have
0.0pt P
17 been aimed at Native audiences and interests. The films included ———
18 such fascinating titles as Duck Identification Loops (“a series of 8mm Normal P
19 loops to assist hunters in carrying out improved duck-species identi- PgEnds:
20 fication”), La Grand Hermine (“a record of the restoration of Jacques
21 Cartier’s ship”), and Northern Affairs Programme: Resources, Transport
[30], (30
22 and Communications (“a series of films to encourage more investment
23 in the development and exploitation of the non-renewable resources
24 of northern areas”). Not surprisingly, Native people had not partic-
25 ipated in the making of these films, nor would many Native people
26 benefit from their existence. The politely entrenched racism and sex-
27 ism of the nfb would not change until Obomsawin fought her way
28 into film production, becoming the first indigenous artist on staff at
29 the most important documentary film production unit in the world. 58
30 Although she was the first Native filmmaker on staff and may even
31 have been the first Native person making her own film at the nfb,
32 Obomsawin did not finish her first project for several years after her
33 arrival in 1967, during which time Willie Dunn (Mi’kmaq) became
34 the first Native director of an nfb project with his short film The Bal-
35 lad of Crowfoot (1968; 10 minutes, 18 seconds), “an impressionistic,
36 haunting, often bitter account of the opening of the Canadian West,
1 presented through still photography and the words and music of [the
2 filmmaker].”59 A year later, in 1969, the nfb could celebrate what it
3 called the first film“made by an Indian film crew,”These Are My People
4 (Willie Dunn and Roy Daniels, 1969), “a short examination of long-
5 house traditions that George Stoney produced as part of the Chal-
6 lenge for Change program on the St. Regis Reserve (Akwesasne).”60
7 Along with a slew of other titles such as You Are on Indian Land
8 (Mort Ransen, 1969), Challenge for Change marked a new day at the
9 nfb in terms of what was possible for Native media producers. “The
10 astonishing characteristic of these films, produced with government
11 funds,” writes the film scholar Richard Barsam, “is that they present
12 the subject’s, not the government’s point of view and are critical of [31], (31)
13 government policies and practices.”61 It was a model that Obomsawin
14 would take to heart in the late 1960s, although it was not the only one
Lines: 267 to
15 a minority filmmaker would find worth learning at the nfb.
———
16 Obomsawin has rightly been honored as the first Native filmmaker
0.0pt PgV
17 on staff at the nfb, but it is important to note that she was not the ———
18 first nonwhite filmmaker to work there. One of her predecessors Normal Page
19 was the great director William Greaves, an African American who PgEnds: TEX
20 headed up to Canada when his acting career hit the wall of Hol-
21 lywood racism. From 1952 to 1960, Greaves stopped acting to learn
[31], (31)
22 filmmaking at the nfb, working on dozens of nonfiction projects, in
23 which he was schooled in the intricacies of film production, and even
24 participating in the beginning of cinema verité in North America.
25 When he returned to the United States in 1960, he had become a
26 skilled filmmaker who quickly made his presence felt in the world of
27 nonfiction, with creative profiles of Booker T. Washington, Frederick
28 Douglass, Muhammad Ali, and other figures that he produced for
29 public television and government agencies. Although Greaves broke
30 a number of barriers in his long and influential career, one that con-
31 tinues to unfold after five decades of work, and has been hailed as “the
32 leading Black documentary filmmaker in the United States today,” his
33 accomplishment has not received the attention it deserves. 62 In this
34 regard, Greaves and Obomsawin have shared a common fate, one
35 that plagues even the best filmmakers working in nonfiction cinema
36 (especially when their work has a political edge or comes from a
1 minority position in terms of race), and their similarities extend

2 beyond the lack of appropriate recognition. Obomsawin’s career has
3 followed a path that Greaves first laid out at the nfb: the cultural
4 outsider who joins the state-sponsored media institution almost as
5 a token presence, learns the cinematic trade from some of the best
6 craftspeople in the business, then reappropriates the ideological tools
7 of the state for Other purposes in time to support the various liber-
8 ation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 63 It is a brilliant maneuver
9 to undertake, although not one for the faint of heart.
10 Obomsawin may have envisioned this path from her first mo-
11 ments at the nfb (she is too modest to say as much), but she must
12 have glanced at her lily-white surroundings and sometimes won- [32], (32
13 dered if she were in the right place. Of course, the glass ceiling had
14 been installed above her head with the utmost politeness, as befitted
Lines: 26
15 the reigning liberal culture of the nfb, but even polite barriers were
———
16 not easily moved. The patronizing, even fawning attention that she
0.0pt P
17 received could itself become an obstacle to advancement. For exam- ———
18 ple, when John Grierson returned to the nfb in a consulting role Normal P
19 after a long tenure overseas, he became fixated with the attractive PgEnds:
20 Abenaki newcomer. With more than a hint of Orientalist fascination,
21 he praised the wondrous “dream magic” that she spun into the drab
[32], (32
22 world of the nfb. “Listen to this woman and pay attention,” he lec-
23 tured his younger colleagues, who gathered in awe of their founding
24 father.“You will hear wisdom! Not the wisdom of Plato, Dante, Shake-
25 speare, Tolstoy—but wisdom from another realm. Dream-magic!”64
26 Despite such encomiums from above, Obomsawin was not given
27 the chance to make her own films during these first years at the
28 board. Instead, she served as a consultant on various projects dealing
29 with Native people. For example, when the veteran producer George
30 Pearson screened a test print of Cold Journey, a feature about the
31 challenges confronting a young Native man in mainstream Canadian
32 society circa 1970, the audience was resoundingly unimpressed. Some
33 of Pearson’s colleagues at the nfb considered dropping the film from
34 theatrical release, but Robert Verrall, now director of production at
35 the nfb, thought that Obomsawin might have some ideas and ar-
36 ranged a private screening for her. As Verrall must have anticipated,
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [33], (33)
13
14 figure 7. Obomsawin at the National Film Board, ca. 1975. © National Film Lines: 284 to
15 Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Photograph used with the permission
———
16 of the National Film Board of Canada. -1.41002p
17 ———
18 her response was very different from the largely white test audience’s. Normal Page
19 “This film is too important to kill,” she told him. “There’s just too PgEnds: TEX
20 much in it that has to be shown and discussed.” With her encour-
21 agement, the film was recut and then released into theaters across
[33], (33)
22 Canada in 1972. Although the final product did not set the box office
23 afire, it accomplished what Obomsawin had hoped: it was successful
24 in “bringing whites and Indians looking at the same film together,”
25 as Verrall said, and, perhaps with this cross-cultural value in mind,
26 he later asked her to edit down a half-hour version for children’s
27 educational television. 65
28 Just as important as Obomsawin’s consulting work on films such
29 as Cold Journey was her work with a different sort of media—educa-
30 tional kits about Native people designed for Canadian teachers. For
31 someone who had been mistreated in the education system, it was
32 a tremendous opportunity to challenge the curricular shortcomings
33 that she had experienced throughout her youth. In preparing inno-
34 vative kits for national distribution, she was crafting stories as part of
35 the overall lesson plan and creating filmstrips with Native languages
36 and music, both of which took her another step in the direction of
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [34], (34
13
14 figure 8. Obomsawin during the making of L’Ilawat educational kit for the
National Film Board, ca. 1975. © 1975 National Film Board of Canada. All Lines: 29
15
rights reserved. Photograph by: Robert Van Der Hilst. Photograph used with ———
16
the permission of the National Film Board of Canada. -3.099p
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 nonfiction film. What was most exciting to her about the kits was PgEnds:
20 getting Native people involved in the development of such classroom
21 resources, often for the first time in Canadian history. “Just to think
[34], (34
22 that now a teacher would actually use our material and our voices for
23 teaching,” Obomsawin later said with astonishment. “It was such a
24 victory.”66 Although the kits were intended for use in primary schools,
25 they were soon popping up in universities and other unexpected set-
26 tings, in part because they were well made, and in part because of the
27 paucity of “Native voices” then available in instructional media.
28 While Obomsawin was working at headquarters in Montreal in the
29 late 1960s, busy with the kits, her consulting work, and other projects,
30 she remained eager to preserve her tribal connections. When not pre-
31 occupied with nfb business, she raised money for the Odanak Reserve
32 with singing performances and even modeling jobs, which must have
33 been one of the few instances of high-fashion paychecks ending up
34 in Native hands. And she finally got an opportunity to move behind
35 the camera, finishing her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory, in
36 1971. It was a pioneering work of Native cinema that, like much of
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
[Last Page]
11
12 [35], (35)
13
14
Lines: 311 to
15
———
16
-3.39801p
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
20
21
[35], (35)
22
23
24
25 figure 9. Obomsawin in Yellowknife at a conference on education, ca. 1971.
26 Courtesy of the filmmaker.
27
28 her work, has not received the attention it deserves, even though it
29 was one of the early films that set the pattern for her more celebrated
30 projects. Like all her artistic work, her first documentary had its roots
31 in the painful lessons of her early life: a profound sensitivity to cross-
32 cultural affliction and how it shapes the lives of Native people as well
33 as the possibility of transcendence through creativity, communica-
34 tion, and compassion. In stepping into the realm of documentary
35 film production at the tail end of the 1960s, Obomsawin had found
36 the ideal place to test these lessons.
1
2
3
4
5
6
2
7
8 Early Films
9
10
[First Pag
11
12 [36], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 t
15 Christmas at Moose Factory
———
16 The coloring is inside the lines, more or less, and the picture is a
0.0pt P
17 bright splash of red, blue, and green on construction paper. The lens ———
18 is close enough to reveal an unsteady line, the product of a small hand Normal P
19 still learning to manage the pencil. As the seconds slip past, we see PgEnds:
20 nothing but drawings, seemingly the work of many different hands.
21 On the sound track a dog barks through howling wind, two lonesome
[36], (1)
22 sounds that emerge again and again in the fourteen-minute film. Like
23 Robert Coles’s work with the drawings of African American children
24 bruised by racial discrimination, this creative documentary is built
25 from crude drawings that carry more power than any professional
26 illustration, simple drawings that capture an unjaded vision of life
27 in the winter of 1967–68 at Moose Factory, a residential school for
28 Northern Cree children. When we eventually hear Obomsawin on
29 the sound track, she is subtle in her narration, explaining how “these
30 children speak with their drawings about life around them and how
31 they feel when Christmastime comes.” The camera swoops across the
32 drawings, accentuating particular details as they flip past like a slide
33 show, accompanied by a rich collage of sound: dishes clattering; a
34 Skidoo revving; a child talking about seeing a black bear; a mother’s
35 shopping expedition; and Santa placing gifts underneath the holiday
36 tree.
EARL FILMS 37
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [37], (2)
13 figure 10. Publicity photograph from the making of Christmas at Moose
14 Factory (1971). © [1967–1968] National Film Board of Canada. All rights
reserved. Photograph by: Ben Low. Photograph used with the permission of
Lines: 44 to
15
the National Film Board of Canada. ———
16
1.67pt Pg
17 ———
18 In rapid succession, Obomsawin shows us several drawings of a Normal Page
19 conventional Christmas star, before she mixes in cultural difference, PgEnds: TEX
20 suddenly but unthreateningly, through peals of laughter and two-
21 dimensional images familiar to every parent, uncle, or aunt. As a
[37], (2)
22 drawing of an angel appears on-screen, several young voices are quick
23 to tell us that it is no ordinary angel—it is an “Indian angel,” we learn.
24 In a similar maneuver, Obomsawin gives us a standard Christian
25 hymn breaking through the howling wind, before cutting to a Cree-
26 language sermon and a mournful Cree voice singing over acoustic
27 guitar. Conventional expectations for a white Christmas have been
28 gently complicated, allowing Obomsawin’s universalist message to
29 ring through: How different are these children from your own? The
30 message is too subtle to dip into the sentimental treacle that is of-
31 ten slathered across Other children on television, such as those who
32 appear before bloated American celebrities encouraging us to pledge
33 our support for a Cambodian orphan for “the price of a cup of coffee
34 per day.”1 Instead, Obomsawin provides a more artful evocation of
35 empathy, collective decency, compassion, one that does not cast the
36 children in the role of ill-fated victims.
38 EARLY FILMS
1 The drawings continue to flip past, and the voices continue to

2 murmur happily, lulling the viewer into a state of relaxed bemuse-
3 ment before Obomsawin gives us a surprise ending: real photographs
4 of the child artists from Moose Factory, many smiling, mostly girls,
5 real children, real Native children, not kids reading from a script, not
6 disembodied voices that we can let drift off into abstraction. Then a
7 final poignant image: a thirty-something Cree man in flannel shirt
8 and jeans, his arm around his son and his dog, all their eyes closed
9 in contentment, a male version of Madonna and child, a far cry
10 from the 1970s stereotype of the Native male as social threat, angry
11 activist, broken addict—or, alternately, noble shaman of the natural
12 world. Instead, he appears ordinary, decent, loving, a good father. [38], (3)
13 Deserving. Obomsawin leaves us with this powerful symbol of shared
14 humanity, an image to which almost all viewers can relate, and then
Lines: 46
15 cuts to the credits, which announce: “Written and directed by Alanis
———
16 Obomsawin.” In 1971, almost four years after she captured the audio,
0.0pt P
17 the National Film Board (nfb) released her first film. Her humane ———
18 universalism had leapt from song to screen without a stumble, and Normal P
19 at the age of thirty-nine she had become the first Native woman to PgEnds:
20 make a film for the nfb. It was a good beginning.
21 In this chapter I want to write with some care about Christmas
[38], (3)
22 at Moose Factory and Obomsawin’s other early films because they
23 are almost unknown, largely unstudied, and certainly underrated—
24 reason enough to give them some consideration here. I believe that
25 these films are important in establishing the ground on which Obom-
26 sawin was working as well as the goals that she was attempting to
27 accomplish. Through her pathbreaking early work, we can see her
28 thematic preoccupations, her strategies for dealing with power inside
29 and outside the nfb, and her personality as a visual artist as it takes
30 shape. In a flurry of activity between 1977 and 1988, she released six
31 hour-long documentaries on the heels of the aforementioned Christ-
32 mas at Moose Factory: Mother of Many Children (1977); Amisk (1977);
33 Incident at Restigouche (1984); Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary
34 of a Métis Child (1986); Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987);
35 and No Address (1988). With each of these, she seemed to be devel-
36 oping a greater sense of what was possible with documentary cinema
EARL FILMS 39
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [39], (4)
13
figure 11. Obomsawin in 1967 during the production of Christmas at Moose
14
Factory (1971). © [1967–1968] National Film Board of Canada. All rights Lines: 58 to
15 reserved. Photograph by: Ben Low. Photograph used with the permission of ———
16 the National Film Board of Canada. 7.08998pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 and, in the process, demonstrating the nascent power of indigenous PgEnds: TEX
20 media to Canadian viewers. Because of her early experiences with
21 racism, she had always been ideologically opposed to the reigning
[39], (4)
22 systems of thought governing the lives of Native people in North
23 America, but, in the late 1970s and 1980s, she was finding an extraor-
24 dinary means for combating them. As the political theorist James
25 Scott once wrote: “The main function of a system of domination is
26 to accomplish precisely this: to define what is realistic and what is
27 not realistic and to drive certain goals and aspirations into the realm
28 of the impossible, the realm of idle dreams, of wishful thinking.”2
29 During the productive decade beginning in 1977, Obomsawin would
30 show that her documentary agenda for Native people was more than
31 an idle dream, that her traditional Abenaki storytelling voice could
32 be transformed into the realm of cinema, and that indigenous re-
33 sistance to the orthodoxies of the mass media was both feasible and
34 necessary. The process would begin with her first substantial project,
35 a wide-ranging look at Native women in Canada called Mother of
36 Many Children.
40 EARLY FILMS
1 Mother of Many Children

2 Obomsawin has never used the term feminist to describe herself, fear-
3 ing somehow that to do so would limit her to women’s issues. When
4 asked about the term, she tries to transcend it without rejecting it, ex-
5 plaining that she opposes all injustice facing “men, women, children”:
6 “I don’t care who it is; I’m going to go there and stand with whomever,
7 even if I have to stand on my own.”3 Perhaps because of her childhood
8 experiences with racial taunts and abuse, she is hesitant about labels
9 of any sort, even ones with positive connotations for many of us.
10 Nevertheless, her films are the undeniable product of an interest
11 in revaluing the work and lives of women (something I’ll address
12 in more detail in the next chapter). After making Moose Factory, [40], (5)
13 Obomsawin turned her attention to Native women in her second
14 film, Mother of Many Children (1977). Now the mother of her own
Lines: 63
15 young daughter, Kisos, whom she adopted at the age of one week,
———
16 Obomsawin wanted to “pay homage to women at home, who sur-
0.0pt P
17 vive, who take care of children—people that you don’t really know.” ———
18 Her goal was to represent the broad spectrum of Native women liv- Normal P
19 ing across Canada in 1977—a fine subject for a film, she thought, PgEnds:
20 although she was hard-pressed to find support for it. “I have letters
21 saying ‘Forget it,’ ” she recalls. Initially less than enthusiastic, the nfb
[40], (5)
22 expected her to find external funding for the project, and one of the
23 most likely outside sources, the Department of Indian Affairs, ex-
24 pressed no interest in funding a documentary about Native women.
25 Almost ready to give up, she thought: “That’s crazy: I’ve spent my
26 energy on this, and I’m going to do it.” The next morning she started
27 drumming up support the hard way, by what she calls “standing up
28 in a canoe.” She took the train from Montreal to Ottawa and made
29 personal appeals in various offices, finally getting a small amount
30 from the secretary of state, just enough to film one sequence. Each
31 time she finished a sequence, she returned to Ottawa to plead her case
32 once again, eventually getting enough to finish an almost hour-long
33 film. When the final results were screened in Ottawa, she got a letter
34 from the secretary of state saying it was the best investment in a film
35 his office had ever made, and she remembers that, ironically, “the
36 man in charge of Indian Affairs also wrote me a fantastic letter.”4
EARL FILMS 41
1 The film that received this praise, Mother of Many Children, is a

2 subtle document of female empowerment. It begins with an epigraph
3 claiming that there is no he or she in Native languages, gently estab-
4 lishing a feminist theme that is inherent rather than overt. No one
5 in Obomsawin’s films talks about rights, gender oppression, political
6 activism, or glass ceilings. No one utters a catchphrase of 1970s ac-
7 tivism like the personal is political or a bumper-sticker slogan like a
8 woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Yet Obomsawin’s
9 message—that women are an essential force within Native cultures
10 in Canada—comes through with indelible clarity.
11 Mother of Many Children works on a horizontal plane: rather than
12 diving deep into one or two subjects, it moves around the Cana- [41], (6)
13 dian landscape every few minutes, pausing to focus on a woman of
14 interest, to take in her story, before moving to another interviewee,
Lines: 68 to
15 often someone quite different. 5 The result of this lateral movement
———
16 is a feeling that all these women are connected, despite differences in
0.0pt PgV
17 language, tribal affiliation, educational background, and geography. ———
18 A young Ojibway 6 woman at Harvard and a traditional Inuit throat Normal Page
19 singer are presented as relatives of a sort, as much as the nineteen- PgEnds: TEX
20 year-old Cree woman giving birth in the Fort George James Bay hos-
21 pital is literally in the same family as the Cree elder shown in a wigwam
[41], (6)
22 six hundred miles away, singing in anticipation of his grandchild.
23 Benefiting from the skilled editors with whom she worked at the nfb,
24 Obomsawin maintains this elegant horizontal structure throughout
25 the fifty-two-minute film, moving seamlessly between old ways and
26 new challenges, traditional ways and contemporary issues.
27 At the beginning of the film, soon after the childbirth scene, a Cree
28 elder tells the camera that women were “more powerful than men”
29 in their traditional society: women were the ones who taught art
30 and ideas to the young, the ones responsible for transmitting tribal
31 knowledge between the generations. As if to underscore the strength
32 and autonomy of Native women, Obomsawin cuts to a long shot
33 of several Inuit women walking on lichen-covered rocks near the
34 Arctic Circle, picking year-old berries that have been preserved in the
35 snow, before she moves to a closer shot of women fishing through
36 the ice. Next the scene shifts south toward the Forty-ninth Parallel,
42 EARLY FILMS
1 to an Ojibway grandmother making a doll from leaves that will turn

2 colors with the seasons and a young woman remembering how she
3 was included in the backwoods hunting and trapping of her father’s
4 world. 7
5 Always rocking back and forth between her emphases on auton-
6 omy and oppression, Obomsawin then cuts to Marie Williamson,
7 an elderly Ojibway who provides a history lesson about the abuses
8 of Canadian residential schools. She remembers back to 1914, as she
9 and her siblings were taken from their family when Williamson was
10 nine, bound for the supervision of the priests at a school called St.
11 Anthony’s (later St. Mary’s). Williamson’s grandmother was afraid
12 she would never see them again, as Williamson tells the camera be- [42], (7)
13 fore adding: “And we never did see her again.” She then describes
14 the rigors of residential school life, with Obomsawin explaining in
Lines: 72
15 voice-over that the last such school was in operation until 1969 at
———
16 Moose Factory, the site of her previous film.
0.0pt P
17 Mother of Many Children does not dwell for long on the tragic ———
18 before moving to a new scene in which Mohawk teachers have taken Normal P
19 over a former residential school and Native children explain how PgEnds:
20 grateful they are to have one another in the classroom, rather than
21 finding themselves lost in a sea of non-Native faces. One young girl
[42], (7)
22 talks about the abuse she suffered from white children in the past, but
23 now an easy smile seems to reflect a feeling of comfort that she has
24 discovered in the tribal school. Once again, Obomsawin’s message
25 is subtle but clear: Vulnerability can be overcome through solidarity
26 and resistance. Start your own schools; launch your own lawsuits; tell
27 your own stories.
28 The filmmaker then takes us to the far north, to a young I’ilawat
29 woman named Marie Leo who describes her coming-of-age in her
30 rural village. Just as the filmmaker did in Moose Factory, here again
31 she uses the rough drawings of a child, this time to illustrate Leo’s
32 time in the traditional menstrual hut at the age of eleven. Here, as in
33 the rest of the film, the voices are paramount, especially Native voices.
34 Throughout the film Obomsawin mixes the English translation at a
35 lower level than the original Native speakers. While English speakers
36 might have to work to hear the translation, Native language speakers
EARL FILMS 43
1 would have no trouble deciphering the original voice on the sound

2 track.
3 Next the film moves to Harvard University, where we see an Ojib-
4 way woman named Wilma Salmon in a seminar. An African American
5 professor is talking about the burden placed on oppressed peoples:
6 they must endure the oppression and also take the lead in overcoming
7 it. It seems unfair, he suggests, but inevitable because no one else can
8 do it for them. After talking about the difficulty of going back to
9 her village from a place like Harvard, Salmon displays some of her
10 artwork to the camera, which is a perfect segue to the next scene, in
11 which Inuit women are sitting behind the microphones of a radio
12 station, talking about their work, local events, and cold weather. “Ev- [43], (8)
13 erything happens through the radio station,” Obomsawin explains to
14 the viewer as we see Inuit women making prints from carved stones
Lines: 78 to
15 to be sold at a tribal co-op in Montreal. The Inuit sequence ends with
———
16 a beautiful shot of female throat singers, who will also appear in her
0.0pt PgV
17 next film, Amisk. ———
18 Mother of Many Children takes a more political twist in the next two Normal Page
19 sequences, where a speaker at the National Native Women’s Confer- PgEnds: TEX
20 ence tells the audience that they have to take a more aggressive posture
21 and give “static” to those who impede their progress. “It takes women
[43], (8)
22 to get things going,” the speaker says into the microphone. Obom-
23 sawin then cuts to a young woman—Jeannette Corbiere Lavell—
24 contesting section 12.1.b. of the Indian Act, which caused Native
25 women to lose their legal status as tribal members on marrying white
26 men. This articulate young Ojibway woman describes her lawsuit
27 against this injustice, which brought her into contact with a low-level
28 judge who said, “You should be grateful that a white man married
29 you,” before ruling against her. Although his ruling was overturned
30 at a higher level, the Supreme Court of Canada finally voted five to
31 four to uphold the discriminatory act, which had disenfranchised
32 this women and thousands like her. Still, Lavell does not express
33 bitterness, instead choosing to emphasize the value of the failed legal
34 effort in bringing attention to the cause. She seems to have been right:
35 in 1979, an Aboriginal Women’s Walk from Oka to Ottawa expanded
36 international awareness of this provision of the Indian Act, lead-
44 EARLY FILMS
1 ing in 1981 to an official condemnation from the un Human Rights

2 Committee. Finally, in 1985, an embarrassed Canadian government
3 remedied the situation with the repeal of section 12.1.b and the passage
4 of an accompanying bill (c-31) ending federal authority over tribal
5 membership. 8 One historian described the repeal as sounding “the
6 death knell of the official policy of assimilation.”9
7 After giving an overview of this contemporary legal and political
8 controversy, Obomsawin goes back to the old ways, showing an older
9 Ojibway woman threshing rice into a canoe with two long sticks,
10 seeding the river at the same time she collects rice. A man steers the
11 canoe as the woman sits in the back harvesting the rice, while in a
12 voice-over an Ojibway woman speaks about the power of women [44], (9)
13 in tribal councils. Obomsawin then interviews Lillian Potts, the first
14 woman to serve as Cree chief, who talks about her daughters needing
Lines: 82
15 to be independent and educated “even if they are girls.”
———
16 The filmmaker continues to interweave her celebration of the en-
0.0pt P
17 durance of traditional ways with her analysis of social and political ———
18 problems besetting contemporary Native people. In an isolated Métis Normal P
19 town called Vogar, she meets with a woman who complains that the PgEnds:
20 young people are drinking too much. Three caskets appear on-screen,
21 and Obomsawin tells us that these young Métis people met a violent
[44], (9)
22 death, although the exact cause is not specified. (Out of respect, she
23 uses still photographs taken during the short funeral sequence rather
24 than disturbing the proceedings with a camera crew). The penul-
25 timate scene takes place inside the Portage Correctional Centre in
26 Manitoba, which incarcerates Native women whose lives have taken
27 troublesome turns. Some of the women interviewed have as many
28 difficulties after prison as they did before. “You feel kind of sad leav-
29 ing this place,” says one woman in silhouette, before describing how
30 Native women are released from jail in a manner that seems designed
31 to encourage a return trip.
32 Again Obomsawin balances her presentation of the hurdles facing
33 Native women with an evocation of their collective, creative power,
34 cutting to a rehabilitation center where Native people are helping
35 one another with substance abuse, the same subject of her later film
36 Poundmaker’s Lodge. In doing so, Obomsawin is not glossing over a
EARL FILMS 45
1 grim reality: one woman tells the camera, “We don’t have a chance
2 being Indian,” another talks about being mocked as a “pagan,” while
3 a third, in an echo of the filmmaker’s own experiences, describes the
4 pain of seeing her girls taunted and beat up on the way home from
5 school.
6 To end her film, Obomsawin returns to her emphasis on the power
7 of tradition even in the face of the new. The emblematic figure here is
8 108-year-old Agatha Marie Goodine, a Cree woman who walks down
9 a rural path with various female descendants in tow, all of them linked
10 arm in arm. She does not seem like a person from another century,
11 but in a sense she is: Goodine is old enough to have been listed on an
12 important treaty from 1876. 10 A warm, humorous presence, Goodine [45], (10)
13 tells the camera: “Life was so beautiful then. . . . We thought it would
14 go on forever.” She is also the source of the film’s title, explaining:
Lines: 88 to
15 “The Great Spirit created a woman and made her the mother of
———
16 many children.” With that, the film ends, having taken us from the
0.0pt PgV
17 birth of a child to the last years of old age. ———
18 Normal Page
19 Amisk PgEnds: TEX
20 Far north: a river winds through land frozen in a way that suggests the
21 proximity of the Arctic Circle. The camera sways with the movement
[45], (10)
22 of the oars, gazing down at the icy river, the tip of the traditional canoe
23 in center frame. Then a long shot—again, beautifully composed—
24 of a man in snowy woods, dwarfed by snow-covered pines, talking
25 through translation about hunting and trapping being his way of life,
26 one that has kept him out of the white man’s schools. In the opening
27 moments, Obomsawin is creating a portrait of her father’s world, the
28 snowshoe world of an Abenaki guide in the 1920s, which remains
29 very much alive in another Native context, much further north, fifty
30 years later in James Bay, Canada. Very much alive, and very much at
31 risk, we soon learn, as Obomsawin describes the vast hydroelectric
32 project threatening the traditional Northern Cree way of life. As she
33 establishes these stakes, she does so without forcing the connection
34 between the controversial project and the slender canoe in the water,
35 instead letting the viewer make the link. Although a welcome relief
36 from the doctrinaire tone of some political documentaries of the
46 EARLY FILMS
1 1970s, her gentle handling of the material may obscure the signifi-
2 cance of the proceedings, in terms of both the cultural threat of the
3 engineering project and the Native response to the project. The Cree
4 and Inuit resistance was “unprecedented,” according to one historian,
5 who described the Canadian government’s tendency to ignore Native
6 concerns when making use of Native land, even for what, in the case
7 of James Bay, was the largest project of its kind in North America to
8 that time. 11
9 After the opening sequence, the filmmaker appears on-screen, wel-
10 coming Native performers to Montreal for a benefit concert that will
11 “raise money in support of the cause of our people in the North,”
12 as she says. Several clerks, all of them older white women, check the [46], (11
13 paperwork of the arriving performers, who are coming from as far
14 off as Alaska, and they seem surprised to be able to communicate
Lines: 96
15 with the dark-skinned men and women. “Oh, they do speak English,”
———
16 one woman says with relief. Obomsawin forefronts this exchange as
0.0pt P
17 if to make her overarching point. “They know nothing,” she has often ———
18 complained about white Canadians with regard to Native cultures. 12 Normal P
19 Then Obomsawin cuts without comment to outside the grand PgEnds:
20 concert hall, before sharing one of the performances inside, a Dogrib
21 drum circle from the Northwest Territories performing with intense
[46], (11
22 passion. Unlike other films that document benefit concerts in the
23 1970s, such as the Concert for the People of Kampuchea (Keith McMil-
24 lan, 1979), which starred Pete Townsend and other white celebrities
25 charged with entertaining white teenagers for the benefit of far-off
26 brown people, Amisk has a Native filmmaker capturing Native perfor-
27 mances before a mixed audience, performances that she intersperses
28 with Crees talking plaintively about the loss of their land. In a mo-
29 ment of particular poignancy, a Cree elder complains to the camera
30 about white geologists and surveyors who will not even answer ques-
31 tions about what they are doing at James Bay. In such stories the old
32 patterns of colonization seem very much alive, and no one in power
33 seems to respect what the essayist Wendell Berry has called the first
34 political principle: “that landscape should not be used by people who
35 do not live in it and do not share their fate.”13
36 Despite such quiet, reflective moments, Amisk still revolves around
EARL FILMS 47
1 concert footage, and among the many fine performances in the film
2 is one by the filmmaker herself. About halfway through the fifty-two-
3 minute film, Obomsawin appears onstage in a red dress to sing a
4 lullaby in English but with a traditional Abenaki inflection, making
5 it obvious why she was such an acclaimed performer. Hers is one
6 of several stellar moments in the film, which provides an excellent
7 forum for Native creativity. The production values here, as in most
8 of Obomsawin’s work with the nfb, are high: smart, professional
9 camera work and crisply recorded sound, during the performances
10 as well as the interviews. At one point, the camera slowly zooms
11 in on Inuit women standing nose to nose in an astonishing display
12 of traditional Inuit throat singing (the same women who appear in [47], (12)
13 Mother of Many Children). The energy of the moment is in stark
14 contrast to the political desperation expressed in the interviews with
Lines: 102 to
15 various Cree people—yet, if their position is desperate as the Que-
———
16 bec authorities move forward with preparations for the dam, their
0.0pt PgV
17 demeanor is not. These calm-spoken, almost wistful accounts of the ———
18 grim political situation contrast nicely with vivid demonstrations of Normal Page
19 Native cultural vitality onstage, including in the heart of the film PgEnds: TEX
20 a number of nontraditional performances by Native folksingers. In
21 sharing only those individuals with whom she expresses solidarity,
[47], (12)
22 Obomsawin steers clear of the conflictual situations that enliven her
23 later films, making the voice and face of officialdom noticeably absent
24 from Amisk. Yet this suits the goal of the film, as stated just before
25 the closing credits, when Obomsawin describes the success of the
26 performances to packed houses over the course of a week. “For the
27 first time ever in Montreal, people became aware of the strength and
28 richness of our culture,” she says, “and we became aware of the unity
29 of our people.” During her final words, she cuts from the concert hall
30 back to the traditional canoe moving through the icy waters that we
31 saw in the opening moments. Now it seems to be moving faster—
32 an inspirational image that seems to signify a new assertiveness for
33 Native peoples launching into the cold waters of modern Canadian
34 politics. Amisk is more than a concert film, a somewhat pejorative
35 designation in nonfiction cinema. Rather, it is a testimony to cultural
36 survival and creativity. Indeed, Obomsawin captured what was in
48 EARLY FILMS
1 many ways a turning point for Native resistance against government

2 arrogance and white Canadian ethnocentrism, using the concert as
3 a microcosm of the larger perspective in which unique Native voices
4 would talk back to white Canada and, for the first time, be heard.
5
6 Incident at Restigouche
7 In 1981 the Quebec provincial police conducted a monumental raid
8 on the Mi’kmaq fishing town of Restigouche, seeking to impose new
9 regulations on local salmon fishermen. When Obomsawin heard
10 about the crisis on the news, she immediately wanted to head to
11 Restigouche with a crew, but the nfb was never designed for rapid re-
12 [48], (13
sponse. “That’s the problem for many documentary filmmakers,” she
13 complained. “When there’s something important happening, there’s
14
no way of getting there fast.” Her institutional home, often a great Lines: 10
15
benefit to her, was now forcing her to wriggle through bureaucratic ———
16
channels for several weeks before she could get funding for a small 14.0pt
17 ———
crew. By then the police had mounted a second raid on the Mi’kmaq
18 Normal P
reserve, but Obomsawin was there soon afterward, finally on the
19 PgEnds:
scene with a camera crew to document what she would describe as
20
“the biggest and most violent action in Canada versus Indians in fifty
21
years.”14 [48], (13
22
Because she could sense the importance of the unfolding events,
23
Obomsawin was irritated at what she had missed, later claiming that
24
25 the film would have been very different if she had been able to start
26 shooting right away. “I had a very hard time making that film,” she
27 told one reporter. Having missed much of the action, she had to rely
28 on footage from the cbc and stills from a freelance photographer
29 and from L’Aviron, a Campbelton newspaper. After shooting some
30 interviews soon after the second raid on the town, she went back to
31 the nfb to get permission to conduct more interviews, including one
32 with the minister of fisheries, Lucien Lessard, the official who ordered
33 the raid. The response from the nfb administration was dispiriting.
34 “Well, I don’t think you should interview the whites,” she was told in
35 no uncertain terms. “Racism and prejudice exist at there [at the nfb]
36 like anywhere else,” she complained in 1987, expressing a bitterness
EARL FILMS 49
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [49], (14)
13
14 figure 12. Incident at Restigouche (1984). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin.
Produced by Alanis Obomsawin, Andy Thomson. © 1984 National Film Lines: 122 to
15
Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Photograph courtesy of Journal l’Aviron ———
16
de Campbellton. -0.08801p
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 that she rarely made public. “My history at the board has not been PgEnds: TEX
20 easy,” she added. “It’s been a long walk.”15
21 Obomsawin’s response was savvy: she held her tongue, left the nfb
[49], (14)
22 meeting, and proceeded to do exactly what she wanted, conducting
23 the interviews she needed, including a remarkable exchange with
24 Lessard. When confronted about her disobedience, she shot back at
25 her superiors: “Now I’m going to tell you how I feel.” “Nobody is
26 going to tell me who I’m going to interview or not interview,” she
27 said. 16 She pointed out how often white filmmakers had interviewed
28 Native people in nfb films and how the opposite had never been true.
29 By the 1980s such representational inequities had become blatantly
30 indefensible, as her superiors soon realized. Having won her point,
31 Obomsawin now had the space to make her film in relative peace,
32 a reflection on her growing power within the nfb. With every pass-
33 ing year she was acquiring greater authority and autonomy to make
34 documentaries as she saw fit, eventually reaching the point where she
35 was willing to defy her superiors to create what she envisioned as
36 necessary and true.
50 EARLY FILMS
1 The result was a far more aggressive form of political documentary

2 than anything Obomsawin had attempted before, from the opening
3 frames: three black-and-white stills of billy-club-wielding cops in riot
4 gear, accompanied by the ominous thud of jackboots on the pave-
5 ment. Then, suddenly, we see a kindly looking old man in a brown
6 felt hat, apparently a Mi’kmaq elder. Bathed in the afternoon light, he
7 almost seems shot in sepia as he describes the first raid on his town.
8 Then, with a protest song about Restigouche on the sound track,
9 Obomsawin cuts back to the black-and-white photographs, her only
10 visual evidence of the first raid, including an image of a cop with his
11 boot on the neck of a unarmed young man. To viewers who know
12 little about the crisis, it is hard to imagine that all the trouble is over [50], (15
13 salmon, and Obomsawin seems to anticipate our wonderment. In
14 what at first seems like a mistake, she lets a mawkish folk song run on
Lines: 12
15 the sound track while cutting to crude drawings of old-time Mi’kmaq
———
16 life, with banal images of men on boats, salmon in the water, salmon
0.0pt P
17 fighting their way upstream. To demonstrate the historical impor- ———
18 tance of fishing, she even appears to sentimentalize the salmon’s life Normal P
19 cycle, but the whole sequence is redeemed at its close with a clever PgEnds:
20 cut from salmon eggs to a Mi’kmaq newborn crying. Her point is
21 plain: the life cycle of this tribe is linked inextricably with this fish.
[50], (15
22 That is why the Mi’kmaq fishermen are resisting the government’s
23 encroachment on their fishing ground; that is why fishing rights are
24 seen as essential to tribal sovereignty.
25 A title flashes on-screen:“The First Raid, June 11, 1981.”Obomsawin
26 shows photographs of the three hundred provincial police and ninety
27 game wardens who descended on the town after cutting the local
28 telephone service to preserve the element of surprise. The onslaught
29 looks nothing if not military in nature, and we hear from a Mi’kmaq
30 teenager who headed into the melee with his camera, recalling that
31 there were “so many cops I couldn’t get them all on film.” Next we
32 hear from a tribal councillor who tried to keep violence from erupting
33 when Mi’kmaq fishermen refused to leave the banks but was told to
34 shut up. “You don’t represent nobody,” the cops told him. “We’re
35 the bosses, and we’re taking over now.” The cops shout orders in
36 French, a language that many locals do not understand, and then
EARL FILMS 51
1 lash out with nightsticks when the fishermen do not respond or, even
2 more dangerously, try to prevent them from shredding the nets that
3 constitute their livelihood. Overhead a chopper helps the police track
4 down a single Mi’kmaq man who has taken off running, until he is
5 grabbed by the hair, thrown to the ground, and stomped. It is a vile
6 scene, and Obomsawin does an excellent job of conveying the drama
7 and chaotic energy of the day, although she is working only with
8 photographs and reminiscences.
9 Obomsawin then cuts to an interview with the man who ordered
10 the raids. “Virtue was not necessarily just on one side,” concedes
11 Lucien Lessard. Seated in front of a lace curtain, he sports his weekend
12 clothes, a wide-lapel leisure suit that gives him the appearance of a [51], (16)
13 1970s game-show host, although he is anything but jaunty as he reels
14 off justifications in fast-paced French. “One must not think that just
Lines: 127 to
15 because they are Natives,”he says,“that all is pure.”In her shifting back
———
16 and forth between Native and white accounts of an event, juxtaposing
0.0pt PgV
17 versions of “the truth,” we can see how Obomsawin was beginning to ———
18 use what Zuzana Pick describes as a “reflexive strategy that exposes Normal Page
19 the tension between one regime of knowledge, which is embodied PgEnds: TEX
20 and localized, and the other, which is imaginary and deferred (the
21 discursive and representational archive of colonialism).”17 A turning
[51], (16)
22 point in many ways, Incident at Restigouche marks the beginning of
23 this powerful aesthetic strategy, one that will characterize most of
24 Obomsawin’s later work (most notably, her Oka films of the 1990s
25 and Mi’kmaq films of the new millennium).
26 In the next sequence of Incident at Restigouche, Obomsawin leaves
27 Lessard in his chair for the time being and moves on to the second
28 raid, nine days after the first, showing how the locals were deter-
29 mined to prevent the humiliation of June 11 from happening again.
30 With pan-tribal supporters arriving from as far away as Alaska, the
31 Mi’kmaq people seem prepared for rubber bullets, tear gas, and what-
32 ever else the police will throw at them. Obomsawin cuts back to her
33 interview with Lessard, now wheeling defensively, explaining that the
34 Mi’kmaq would never have accepted the government’s new fishing
35 regulations without the violent confrontation at Restigouche. “I ask
36 you, Mademoiselle Alanis, would it have been possible [to solve the
52 EARLY FILMS
1 situation in another way]?” The camera pans with agonizing slowness

2 across the lace curtains to the figure of Obomsawin, who sits across
3 from the minister looking profoundly unimpressed with his rational-
4 izations. A thundering silence. Then, after some intervening footage
5 of the minister in Restigouche trying to broker an agreement with
6 the Mi’kmaq tribal leaders, she fires back at him: “I was outraged by
7 what you said to the [Mi’kmaq] band council. . . . It was dreadful.”
8 He seems taken aback as she dresses him down about the importance
9 of Native sovereignty, a topic he appears never to have entertained
10 seriously. Herein lies one of the themes of the film: the irony of Que-
11 becois resentment toward the hegemony of Anglo-Canadians, given
12 their own a history of oppressing the Native people in their midst. [52], (17
13 After listening to her impassioned defense of the sovereign rights of
14 First Nations, Lessard asks in disbelief: “Are you telling me Montreal
Lines: 13
15 belongs to you?” The proposition seems absurd to him but not to the
———
16 filmmaker, who shoots back: “Of course, all of Canada belongs to us!”
0.0pt P
17 She leans over and explains: “We always shared, and you took, took, ———
18 took. Instead of being proud of us, you talked about ‘your Canada.’ ” Normal P
19 In response he tries to suggest that six million French Canadians in PgEnds:
20 the province almost necessitate some kind of dominance over smaller
21 tribal populations, but he seems shaken and eventually half apologetic
[52], (17
22 about what he has wrought at Restigouche. Yet, if Obomsawin was
23 furious with him for what he had done, she still appreciated his
24 willingness to talk with her on camera. “I stuck to my guns and he
25 stuck to his, but I admire somebody like that,” she later said about
26 an exchange that a Canadian film magazine described as “one of the
27 strongest we’ve ever seen in documentary.”18
28 In the final segments of the film, Obomsawin describes the af-
29 termath of the two raids, including arrests and trials of Mi’kmaq
30 fishermen who were alleged to have resisted capture. When the local
31 judge chooses to discount photographs taken at the scene because
32 they came from a Native photographer and then decides to “make
33 an example” of one man, the local women are not surprised to find
34 the legal system stacked against them (although the conviction was
35 overturned on appeal). Obomsawin also talks to elders who say that
36 the raids were traumatic events in the life of the reserve that will be
EARL FILMS 53
1 remembered for generations, a sentiment that will be borne out in her

2 subsequent Mi’kmaq films, Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002) and
3 Our Nationhood (2003), almost twenty years later. As if to anticipate
4 her continuing commitment to Mi’kmaq sovereignty as a microcosm
5 of Native rights in general, Obomsawin expressed her concern about
6 the long-term impact of the incident, the brutality of which took her
7 aback: “During the raids Lessard ordered, the cops shouted at the
8 Mi’kmaq, ‘Maudit sauvage, you fucking Indian, you fucking savage.’
9 When you hear that, you ask, ‘Who are the real savages?’ I’m not say-
10 ing that the Mi’kmaq were angels. But you know, with 550 policemen
11 there, I think [the Mi’kmaq] behaved in a way that [was] more than
12 dignified. And to have the children watch that! It’s not something [53], (18)
13 that people are going to forget.”19
14 After all her difficulties with the nfb over the production, the re-
Lines: 135 to
15 sponse to her finished film was surprisingly positive. Peter Katadotis,
———
16 then the director of English-language production, was “very excited,”
0.0pt PgV
17 she recalls. “At the end, he really liked the film, and he told me so.” ———
18 Her faith in the nfb was restored over time, enough so that in 1987 she Normal Page
19 could say: “The Board is the voice of the country—people sometimes PgEnds: TEX
20 forget this. . . . They make films that could not be made anywhere
21 else. Who would allow the people to tell their stories?”20 Yet Native
[53], (18)
22 people had not been “allowed” to tell their own stories at the nfb until
23 Obomsawin started making films there in the 1970s. In her rhetorical
24 question, she almost appears to forget that she was the one who gave
25 the grain of truth, at least from a Native perspective, to the nfb’s
26 high-minded rhetoric.
27
28 After Incident at Restigouche
29 In the late 1980s and early 1990s Obomsawin made several other films
30 that were natural extensions of the positions and practices she had
31 already expressed in her work. In 1986 she made a small documentary,
32 one of her most poignant, about a ward of the state who was shuttled
33 twenty-eight times between foster homes, often in abusive conditions,
34 until he committed suicide at the age of fourteen. Richard Cardinal:
35 Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child is told through snippets from
36 Richard Cardinal’s diary, creative reenactments of boys running in
54 EARLY FILMS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [54], (19
13
figure 13. Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986).
14
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Produced by Marrin Canell, Alanis Obom- Lines: 15
15 sawin, Robert Verrall. © 1986 National Film Board of Canada. All rights ———
16 reserved. Photograph used with the permission of the National Film Board -2.4100
17 of Canada. ———
18 Normal P
19 fields, and interviews with those who knew Cardinal. We hear Leo PgEnds:
20 Crothers, Cardinal’s last guardian, describing the boy who hanged
21 himself from a tree in his backyard only forty-two days after his
[54], (19
22 arrival. “He was a good worker,” Crothers says. Obomsawin follows
23 the story beyond the boy’s death, taking on an activist role when
24 she mails a gruesome suicide photograph to government officials to
25 condemn their inaction in the case as well as their general inattention
26 to the needs of Native children. In sharp terms she describes the
27 astonishing gaps in social services, including a failure to share records
28 about Cardinal’s suicidal past before it was too late. Psychologists,
29 social workers, doctors, administrators—all these functionaries of the
30 state failed this articulate, emblematic Indian child, as Obomsawin
31 paints it, and the results of a government hearing seem to support
32 her claims, describing “serious inadequacies” in the boy’s care, and
33 noting that he “never got what he needed most . . . to go home.” As
34 the film would have it, the most attention Cardinal ever got from the
35 state was at his funeral, and Obomsawin wants her documentary to
36 challenge this status quo. Her desire was that this thirty-minute film
EARL FILMS 55
1 prompt a change in attitude toward Native children under the care

2 of the state. She said: “I want people who look at the film to have a
3 different attitude next time they meet what is called a problem child
4 and develop some love and some relationship to the child, instead of
5 alienating him.”21
6 Some viewers might have had this response, but more measurable
7 was the change at the official level: as a result of the film and the
8 publicity surrounding it, Canadian law was changed to improve the
9 situation of Native children in the foster-care system. Obomsawin’s
10 film was a rare example of a social-uplift documentary actually bring-
11 ing about political change in a demonstrable manner, although it is
12 important to note that it did not spark policy change in a vacuum. [55], (20)
13 Instead, it was another example of documentary film building on
14 the momentum of an existing social movement or organization, in
Lines: 151 to
15 this case the work of Métis living within the province of Alberta.
———
16 Numbering well over 100,000, the Métis live all across Canada but are
0.0pt PgV
17 concentrated in the prairie provinces such as Alberta, where they have ———
18 had their greatest success in acquiring political rights and influence Normal Page
19 over issues such as foster care. In no small measure their influence is a PgEnds: TEX
20 result of having secured their own land base in Alberta, which has not
21 happened for Métis elsewhere in Canada. In enacting provincial laws
[55], (20)
22 such as the Métis Population Betterment Act (1938) and the Métis
23 Settlement Act (1990), Alberta became the only province to establish
24 Métis settlements within its boundaries—and the only one to attempt
25 to forge a legal definition of Métis identity. 22 The Métis seem to have
26 the most tangled history in terms of identity formation of any Native
27 group in North America, but as one scholar has noted: “This complex
28 history does not alter the fact that today the Métis are recognized by
29 the Canadian constitution as a single, holistic aboriginal group.”23
30 And their growing power as such in Alberta in the 1980s provided the
31 ideal conditions for Obomsawin’s film to make a difference in terms
32 of public perception and policy.
33 Obomsawin followed Richard Cardinal with two more films de-
34 signed to prick the conscience of viewers who knew little about
35 the most vulnerable subgroups of the Native population in Canada:
36 substance abusers and the homeless (two groups with a significant
56 EARLY FILMS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [56], (21
13
14
Lines: 16
15
———
16
0.091p
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[56], (21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33 figure 14. No Address (1988). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Produced by
34 Marrin Canell, Alanis Obomsawin. © 1988 National Film Board of Canada.
35 All rights reserved. Photograph by: Audrey Mitchell. Photograph used with
36 the permission of the National Film Board of Canada.
EARL FILMS 57
1 overlap). In Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987), Obomsawin

2 presents a rehabilitation center where the therapeutic value of re-
3 turning to tribal customs and community is emphasized. The film
4 includes a number of moving interviews, always one of the film-
5 maker’s strengths, as well as quick historical surveys of the damage
6 done by alcohol to Native lives. Then, in 1988, she released No Ad-
7 dress, which depicted the horrific conditions facing the estimated
8 twelve thousand homeless people living in Montreal at the time.
9 Working in a classic mode of documentary, Obomsawin exposes an
10 overlooked social problem and reveals how ordinary Native men and
11 women have become orphans of the city. She profiles young Native
12 women who leave their reserves and find themselves on cold urban [57], (22)
13 streets, disconnected from family, tradition, and even social services
14 that might help them—the title refers to the inability of the welfare
Lines: 169 to
15 system to even locate many street people. In an image of dark irony
———
16 that upends a normally complacent symbol of holiday cheer, we see
0.0pt PgV
17 homeless men sleeping under Christmas trees. ———
18 Trying to figure out what is happening to these Native men and Normal Page
19 women, Obomsawin conducts interviews on the streets, in mobile PgEnds: TEX
20 soup kitchens, in the office of compassionate social workers. She talks
21 to women who lament their descent into drugs and prostitution. “I
[57], (22)
22 want to go back to my family,” they plead to the camera. As always,
23 Obomsawin hints at the solution toward the end of the film: cultural
24 self-help in the form of the Montreal Native Friendship Centre, com-
25 munity radio, and other institutions that promote Native solidarity.
26 Wielding the image of the solitary Native person cut off from the
27 tribal community and abandoned among the glass towers of the city,
28 the film provides a powerful metaphor of contemporary Native life in
29 Canada, where Native people can endure both a literal and a figurative
30 homelessness in a white-controlled economy and political system. No
31 Address is a thoughtful film, softer in spirit than the more aggressively
32 political work Obomsawin would dive into in the 1990s, and one that
33 leaves the audience in a hopeful mood. As Zuzana Pick has observed,
34 the film “constructs a social and psychological framework for hope
35 through solidarity and empathy,” two qualities that are, I believe,
36 always at the heart of Obomsawin’s cinematic vision of the world,
58 EARLY FILMS
1 two qualities that she possessed well before she began making movies
2 for the nfb. 24 Their origins lie in the traditional art of storytelling
3 that she learned as a child in Odanak and later performed on stages
4 across Canada, one that depends on the creation of empathy and
5 solidarity among a community of listeners. Perhaps more than any
6 single quality, her profound knowledge of the Abenaki oral tradition
7 would set her apart from other filmmakers and give subtle, if often
8 overlooked, form to the work she was creating at the nfb. In the
9 final portion of this chapter, I want to explore how her documentary
10 aesthetic has its roots in this older art form, whose mastery has long
11 been associated with members of the Obomsawin family.
12 [58], (23
13 Storyteller
14 In almost all her films, Obomsawin tells stories that are political in
Lines: 17
15 subject and activist in origin, and, as a result, it is not difficult to
———
16 situate her work within one of the main frameworks for political
0.0pt P
17 documentary. Almost two decades ago, in an edited collection called ———
18 Show Us Life, Thomas Waugh wrote about what he termed commit- Normal P
19 ted documentaries, nonfiction films that were designed to spark social PgEnds:
20 change rather than being content merely to record it. 25 Unlike the
21 cozier armchair accounts of the world’s troubles that often appear
[58], (23
22 on network television, “committed documentaries” function as me-
23 dia interventions in what is happening on the ground. For example,
24 Obomsawin’s purpose in making Amisk was to take part in the protest
25 against the James Bay hydroelectric project.“This is why I make films,”
26 she says. “To go for changes.”26
27 Another writer, Cameron Bailey, has set out a more recent version
28 of Waugh’s idea under the eloquent term cinema of duty, a cinema
29 that he describes as “social-issue oriented in content, documentary
30 realist in style, [and] firmly responsible in intention.” According to
31 Bailey, a film of this sort “positions its subjects in direct relation to
32 social crisis, and attempts to articulate solutions to problems within
33 a framework of centre and margin, white and non-white communi-
34 ties.”27 No doubt, Obomsawin fits this definition as well. Not only
35 does she work on social crises that the federal “centre” seems to be
36 inflicting on the Native “margins” of Canadian society, but she also
EARL FILMS 59
1 uses the same language as Bailey to describe her motivation. “I love

2 what I do. It’s like a duty,” she says. “I am really at the service of my
3 people.”28
4 Yet, as simple as it is to slot her work into these general definitions,
5 it is much harder to figure out the particulars of her filmmaking
6 practice and uncover the unique aesthetic that was emerging over the
7 first two decades of her career. The difficulty comes in part, I believe,
8 from her development of a more subtle aesthetic than what we see
9 in the work of celebrated documentarians like Errol Morris, Michael
10 Moore, or Marlon Riggs, artists who forefront their own personal-
11 ity through some combination of ironic juxtaposition, idiosyncratic
12 editing, musical punctuation, and cinematographic flourishes. Un- [59], (24)
13 like these filmmakers’ styles, Obomsawin’s can sometimes wash over
14 viewers without their awareness or appreciation.
Lines: 179 to
15 D. B. Jones, the main historian of the nfb, is one such viewer. Jones
———
16 has dismissed Obomsawin’s formal accomplishment even as he ex-
0.0pt PgV
17 pressed admiration for what she is doing. For example, he praises her ———
18 for avoiding the “oversimplification of issue and technique,” “crude Normal Page
19 tendentiousness,” and “over-reliance on words” that tarnished more PgEnds: TEX
20 than a few well-meaning political films in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet,
21 even as he hails the strong filmmaking in her “personal and self-
[59], (24)
22 effacing” projects in one sentence, he sniffs about them “lacking in
23 artistic breakthroughs” in the next. 29 This is an uncharitable reading
24 of her work, one that glosses over its understated richness.
25 One of the few scholars to see the depth of Obomsawin’s work has
26 been Jerry White, a film and media studies professor at the University
27 of Alberta. White concedes that, on an initial viewing, her films might
28 seem unremarkable in formal terms and might even be written off as
29 mere appropriations of an older, pedantic nfb house style to Native
30 ends. The filmmaker even contributes to this narrow interpretation
31 at times, such as when she told White in an interview: “I like to make
32 it as plain as possible, so that the attention has to be on the work
33 and what the people are saying. . . . I don’t like to do fancy things
34 where your attention is on other things.” Rather than accepting her
35 modest words at face value, however, White studied her films and
36 found “a significant transformation of documentary aesthetics” in
60 EARLY FILMS
1 her ongoing project. In a brilliant summation of her stylistic accom-

2 plishment, he writes: “She takes what she finds valuable from the
3 Canadian tradition of documentary (low-budget production, fusion
4 of as opposed to choice between interviews, observational techniques,
5 and voice-over), and adds what she needs for her activist project (em-
6 phasis that this is her speaking in the voice-over, that these films are
7 foremost for ‘our people,’ secure in the knowledge of who that is).
8 The mixture of forms associated with such contradictory impulses
9 as nation-building and activism/agitation looks a little strange on
10 first glance. But when the films are considered together, and in the
11 context of Obomsawin’s activist priority, the sheer consistency of her
12 aesthetic mixture makes it clear that these films occupy a complex [60], (25
13 social and cultural space.”30
14 If at first glance Obomsawin seems to offer a Native gloss on the
Lines: 18
15 orthodox nfb style, the truth is, I think, closer to what Merata Mita
———
16 once said about working as an indigenous filmmaker in New Zealand:
0.0pt P
17 some artists manage to “express their peculiarly Maori experience in ———
18 the language of the oppressor.”31 No doubt Obomsawin picked up Normal P
19 the “language of the oppressor” to some degree, becoming well versed PgEnds:
20 in nfb conventions over her first years as a filmmaker, but that did
21 not mean she lost her unique vision as a Native artist and activist
[60], (25
22 in the bureaucratic haze. “I’ve certainly learned much from the Film
23 Board,” she says, “but I have my own way.”32
24 What is the Obomsawin way? Unlike the pure realist narrative
25 found in the most straightforward nonfiction cinema, including the
26 nfb didacticism that put Canadian schoolchildren to sleep in the
27 1950s, her films have several important qualities that set them apart.
28 First is a clear sense of subjective authorship—her subtle but strong
29 presence in voice-over is just one way in which her creative hand is
30 emphasized in almost all her films. Second is a willingness to make
31 sudden poetic diversions into song or artful images, such as the sur-
32 prising cutaways to fish spawning in Incident at Restigouche or the
33 canoe slicing through the icy river in Amisk. Third is a storytelling
34 technique that is measured and at times almost meandering, using
35 what White has characterized as a “non-narrative, elliptical docu-
36 mentary ethic.”33
EARL FILMS 61
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [61], (26)
13
14 figure 15. Obomsawin performing traditional Abenaki stories and songs,
Lines: 199 to
15 ca. 1970. Courtesy of the filmmaker.
———
16
-0.08801p
17 The contemplative pace comes, in part, out of the Abenaki sto- ———
18 rytelling tradition that Obomsawin learned from relatives such as Normal Page
19 Théophile Panadis, who had such a profound influence on her. PgEnds: TEX
20 Known as “The Storyteller” throughout the Abenaki woodlands,
21 Panadis related traditional narratives to audiences that included the
[61], (26)
22 wide-eyed young filmmaker as well as other tribal children and even
23 folklorists and anthropologists who had made the trek to Odanak. 34
24 Surely it is a coincidence that Obomsawin joined the nfb in 1967,
25 just a year after Panadis’s death, but one can imagine her desire to
26 continue his work at least in some symbolic fashion. By the time she
27 started working at the nfb, she had already begun to return the gift
28 he had given her by touring folk festivals and universities to perform
29 Abenaki songs and tales. The oral tradition was an essential part of
30 her childhood as well as the first place she found success as an artist,
31 and for this reason it may have made its way into her film career at
32 some level. That is what I want to explore in the coming pages.
33 So what does an Abenaki story sound like? I can give one example
34 from the filmmaker’s own family. In January 1959, an elderly great-
35 aunt, Olivine Obomsawin, spoke in her Native language to the Dart-
36 mouth College anthropologist Gordon Day, sharing with him a rare
62 EARLY FILMS
1 Abenaki version of Roger’s 1759 raid on Odanak that she had heard as
2 a little girl from her own grandmother. I quote it at length to provide a
3 sense of the way in which Abenaki narrative would deal with a violent
4 clash between Native and non-Native cultures, something that would
5 occupy Alanis Obomsawin for much of her cinematic career, and to
6 suggest that such stories about Abenaki history were the foundation
7 for her work as a filmmaker. This is the story that her elderly relative
8 told the anthropologist, who translated it as follows:
9
And the Indians at that time in the fall were dancing. Already
10
the harvest was all gathered. . . . And they danced and some-
11
12 times celebrated late, dancing and sometimes going out be- [62], (27
13 cause it was a nice cool night. They rested, some went to
14 smoke and rest. And one, a young girl, a young woman, she
did not immediately go in when the others went in. When Lines: 20
15
they went into the council house to dance again that one, the ———
16
young girl, the young woman, did not go in because it was 7.0pt P
17 ———
18 cool and she stayed outside. She remained longer outside, Normal P
19 and it was dark, and when she was ready to go in at the start
PgEnds:
20 of the dancing inside the house, when she was ready to go in,
21 then someone stopped her. He said,“Don’t be afraid.” In In-
[62], (27
22 dian, you understand, he said,“Friend. I am your friend, and
23 those enemies, those strange Iroquois, they are there in the
24 little woods [planning] that when all [the Abenakis] leave
25 for home they would kill them all, their husbands, and burn
26 your village, and I come to warn you.” And surely the young
27 woman went into the council house, the dancing place, and
28 she warned the other Indians what he told. She warned what
29 she had been warned. And some did not believe her, because
30 she was so young, because she was a child. Some of them
31 stopped and went home to see about their children and
32 get ready to run away. And some of them did not listen to
33 that young girl, the young woman. . . . And some Indians at
34 once hurried home. They stopped dancing and went home,
35 and they went to see about their people, their children, in
36 order to run away as soon as possible, so they could hide. . . .
EARL FILMS 63
1 [F]ather gathered everyone—it was dark, of course—in the

2 dark[;] no one kindled a light. They gathered their children
3 in the dark, you can be sure. And they left to hide somewhere
4 where they could not find them. Of course it was night at
5 that time and they hid—in a big ravine where they could
6 not find them. And that man, the old man, they counted
7 their children to see if they were all there there where it was
8 deep. And one had been left! My aunt’s grandmother was
9 the one who was missing! And she did not know that she
10 was alone in the house, but already she was awake, and she
11 was sitting at the foot of the bed and she was looking out
12 of the window leaning on the window sill. She was singing, [63], (28)
13 she was calmly singing [to herself]. She did not even know
14 that the others were gone. Suddenly then her father quickly Lines: 212 to
15 entered in the dark, entering quickly, and he took her—he
———
16 found her singing, this one. Right away he took her and left 7.0pt PgV
17 as quickly as he possibly could to the ravine—the big ravine ———
18 that is where Eli Nolet’s house [now] is, that’s where the Normal Page
19 ravine is, At the Pines, that’s what they call it at Odanak, At PgEnds: TEX
20 the Pines. And there they hid, the Indians, the Abenakis. And
21 my grandfather, the Great Obomsawin, the Great Simon, he [63], (28)
22 crossed the river, just as the sun was rising. Just as the sun is
23 seen first. He didn’t arrive soon enough, and just at that time
24 he is almost across the river when the sun showed. And his
25 hat—something shone on his hat, something [bright] that
26
he wore. And there he was shot down on the other side—
27
he was the only one [to get across]. All that were with the
28
houses—well, that was when they burned the village—the
29
others, surely many were killed of the others, all that were
30
with the houses. 35
31
32 Alanis Obomsawin the filmmaker has a great deal in common with
33 Olivine Obomsawin the storyteller. Like her relative, she zooms in
34 on moments of extreme crisis between Native and white to provide
35 a marginalized perspective on a critical historical event. Like her
36 relative, she uses children as key figures in her narratives, either as
64 EARLY FILMS
1 passing images, as in Incident at Restigouche, or as the main subjects,

2 as in Richard Cardinal. Like her relative, she highlights the calming
3 influence of Native song. And, finally, like her relative, she emphasizes
4 Native people helping one another across tribal lines.
5 Interestingly, one of the few other Abenaki versions of this pivotal
6 event comes from Théophile Panadis around the same time (ca. 1960),
7 and it seems probable that Obomsawin heard one or both versions
8 in her early years. One piece of evidence supporting this supposition
9 is that the lone girl in her song about the raid resembles the girl who
10 gives the warning in the Abenaki version of the attack and that this
11 noteworthy figure does not appear in the standard English and French
12 sources. Moreover, the filmmaker made no secret of her reverence [64], (29
13 for the Abenaki stories she learned as a girl, even dedicating her song
14 about the “massacre of our people in Odanak by Major Rogers and
Lines: 21
15 his men” to her Uncle Théophile and her Aunt Alanis. 36
———
16 Obomsawin’s fondness for the oral tradition was not unusual for
0.0pt P
17 someone who cherished her ties to Abenaki communities and saw ———
18 herself as an educator at heart. As Michael Dorris has written, the Normal P
19 oral tradition is “the vehicle through which wisdom is passed from PgEnds:
20 one generation to the next and by which sense is made of a confusing
21 world. It is responsible in large part for the education, entertainment,
[64], (29
22 and inspiration of the community.”37 Abenakis seem to have been
23 unusually scrupulous about their stories—scholars have argued, for
24 example, that they were “very tenacious” about their oral tradition,
25 which they regarded as an indispensable tool for the transmission
26 of cultural values and knowledge.”38 Despite the cultural dislocation
27 that affected many Abenakis of her generation, Obomsawin fit this
28 older pattern. Telling stories was the centerpiece of the Abenaki edu-
29 cation that she received from her relatives, and she never abandoned
30 the storyteller’s art, always relying on the power of the spoken word
31 in her creative expression as a performer, a creator of educational
32 kits, and rare filmmaker who listens before she looks. “I am very
33 fussy about sound,” she says. “I come from a place where hearing and
34 listening to people is important.”39
35 In the hands of someone like Obomsawin, documentary film be-
36 comes an extension of traditional storytelling, which often used vocal
EARL FILMS 65
1 inflection, facial expression, and dramatic gesture in a protocinematic

2 manner. “Film is a way of seeing very like the oral tradition,” Leslie
3 Marmon Silko has pointed out.“It operates on a highly refined, simul-
4 taneous, personal level. . . . Film gives the feeling that we get going
5 for a walk, experiencing many things at once in a simple elemental
6 way.”40 It is important, I think, to see the connections between the
7 two art forms for someone steeped in both, but to do so without
8 shading into the reductivist mind-set that brings all Native artistry
9 back to nature. I do not see Obomsawin’s work as “simple,” and, if it
10 does have an “elemental” power, that power does not come out of the
11 natural world. 41 Rather, it comes out of an imagination honed by the
12 art of Abenaki storytelling, a specific cultural practice as constructed [65], (30)
13 as an Elizabethan sonnet or a trompe l’oeil painting. It is not a birch
14 tree or a hedgehog stumbling toward the dawn. It is an art form at
Lines: 225 to
15 the core of her cinematic practice, one that warrants scrutiny as a key
———
16 influence on her documentary work.
0.0pt PgV
17 Obomsawin’s careful attention to the spoken word, its cadences ———
18 and nuances, is unusual among documentarians, and it begins in the Normal Page
19 first moments of her filmmaking. Long before proposals are written PgEnds: TEX
20 and cameras are in place, she heads alone into the field with her tape
21 recorder to do nothing more than talk to people. “It’s not the image,”
[65], (30)
22 she stresses. “It’s the word that is most important. It is what people
23 are saying. . . . It’s the people themselves who tell me what they are
24 and what the story is. And . . . if it means listening for 15 hours with
25 one person, I’ll do it.”42
26 When she returns with a camera crew to capture the same person
27 on film, Obomsawin still honors the spoken word, refusing to cut
28 off the storyteller—as much as the high cost of film will allow. Her
29 willingness to listen even continues into the editing room. As Jerry
30 White has suggested, the people in her films are allowed to complete
31 thoughts, to pause for a moment’s reflection, to stumble in their
32 wording before finding their way, all of which slows the pace of the
33 film to a point that is quite unusual for nonfiction cinema. Not only
34 does she break with “rhetorical norms of documentary, such as focus
35 or concision,” White observes, but “it’s clear, just as she says, that she
36 wants your attention to be on what the people are saying: that her
66 EARLY FILMS
1 films feel a little slow and rambling, and formally stripped down, is a
2 testament to how little conventional documentary really does this.”43
3 An older rhythm is at work here, one more leisurely than what
4 commercial television demands. With her background in the patient
5 art of storytelling, Obomsawin seems to create a space for contempla-
6 tion, conversation, and reflection, qualities that have been squeezed
7 out of the global media marketplace. “No contemplation is possible,”
8 Jean Baudrillard has complained about contemporary cinema. “The
9 images fragment perception into successive sequences, into stimuli
10 toward which there can be only instantaneous response, yes or no—
11 the limit of an abbreviated reaction. Film no longer allows you to
12 question.”44 With its casual pace and nuanced point of view, Obom- [66], (31
13 sawin’s filmmaking harks back to an older mode of narrative, one
14 that implies respect for the audience and the sense that the listener
Lines: 22
15 is a kindred spirit, not a mere agent of consumption, a demographic
———
16 target. Obomsawin is telling the story, of course, but she is not alone
0.0pt P
17 in her self-imagined field of discourse; she is not communicating ———
18 monologically, as the mass media tend to prefer. 45 Rather, she is talk- Normal P
19 ing with us in her films, allowing us time to reflect, consider, and PgEnds:
20 question.
21 Obomsawin is not alone in this conversational impulse. If she was
[66], (31
22 one of the first Native people to bring a storytelling aesthetic into
23 cinema, she certainly was not the last. In her wake, Native filmmak-
24 ers have become quite explicit about using cinema for the older art
25 of telling stories. Carol Geddes, the talented Tlingit filmmaker, has
26 described the crucial connections between filmmaking and Native
27 oral traditions. “Visual media such as film and video,” she says, “are
28 uniquely appropriate to cultures which have traditionally relied on
29 the spoken word, music, and drawings to communicate.”46 Similarly,
30 Loretta Todd, a Métis filmmaker, has written: “I see myself in the
31 same way as the storyteller, except my way of telling the story is
32 different. The storyteller, the artist, has a role to play in the health
33 of the community. Even though there is no word for ‘art’ and ‘artist’
34 in most communities, there is a word for people who tell stories.
35 There’s a word for people who make things and help people with their
36 dreams.”47 Dreams are not irrelevant here, although the subject might
EARL FILMS 67
1 seem more appropriate to fiction filmmakers like Fellini or the Coen

2 brothers than a nonfiction realist like Obomsawin. Yet Obomsawin
3 has a deep interest in dream states, which seem to provide her with
4 imaginative connections to places we need to go, taking us between
5 here and there. “As a little girl, I used to have very fantastic dreams,”
6 she remembers. “I think dreams have meanings for sure. They could
7 be bringing messages.”48 They are, perhaps, the most fundamental
8 form of storytelling, one that has long informed the indigenous oral
9 tradition (as it has certain elements of modernist literature in the
10 Western tradition).
11 The popular Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac tells a traditional story
12 about the significance of dreams in the matrix of conquest. In this [67], (32)
13 story, an Abenaki man dreamed that he saw a white man, his neigh-
14 bor, wearing a fine white shirt. When he woke up, he went to his
Lines: 233 to
15 neighbor’s house and described what he had seen to the white man,
———
16 who was attentive and polite. “I understand,” he said, well aware of
0.0pt PgV
17 the importance of dreams to the Abenakis, and then he went inside ———
18 his house to retrieve the white shirt and give it to the Abenaki man. Normal Page
19 The Abenaki man took the shirt with appreciation and returned to PgEnds: TEX
20 his home. The next day, his neighbor appeared at his door with a
21 loaded rifle in hand. “I had a dream last night,” the white man told
[67], (32)
22 him. “In my dream, you gave me all of this tract of land, this wide
23 valley where you and your family hunt.” The Abenaki man glanced at
24 the rifle and at the expression in his neighbor’s face. “I understand,”
25 he said at last. “The land is yours. But let us no longer tell each other
26 our dreams.”49 Obomsawin has defied this logic, choosing instead
27 to share her personal visions with the other side, something that
28 I address in chapter 4, which describes documentary as a “middle
29 ground” between cultures. For Obomsawin, the camera is the equal-
30 izer between cultures: it is the mechanism to record stories of Native
31 dreams (and nightmares) and share them with other people far and
32 wide.
33 So that this notion does not seem like an imposition of stereotype, I
34 want to give one example of how dreams have propelled Obomsawin’s
35 cinematic life. In 1988, while in Edmonton, Obomsawin turned on the
36 news in her hotel room and saw an interview with a woman named
68 EARLY FILMS
1 Crothers. The woman was talking about Richard Cardinal, who had
2 lived for a short time as a foster child in the home she shared with her
3 husband. As we have seen, Cardinal, barely seventeen, had hanged
4 himself in their backyard not long after coming to the Crothers’s.
5 “I felt so bad,” Obomsawin remembers thinking about the plight
6 of these well-meaning foster parents trapped in an insane system
7 that shuttled a Native adolescent from home to home with jarring
8 regularity. “I didn’t want these people to feel sorry that they had
9 taken him in,” she said. Just as a humane gesture, well before she was
10 planning to make a film about the incident, Obomsawin got in her
11 rental car and drove out to the Crothers’s house, thinking she just
12 wanted to talk to them about what happened. [68], (33
13 The Crotherses gave her a warm response, seeming eager to meet
14 someone who knew firsthand about the challenges facing Native
Lines: 23
15 youths. After a few hours of drinks and conversation that lasted well
———
16 past the dinner hour, the filmmaker looked out into the night and
0.0pt P
17 saw a massive snowstorm gathering force, and she wished that she ———
18 could stay the night rather than risk the drive back to Edmonton. Normal P
19 When the Crotherses realized the severity of the storm and extended PgEnds:
20 an invitation to her, Obomsawin replied: “Yes, I’ll stay, but I want to
21 sleep in Richard’s bed.” Rather than being taken aback, the Crotherses
[68], (33
22 seemed open to this gesture of solidarity between two Native people
23 and led the filmmaker upstairs to the attic, where behind a trap door
24 were four beautiful bedrooms, one of which had been Richard’s until
25 a few days earlier. 50
26 “I slept in his bed,” Obomsawin recalls, “and that night I was really
27 concentrating and talking to him, and wondering if there is some-
28 thing that I should do. And I had this really very weird dream, and I
29 was asking him how he felt. And I dreamt that I was in a place lying
30 on some pieces of iron—very, very big pieces. And as I was lying
31 there a car came down on me. I woke up and I was choking—it was
32 coming down on me and there was nothing I could do. And that was
33 my answer, and I thought, ‘I have to do something.’ So that’s when I
34 decided to make the film.”51
35 Dreams and stories: these elements from an older world have gone
36 into Obomsawin’s decolonizing cinema, one that would expose the
EARL FILMS 69
1 government’s mistreatment of Native youths like Richard Cardinal.

2 I believe that these Abenaki influences are critical to understanding
3 what Obomsawin does with cinema, but I do not want to bring
4 it all back to some stereotypical sense of Nativeness (essentialized
5 connections to the natural world, an innate talent for vision quests,
6 an intimate rapport with animals, etc.). These factors are influential
7 in the lives of some Native artists but completely irrelevant in others.
8 It is too simple to ghettoize Native creative expression by labeling it
9 indigenous aesthetics and denying the welter of influences in which
10 modern artists must work. No doubt, Abenaki traditions made their
[Last Page]
11 mark on Obomsawin’s imagination, shaping her cinema in ways that
12 are only beginning to be unraveled here. But, as much as her narrative [69], (34)
13 style comes out of indigenous poetics, it also heeds the properties of
14 classic rhetoric. In an era in which the documentary filmmaker has
Lines: 243 to
15 become one of the great engines of public persuasion, Obomsawin
———
16 has used her cinema for a classic purpose: to make arguments about
70.0pt Pg
17 the nature of the social world and how it might be improved. Like ———
18 orators from the classical past, she speaks with eloquence about the Normal Page
19 urgent concerns of the day, illuminating the follies of the past, and PgEnds: TEX
20 envisioning solutions for the future. Her success is dependent on her
21 ability to meet the criteria that Aristotle proposed as characterizing
[69], (34)
22 effective rhetoric: an argument must appear credible, convincing, and
23 compelling. 52 And meet those criteria she does. The credibility of her
24 work comes from the stature of the speaker, the moral authority that
25 Obomsawin has earned over the decades. Its convincing nature comes
26 from the evidence that she is able to muster as a documentarian. Its
27 compelling quality comes from the passion in her cinematic voice.
28 All these qualities were as critical to Théophile Panadis as they are
29 to Alanis Obomsawin, but Obomsawin added something to the stew
30 that her relative never experienced: a gendered position as a Native
31 woman.
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
3
7
8 A Gendered Gaze?
9
10
[First Pag
11
12 [70], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 t
15 In our language there is no word for he or she.
———
16 Alanis Obomsawin 11.5pt
17 ———
18 Is it significant that the cardinal figure in Native filmmaking is fe- Normal P
19 PgEnds:
male? Yes, I think so, although in ways that are more complex than
20
I initially expected. I went into this project with some unexamined
21
assumptions about the way gender identity would play out on-screen [70], (1)
22
for Obomsawin, and I fear that this could have overdetermined my
23
reading of her films. Yet, if I have labored under some initial naïveté
24
in asking how her gender position influences her cinematic produc-
25
tion, I am not alone: film scholars have debated the meaning of this
26
27 question, in various forms, for the past three decades. 1 In the pages
28 ahead, I hope to explore the challenges of generalizing about the so-
29 called female gaze and about what happens when a woman is calling
30 the shots in documentary production.
31 We might begin by asking if it is even possible for Obomsawin
32 to present a female gaze when she works so often with a male-
33 dominated crew of National Film Board (nfb) professionals, from
34 sound recordists to cinematographers to editors? Although her col-
35 laborative process would seem to complicate the picture, it is, I think,
36 possible that her filmmaking gaze remains gendered. After all, it was
A GENDERED GAZE? 71
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [71], (2)
13
figure 16. Obomsawin during the shooting of Richard Cardinal in 1983.
14
Courtesy of the filmmaker. Lines: 60 to
15
———
16
her controlling intelligence that shaped her film projects from start
5.19498pt
17 ———
18 to finish and made her a nonfiction auteur rather than a mere cog Normal Page
19 in the nfb machine—after all, among other duties, she conceives, PgEnds: TEX
20 researches, writes, narrates, directs, and coproduces almost all her
21 films. And she brings, I believe, a particular intelligence to all these
[71], (2)
22 roles, one that reflects her experience as a gendered—as much as a
23 racialized—neocolonial subject. Her choice of subject, her style of
24 storytelling, and her way of interacting with interviewees all seem to
25 come out of an implicit sense of sisterhood running throughout her
26 work as well as, of course, her commitment to her Abenaki past and
27 her First Nations future.
28 The feminist impulse is most obvious in a film such as Mother of
29 Many Children, although it shapes all Obomsawin’s work to some
30 degree. As the reading of the film in chapter 2 should suggest, Mother
31 of Many Children is a clear tribute to the underappreciated strength
32 and diversity of Native women as well as a call to unity for rea-
33 sons of sisterhood as much as race. As such, its gender politics are
34 unmistakable. Then why does the filmmaker seem hesitant to talk
35 about gender with the same passion and effusion that she brings to
36 discussions of race? I suspect that her reluctance is less a failure of
72 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 political commitment than a product of her generational and class

2 background. As an Abenaki woman who grew up in an impoverished
3 small town during the Depression and the Second World War, she did
4 not come of age when feminist was a common term, nor did she have
5 a chance to attend a university, where feminist theory or women’s
6 studies might have been taught. This lack of exposure may explain
7 why she views a feminist position as a potential limitation, as if it
8 would restrict rather than open up her field of vision, and why she
9 has sometimes kept her distance from the most overt forms of gender
10 solidarity. For example, when in the 1980s the nfb launched its film
11 unit for women under the name Studio D, Obomsawin claimed to
12 [72], (3)
give it her full support even though she did not want to work there. “I
13 didn’t want to be closed in a frame like that because I was concerned
14
about the whole family,” she said. “I could not say that I would only Lines: 62
15
work with women.”2 ———
16
If she shied away from some aspects of feminist discourse emerging 14.0pt
17 ———
in the 1970s, Obomsawin was never blind to the gender inequities of
18 Normal P
postwar Canada—far from it. If anything, the thematic preoccupa-
19 PgEnds:
tions of her work suggest that she was acutely aware of these cultural
20
biases. From her earliest projects (such as Mother of Many Children)
21
to more recent work (such My Name Is Kahentiiosta [1996]), she [72], (3)
22
has focused her lens on Native women at risk as well as on those
23
24 in successful leadership roles as artists and activists. For her own
25 part, she sees her path as “a long road” toward respect as a Native
26 woman working in a white male world like the nfb and has never ro-
27 manticized the fate of the twice oppressed. Some indigenous female
28 artists have executed a judo move that turns double marginalization
29 to their advantage, at least as an act of rhetorical bravado. “Swimming
30 against the tide becomes an exhilarating experience,” says the Maori
31 filmmaker Merata Mita, in many ways Obomsawin’s equivalent in
32 the Anglophone Southern Hemisphere. “It makes you strong,” Mita
33 claims. “I am completely without fear now. . . . [F]or 90 minutes or
34 so, we have the capability of indigenising the screen in any part of
35 the world our films are shown.”3 Characteristically, Obomsawin has
36 expressed her own triumph over patriarchal obstacles in more subtle
A GENDERED GAZE? 73
1 terms, usually alluding to the challenges that she has faced, before
2 quickly switching the conversation to other areas.
3 At best gender was a small, occasional advantage to Obomsawin as
4 a filmmaker. Like the earliest generations of female anthropologists,
5 she may have found that interviewees would invite her into their
6 homes to talk in front of a tape recorder far more readily than they
7 might a male visitor. Her gender might also have made her seem less
8 threatening to potential interviewees in power, including the male
9 politicians and army officers with whom she sometimes does battle.
10 Even young female filmmakers today are aware of this apparent silver
11 lining to the old cult of domesticity in which women were consigned
12 to the home front. “In the field, as a woman, it’s a great advantage,” [73], (4)
13 said the documentarian Liz Garbus soon after making her first film,
14 The Farm, in 1998. “I think that people are used to talking to women.
Lines: 65 to
15 They’ve always talked to their mothers. That was the one person in
———
16 their family they went to talk to. In this society, people are more
0.0pt PgV
17 used to talking to women within [their] families, so I think that’s an ———
18 advantage.”4 Normal Page
19 These are rosy scenarios to contemplate, but the systemic burden of PgEnds: TEX
20 gender oppression on Native women cannot be minimized so easily.
21 Indeed, the accomplishment of a Native woman such as Obomsawin
[73], (4)
22 is all the more remarkable when considered in the larger political
23 context of imagemaking in the West. Over the past century, cinema
24 has not proved itself a welcome home to Native women, either in
25 front of the camera or behind it. Of course, most of the damage has
26 come in front of the camera, where Native women (or white actresses
27 in redface) have been pilloried, parodied, and perversely fetishized.
28 With few exceptions, their representational fate has been a twofold
29 simplification: dichotomization or dismissal.
30 In the first instance lies the split between maiden and squaw, a
31 dichotomy that casts Native women either as willing martyrs to Euro-
32 pean American expansionism or as animalistic sex objects who, when
33 not meeting the carnal needs of white men, become silent drudges
34 in the seemingly ceaseless toil of their culture. It goes without saying
35 that neither side of this dichotomy has resulted in on-screen histor-
36 ical accuracy. The myth of the Indian maiden has given audiences
74 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 the soft-focus romanticism of Ramona and Pocahontas, while the

2 squaw has made her appearance, largely mute, in a series of charac-
3 ters including the cruelly imagined Look in The Searchers (1956), the
4 libidinous Running Deer in A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein,
5 1970), and their orgiastic counterparts who flock to Dustin Hoffman’s
6 side in Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970).
7 Most of the time, however, even the worst stereotypes have been
8 absent: when it comes to Native women, the Western gaze has been
9 dismissive, uninterested, or pointed in the wrong direction altogether.
10 Even on the dusty trail of the cowboy movie, the one genre in which
11 a Native face might appear without astonishing the audience into
12 some kind of seizure, Native women have been rendered insignifi- [74], (5)
13 cant or invisible (with very few exceptions). 5 “Silence surrounds the
14 lives of Native North American women,” writes Laura F. Klein and
Lines: 70
15 Lillian A. Ackerman, two historians of the subject. “We never hear
———
16 their voices and are never told their tales.”6 Whenever something of
0.0pt P
17 Native women’s lived experience makes it on-screen, it is too often a ———
18 distorting fragment, one that suits the needs of a producer hungry Normal P
19 for something romanticized, eroticized, objectified—certainly, not PgEnds:
20 anything resembling a real Native woman. 7
21 Obomsawin was no stranger to these stereotypes, as the discussion
[74], (5)
22 in chapter 1 of her schoolyard abuse and later media objectification
23 should indicate. Especially when her career was first taking off in
24 the 1960s and 1970s, white audiences must have had a hard time not
25 viewing her through the warped lens of cultural prejudice to imagine
26 her as the embodiment of the Pocahontas/Indian princess myth, in
27 which the attractive Indian maiden provided “an important, non-
28 threatening symbol of white Americans’ right to be here, because she
29 was always willing to sacrifice her happiness, cultural identity, and
30 even her life for the good of the new nation.”8 Obomsawin defied such
31 stereotypes from the moment she began her public life as an artist.
32 Working in the face of persistent objectification, she confounded
33 expectations of Native women as silent, sacrificial, or merely sexual.
34 This was true in three main phases of her career: as a singer and
35 storyteller in her late twenties; as an education consultant in her
36 thirties; and, finally, as a filmmaker in her forties and beyond.
A GENDERED GAZE? 75
1 At first Obomsawin was sui generis. I have already suggested that,

2 for more than seven decades of North American cinema, Native
3 women had been the object of looking, never the agent. The sudden
4 appearance of a Native woman calling the shots must have startled
5 and even disturbed some non-Native viewers. As E. Ann Kaplan has
6 suggested, the gaze of the Other can destabilize white subjectivities,
7 especially for those unaccustomed to seeing alternative points of view
8 on the screen. 9 In the 1970s and 1980s, when Obomsawin’s films were
9 first appearing in theaters, college auditoriums, and classrooms, her
10 work must have seemed disconcerting to those whites who expected
11 confirmation of their lived experience, one in which Native women
12 were either absent or presumed to conform to media mythologies. [75], (6)
13 Yet here was a Native woman telling powerful nonfiction stories from
14 her own point of view, serving as the obvious link between the diverse
Lines: 76 to
15 perspectives in her films, functioning as the controlling presence on-
———
16 screen and off. There was nothing subordinate about Obomsawin’s
0.0pt PgV
17 public persona as a filmmaker—occasionally defiant, usually soft- ———
18 spoken, but always in charge, never the mere mouthpiece for someone Normal Page
19 else’s agenda. Watching her films, we see only what she wants us to PgEnds: TEX
20 see, although her very personal vision is neither confrontational nor
21 off-putting in its idiosyncrasies (given the relative popularity of her
[75], (6)
22 films, I can assume that I am not the only one who feels this way).
23 Indeed, her personal vision as a Native woman is so compelling and
24 well crafted that it is hard to throw it aside in favor of opposing points
25 of view, such as those of the male government officials in Incident at
26 Restigouche. If multiple perspectives are always provided in her films,
27 Obomsawin makes clear which one she endorses. She may be subtle,
28 but she is never silent.
29
30 Perhaps it is not surprising that a Native woman would be the first
31 staff filmmaker at the prestigious nfb or that she would become so
32 prominent in the world of indigenous media as the decades passed.
33 Native women have always been essential creative forces in their com-
34 munities, although the outside world tends to overlook this fact. As
35 one Native scholar has observed: “The value accorded their women
36 by Indian cultures has been vastly underrated—historically and to-
76 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 day.”10 If women’s roles in Native cultures have been too diverse to

2 generalize without caveat, their vast cultural influence is undeniable,
3 especially in the area that Obomsawin knows best—education. In a
4 keynote address at the National Symposium on Aboriginal Women of
5 Canada in 1989, the novelist Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) talked
6 about the continuing power of Native women as teachers even after
7 the devastations of colonialism. “In traditional Aboriginal society,”
8 she said, “it was women who shaped the thinking of its members in a
9 loving, nurturing atmosphere within the base family unit.”According
10 to Armstrong, the current challenge is to preserve the traditional role
11 of Native women as “insurers of the next generation.”11 So much
12 did Obomsawin’s work seem to fit this mandate that the symposium [76], (7)
13 featured a retrospective of her films.
14 In addition to extending the general role of Native women as
Lines: 80
15 teachers into new forums such as educational kits and documentary
———
16 filmmaking, Obomsawin has also brought her specific background
0.0pt P
17 as an Abenaki woman to her creative life. Historians suggest that ———
18 the Abenakis had long employed a gender division of labor that re- Normal P
19 sembles European American practices, at least on first glance. While PgEnds:
20 boys learned to hunt with their fathers and prepared for their solitary
21 vision quest, girls were pushed into a more communal direction—
[76], (7)
22 planting and harvesting crops, boiling maple syrup, tanning hides,
23 and cooking meals with other women. Although their lives did not in-
24 clude opportunities for political and military glory, Abenaki women
25 were regarded with far greater respect than European American males
26 ever granted the “guardians” of their own domestic sphere (roman-
27 tic protestations from the nineteenth century or Phyllis Schaffley
28 notwithstanding). Among the Abenakis, the words mother and grand-
29 mother were terms of great honor, and women’s labor was celebrated
30 for its physical dexterity and visual artistry, whether in decorating
31 shirts, embroidering winter coats, making jewelry, or weaving bas-
32 kets. 12 Interestingly, in her filmmaking practice, Obomsawin seems
33 to have fused traditional Abenaki gender roles. While she continues
34 the artistic and pedagogical legacies of her grandmothers, she has also
35 pushed her way into positions of cultural and political leadership as
36 an activist and even into nonviolent forms of military engagement (as
A GENDERED GAZE? 77
1 will become clear in later discussions of her work at Oka and Burnt
2 Church). Working as a teacher, a visual artist, and a cultural leader
3 from the pulpit of cinema, Obomsawin has transformed traditional
4 gender expectations, both Native and non-Native, in ways that are
5 fascinating—although not without parallel.
6 In the broadest outlines, Obomsawin’s path has some resemblance
7 to that of a number of white Canadian women who entered film-
8 making in the early 1970s. Moving in the same general circles as
9 Obomsawin, Anne Claire Porter, Mireille Dansereau, Aimée Danis,
10 Louise Carré, and Hélène Girard, among others, constituted the first
11 wave of Quebecois women behind the lens, laboring for the most
12 part under the nfb logo. Within a few years, Lea Pool, Micheline [77], (8)
13 Lanctot, Paule Baillargeon, Brigitte Sauriol, and others began work-
14 ing with private funding rather than nfb support. The watershed
Lines: 82 to
15 year for Canadian women in film was 1975, just as Obomsawin was
———
16 shooting her first substantial project, Mother of Many Children. In
0.0pt PgV
17 this “international woman’s year,” a number of Quebecois women ———
18 made their first films and, in the process, created a body of work that Normal Page
19 tended to reflect the preoccupations of 1970s feminism: a concern PgEnds: TEX
20 about gender oppression; a valorization of women’s labor; and an ac-
21 knowledgment of the diversity of women’s experiences. Like Mother
[77], (8)
22 of Many Children, these films were, according to Nicole Giguére, “not
23 so much protest films as attempts to allow women’s voices to be heard
24 on topics of importance to them.” Without claiming a “specifically
25 feminine form of cinematographic writing,” Giguére has noted some
26 common traits in the first wave of feminist nonfiction in Quebec.
27 These directors’ films tend to feature women on-screen; their cam-
28 eras tend to maintain a respectful distance that works against crude
29 voyeurism or aggressive interrogation; and their approach to political
30 issues is often through the personal, rather than going straight at the
31 outbreaks of political violence and nationalist crises that captured the
32 interest of their male counterparts at the nfb. According to Giguére,
33 “every male filmmaker worthy of respect has at least one film that
34 is focused upon the political situation [in 1970s Quebec],” whereas
35 women tended to work on a more intimate scale. 13
36 Obomsawin does not fit neatly within these generalizations. Unlike
78 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 most of her white counterparts in Quebec in the mid-1970s, she made

2 films with a strong protest component (Amisk, e.g., was, as we have
3 seen, designed to raise awareness about the ill effects of the James
4 Bay hydroelectric project). By the early 1980s, she showed little fear
5 of interrogation when it came to government ministers stepping on
6 Native rights, even if she otherwise treated her interviewees with
7 uncommon courtesy. And, as her career progressed, she would show
8 an increasing desire to confront political crisis in its rawest forms,
9 taking her camera ever closer to moments of violent strife in places
10 like Restigouche and Oka. Moreover, in the four films that she would
11 create in the 1990s after her summer behind the barricades at Oka, she
12 would work on an epic scale that her white Quebecois counterparts [78], (9)
13 certainly did not attempt in the 1970s. Simply put, once we move past
14 the broadest strokes, Obomsawin has relatively little in common with
Lines: 86
15 her white Quebecois peers.
———
16 To get a closer analogue to Obomsawin’s filmmaking practice, gen-
0.0pt P
17 der and race must, I suspect, be considered in tandem rather than in ———
18 isolation. 14 Rather than considering the white Quebecois women who Normal P
19 worked down the hall at the nfb or elsewhere in Montreal, we need PgEnds:
20 to look further afield, to filmmakers who are indigenous and female.
21 For example, we might consider Obomsawin’s creative connections
[78], (9)
22 to aboriginal women in Australia like Tracey Moffatt, Rachel Perkins,
23 Sally Riley, Darlene Johnson, Erica Glynn, or Frances Peters, although,
24 even when the factors of gender and race are considered together, we
25 have to be cautious about making blanket generalizations that would
26 cover these very different filmmakers. One scholar has wisely sug-
27 gested that these women should be understood as individual artists,
28 only then pointing cautiously at some common threads, including
29 “disturbing readings of colonial history,” “stark accounts of familial
30 trauma and connectedness,” and an “ability to transform Aboriginal
31 traditions, such as the mythological tropes and orality into cinematic
32 forms, in their duty as cultural activists and in their exemplary artistic
33 and aesthetic gifts.”15 These descriptions could also apply nicely to
34 Obomsawin, even if her films are less self-revelatory than the ones
35 from down under. 16
36 Bringing together race and gender also suggests a comparison be-
A GENDERED GAZE? 79
1 tween Obomsawin and the Maori filmmaker Merata Mita, the first
2 Maori and the first woman to make a feature-length film in New
3 Zealand. The two celebrated women followed a strikingly similar
4 path into filmmaking, even starting in much the same place. “We
5 were offered no choices, given no alternative; television made us in-
6 visible,” Mita says about growing up in New Zealand in the 1940s
7 and 1950s, just a few years after Obomsawin was coming of age in
8 Three Rivers. Like the Abenaki filmmaker, Mita was raised in her tra-
9 ditional culture, got her foot in the filmmaking door as a consultant
10 on someone else’s project, worked her way into the state-sponsored
11 film production unit, and then shattered the glass ceiling to make her
12 own hard-hitting political films like Patu! (1983), which the London [79], (10)
13 Film Festival hailed as a “major documentary of our time.”17 Both
14 have channeled their political passions into their cinema; both have
Lines: 90 to
15 worked with indigenous children; both have challenged comforting
———
16 stereotypes about race relations in their seemingly progressive na-
0.0pt PgV
17 tions. 18 The only interesting divergence is where they ended up: unlike ———
18 Obomsawin, Mita has since delved into fiction film and worked as a Normal Page
19 screenwriter, following a frequent pattern of documentarians “grad- PgEnds: TEX
20 uating” from the form, something that Obomsawin has steadfastly
21 refused to do. 19
[79], (10)
22 Better still, Obomsawin can be compared with indigenous women
23 filmmakers closer to home, especially documentarians like Carol
24 Geddes, Loretta Todd, Lena Carr, Arlene Bowman, Barb Cranmer,
25 and Sandra Day Osawa, all of whom work in Canada or the United
26 States. Despite differences based on personal backgrounds, creative
27 aspirations, available technologies, and institutional settings, these
28 women share some meaningful common ground with the prolific
29 Abenaki filmmaker. All of them, I believe, have drawn on their expe-
30 riences as neocolonial subjects in sexist societies to articulate a set of
31 five practices (or some combination thereof).
32 The first thread that runs through the work of Obomsawin and
33 her closest peers is that it challenges the formation of national public
34 memory in the United States and Canada from a Native standpoint.
35 This includes a desire to reinscribe on film what has been erased
36 from the historical record, namely, the agonies of the colonial past
80 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 and their continuing legacies in the lives of Native people. Almost

2 all Obomsawin’s mature work—including Incident at Restigouche
3 (1984), Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), My Name Is Kahen-
4 tiiosta (1996), Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man (1997), Rocks at Whisky
5 Trench (2000), Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002), and Our Na-
6 tionhood (2003)—challenges the received wisdom about indigenous
7 people and reveals the tragic interplay of past and present in Native
8 struggles to defend themselves against the onslaught of state author-
9 ities and oppressive public ignorance. Other Native women, such as
10 the Vancouver-based filmmaker Loretta Todd, have followed Obom-
11 sawin’s lead in challenging public memory. In Forgotten Warriors: The
12 Story of Canada’s Aboriginal War Veterans (1996), Todd examines the [80], (11
13 neglected role of Native soldiers in the Second World War as well as
14 the little-known story of how the Canadian government seized thou-
Lines: 94
15 sands of acres of land from these same veterans, who had served their
———
16 country with distinction. “These men had never been present in the
0.0pt P
17 consciousness and memory of Canada,” she says. “I wanted to actu- ———
18 ally infiltrate the Canadian cultural memory, to try and implant us, to Normal P
19 create images that were timeless, to almost create our own archive.”20 PgEnds:
20 Another filmmaker based in Vancouver, Barb Cranmer, has shown
21 how traditional ways of life remain alive on the northwest coast in
[80], (11
22 films such as the award-winning Qutuwas: People Gathering Together
23 (1997). “It was important for me to get the truth out there from our
24 own perspective, and do it with the respect and integrity that comes
25 from our community,” Cranmer says. “That’s been a driving force
26 for me.”21 In a similar vein just south of the Forty-ninth Parallel, the
27 Seattle-based Sandra Day Osawa has produced films such as Usual
28 and Accustomed Places (1998), highlighting the difficulties that the
29 Makah nation has faced with regard to fishing and hunting rights
30 over the past hundred years; likewise, Osawa’s powerful Lighting the
31 Seventh Fire (1995) explores the same issue for the Anishinabe people
32 in the Great Lakes region.
33 The second thread is that the work of these women insists on
34 the significance of individual Native lives—and often with a gen-
35 dered twist. Although their filmmaking sometimes focuses on Na-
36 tive men—as in Todd’s Today Is a Good Day: Remembering Chief
A GENDERED GAZE? 81
1 Dan George (1998), Osawa’s Pepper’s Powwow (1995), or Obomsawin’s

2 Spudwrench—it more often explores the lives of Native women as a
3 means to challenge the masculinist assumptions of European Amer-
4 ican culture. For Obomsawin this impulse is most obvious in Mother
5 of Many Children and My Name Is Kahentiiosta, although at some
6 level it runs throughout all her work. For example, she celebrates
7 Native women by emphasizing their voices in the most literal sense:
8 all her films demonstrate the transgressive power of female voice-
9 over in documentary as an accompaniment to visual evidence. As
10 Christopher E. Gittings has suggested, a female voice-over “evicts
11 the ‘symbolic father’ from the cinematic space of enunciation . . .
12 [81], (12)
[thereby] troubling the historical male monopoly on this transcen-
13 dental, authoritative form of cinematic representation.”22
14
Obomsawin is not alone in her reliance on female voices, whether Lines: 96 to
15
in narration or interviews. Barb Cranmer uses female narrators in ———
16
most of her documentaries, including Laxwesa Wa: Strength of the 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
River (1995), Qutuwas, and T’Lina: The Rendering of Wealth (1999).
18 Normal Page
So does Sandra Osawa, who narrates In the Heart of Big Mountain, her
19 PgEnds: TEX
1988 exploration of the life of the Navajo matriarch Katherine Smith,
20
who lost her traditional lands in Arizona when valuable natural re-
21
sources were discovered there. Carol Geddes also fits this pattern, with [81], (12)
22
films such as Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief (1988), which follows five
23
24 Native women who are successful in various professions. In Navajo
25 Talking Picture (1986) and Song Journey (1994), Arlene Bowman made
26 two fascinating documentaries that revolve around the experiences
27 of Navajo women, serving in both films as narrator and on-screen
28 guide to the unfolding events. In the first film her relationship with
29 her traditional Navajo grandmother takes center stage, while in the
30 second it is the filmmaker’s desire to find a place for herself and other
31 alienated Native women in male-dominated portions of powwow
32 culture. 23 The female voice is also central to Loretta Todd’s work. The
33 Learning Path (1991) begins with an on-camera introduction from the
34 actor Tantoo Cardinal (Cree), before we hear the filmmaker’s voice
35 narrating painful stories of Native education in Canada. 24 Finally, in
36 Lena Carr’s Kinaalda: Navajo Rite of Passage (2000), the filmmaker
82 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 narrates her thirteen-year-old niece’s experience of a sacred ceremony

2 marking her passage into womanhood.
3 The third thread is that these filmmakers often depict the po-
4 litical resilience and cultural creativity of Native people, thereby
5 complicating the stereotypical Western view of Native subjectivity
6 as simple, primitive, or monolithic. On the cultural side, Obom-
7 sawin’s Amisk presents Native artistry in both contemporary and
8 traditional terms, while Christmas at Moose Factory shares a charm-
9 ing glimpse of youthful creativity. Barb Cranmer has produced a
10 moving tribute to traditional female weavers on the northwest coast
11 entitled Gwishalaayt: The Spirit Wraps around You (2001), perhaps
12 inspired by Loretta Todd’s Hands of History (1994), which explores [82], (13
13 the work of four Native women artists and shows“the central role that
14 Aboriginal women have always had in their communities of origin
Lines: 99
15 and in determining the survival of their people.”25 Todd is also the
———
16 creative force behind Today Is a Good Day, which profiles the actor,
0.0pt P
17 poet, and cultural activist best known for his role in Little Big Man. ———
18 Carol Geddes profiled a more obscure artist in her Picturing a People: Normal P
19 George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer (1997), which details the life of PgEnds:
20 a young man from the Yukon community of Teslin who was one of
21 the first Native photographers to become “a creator of portraits and
[82], (13
22 a keeper of his culture,” as the nfb catalog puts it. 26 Perhaps the most
23 prolific filmmaker working on the subject of Native artistry is Sandra
24 Osawa, who in addition to her more political films has produced the
25 exploration of Native jazz music Pepper’s Powwow and a hilarious
26 look at the career of a Native comedian, On and Off the Res with
27 Charlie Hill (2000). (Osawa is now at work on a film about Maria
28 Tallchief, the celebrated Osage ballerina.) Finally, Arlene Bowman’s
29 Song Journey gives a sympathetic look at Native women excluded
30 from certain public performances at intertribal powwows.
31 As for political resilience, Obomsawin has never ceased touching
32 on this theme, whether it is the strong women activists who appear
33 in Mother of Many Children or the various acts of Native defiance
34 that form the backbone of Incident at Restigouche, Kanehsatake, Is
35 the Crown at War with Us? and Our Nationhood. Resilience is also a
36 great theme in Osawa’s work, most notably in Lighting the Seventh
A GENDERED GAZE? 83
1 Fire, Usual and Accustomed Places, and In the Heart of Big Mountain,
2 as well as in Barb Cranmer’s Laxwesa Wa. Loretta Todd has also
3 explored this theme: Forgotten Warriors culminates with the aging
4 veterans coming together from across Canada to perform a healing
5 ceremony for the benefit of their fallen brethren.
6 The fourth thread is a desire to expose the deceptions of federal,
7 state, and local governments in their dealings with Indian nations
8 as well as the generalized white racism that supports such conduct.
9 Almost all Obomsawin’s films fit this description, most evidently in
10 the conduct of rampaging whites (soldiers as well as civilians) in
11 Incident at Restigouche, Kanehsatake, Rocks at Whisky Trench, and Is
12 the Crown at War with Us? Barb Cranmer has also worked in this [83], (14)
13 vein, showing in Laxwesa Wa how the Canadian government has
14 “managed” Native fisheries into a disastrous condition that Native
Lines: 102 to
15 people are struggling to overcome. Loretta Todd has been unflinching
———
16 in her depiction of the failings of the Canadian state in Forgotten
0.0pt PgV
17 Warriors and The Learning Path, while Sandra Osawa has followed ———
18 suit in an American context, with hard-hitting exposés of government Normal Page
19 failures and generalized Indian hating in Lighting the Seventh Fire, PgEnds: TEX
20 Usual and Accustomed Places, and In the Heart of Big Mountain.
21 Finally, the fifth thread is a belief in the importance of cultural
[83], (14)
22 continuity and pan-tribal solidarity. Obomsawin gives great weight
23 to both themes in Amisk, Mother of Many Children, Poundmaker’s
24 Lodge, No Address, and Incident at Restigouche as well as in her later
25 films about the Oka crisis, and her peers have followed suit. Geddes’s
26 Picturing a People stresses the importance of documenting the Native
27 past, Todd’s Forgotten Warriors celebrates the links between aging vet-
28 erans, Carr’s Kinaalda and Cranmer’s T’lina underscore the necessity
29 of maintaining traditions, and even the title of Osawa’s Lighting the
30 Seventh Fire honors a traditional Anishinabe prophesy signaling “a
31 return to traditional ways.”
32 Even when the connection to the past is bittersweet, these filmmak-
33 ers present it as worth pursuing. In her controversial Navajo Talking
34 Picture, Arlene Bowman shares her desire to connect with traditional
35 Navajo life as well as her frustrations in failing to achieve it, while
36 her follow-up project, Song Journey, shows her making a more satis-
84 A GENDERED GAZE?
1 fying connection with her roots (broadly defined) and her seemingly
2 newfound enthusiasm for pan-tribal solidarity. In the narration to
3 the second film, Bowman describes feeling a need to visit her ances-
4 tral Navajo land, where she would, she believed, be brought “back
5 to [her] traditions.” She admits that she does not “normally come
6 out to the reservation very much,” and that her interest in powwows
7 had long been “dormant,” but that making Song Journey gave her an
8 opportunity to rekindle both these interests. At the end of the film,
9 Bowman enters a crowd of dancers and experiences a moment of
10 pure pan-tribal solidarity. “I felt a sense of wholeness dancing with
11 the people of all nations,” she explains.
12 Like Obomsawin, Cranmer, Carr, Geddes, and Osawa, Bowman [84], (15
13 idealizes the notion of solidarity among Native people regardless
14 of geography and generation. Underneath this insistence on the vi-
Lines: 10
15 tal connections between Native people is a willingness to suspend
———
16 judgment of localized problems such as tribal mismanagement, dis-
0.0pt P
17 putes with other tribes, and gender relations within particular Indian ———
18 communities (any autocriticisms are muted). All these Native women Normal P
19 filmmakers seem to avert their cameras from divisive issues that might PgEnds:
20 weaken resolve against the perceived greater enemy: government ne-
21 glect of Native rights and white ignorance about Native people. Even
[84], (15
22 when a film acknowledges intertribal strife, as does Osawa’s In the
23 Heart of Big Mountain regarding Hopi-Navajo land disputes, it does
24 so gently, reserving its anger for the federal government and private
25 corporations, which are behind the dispossession of Navajo families.
26
27 Although some combination of these five factors is at play in almost
28 all Obomsawin’s films as well as those of her Native peers, I hope
29 not to fall into the notion that position explains production, that
30 is, not to lapse into the simplistic formulation that the combination
31 of Native and woman results in a predictable textual outcome. As I
32 have suggested throughout this chapter, generalizing about gender
33 cannot be done without frequent caveats. Because I have outlined
34 a few broader propositions about Obomsawin’s work based on her
35 gender position, I worry, along with Trinh T. Minh-ha, that “what we
36 ‘look for’ is un/fortunately what we shall find” in academic inquiry.
A GENDERED GAZE? 85
1 Trinh has taken some shots at certain scholars such as anthropologists

2 whom she sees as inventing patterns rather than finding them, as
3 projecting their own imaginings on the bodies of the Other, all the
4 while aspiring toward Malinowski’s goal for ethnography: to “grasp
5 the native point of view . . . to realize his vision of the world.”27
6 Can one look for a structure without structuring? It is a question
7 for a humanist like me as much as for social scientists. Trinh asks
8 this rhetorical question and answers it in the negative, noting how
9 difficult it is for the academic mind to admit that “recording, gather-
10 ing, sorting, deciphering, analyzing and synthesizing, dissecting and
11 articulating are already ‘imposing our[/a] structure,’ a structural ac-
12 tivity, a structuring of the mind, a whole mentality.”28 Even in looking [85], (16)
13 for the gendered qualities in Obomsawin’s cinematic gaze, I have, I
14 realize, my own structures to impose on indigenous media, although I
Lines: 114 to
15 retain the faint hope that my impositions are more suggestive and less
———
16 totalizing than the ones found in the work of the grand taxonomers
0.0pt PgV
17 to whom Trinh objects most stringently. Rather than essentializing ———
18 what female Native filmmakers like Obomsawin are doing, I want Normal Page
19 to acknowledge the contradictions and paradoxes embedded within PgEnds: TEX
20 their work, even as I scramble up the interpretive hill to take in a
21 wider view of the subject.
[85], (16)
22 In closing here, I want to return to my original question: Is it
23 significant that the cardinal figure in Native filmmaking is female? I
24 think that it is, for the reasons stated above as well for one final reason:
25 Obomsawin’s gendered subjectivity seems to underwrite one of the
26 fundamental qualities of her work, an ethos of social concern that is
27 based on an attitude of profound compassion. Obomsawin often ex-
28 presses sympathy in response to suffering, a heightened appreciation
29 of human interdependence, and a willingness to sacrifice her own
30 needs to assist society’s most vulnerable members. Characterizing
31 Obomsawin in this way might seem disturbingly close to endorsing
32 the stereotype of the hypernurturing, self-sacrificing Native woman,
33 but this ethos is something that the filmmaker places front and cen-
34 ter in her own interviews, activism, and documentaries. 29 Qualities
35 that might seem like patriarchal legacies are transformed into an
36 expansive force in her work, a force that takes her far beyond the
86 A GENDERED GAZE?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [86], (17
13 figure 17. Obomsawin during the shooting of Mother of Many Children
14 (1977). Courtesy of the filmmaker. Lines: 12
15
———
16
essentialist role of nurturing kin to a larger political context in which 9.9119
17 ———
18 compassionate filmmaking becomes a kind of public service. Obom- Normal P
19 sawin is not succumbing to some mythology of domestic entrapment PgEnds:
20 when, throughout her work, whether as a filmmaker, an education
21 consultant, or a performer, she talks about the importance of chil-
[86], (17
22 dren. Rather, she focuses her attention on any child at risk, not just
23 members of her own family, clan, or tribe. In films such as Christmas
24 at Moose Factory, Mother of Many Children, and Richard Cardinal,
25 she reveals a sustained interest in the vulnerabilities of young people
26 that few male documentarians have ever developed, suggesting that
27 true compassion goes well beyond one-on-one nurturing. Within
28 her films, compassion is a larger social practice that can ameliorate
29 the worst problems in Canadian society, whether an imperfect foster-
30 care system (Richard Cardinal), homelessness (No Address), substance
31 abuse (No Address), or the neglect of Native land claims and fishing
32 rights (Incident at Restigouche, Amisk, etc.).
33 Although these subjects fit within the progressive documentary
34 tradition that begins with John Grierson in the 1930s (and whose in-
35 fluence I will discuss later), Obomsawin’s ethos gives her a different
36 angle of approach than her male nonfiction forebears. Unlike male
A GENDERED GAZE? 87
1 documentarians who have pointed their cameras at, say, underprivi-

2 leged children or the ill-housed working class, Obomsawin does not
3 look through the lens and see abstract symbols of oppression. Rather,
4 she listens to the subject and allows even the most vulnerable child
5 to speak and be heard as a distinct individual—even posthumously
6 (in the case of Richard Cardinal). Can Native children at risk be the
7 subject of respectful cinematic attention, attention that neither pities
8 nor sensationalizes? Obomsawin was one of the first Native women
9 to answer that question with a resounding yes in her caring films
10 about those who have been silenced and neglected, employing an
[Last Page]
11 ethos of compassion that seems to have come, at least in part, out
12 of her gendered position as a Native woman in Canadian society, [87], (18)
13 a position that, like most everything else, is a historical and social
14 construction but palpable nonetheless in how it has shaped her atti-
Lines: 138 to
15 tudes. Without romanticizing or essentializing the traditional gender
———
16 roles assigned to women, Obomsawin reveals how what was once a
193.69pt
17 personal/familial ethos can be transposed to a societal stage through ———
18 her particular brand of cinema engagé. Whether this ethos originated Normal Page
19 in old-fashioned European American gender constraints or perhaps PgEnds: TEX
20 simply in an older Abenaki emphasis on human interdependence is
21 immaterial. What matters is how she has turned it into a powerful
[87], (18)
22 form of social critique that animates all her creative work.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
4
7
8 Documentary on the Middle Ground
9
10
[First Pag
11
12 [88], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 t
15 The spark was an unlikely combination of golf and greed. In 1989
———
16 an ill-conceived plan for sixty luxury homes surrounding an upscale
0.124p
17 golf course set off the most serious confrontation between Native ———
18 people and government authorities in contemporary Canadian his- Normal P
19 tory, something that for U.S. observers might have evoked the deadly PgEnds:
20 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Histories of the
21 Oka standoff have shown what Alanis Obomsawin would reveal in
[88], (1)
22 four films during the 1990s: that, as in all such matters, the underlying
23 reasons for the violence had been sown in centuries past.
24 For more than two hundred years, Mohawks in the town Kaneh-
25 satake had endured the expansion of the adjacent town, Oka, whose
26 largely white population kept spreading into lands that the Mohawks
27 considered their rightful property. Beginning in the 1780s, the Mo-
28 hawks had delivered a number of petitions requesting formal title to
29 land they believed themselves to have been promised. Although the
30 tribe had little success in their quest for official land rights over the
31 next two hundred years, some outsiders, including figures within the
32 Canadian government, were sympathetic to their demands. When
33 apprised of the brewing conflict over the golf course in the late 1980s,
34 John Ciaccia, the minister for Indian affairs in Quebec, wrote to
35 the mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, about the Mohawk predicament:
36 “These people have seen their lands disappear without having been
DOCUMENTARY ON THE MIDDLE GROUND 89
1 consulted or compensated, and that, in my opinion, is unfair and un-

2 just, especially over a golf course.” Contemporary local politicians,
3 however, were no more attuned to tribal concerns than their pre-
4 decessors had been in the past. When asked at a municipal council
5 meeting in March 1989 if he had consulted the Mohawks about his
6 development plan for the golf course, Ouellette scoffed: “You know
7 you can’t talk to the Indians.”1 To the Mohawks this was the final
8 insult in a long chain of abuses.
9 Having witnessed too many incremental steps toward the long-
10 term erosion of their lands, Mohawk activists took a stand over a small
11 tract of forest that included a number of Mohawk graves. At first these
12 [89], (2)
activists relied on peaceful protest to secure what they considered a
13 sacred plot of land, working the legal and political channels with their
14
scant resources. When the white city council continued to support Lines: 33 to
15
plans for the golf course, they turned to more aggressive forms of ———
16
dissent, culminating in their decision to arm themselves and take up 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
defensive positions on the disputed land.
18 Normal Page
Furious, Ouellette ignored Ciaccia, who had requested that he not
19 PgEnds: TEX
involve the provincial police, and called in the Sûreté du Québec (sq)
20
to settle the matter once and for all. Its officers more often spending
21
their time on country roads in pursuit of speeding motorists, the sq [89], (2)
22
was not trained for military-style exercises against indigenous people
23
24 or anyone else. But now dozens of officers showed up in the sleepy
25 town with assault rifles and bulletproof vests, wielding billy clubs
26 and tear gas, reminiscent of the situation that Obomsawin recounted
27 in her 1984 Incident at Restigouche. Rather than inspiring confidence
28 that the situation would soon be settled, their arrival created dread
29 and tension among local people on both sides of the issue. 2 According
30 to one observer, Mohawk children were asking their parents when,
31 not if, the police were going to shoot them. 3
32 Instead of giving in to the pressures of the sq, the Mohawk warriors,
33 as they became known, began digging into trenches on the disputed
34 land.“When it became clear that the sq was preparing to move in with
35 armed force,”one Canadian journalist wrote,“the Mohawk protestors
36 decided to call in the Warriors from the larger communities of Kah-
90 DOCUMENTARY ON THE MIDDLE GROUND
1 nawake and Akwesasne.”4 In response to Mohawk defiance, the local

2 authorities decided that it was time for bold action.
3 The morning of the raid was horrific. Police tried to rush into
4 the woods along a narrow road, but, facing gunfire from the pines,
5 they were forced to abandon their vehicles and retreat. Frustrated
6 warriors pumped bullets into deserted police cars, ransacked them
7 for weapons, and then piled them into a twisted heap of scrap metal
8 to block further access to the road. The raid had begun just before
9 dawn, with no more than thirty warriors stationed in the pines, but
10 soon after it started supporters began pouring into the woods. Within
11 hours of the first gunshots, seventy-five warriors had assembled and
12 were taking stock of their collective arsenal—a few dozen shotguns [90], (3)
13 and .22-caliber rifles, ten bolt-action .303s, a small number of pistols,
14 and a disturbingly large number of assault rifles, including auto-
Lines: 40
15 matic car-15s, m-1 carbines, and even a Russian-designed machine
———
16 gun known as an rpk. Although the warriors were still outgunned
0.0pt P
17 and outnumbered, they had some advantages: the sq did not know ———
18 the woods, did not know how many warriors it was facing, and did Normal P
19 not know about the dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of PgEnds:
20 ammunition. 5
21 Surging into the woods in the early morning haze, the sq soon
[90], (3)
22 discovered the seriousness of the opposition as Mohawk weapons
23 began to fire. As one journalist described the scene: “A short, fierce
24 gun battle erupted, and a bullet ripped through a seam in Corporal
25 Marcel Lemay’s flack jacket and pierced his heart.” While it would
26 later be determined that the bullet that killed Lemay probably had
27 come from the warriors’ position (even though the gun that had
28 fired on him would never be found), at the time no one was certain
29 whether the officer had been the victim of friendly fire or a warrior’s
30 rifle. The Mohawks denied responsibility, even though some recalled
31 hearing one of their comrades shouting, “I think we got one,” in the
32 heat of battle. 6
33 According to journalists’ accounts, the situation got worse from
34 there. “There’s only one way we’re going to be able to build the golf
35 course,” Ouellette had warned ominously long before the violence
36 began. “That’s with the army.”7 Yet, even after the sq raid and the
1 shooting of Corporal Lemay, bringing in the armed forces seemed

2 unlikely. Federal Indian Affairs Minister Tom Siddon stood in the
3 pines to reassure journalists and other observers: “This is a place
4 of tranquility and great historical and spiritual significance to the
5 people of the Mohawk Nation, and we respect that.” Yet, just a few
6 days after this public declaration, the Canadian armed forces were
7 dispatched to replace the exhausted sq on the barricades. 8 With tanks,
8 helicopters, and well-armed soldiers lining the razor wire that had
9 now been strung through the forest, the standoff would last long into
10 the summer, with the warriors eventually falling back to a building
11 that housed a Native treatment center for addiction. They remained
12 under siege in the treatment center until an agreement was reached, [91], (4)
13 seventy-eight days after the initial raid.
14 No one living in Canada could have missed this dramatic crisis on Lines: 45 to
15 the barricades between Native and white. Night after night, the news
———
16 coverage had been extensive, if short on knowledge about the back- 7.0pt PgV
17 ground of Native land claims. One Mohawk observer, Dan David, ———
18 claimed that most journalists were unwilling to seek the truth, pre- Normal Page
19 ferring to lose themselves in a haze of stereotype and simplification PgEnds: TEX
20 about “the shoot-out at the Oka Corral,” as one British paper dubbed
21 it. “To most of them, this was just a cop story,” David complained [91], (4)
22 about the journalists, adding that the standoff was painted as if “the
23 police and soldiers were there to ‘restore law and order,’ to put things
24 back the way they were.” He believed that few outside journalists
25 could appreciate the price of going back to the status quo, which he
26
described as “a certain and steady ride down a one-way street to an
27
oblivion called assimilation.”9
28
Instead of seeking the truth, the news coverage often relied on gov-
29
ernment press releases and other one-sided sources. One Quebecois
30
writer described the surreal scene that he witnessed on Canadian
31
television during the two and a half months of crisis:
32
33 Like a succession of heat hallucinations, army tanks ground
34 through a dappled Canadian forest at the height of summer;
35 teenage boys in battle gear slowly encircled the Kanehsatake
36 Mohawks with bale after bale of razor wire; and the armed
1 Warriors with their noms de guerre like Spudwrench, Wiz-

2 ard, and Lasagna jabbed heavily sedated tv viewers coming
3 down from Twin Peaks. Eventually we saw a white mob in
4 jogging shorts stoning cars filled with Indian old people
5 and children. We watched as the Prime Minister, in his oddly
6 platitudinous style, congratulated‘all members of the armed
7 forces of Canada for their forbearance.’And we’re still seeing
8 the official media logo of the crisis: a poster-perfect sol-
9 dier and a masked Mohawk warrior standing inches apart,
10 eyeball-to-eyeball. 10
11
12 This was the depressing media landscape that Obomsawin en- [92], (5)
13 countered in the summer of 1991, but she was in a rare position to
14 do something about it. Never before had an indigenous person been
armed with the tools of the electronic mass media when this sort of Lines: 56
15
crisis was unfolding; never before had it been possible to create a well- ———
16
funded portrait of state violence against Native people. The result was 7.0pt P
17 ———
18 an extraordinary cinematic record of Oka that would challenge the Normal P
19 ignorance and bias governing mainstream press coverage.
PgEnds:
20 On the morning of the raid, in the middle of work on Le Patro, her
21 short film about a Montreal community center, Obomsawin heard
[92], (5)
22 the news on the radio and knew what she had to do. Driving imme-
23 diately to Oka, she surveyed the situation, realized the importance
24 of what was happening, and sped back to Montreal to gather what
25 she needed. Not wanting to sit through the endless hassles that had
26 waylaid her efforts with Incident at Restigouche, she was firm in her
27 resolve to outrun the bureaucracy this time. “I told the Film Board,
28 ‘I’m changing production and I’ve got to get there right now.’ ”11 Ten
29 years had passed since Restigouche, and now, with seven films and
30 various awards to her credit, she was someone to be reckoned with at
31 the National Film Board (nfb). When she got what she wanted, she
32 headed out to Oka with a cameraman and an assistant, doing sound
33 herself until another crew member joined her in the warriors’ camp.
34 “Alanis Obomsawin did not spare the viewers,” a reviewer would
35 later write about her film, “just as she and her film crew were not
36 spared a single sickening moment of the stand-off.”12 Her willing-
1 ness to remain inside the barricades to record the unfolding events,

2 not knowing what kind of violence might erupt, represents one of
3 the great acts of courage in the history of documentary filmmaking.
4 Even at sixty-one years of age, she was willing to endure near battle
5 conditions as well as simple discomforts such as sleeping on the cold
6 ground. For seventy-eight days she remained in place while her var-
7 ious crew members, mostly younger male technicians, were anxious
8 to rotate out of harm’s way—“some of them didn’t want to stay there
9 too long,” she recalls without passing judgment. As someone with an
10 antipathy to firearms, she had to steel herself to stay where everyone—
11 warriors, police, soldiers—was heavily armed. Most nights she could
12 barely sleep a few hours before a new emergency erupted along the [93], (6)
13 razor wire and she had to run through the darkness to where it was
14 happening, believing that her presence with the camera would have
Lines: 68 to
15 a restraining effect on the army. “I was told many times that the fact
———
16 that I was there, especially as a Native person, [meant] that the police
0.0pt PgV
17 and army wouldn’t do certain things there with the camera.”13 ———
18 Not that the warriors were getting special treatment from the me- Normal Page
19 dia in general—far from it. In the long, slow hours between flare-ups PgEnds: TEX
20 of violence and tension, Obomsawin and the warriors watched the
21 television coverage with a skeptical eye, comparing the slant of the
[93], (6)
22 cbc reports to what they could see happening around them. With so
23 much of the mainstream coverage seeming to regurgitate the official
24 line provided in army briefings and ministerial press conferences, the
25 warriors were infuriated by their inability to get their own perspective
26 to the Canadian public. For a long time, Obomsawin remembers, the
27 few reporters inside the barricades were not allowed to send footage
28 over the razor wire or even communicate with their own news or-
29 ganizations. When telephone contact was finally established across
30 the barricade, Obomsawin listened to her nfb superiors pleading for
31 her to cross to safety. Although supportive of what she was doing
32 in principle, they were concerned about the considerable expense
33 of keeping her crew in place, not to mention her well-being. Their
34 fears were not irrational. “It was like wartime,” she said, remembering
35 the rumbling tanks on the perimeter, the army grunts sweeping the
36 woods with search lights, the oppressive drone of helicopters over-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [94], (7)
13 figure 18. Obomsawin sleeping on the ground behind the barricades while
14 making Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Courtesy of the film-
Lines: 81
15 maker.
———
16
0.5899
17 head, the moments of uncertainty when the warriors would run out ———
18 of their bunkers at 3:00 a.m. to confront soldiers, sometimes with Normal P
19 insults or hurled eggs, while the angry soldiers fixed their bayonets PgEnds:
20 in response. 14
21 The worse it got, the more Obomsawin felt the need to stay. In
[94], (7)
22 the middle of the standoff, the cbc pulled its reporters out, mean-
23 ing that, as Obomsawin recalls, “there was quite a bit of stuff that
24 the cbc didn’t have [on film] because they weren’t there to film it.”
25 She was determined to remain in place, a Native witness to potential
26 atrocities, no matter what her nfb colleagues told her, no matter what
27 other observers were doing. Right until the end of the standoff, she
28 stuck behind the barricades, leaving only the day before the warriors
29 planned to exit. Waiting for her at the razor wire were the head of
30 the nfb and her lawyer, both of whom were eager to prevent the
31 confiscation of her footage (a number of journalists had lost their
32 film to the soldiers in this manner). On the following day the war-
33 riors came across the barricades as she anticipated, and Obomsawin
34 made the most of her frontline position to record what the warriors
35 called their exit rather than their surrender. According to one review
36 of her 1993 Kanehsatake: “Shocked and sickened viewers have to re-
1 mind themselves that these are our valiant Canadian ‘peacekeepers,’

2 sanctioned by the Mulroney government, who are grinding people’s
3 faces into the pavement, roughing up women and separating them
4 from their children.”15 Such painful scenes of Native exodus from
5 the pines would be at the heart of a later film she would make about
6 Oka, Rocks at Whisky Trench (2000), which she would release a decade
7 after the crisis. But now her task was making the film that would be
8 called Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, the first of her four searing
9 documentaries about what happened that summer.
10 In the fall of 1991, she began working on the footage that she
11 and her crew had captured at Oka, trying to shape a narrative out
12 of the chaos that they had witnessed. Working with three different [95], (8)
13 crews over the seventy-eight-day standoff, she had amassed over 250
14 hours of sixteen-millimeter film, a vast quantity, and one that did
Lines: 83 to
15 not even include another fifty hours of stock shots that would be
———
16 added for consideration in the editing room. The amount of footage
0.0pt PgV
17 was overwhelming even to her award-winning editor, Yurij Luhovy, ———
18 who said that it was far more than had ever been shot for an nfb Normal Page
19 film. “It was a huge project,” he said. “Just to give you an idea of PgEnds: TEX
20 the magnitude, it took me six months just to view the raw footage
21 and mark the best elements in the film. Then, two of my assistants
[95], (8)
22 would remove the selected elements from which I then made the first
23 rough-cut assembly consisting of twelve of the best hours shot.”16
24 The results of all this work and struggle are impressive: a brilliant
25 film of occupation and resistance that echoes with the sounds of cry-
26 ing children, grim-faced soldiers, high-velocity gunfire, and grinding
27 tank treads—none of which a viewer would expect to see in the placid
28 Canada of stereotype.
29
30 Reading Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
31 Obomsawin’s epic document of state violence and indigenous sover-
32 eignty under fire begins, appropriately enough, with gravestones.
33 Each one is carved with a Mohawk name from the 1820s, each one
34 a testament to the tribe’s deep roots in the woods around Oka. In
35 voice-over we hear the calming tone of the filmmaker’s voice as she
36 provides a thumbnail sketch of the crisis. She tells us about the
1 golf-course expansion while showing images of affluent whites on

2 a putting green, then pans across a stand of majestic trees as she
3 describes the encroachment onto “Mohawk land.” Although in these
4 opening minutes she has not expressed her explicit judgment of who
5 is right and who is wrong, her use of this phrase, which elides the
6 complex legal status of the pines, sets her squarely in the Mohawk
7 camp on the most fundamental issue in the film.
8 As if to underscore her place in the Mohawk camp where she lit-
9 erally lived for those seventy-eight days, Obomsawin begins sharing
10 sympathetic testimonials from the Native side, beginning with two
11 Mohawk women, Ellen Gabriel and Kahentiiosta, both of whom were
12 seasoned activists and veterans of similar conflicts (although the film [96], (9)
13 does not acknowledge this fact, nor does Obomsawin’s later film on
14 Kahentiiosta). A well-spoken young woman, Ellen Gabriel tells the
Lines: 91
15 camera about the raid onto Mohawk land: “We were fighting some-
———
16 thing without a spirit—they were like robots.” Cut to menacing im-
0.0pt P
17 ages of gun-toting soldiers in gas masks, their faces utterly obscured, ———
18 and simulated footage from a war zone: uncontrolled camera move- Normal P
19 ments in the woods; the sound of gunfire; angry voices. Obomsawin PgEnds:
20 then appears in the woods with “Mad Jap,” as the Mohawk leader
21 Robert Skidders decided to code-name himself during the standoff.
[96], (9)
22 “I think we tried to conduct ourselves in a very honorable way,” he
23 tells her, “because we did try to avoid violence.”
24 In the first moments of the film, Obomsawin has cast her Mohawk
25 subjects in a warm light while suggesting that the Canadian police
26 and soldiers are inhuman cogs in a vast war machine. Other scholars,
27 however, have detected a more ambivalent posture in the film. In
28 an excellent article about Kanehsatake, Zuzana Pick has described
29 the “contrast in rhetorical forms” that shapes the opening segment
30 of Obomsawin’s most important film. According to Pick, the film-
31 maker shifts between autobiography, interpretation, reminiscence,
32 and chronicle like a practiced storyteller and, in the process, is able to
33 “integrate affective, experiential, and interpretive modes of speech.”
34 As Pick sees it, the filmmaker’s point of view is strong but not exclu-
35 sive: rather than sanding off the edges of competing accounts in order
36 to make them fit into a smoother narrative, she allows the various
1 stories to coexist, rubbing against one another, jostling in juxtaposi-

2 tion for the viewer to sort out. Pick claims that this inclusivist vision
3 “disrupts the unified position of the narrating subject” and subverts
4 the possibility of a single “interpretative frame,” but this strikes me as
5 a mild overstatement. 17
6 As in all her films, Obomsawin has a subtle but strong presence
7 throughout the narrative, one that never leaves the viewer uncertain
8 of who is telling the story (or why). Even when she strives for balance,
9 which she often does in her coverage of Oka, Obomsawin leaves no
10 doubt where her allegiances lie, as we can see in her fixation on
11 the use of the word savage. “And they call us savages,” one warrior
12 tells the camera in disgust, referring to white Canadians and their [97], (10)
13 military representatives. At several points in the film Obomsawin
14 uses reference to that loaded word from her childhood in order to
Lines: 95 to
15 invert the stereotype onto its white perpetrators. Later in the first half
———
16 hour of the film, she uses nighttime footage of rioting whites, some
0.0pt PgV
17 of them shirtless, burning an effigy of a Mohawk warrior and yelling ———
18 “Savages!” because the Mohawks had shut down a bridge used by Normal Page
19 sixty-five thousand cars each day. The chaos of the French Canadians PgEnds: TEX
20 appears in stark contrast to the composure of the warriors being
21 interviewed in Kanehsatake, a fact that seems even more striking if
[97], (10)
22 the viewer stops to contrast the reasons for their grievances: the whites
23 are rioting in the streets because the Mohawks have closed a major
24 bridge, resulting in longer drive times to work and shopping, while
25 the Mohawks are taking up arms to defend their land after being
26 cheated and deceived for three centuries.
27 Yet Pick is not the only scholar who sees Obomsawin’s work as an
28 “open text” with various voices in more or less equal competition.
29 Another is Laura Marks, who writes about Kanehsatake in her recent
30 The Skin of the Film. After mistakenly identifying the filmmaker as
31 “Anishnabek,” Marks then overestimates the democratic nature of
32 the assembled voices in Obomsawin’s greatest documentary, claim-
33 ing that the filmmaker “does not put one Mohawk in the position
34 of spokesperson, for that would merely mimic the authoritarianism
35 of government officials.” I agree: the film does not privilege the tes-
36 timony of any one Mohawk; it privileges that of two, Ellen Gabriel
1 and Kahentiiosta, whose eloquent voices begin and end the film, and
2 whose sane and thoughtful commentary provides a touchstone for
3 the narrative at a number of points. Marks also argues that the film-
4 maker is interested in Native voices whose claim to the pines “cannot
5 be expressed in the terms of legalistic, territorial discourse,” but that
6 too strikes me as wrong. For the past two centuries, the warriors
7 have developed a “territorial” discourse all their own, talking about
8 their land claims in a manner that is mythic and even sentimental
9 but also quite legalistic—the latter quality has been developed out of
10 necessity in the Canadian courts where Mohawks have pressed their
11 claims since the eighteenth century. Contrary to what Marks implies,
12 their discourse is not naturalistic, and their claims are not spoken [98], (11
13 into the wind between the trees for the exclusive benefit of songbirds
14 and beavers: Mohawks have used the courts, political action, civil
Lines: 99
15 disobedience, and occasional violence for 270 years of resistance, as
———
16 the title of the film suggests. Obomsawin makes clear that she is part
0.0pt P
17 of this long path of resistance, yet Marks believes that the filmmaker ———
18 “maintains a skeptical distance from seemingly authoritative visible Normal P
19 evidence.”18 Obomsawin does avoid the strident tone that reduces PgEnds:
20 some political filmmaking to the level of rude polemic, but this is the
21 same filmmaker who often talks about “our people” in her voice-over
[98], (11
22 narration. If she does not use that particular phrase in Kanehsatake,
23 she tips her hand in another way, choosing to place herself in shot
24 next to her Native interview subjects, something she does not do with
25 whites. 19
26 I suspect that Obomsawin is more of an old-fashioned positivist
27 than Marks realizes. Rather than letting the evidence pile up in any
28 direction that suits the audience, she uses her thematic emphases,
29 camera work, editing, and music to illuminate a single path of plau-
30 sibility through her material—if other interpretations always remain
31 possible (as is always the case with cinematic texts), she seems to sug-
32 gest that the facts on display come with a strongly preferred reading,
33 which is her own. Even if she is less overtly demonstrative about her
34 beliefs than some political artists, and if she seems relatively even-
35 handed as a result, she still does not maintain a “skeptical distance”
36 toward anything Native in her films—her passionate commitment
1 requires intimacy and faith in relation to the Mohawk position. She

2 depends on us overcoming our skeptical distance toward her images
3 of circling military helicopters, rumbling tanks, and atrocities such
4 as blackjack beatings of Mohawk men. She depends on us seeing
5 them as she does: as unmistakable symbols of brutal neocolonialism,
6 racism, and disregard for Native rights. She is a partisan, if relatively
7 subtle in her allegiances, and she expresses neither skepticism nor
8 distance toward her footage of Native mistreatment.
9 Yet, much to its credit, Kanehsatake is a partisan film that does not
10 indulge simplistic pieties of oppression and resistance. In it Obom-
11 sawin shows how the warriors do not stand in opposition to an un-
12 broken white monolith. Official documents, meetings, and press con- [99], (12)
13 ferences appear on-screen, but she highlights the conflicts between
14 official versions—some ministers are openly sympathetic to the Mo-
Lines: 101 to
15 hawks, while others express bellicosity. (Local whites get the same
———
16 balanced treatment—some are shown responding with contempt
0.0pt PgV
17 toward Native people, while others share their heartfelt critiques of ———
18 the raid.) Obomsawin often relies on the principle of ironic juxtapo- Normal Page
19 sition to undercut the official version of events. For example, govern- PgEnds: TEX
20 ment officials tell the media that “no restrictions” are being placed on
21 the delivery of food across the barricades, but then several Mohawks
[99], (12)
22 and one Red Cross worker reveal the opposite to be true. Official
23 rhetoric takes a beating in the next scene as well, which revises one of
24 the stereotypical tableaux of Native-white relations. Early on, when
25 white officials meet with Mohawk leaders to formulate a truce in or-
26 der to avoid sending the army onto Native land, we see Ellen Gabriel
27 giving an eloquent speech about the problems facing Mohawk people,
28 then several government officials promising to remedy the situation.
29 Obomsawin cuts to Federal Indian Affairs Minister Tom Siddon, a
30 wealthy looking white man, making his pledge about this “place of
31 tranquility” being respected, although most Canadian viewers would
32 know that these words would soon be betrayed, adding even greater
33 poignancy to the next statement. A middle-aged Mohawk man stands
34 up, looks at the table where the government officials are seated, and
35 addresses the crowd: “As far back as I can remember, there has always
36 been a struggle,” he says. “I hope that the creator will give you the
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [100], (1
13 figure 19. Across the razor wire in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
14 (1993). Photograph by: Shaney Komulainen. Used with the permission of
the photographer. Lines: 11
15
———
16
2.4119
17 integrity to fulfill these things.” The camera pans toward Siddon and ———
18 the other officials smiling awkwardly. The scene evokes the European Normal P
19 paintings of treaty signings from the eighteenth century, except now PgEnds:
20 the Natives are talking back, speaking for themselves, putting the
21 federal officials on the spot rather than posing mute on the canvas.
[100], (1
22 As this scene might suggest, the filmmaker emphasizes the impor-
23 tance of Native self-determination, historical awareness, and pan-
24 tribal solidarity in Kanehsatake as she does throughout her oeuvre. At
25 a large rally for aboriginal rights near Oka, her camera pans across the
26 crowd, while her microphone captures the energetic drum circles and
27 the various speakers. “It is us who can determine what is best for us,”
28 says Chief Bill Traverse, drums pulsating in the background. “History
29 can teach you many things, but you have got to listen,”another speaker
30 says. Later Obomsawin cuts to a huge banner over the barricade that
31 asks, “are you aware that this is mohawk land?” in both English
32 and French, seeming to echo the famous statement in the title of the
33 1969 nfb Challenge for Change film You Are on Indian Land. And
34 at several points in the film she shows Native people coming from
35 South Dakota, British Columbia, and even Mexico in support of the
36 warriors. “Even if we are not recognized as a nation [because of the
1 standoff], it’s brought all Indian nations together,” says Ronnie Cross,
2 also known as “Lasagna” for his Italian and Mohawk heritage. While
3 Cross talks, Obomsawin cuts to a sign posted in the woods with the
4 words “lasagna dead meat” scrawled on it by the soldiers.
5 Lasagna is not the only one at risk. The tension is palpable in
6 Kanehsatake from the opening scenes to the closing moments, in part
7 because we do not know quite how it will turn out for Obomsawin
8 herself. In watching the filmmaker in danger behind the barricades,
9 the viewer might be reminded of classic war documentaries like John
10 Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945), which offer one of the unique
11 pleasures of documentary, as described by the Hungarian screen-
12 writer Béla Bálazs in his 1945 The Theory of Film. Bálazs suggested [101], (14)
13 that nonfiction cinema was different from all other art forms because
14 “the reality being presented is not yet completed,” that we do not even
Lines: 116 to
15 know whether the filmmaker will survive what she is shooting at, say,
———
16 Oka, and that “it is this tangible being-present that gives the docu-
0.0pt PgV
17 mentary the peculiar tension no other art can produce.”20 Even if the ———
18 viewer infers Obomsawin’s safety from the fact of the completed film Normal Page
19 now running, it is not self-evident that she (or the other principals) PgEnds: TEX
20 will emerge unscathed.
21 Violence permeates the air at Kanehsatake, although most of it
[101], (14)
22 seems to blow across the barricades from where the soldiers and their
23 white supporters are waiting for the Mohawks to make a reckless
24 move. In this manner the film offers a biting critique of white vio-
25 lence, with nasty scenes of rioting French Canadians hurling garbage
26 at heavily shielded police to protest the bridge closure and even nas-
27 tier images of state violence against Mohawk people. When the army
28 replaces the sq at the barricades, Obomsawin lets her camera linger
29 on a vast line of tanks, armored personnel carriers, military heli-
30 copters, and soldiers with shoulder-mounted bazookas as well as on
31 individual acts of aggression on the part of members of the Cana-
32 dian Forces—never has the Canadian state seemed so malevolent in
33 cinema. Yet Kanehsatake is not a simplistic partisan film: it depicts
34 violence on all sides. In one scene we see a large Native man punching
35 and kicking a police officer. In another an ominous-looking Mohawk
36 teenager calling himself “Freddy Krueger,” after the serial-killer pro-
1 tagonist of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, appears on-screen in

2 full body camouflage and bandana-covered face, saying: “Hopefully
3 I’ll come out of this alive.” If the film does not offer much explicit
4 critique of the macho posturing that some male warriors adopted,
5 Obomsawin’s inclusion of this material does encourage such critical
6 readings.
7 “The film is about the struggle,” one Canadian writer has noted,
8 “not about ‘victims’ or ‘politics.’ The people who were characterized
9 in much of the media and by the military as criminals and extrem-
10 ists are instead painted as courageous and creative in Obomsawin’s
11 careful reconstruction of the events.”21 Yet, if Obomsawin chooses
12 not to offer a simple glorification of Native resistance, it is, I be- [102], (1
13 lieve, because she does not want to estrange potential viewers who
14 are not already converted to the cause of Native rights. Accepting
Lines: 12
15 an honorary doctorate from Trent University in 2003, she told the
———
16 graduating students “to keep an open circle so that you don’t alien-
0.0pt P
17 ate anyone,” and Kanehsatake seems a clear product of this lifelong ———
18 philosophy. Writing in Maclean’s in 1994, the journalist Barry Came Normal P
19 observed that Obomsawin’s version of Oka is constructed without PgEnds:
20 obvious heroes and villains, at least not those of the cartoonish sort.
21 Even when the scheming mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, seems to
[102], (1
22 present himself as a “leading contender” for what Came dubs the
23 role of villain, the filmmaker is quick to shift attention to the larger
24 context of the golf-course controversy that includes, as the subtitle of
25 the film has it, “270 years of resistance.”22
26 Sketching out these 270 years in the next section of the film, Obom-
27 sawin gives a clear but awkward historical overview of Mohawk dis-
28 possession beginning in the seventeenth century—generally, she is
29 more skilled at working with living human beings than at manip-
30 ulating static images like historic paintings and maps, although the
31 information is clear and shows the duplicity that the Mohawks have
32 faced, especially with regard to the Sulpician order of the Catholic
33 Church, which abused its crown-appointed control over their land.
34 Always seeking balance even if her scales tip toward the Native side,
35 Obomsawin follows the ominous footage of the church with a brief
36 positive image of Christianity in Oka: a Native minister clutching a
1 Bible overhead while soldiers prevent him from crossing the barri-
2 cade. “In the name of Jesus,” he pleads to no avail as the soldiers stand
3 firm.
4 After this brief historical overview, the film returns to the present
5 day. Drums are beating on the sound track, and tanks are rolling
6 into position on Mohawk hills. Unarmed Mohawk men and women
7 are stopping soldiers with m-16s, demanding to know what they are
8 doing on their land. A warrior talks about police brutality endured
9 during an arrest, and a shaken father describes a soldier shooting into
10 the ground near his son, the mud kicking onto their faces from the
11 ricochet. After a Native man complains about the Catholic Church’s
12 abuse of Native rights, a traditional Mohawk“false face”mask appears [103], (16)
13 stuck in the ground as an ominous sign, one that is confirmed when a
14 young Mohawk woman named Chicky promises: “You’re going to see
Lines: 124 to
15 a‘death feast.’ . . . That’s what they want.”Chicky then talks about the
———
16 need to stand up and fight back, as Obomsawin’s protagonists often
0.0pt PgV
17 do. “No more compassion. I’ve had it,” Chicky swears. “I’ll never bow ———
18 down to them because they’ll just step on your hands.” Normal Page
19 The next image provides a jarring microcosm of the film overall. PgEnds: TEX
20 Shot from the ground with a beautiful blue sky in the background, the
21 camera captures a masked warrior named “Psycho” warning a army
[103], (16)
22 colonel: “From here on in, we’re going to be burying each other.”
23 The response from the colonel is just as threatening: “No Canadian
24 military soldier will fire one shot . . . first.” The last word is freighted
25 with meaning: retaliation will be fierce. In case the viewer suspects
26 this exchange is mere rhetoric, Obomsawin cuts to a French Canadian
27 mob attacking a convoy of Mohawk elders, women, and children leav-
28 ing the reserve in fear of escalating violence between the army and the
29 warriors—softball-sized rocks shatter windows and land inside their
30 cars, with one hitting a seventy-seven-year-old man (this exodus will
31 become the subject of the later Rocks at Whisky Trench). Somewhat
32 balancing her coverage with a quick nod in the opposite direction
33 (where lesser sins are found, according to the film), Obomsawin then
34 describes how two warriors vandalized a nearby house, although she
35 is quick to mention that “the community”—a phrase that for her
36 signifies the Mohawks and their supporters—was opposed to such
1 criminal acts. It is clear that she wants the Mohawk warriors to appear
2 as “soldiers of the Mohawk nation” engaged in legitimate resistance
3 rather than as thugs and criminals, as Canadian officials, including
4 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, would have it. (Mulroney and other
5 government officials used the word terrorists at the time, if not with
6 the frequency it might been deployed in the post-9/11 media.)
7 When the warriors fall back into the treatment center to make
8 their last stand, the film falls into darkness, with silhouettes moving
9 in front of military krieg lights and Mohawk campfires. The images
10 seem straight out of news coverage of a distant conflict, perhaps
11 Guatemala in the 1980s or Angola in the 1970s. There are even echoes
12 of 1960s Vietnam with a chopper roaring overhead in the darkness, [104], (1
13 an indigenous female voice singing on the sound track, and a square-
14 jawed army officer, haughty in his black beret for the sake of the
Lines: 12
15 news cameras, looking fierce and mad like the young Kurtz in the
———
16 photographs shown to Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s
0.0pt P
17 Apocalypse Now (1979). ———
18 As much as it evokes war images from the nightly news and Holly- Normal P
19 wood, Kanehsatake is also about the phenomenon of media warfare, PgEnds:
20 about using the camera as a weapon in both defensive and offensive
21 capacities. We see an unarmed Mohawk defying a line of tanks in a
[104], (1
22 scene right out of Tiananmen Square, seeming to play to the cameras
23 in a way that evokes the famous footage from the previous summer.
24 We also see the warriors watching their own television coverage while
25 behind the barricades, appearing frustrated by the distortions of the
26 non-Native media. Through these and many other images, Obom-
27 sawin emphasizes how the mainstream reporters have a partial view
28 at best, with soldiers keeping most of them behind a cordon that
29 literally separates them from the crucial events. At one point she
30 includes footage of white reporters clamoring for the proper spelling
31 of an officer’s name in a way that implies an obsequious, spoon-fed
32 relationship to the military. Then, in a particularly revealing shot, she
33 shows a soldier taking surveillance photographs of the warriors with a
34 telephoto lens, prompting the warriors to hang a massive canvas cur-
35 tain to obstruct the army’s view into the treatment center. While this
36 action causes enormous frustration in the army ranks, Obomsawin
1 is able to continue filming behind the curtain and create a scene that
2 provides a potent metaphor for the warriors’ actions at Oka as well as
3 for Obomsawin’s media activism: the curtain is an attempt to control
4 the angle of vision on their lives and histories as Native peoples, an
5 attempt to stop the destructive gaze of the Canadian government and
6 commercial interests on their land, an attempt to privilege the Native
7 angle of vision in understanding the significance of the pines.
8 Obomsawin continues to highlight the significance of vision in the
9 scenes ahead. “We’re your eyes,” a sympathetic white photojournalist
10 says after crawling under razor wire to join the warriors, much to the
11 irritation of the army. “They’re trying to blind us by getting us out of
12 here,” he says. “I’m not going to be blinded. I want you to see; I want [105], (18)
13 the people to see what’s going to happen.” Obomsawin transitions
14 to a night scene in which the army is harassing the warriors with
Lines: 132 to
15 searchlights before deciding to tear down the curtain. “We can’t see,”
———
16 an annoyed officer yells in the darkness. “The only reason they are
0.0pt PgV
17 doing this [tearing down the curtain] is that they cannot see,”Mad Jap ———
18 explains to his comrades as the soldiers swirl through the darkness Normal Page
19 toward the curtain. “Get that fucking light off me!” Mad Jap yells at PgEnds: TEX
20 them, before the warriors return the favor with a bright light of their
21 own. “You should be real proud,” Mad Jap taunts one of the soldiers,
[105], (18)
22 illuminated in the bushes like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
23 “They’re gonna have your pictures in the papers . . . as cowards,” he
24 shouts. “Fuck off,” the soldier says in response, looking straight at the
25 camera with cold disgust.
26 Mad Jap’s comment has an unintended significance for what
27 Obomsawin is doing with her media work. The power to place
28 someone’s picture in the paper (or in a film) is an essential one in her
29 universe, where political power comes from controlling the process of
30 witnessing, documenting, and disseminating what is happening on
31 the ground in moments of political and social turmoil. (Obomsawin
32 often acts as a witness with her camera crew, which may account
33 for the great reliance on actuality footage in her films, in which we
34 seem to see events as they are happening, almost as if seeing through
35 her eyes, rather than watching a never-ending stream of talking-head
36 interviews or enduring a pedantic “voice-of-God” narration over a
1 slide show of historic photographs.) At one point in Kanehsatake

2 we catch a glimpse of Obomsawin behind the barricades as soldiers
3 intercept rolls of film thrown from photojournalists to their editors,
4 an obvious example of the state protecting the official version from
5 democratic tampering. The battle to control the flow of visual evi-
6 dence continues during tense negotiations over the razor wire, even
7 over absurd issues such as whether the warriors did, in fact, pelt a
8 tank with eggs. When asked whether he can prove that an egg hit the
9 giant tank, the soldier replies, “Give me the camera, and I’ll tape it
10 for you,” prompting a scoff from the filmmaker, who knows that she
11 would never see the camera again.
12 As much as Obomsawin serves as an indigenous witness to state vi- [106], (1
13 olence, she also testifies to the merits of the Mohawk cause. Through-
14 out Kanehsatake she makes a concerted effort to humanize the tough-
Lines: 13
15 looking, code-named, masked warriors of the Mohawk nation, often
———
16 through an emphasis on Native children. Warriors are said to be
0.0pt P
17 “family men,” not desperadoes with long police records, as the au- ———
18 thorities would maintain again and again in press conferences and Normal P
19 interviews. When the army cuts the telephone lines to isolate the PgEnds:
20 Mohawk resistance, the filmmaker shares a poignant scene of one
21 warrior on a cell phone, talking in a gentle voice to his small children
[106], (1
22 at home, with army helicopters roaring overhead in the night sky. She
23 shares the sight of two young warriors making plans to marry, as if
24 life goes on, even under siege. She shares her long-standing concern
25 for the welfare of Native mothers, focusing on their efforts to feed
26 their children with limited supplies in something approaching a war
27 zone. In one telling instance of official pettiness, the camera reveals
28 how a military bayonet has pierced each package of flour and corn
29 allowed across the barricade, supposedly to keep contraband from
30 making its way across.
31 In addition to the sympathetic look at warrior families, Kanehsa-
32 take shows the impact of state violence on individual Native bodies.
33 In the most graphic footage in the film, Obomsawin brings the vi-
34 olence to a human level when she introduces Randy “Spudwrench”
35 Horne, a Mohawk steelworker turned warrior whom the soldiers
36 beat beyond recognition, apparently using a blackjack, among other
1 instruments. Even as Horne lies unconscious, his head ballooning

2 with blood, we see the reluctance of the army to grant him access
3 to medical attention, except on their own restrictive terms. It seems
4 to take hours to negotiate his safe passage across the barricade to a
5 waiting ambulance, and, in this sequence, without making an overt
6 editorial comment, Obomsawin has spoken volumes about state vi-
7 olence. In another example designed to show the absurdity of the
8 army’s actions, Obomsawin shows soldiers lacing the shallow waters
9 around the treatment center with razor wire to keep small boats from
10 landing with food or other supplies.“What other reservations are they
11 going to surround?” asks a distraught Mohawk woman.
12 After seventy-eight days, the warriors announced their plan to sur- [107], (20)
13 render. Having left on the previous day, Obomsawin found herself
14 in an ideal position to capture what happened next, and she builds a
Lines: 140 to
15 brutal and chaotic scene on the innovative editing of Yurij Luhovy:
———
16 still photographs flash on-screen, punctuating the sixteen-millimeter
0.0pt PgV
17 footage of soldiers throwing warriors to the ground, children being ———
18 separated from their parents, dozens of people being taken into cus- Normal Page
19 tody, a scramble of frightened voices echoing on the sound track. PgEnds: TEX
20 It is a terrifying scene that marks the end of the standoff, but not
21 the film. To prevent the audience from concluding that, with their
[107], (20)
22 humiliating capture, the warriors had lost their fight, Obomsawin
23 adds a postscript that flashes forward one year. Now smiling Native
24 people are marching together through the sunny streets of Oka. In
25 voice-over, the filmmaker explains that all but three warriors were ac-
26 quitted of the charges against them and that the total cost of the siege
27 to the federal government was the astronomical sum of $155 million
28 dollars. Yet the sense of hope and even triumph is mitigated in her
29 next breath, when she notes that Mayor Ouellette, the politician who
30 had proposed the golf-course development in the first place, has been
31 reelected in Oka and that the status of the pines remains unresolved.
32 The Mohawks may have won the battle, the film suggests, but the war
33 goes on.
34 Kanehsatake maintains this sense of bittersweet triumph through
35 the credits, with a final scene of the sq taking shackled warriors
36 into police headquarters while Mohawk women shout encourage-
1 ment from the street. As the credits roll to reveal the vast number of
2 people who worked on the film (ten camera operators, seven sound
3 recordists, seven sound assistants, etc.), Obomsawin finishes just as
4 she began, with Ellen Gabriel and Kahentiiosta talking about the
5 virtues of the Mohawk people. These may be the final images, but
6 they are not the most indelible. For me the lingering image of the film
7 will always be an army helicopter droning overhead: it is an emblem
8 of the Canadian state that stands in stark contrast to the mythologies
9 of tolerance sustaining official political discourse. If anything, in the
10 documentary vision of Alanis Obomsawin, Canada looks more like
11 its brutal southern neighbor than it ever cared to admit.
12 In capturing the confusion and dismay of ordinary people engaged [108], (2
13 in armed resistance, Obomsawin’s film reaches the level of insight that
14 I admire in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), a similar
Lines: 14
15 film now regarded as a modern classic. Yet, because Obomsawin is
———
16 a Native woman working in Canada, which seems to represent three
0.0pt P
17 strikes in the United States, audiences in the lower forty-eight have ———
18 not seen Kanehsatake (or her other films) outside elite film festivals Normal P
19 and the occasional college classroom. Still, the film was not relegated PgEnds:
20 to the back shelf in the nfb warehouse, waiting for remote school dis-
21 tricts to place their order—far from it. Like all her work, Kanehsatake
[108], (2
22 made its way into the world through the nfb’s extensive channels of
23 distribution, meaning that it would be widely available across Canada
24 and receive far more attention than the average nonfiction release in
25 the United States. If reaching libraries, high schools, and nonprofit
26 institutions has never lent cachet to a filmmaker, it has always been
27 a worthy goal in Obomsawin’s mind because it gives her another
28 chance to shape the curriculum from a Native perspective, something
29 her performances and educational kits had done in the 1960s. “All of
30 my work—whether singing or storytelling or filmmaking—has been
31 a fight for inclusion of our history in the educational system in our
32 country,” she has said, no doubt remembering her own childhood ex-
33 periences with schoolhouse racism. “I wanted schools to be a better
34 place for our children so that they can be honored for who they are
35 and feel good about themselves.”23
36 Kanehsatake also had an extraordinary life outside the nfb’s nor-
1 mal distribution network among educational and cultural institu-

2 tions. The film did well on British and Japanese television, won
3 eighteen awards around the globe, and held the spotlight at major
4 festivals such as Sundance. Among the three hundred films at the
5 1993 Festival of Festivals in Toronto, it was one of the few to gar-
6 ner cheers and even a standing ovation on its way to winning the
7 festival’s prize for best Canadian feature film of the year. Even with
8 such accolades, the film was not aired on U.S. television, not even on
9 public broadcasting stations with significant Native viewerships, and
10 even Canadian television tried the same approach at first. When the
11 film was released in 1993, the cbc continued its long-standing neglect
12 of Obomsawin’s work, in this case arguing that she needed to slice [109], (22)
13 thirty minutes from the two-hour film to make room for commer-
14 cial breaks. In a reflection of the considerable degree of autonomy
Lines: 148 to
15 that the nfb then possessed within the Canadian mediascape, Colin
———
16 Neale, the executive producer who worked with Obomsawin on the
0.0pt PgV
17 film, rebuffed the network’s demand. “We were not prepared to cut ———
18 it down to someone else’s specifications,” he told Maclean’s. Neale Normal Page
19 also said that the head of cbc documentaries, Mark Starowicz, “was PgEnds: TEX
20 not impressed with the film,” although Starowicz claimed that his
21 reservations about Kanehsatake involved only its length. 24
[109], (22)
22 Obomsawin did have an important ally at the cbc—the chairman,
23 Patrick Watson, who admired Kanehsatake enough to host a party in
24 the filmmaker’s honor at his home during the Toronto festival. As
25 an administrator reluctant to weigh in on programming decisions,
26 Watson must have felt some frustration about the situation, especially
27 as he listened to Obomsawin make her case for airing the film uncut
28 and unaltered. “ ‘Alanis is understandably angry,’ Watson said about
29 his network’s stonewalling,” Maclean’s reported. 25
30 Eventually, public interest in Kanehsatake overpowered the cbc’s
31 bureaucratic reluctance, and the network aired it on January 31, 1994.
32 According to one Canadian writer, Kanehsatake gave “one dispos-
33 sessed group a clear voice that echoes across this country.” The same
34 writer praised Obomsawin for her balance and passion, noting that
35 the filmmaker “was able to contribute a depth of understanding and
36 a dedication to the cause of the people behind the barricade so that
1 they could tell their story to the world in their own way, clearly, calmly,
2 without blind anger, but with the determination that the struggle will
3 continue.”26
4 Not all commentary on Kanehsatake was entirely positive. The ar-
5 ticulate Mohawk spokesperson Ellen Gabriel, who later administered
6 the First Peoples’ house at McGill University, said after her appearance
7 in the documentary: “I was hoping she would have shown more of
8 the community members, because the people she interviewed were
9 more the people from the Treatment Centre, who were not people
10 from the community [some of the Mohawk warriors were not lo-
11 cals]. But overall, I think it’s a very powerful film.” Although the
12 filmmaker was not willing to show the full extent of internecine strife [110], (2
13 that existed among Mohawks at the time, Gabriel was appreciative
14 of what Obomsawin had done. “You would never be able to even
Lines: 15
15 describe—or people wouldn’t believe—that this happened unless a
———
16 documentary like Alanis’ had come out. She helps to get the word out
0.0pt P
17 to places that otherwise wouldn’t probably hear of these situations. ———
18 I think she’s done a more than excellent job of trying to help her Normal P
19 people show their struggles and their humanity, and show to the PgEnds:
20 future generations what their ancestors were doing in the late 1900s
21 and beyond.”27
[110], (2
22
23 Aftershocks
24 What happened at Oka continued to divide Canadian public opinion
25 long after the release of Kanehsatake. In 1995, a provincial coroner’s
26 report blamed the sq for most of the violence and needless chaos
27 in the seventy-eight-day standoff but assigned responsibility for the
28 sole fatality to the warriors. Although the report did not provide
29 the name of the killer, it indicated, as we have seen, that a single
30 bullet from the Mohawk position had killed Marcel Lemay. 28 The
31 report did little to settle the frayed nerves of Oka participants and
32 observers, Obomsawin included, and she continued to work through
33 her experiences at Oka for the next decade, creating three more films
34 out of what she had witnessed in the pines. Although they might
35 seem dwarfed by the magnitude of the drama captured in Kanehsa-
36 take, these subsequent documentaries—My Name Is Kahentiiosta,
1 Spudwrench— Kahnawake Man, and Rocks at Whiskey Trench—are

2 more than footnotes to the initial film.
3 Unlike Kanehsatake, My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995) is a mem-
4 oir rather than a history of the standoff, with one Mohawk woman
5 providing a microcosm of the event and its aftermath. In traditional
6 Mohawk fashion, Kahentiiosta begins the twenty-nine-minute film
7 with a recounting of her birth and family history, before emphasizing
8 the impact of the Oka crisis on her children. Hearing her voice-over
9 rather than the filmmaker’s, we learn about the feeling of “being in-
10 vaded” and the sense of traditional Mohawk territory slipping away.
11 “In my lifetime, we just see a big pile of steel going by,” she complains
12 about the St. Lawrence Seaway, where vast tankers have pushed out [111], (24)
13 local fishermen. In addition to a thematic emphasis on changes forced
14 on the land and rivers in the name of progress, the film highlights
Lines: 160 to
15 the importance of fighting back in self-defense when pushed, always
———
16 a subtext in Obomsawin’s work. Bringing together the two themes
0.0pt PgV
17 in one breath, Kahentiiosta says: “We were all ready to die—might ———
18 as well go with the land.” Obomsawin presents her protagonist both Normal Page
19 as a tough-talking macha warrior who rides behind the barricades PgEnds: TEX
20 on an atv smoking Che cigars and as a more conventional thirty-
21 something woman in a flower-print dress, seated in a pasture, talking
[111], (24)
22 about her connection to the trees. Kahentiiosta gives Obomsawin an
23 opportunity to use more of her vast store of Oka footage, this time
24 with an even greater focus on the contribution of Native women, and
25 once again to frame the standoff as a Mohawk triumph. “We didn’t
26 lose,” Kahentiiosta says, pointing out that the golf-course plan was
27 halted and that the pines are still standing.
28 Of the four Oka films, Kahentiiosta is the smallest in scale and
29 not quite as compelling as Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man (1997). This
30 fifty-nine-minute film explores the life of the Mohawk steelworker
31 Randy “Spudwrench” Horne before and after his gruesome beating in
32 the woods around Oka. D. B. Jones, one of the historians of the nfb,
33 has described Spudwrench as the “most rounded” of Obomsawin’s
34 follow-up films to Kahensatake. Making the often-expressed obser-
35 vations that her interviewing voice is “soft and lilting” and that “the
36 film’s gentle pace is a stylistic analogue to its mood of serenity,” Jones
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [112], (2
13
14
Lines: 18
15
———
16
0.091p
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[112], (2
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33 figure 20. My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin.
34 Produced by Alanis Obomsawin. Photograph taken from the production. ©
35 1995 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Photograph used
36 with the permission of the National Film Board of Canada.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [113], (26)
13
14
Lines: 186 to
15
———
16
1.67pt Pg
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
20
21
[113], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32 figure 21. Randy “Spudwrench” Horne in Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man
33 (1997). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Produced by Alanis Obomsawin.
34 Photograph by: John Kenney. © 1997 National Film Board of Canada. All
35 rights reserved. Photograph used with the permission of the National Film
36 Board of Canada.
1 also makes some uncommon points about her use of “seemingly off-
2 the-point cutaway shots [to] reinforce the mood: the girl on the porch
3 swing, a man harvesting potatoes from his garden.” He also suggests
4 that the most remarkable thing about Obomsawin’s version of the
5 confrontation at Oka is that, in spite of the eruptions of violence and
6 anger, “neither side really wants to hurt the other.”29
7 Certainly, Spudwrench comes across as peaceful and hardworking,
8 which suits the film’s emphasis on the importance of Native labor to
9 the wider economy of North America. In depicting scenes such as
10 Spudwrench’s long commute from Canada to New York City to toil
11 on half-constructed skyscrapers, Obomsawin creates an insightful
12 portrait of Native men as a neglected part of the working-class cul- [114], (2
13 ture of North America, and her film reads almost like a First Nations
14 companion to the labor-oriented textbook Who Built America? Soon
Lines: 18
15 after the release of the film, Obomsawin told one interviewer that she
———
16 “wanted to show the contribution these [Mohawk] people have made
0.0pt P
17 for so many generations in terms of building bridges and buildings ———
18 all around the world. It really is an important thing.”30 In addition to Normal P
19 depicting the work ethic of Mohawk men, the film contains further PgEnds:
20 attempts, as in Kanehsatake, to humanize the warriors with a sympa-
21 thetic glance at their home lives, with wives and children given ample
[114], (2
22 time to address the camera.
23 The final film on Oka (thus far) appeared in 2000 under the ti-
24 tle Rocks at Whisky Trench. This well-shot 105-minute documentary
25 recounts the trauma inflicted on Mohawk families, mostly women,
26 children, and elders, who fled from their homes on August 28, 1990,
27 when the Canadian Army descended on Oka. Forming a convoy to
28 drive across the Mercier Bridge toward Montreal, seventy-five Mo-
29 hawk cars passed through a narrow gap called Whiskey Trench, where
30 angry whites were waiting for them with rocks, bottles, and racial
31 taunts. Windows were shattered, faces were bloodied, yet the sq made
32 no arrests (although the police did prevent whites from storming at
33 least one car). In interviews that Obomsawin conducted almost a
34 decade after the event, the victims make clear the lingering effects of
35 the experience and decry the white racism that fueled the violence.
36 Perhaps more than any of her other films, Rocks at Whiskey Trench
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [115], (28)
13
14
Lines: 206 to
15 figure 22. Mohawk families running a gauntlet of rocks, bottles, and racist
epithets in Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. ———
16
Produced by Alanis Obomsawin. © 2000 National Film Board of Canada. All
4.58998pt
17 ———
18 rights reserved. Photograph used with the permission of the National Film
Normal Page
19 Board of Canada.
PgEnds: TEX
20
21 provides a scathing indictment of white Canadian racism, including
[115], (28)
22 the racism of the mainstream media. “Many reporters covering the
23 situation in Montreal had anti-Mohawk views,” Obomsawin has said.
24 “When they announced that the cars were on the bridge, they told
25 people to get down there and stop them [the Mohawks] from es-
26 caping.”31 A passionate and compelling film, Rocks at Whisky Trench
27 represented yet another attempt to depict the crisis from a Native
28 point of view, although the passage of years had given Obomsawin
29 an additional sense of urgency. “I felt very bad that a lot of people had
30 died since the experience,” she said, before explaining her rationale
31 behind the four documentaries dedicated to showing the world what
32 had happened at Oka. “It’s for other generations to have an idea of
33 what happened.”32
34 If the Oka films are for the future, they are also for the other
35 side, those who did not support the Mohawk cause—but even when
36 Obomsawin challenges white attitudes toward Native peoples, she
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [116], (2
13
14 figure 23. Native activists confront armed soldiers in Rocks at Whiskey
Lines: 21
15 Trench (2000). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Produced by Alanis Obom-
sawin. © 2000 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Photo- ———
16
graph used with the permission of the National Film Board of Canada. 1.9119
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 does so without the rancor of an unskilled polemicist. Instead, she * PgEnds:
20 demonstrates an uncommon ability to combine passionate advocacy
21 and a gentle, inclusive tone (often conveyed through her calm voice-
[116], (2
22 over narration) and to come across as fair and committed. As a result,
23 she has, I suspect, been able to avoid shutting down less sympathetic
24 viewers, something that is not always true of political films set in
25 Indian country.
26 At the same time that Kanehsatake was being trumpeted as a great
27 accomplishment of the nfb, another Canadian film on Oka was not
28 so fortunate in its public reception. Alex MacLeod’s Acts of Defiance,
29 a 1993 nfb film on Oka, was attacked in some quarters of the press
30 as one-sided propaganda. One reporter claimed that only the sol-
31 diers appeared armed and dangerous in MacLeod’s film while the
32 Mohawks came across as heroic resisters—a phony posture, he ar-
33 gued, because the warriors were just cloaking their bid for power
34 in what he called the “myth of the wounded Indian.” Complaining
35 about the $250,000 in taxpayers’ money used to finance the film, the
36 writer blasted Acts of Defiance as an example of gross revisionism for
1 distorting what really happened. “Though it’s only three years since
2 Canadians were treated to nightly images of masked, rifle-toting Mo-
3 hawks patrolling their barricades, almost every minute of Acts of
4 Defiance includes shots of armed police officers, soldiers, helicopters
5 or tanks,” he writes in an article with the revealing title “Thugs of
6 the World Unite.” “Viewers are led to conclude that the backbone of
7 the native resistance was teenagers, old people and women carrying
8 babies, all engaged in a righteous revolution against Canada.” When
9 he notes that the nfb press release appeared to endorse the film’s
10 position, the reviewer brings in a conservative “expert” to dismiss the
11 liberal interpretation of Oka in favor of this assessment: “What we
12 have here is a socialist mindset that wants to read popular revolution [117], (30)
13 and people all united against oppression into the situation.” Rather
14 than seeing Oka as a populist uprising, the “expert” suggests that
Lines: 220 to
15 Canadians need to reject misleading films like Acts of Defiance and
———
16 appreciate the real model for the actions of the warriors at Oka: the
0.0pt PgV
17 Chicago gangster Al Capone and his henchmen. 33 ———
18 How were Obomsawin’s Oka films—indeed, all her films—able Normal Page
19 to avoid this sort of knee-jerk condemnation? 34 The answer lies, I PgEnds: TEX
20 think, in a rhetorical strategy that her film career seems to embody:
21 an attempt to use documentary film as a “middle ground” between
[117], (30)
22 Native and white Canadians, something that I explore in the final
23 section of this chapter.
24
25 Documentary Film on the Middle Ground
26 In the past fifteen years, two interrelated concepts have taken root
27 and blossomed in the work of historians and anthropologists, in
28 particular those working on the tangled histories of Native and non-
29 Native North America. The first concept is that of the middle ground,
30 made popular by the historian Richard White. For White, writing
31 about the eighteenth-century pays d’en haut region around the Great
32 Lakes, the phrase applies to the“place in between: in between cultures,
33 people, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”
34 It was a zone of creative communication across borders, a “realm of
35 constant invention” where cross-cultural sensitivity was an art form
36 designed to resolve conflicts without violence. Those skilled in this
1 art were usually doing their fast-talking with their own people in
2 mind, but they had to convince the other side that their cause was
3 reasonable, that “some mutual action was fair and legitimate,” and
4 that there were “congruencies” of interest between the Native and
5 white positions. 35
6 The second concept of interest is that of the cultural broker, the
7 silver-tongued artist of the middle ground who has “breached lan-
8 guage barriers, clarified diplomatic understandings, softened poten-
9 tial conflicts, and awakened the commonality of spirit shared by the
10 human race.”36 Both these metaphors—those of the middle ground
11 and the cultural broker—are flexible enough, I believe, to transpose
12 usefully into film studies, where they could have particular relevance [118], (3
13 in describing documentaries intended to transcend cultural barriers.
14 In this sense I propose that Obomsawin functions as a cultural broker
Lines: 23
15 for the electronic age, working on the middle ground of cultural pro-
———
16 duction, and negotiating between parties with the complex language
0.0pt P
17 of nonfiction cinema. ———
18 Like the cultural brokers of the past, Obomsawin has moved across Normal P
19 borders with the hope of preventing violence. In the case of Kanehsa- PgEnds:
20 take, she literally crossed the barricades between the government
21 forces and the Native resisters, convinced that her presence would
[118], (3
22 not only bring international attention to the story but also discour-
23 age even greater outbreaks of violence. “I don’t like to give myself
24 that kind of power,” she says, but, as noted earlier, she was told many
25 times that her presence had a restraining effect. She believed that
26 the authorities were more circumspect in the presence of a camera,
27 especially one in the hands of a well-known Native woman, and the
28 warriors went so far as to say that “the best times were when the cam-
29 eras were there.”37 This mitigating effect is possible only in the realm
30 of nonfiction production. Because it purports to capture “reality” and
31 “visual evidence” rather than a subjective vision of pure imagination,
32 documentary provides an ideal middle ground for Native people
33 hoping to stake their claims in the age of television.
34 To date, the literature on indigenous media has not focused in
35 depth on its intercultural function, at least not in the explicit terms
36 that I am suggesting. Although scholars have noted how visual arts
1 “have become one of the main forms of intercultural communication

2 between Native Americans and the non-native world” and painters
3 such as Pablita Velarde have been described as “cultural brokers,” this
4 language has not been drawn into discussions of documentary film
5 in general or indigenous media in particular. 38 Yet Obomsawin is
6 engaged in the very same sort of effort: trying to get the other side
7 to consider the plausibility of a Native position on a controversial
8 subject such as Oka. Even before academics started using terms such
9 as middle ground and cultural broker, Obomsawin seemed to think
10 of her work along these lines, calling her films a “bridge” or “place”
11 where Native people could enter into a dialogue with the mainstream
12 of Canadian public opinion. 39 [119], (32)
13 The role of the cultural broker is a difficult one for an artist, and
14 the challenge of working in two worlds has taken its toll on more
Lines: 237 to
15 than one who attempted to fill it. Pablita Velarde, for example, one
———
16 of the best-known Native women painters of the twentieth century,
0.0pt PgV
17 suffered from being “an outsider and insider in two worlds,” accord- ———
18 ing to one scholar. 40 Yet somehow Obomsawin has found a degree Normal Page
19 of equilibrium between her two worlds, Native and white, perhaps PgEnds: TEX
20 because she started her creative life with the constant balancing act
21 of bringing Abenaki songs and stories to all manner of audiences
[119], (32)
22 across Canada. “It was very hard at the beginning,” she recalls, before
23 describing her eventual ease on the middle ground. “I have developed
24 my own way of standing on my two feet no matter where I am and
25 being part of our culture and carrying it with me. I think I bring it
26 to other people who meet me—I bring them something.”41 In her
27 songs, stories, and films, she has brought a great deal to Canadians of
28 all backgrounds, always hoping to pierce the veil of misunderstanding
29 that covers many Canadian eyes, cameras, and televisions whenever
30 Native people are involved. Still, her frustration flares up at times,
31 as does the anger that once made her lash out at racist classmates
32 as a child, and she seems sickened that many Canadians have not
33 shaken their traditional ignorance of Native peoples. “They know
34 nothing,” she fumed in 2002, after nearly half a century of trying to
35 educate them. Recent survey data suggest that her frustration is more
36 than anecdotal. In 2003, almost half of all Canadians reported their
1 disbelief in the legitimacy of Native land claims, while 42 percent

2 supported the notion that Native treaty rights should be abolished
3 altogether, prompting a spokesperson for the Assembly of First Na-
4 tions to complain: “It really does point to a need for greater public
5 education, more dialogue between First Nations and non-aboriginal
6 people.”42
7 Even in the face of such discouraging news and her own private mo-
8 ments of despair, Obomsawin has never stopped walking optimisti-
9 cally into the middle ground of cinema, hoping to connect Native
10 and non-Native perspectives through the lives that she documents
11 on-screen. “You need the relation and the learning places,” she says,
12 and, for her, documentary is a learning place that can include anyone [120], (3
13 willing to listen and watch for an hour or two. With an abiding faith
14 in the power of nonfiction cinema to make sense across various lines
Lines: 23
15 of demarcation, she has said:“I think this is where documentary film-
———
16 making becomes such an important way of preserving and teaching
0.0pt P
17 and making sure people have a place to speak. It changes society. It ———
18 brings knowledge about the others that you always call the ‘others.’ Normal P
19 And all of a sudden you realize that they feel like you, and they have PgEnds:
20 stories that are similar, and they need you, and you need them. And
21 I think the documentary world does that very well.”43
[120], (3
22 Obomsawin’s attempt to connect people across lines of difference
23 is not just intellectual, historical, or logical in its appeal, and her
24 films are more than dry recitations of salient information, in which
25 visual “facts” are marshaled like evidence in a courtroom of public
26 opinion. She seems very aware that more visceral forms of persuasion
27 must occur on the intercultural middle ground, where sentiment is
28 as important as data. For this reason, she is just as interested in
29 emotional persuasion, in shaping an audience’s feelings about Native
30 histories and identities, although doing so without gross manipula-
31 tion. When documentary reaches the heart of its audience without
32 descending into base demagoguery, it is said to possess the intangi-
33 ble quality of passion, something that Obomsawin seems to offer in
34 abundance to her viewers. Even as her work makes a strong case to
35 the “rational mind,” the place of facts and analysis that is “the official
36 mind of science, industry and government,” as Wendell Berry puts it,
1 her strongest appeal is to what Berry calls the “sympathetic mind,”

2 the place where we formulate compassion and understanding when
3 someone evokes a sense of shared humanity. 44
4 Obomsawin has chosen an ideal medium for her intercultural mes-
5 sages of compassion, understanding, and toleration, the place where
6 the sympathetic mind lives most naturally in our postmodern medi-
7 ascape being, I believe, within the documentary form, with its great
8 tradition of listening to outsider voices, pulling for the underdog,
9 and pushing for social change. In the past decade or so a specious
10 brand of commercial nonfiction, including the crass reality programs
[Last Page]
11 that top the Nielsen ratings, has begun to overshadow this humane
12 tradition where filmmakers like Obomsawin have toiled. Her other [121], (34)
13 visions provide a healthy corrective to the fundamental sadism and
14 voyeurism of Joe Millionaire, Cops, and Survivor, not to mention the
Lines: 243 to
15 dull pieties of pbs series like The American Experience. Her work cre-
———
16 ates a space that, as Zuzana Pick points out,“promotes the circulation
210.0pt P
17 of affect between protagonist and viewer.”45 Or, to put it another way, ———
18 Obomsawin shows us why we should care about people we might Normal Page
19 never meet. In the chapter ahead, I will attempt to show how her PgEnds: TEX
20 desire to forge this connection makes her reliance on documentary
21 more than coincidental.
[121], (34)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
5
7
8 Why Documentary?
9
10
[First Pag
11
12 [122], (1
13
14
Lines: 0 t
15 The restitution of things to their real place and meaning
———
16 is an eminently subversive fact.
0.0pt P
17 Fernando Solanas and ———
18 Octavio Getino Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20 Alanis Obomsawin has, as we have seen, known success as a story-
21 teller, singer, activist, education consultant, and documentarian, yet
[122], (1
22 it is the last role that has occupied most of her creative life. What is it
23 about the documentary impulse that she finds so necessary and irre-
24 sistible? Why documentary? Certainly, she is not alone in her reliance
25 on nonfiction to achieve her creative and political goals—over the
26 past three decades, often with her leadership, documentary cinema
27 has become a preferred mode of expression for Native mediamakers.
28 “Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for
29 themselves,” Obomsawin has said. “I feel that the documentaries that
30 I’ve been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our
31 people to look at ourselves . . . and through that being able to make
32 changes that really count for the future of our children to come.”1 In
33 this chapter I want to explore the deeper nature of her documentary
34 expression, asking how it came to be the vehicle of choice for her com-
35 plex artistic visions. As well as looking at the continuing “allure of the
36 real” for indigenous filmmakers like Obomsawin, I want to explore
WHY DOCUMENTARY? 123
1 documentary’s function in the larger mediascapes of North America,

2 using Obomsawin as a jumping-off point to reach some fundamental
3 issues about “representing reality” in contemporary film and video.
4 First, however, let me make some attempt to prove the assertion, often
5 made but never quite demonstrated, that documentary has been the
6 dominant mode in Native media.
7
8 The Dominance of Documentary
9 In 1991, a Native media producer told a film-festival audience in Min-
10 neapolis that Native people watch “white tv” and learn about “white
11 culture” but never have the chance to turn the tables and share their
12 own cultures. He argued that Native people needed to find a way to [123], (2)
13 bring their own realities to the screen, even if the learning process was
14 tentative and awkward. “We may not be able to do it right,” he said
Lines: 50 to
15 modestly,“because we lack the funding, we lack the resources, we lack
———
16 equipment—but we can put together images. We can put together
0.0pt PgV
17 stories. . . . We have that ability. We have that power and knowledge ———
18 to put things together and explain ourselves to many non-Indian Normal Page
19 people.”2 In rapidly increasing numbers in the years since (and to PgEnds: TEX
20 some extent before), Natives have been doing just what this speaker
21 suggested: making films and videos that bring Native perspectives
[123], (2)
22 to Native and non-Native alike. As a result of this desire to inscribe
23 Native histories on various national imaginaries as well as of var-
24 ious personal motivations, the filmography of Native productions
25 now comprises, according to one estimate, over a thousand titles. 3
26 That number might surprise readers who have not seen more than a
27 handful of Native films in their university collections or distributor’s
28 catalogs, and it might even prompt them to wonder, What are all
29 these projects?
30 Two things are clear: most of them are documentaries, and most
31 of them are hard to find. In appendix B is provided a list of sig-
32 nificant nonfiction titles with Native production, direction, or other
33 substantial forms of creative control, not just those with a lone Na-
34 tive actor, writer, or cameraperson. Still, while the list is suggestive,
35 even representative, it is far from comprehensive. The latter would
36 be a worthwhile goal—but almost impossible given the dozens of
124 WHY DOCUMENTARY?
1 projects whose existence is unknown outside a tribal complex in

2 Alaska or Arizona. Sometimes this localism is by design, such as
3 when a tribe documents an issue of cultural sensitivity that it does
4 not want broadcast to the world; more often, however, it is by default,
5 owing to cultural prejudices, funding shortfalls, or inadequate access
6 to media outlets—any of these factors can keep a good project from
7 wider circulation or a promising one from reaching its potential.
8 While Obomsawin has been fortunate to work under the auspices of
9 the National Film Board (nfb), which promotes her titles and keeps
10 them in wide circulation for decades after their initial release, most
11 Native filmmakers have endured far more frustrating circumstances
12 in trying to get their films made and disseminated. As a consequence, [124], (3
13 even a fair number of the most important Native-produced titles
14 are difficult to track down. 4 Yet, in spite of the structural pressures
Lines: 58
15 weighing against their success, Native filmmakers have created an
———
16 impressive body of nonfiction work in the past three decades.
0.0pt P
17 The first wave of Native-produced documentaries appeared in the ———
18 1970s with Obomsawin’s early films as well as multipart television Normal P
19 series such as George Burdeau’s The Real People (1976) and Phil Lu- PgEnds:
20 cas’s Images of Indian (1979–81). More Native productions appeared
21 in the 1980s, including George Horse Capture, Larry Littlebird, and
[124], (3
22 Larry Cesspooch’s I’d Rather Be Powwowing (1983), Chris Spotted
23 Eagle’s The Great Spirit within the Hole (1983) and Our Sacred Land
24 (1984), Rick Tailfeathers’s Powwow Fever (1984), Victor Masayesva’s
25 Itam Hakim Hopiit (1985) and Ritual Clowns (1988), Arlene Bowman’s
26 Navajo Talking Picture (1986), Sandra Day Osawa’s In the Heart of Big
27 Mountain (1988), Mona Smith’s Her Giveaway: A Spiritual Journey
28 with AIDS (1988), and Zacharias Kunuk’s Qaqqiq/Gathering Place
29 (1989), the last one of fifty nonfiction videos that Kunuk would pro-
30 duce about Native life along the Arctic Circle. Many of these direc-
31 tors continued making films in the 1990s and beyond, when they
32 were joined by newcomers such as Roy Bigcrane, Dean Bearclaw,
33 Loretta Todd, Allen Jamieson, Ava Hamilton, Ruby Sooktis, Derron
34 Twohatchet, Beverly R. Singer, Harriet Sky, Christine Welsh, Barb
35 Cranmer, Daniel Prouty, Paul Rickard, Lena and Aaron Carr, Carol
36 Geddes, Puhipau, David H. Kalama Jr., Gary Farmer, G. Peter Jemi-
1 son, Annie Frazier-Henry, and James Fortier. As even a very partial

2 filmography might suggest, the list of Native-produced documen-
3 taries has become quite impressive.
4 Yet, when we turn to fiction film, the situation is quite different.
5 Here we find the first surviving Native film, James Young Deer’s White
6 Fawn’s Devotion (1910), whose early appearance is somewhat mislead-
7 ing given that a Native person did not return to the director’s chair
8 for the next seven decades. 5 If sympathetic Native portraits started
9 to seep into the mainstream in the late 1960s with the release of
10 films like Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1969), real Native produc-
11 tions did not begin stirring again until the 1980s with two satirical
12 works, Bob Hicks’s Return of the Country (1983) and Gerald Vizenor’s [125], (4)
13 trickster fable, Harold of Orange (1984). Then, a few years later, Shelly
14 Niro released It Starts with a Whisper (1993) and Honey Moccasin
Lines: 60 to
15 (1998), both of which were well regarded but little noticed. In a more
———
16 commercial vein, Valerie Red Horse produced the feature Naturally
0.0pt PgV
17 Native (1997) with investment from the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal ———
18 Nation, although it, too, failed to attain anything more than limited Normal Page
19 distribution. 6 PgEnds: TEX
20 The real breakthrough came in 1998 with Chris Eyre’s Smoke Sig-
21 nals, a solid, if unremarkable, buddy movie laced with wry Indian
[125], (4)
22 humor that seemed to astonish white audiences into smiling submis-
23 sion. For those who somehow slept through the Smoke Signals phe-
24 nomenon, Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuit epic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
25 (2002) underscored the point that Native feature filmmaking had
26 arrived as a cultural force. Atanarjuat even attracted the attention of
27 Jacques Chirac, the president of France, who gushed about it being“ce
28 film magnifique,” while the New York Times called it a “masterpiece.”7
29 With the smaller-scale release of several other Native productions
30 in the same time period, including Shirley Cheechoo’s Backroads
31 (2000), Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001), and Sherman Alexie’s
32 The Business of Fancydancing (2002), Native fiction film seemed to
33 have reached a new prominence in the first moments of the new
34 millennium.
35 Two observations might undercut the satisfaction that one could
36 take from this development. First, the main figures behind the recent
1 explosion of interest in Native fiction film are mostly male: Chris Eyre,
2 Zacharias Kunuk, Randy Redroad, and Sherman Alexie. Second, the
3 flowering of Native cinema began long before the fuss over Smoke
4 Signals: it happened in the less visible and less commercial realm of
5 documentary and in the less celebrated hands of women like Alanis
6 Obomsawin, Sandra Osawa, Arlene Bowman, Loretta Todd, Carol
7 Geddes, Lena Carr, and others. As appendix B makes clear, these Na-
8 tive women have been telling stories on film for almost three decades,
9 although too often their work has been left stranded at the crossroads
10 of race and gender.
11 What I am writing in this book reflects my belief that nonfiction
12 cinema deserves better—and not just in the case of prolific artists like [126], (5
13 Obomsawin. In the past decade documentary has begun to shed its
14 image as the unloved stepchild of cinema studies. With the phenom-
Lines: 66
15 enal success of softheaded “reality programs” on tv and the entrance
———
16 of harder-edged documentaries like The Fog of War (Errol Morris,
0.0pt P
17 2003), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004), and Capturing the ———
18 Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003) into the American cineplex, schol- Normal P
19 ars, students, and general audiences have begun looking at nonfiction PgEnds:
20 cinema with a new intensity and interest. On the academic side of the
21 spectrum, Bill Nichols, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Thomas Waugh, Michael
[126], (5
22 Renov, Patricia Zimmermann, Barry Keith Grant, Richard Barsam,
23 and other prominent scholars have launched a small renaissance in
24 documentary studies. These writers have all taken the exploration
25 of nonfiction discourse to an unprecedented depth, asking episte-
26 mological, ideological, and methodological questions that were often
27 taken for granted in the past. With their careful investigations of rep-
28 resenting reality as my model, I hope to treat Native nonfiction with
29 the seriousness and care that it deserves and look at the underlying
30 reasons why Obomsawin and so many other Native filmmakers have
31 been drawn to it. For Obomsawin in particular, the answer to the
32 question, Why documentary? could be summed up in two words:
33 John Grierson. Without doubt, the great Scottish documentarian illu-
34 minated a general path toward nonfiction that Obomsawin seemed
35 to follow, but, in the section ahead, I will suggest how such an answer
36 might obscure more than it reveals.
1 Griersonian Documentary
2 Any attempt to understand Obomsawin’s documentary project must
3 come to terms with her relationship to the paterfamilias of the nfb,
4 indeed, one of the key figures in the history of nonfiction cinema.
5 Because Grierson founded the nfb and set the institutional tone for
6 decades well beyond his own administration (1939–45), and perhaps
7 because he had expressed his own peculiar admiration for Obom-
8 sawin, some scholars have seen her as following in the footsteps of
9 the pioneering documentarian. Jerry White, for example, has argued
10 that her work embodies “the very essence of a Griersonian ethic of
11 filmmaking,” something that “should not be downplayed simply be-
12 cause Grierson has fallen out of favor.”8 Although I respect White’s [127], (6)
13 attempt to redeem the Scotsman’s legacy by showing his relevance to
14 an important Native filmmaker, the flip side is, I believe, even more
Lines: 73 to
15 rewarding for us to consider, namely, the fundamental ways in which
———
16 Obomsawin diverged from her putative mentor.
0.0pt PgV
17 No one could dispute that Grierson’s influence cut a wide swath ———
18 through the nfb ever since its inception, just as it has wherever Normal Page
19 thoughtful and civic-minded people have picked up cameras and PgEnds: TEX
20 wondered how best to depict reality in a way that might change the
21 world. One part Zeus and two parts Columbus in his own voluble
[127], (6)
22 rhetoric about the origins of nonfiction cinema, Grierson was, in fact,
23 there at the beginning, one of the prime movers of social documen-
24 tary, surveying “a whole world undiscovered, a whole area of cine-
25 matic possibility undiscovered,” as he proclaimed in the last interview
26 before his death in 1972. “All we did in documentary was we occupied
27 Oklahoma,” he said, choosing a rancid colonialist metaphor that sug-
28 gests more about his ideological perspective that he ever intended. “I
29 saw here was a territory completely unoccupied,” he explained about
30 the “empty” continent of nonfiction that lay before him in the 1920s
31 and 1930s. 9
32 In the brave new world of nonfiction that he imagined, Grier-
33 son wanted to sweep past the indigenous subjects who would gal-
34 vanize Obomsawin’s attention and attend to something much closer
35 to home, much closer to his cultural roots in Scotland. Promoting a
36 tough-minded, “realist” approach to documentary over so-called ro-
1 mantic visions that included works such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook

2 of the North (1922), Grierson waxed poetic about the nonfiction film-
3 maker’s “social responsibility” to the dimly lit slums of the white
4 working class, the kind of urban spaces he knew well from work-
5 ing in factories along the Clyde, spending his free time around “the
6 soapboxes of Glasgow Green,”where he first heard the rhetoric of pro-
7 gressive politics in the early 1920s. That is where the camera should
8 be pointed, he argued, believing that to look elsewhere was the task
9 of the foolhardy romantic and would serve no social good. Unlike the
10 realist, the romantics had it easy—“easy in the sense that the noble
11 savage is already a figure of romance. . . . Their essential virtues have
12 been declared and can more easily be declared again, and no one will [128], (7
13 deny them.”According to Grierson, the real challenge was to bring the
14 nonfiction camera into the “streets and cities and slums and markets
Lines: 78
15 and exchanges and factories,” to his own people, more or less, whose
———
16 “essential virtues,” he believed, were not so easily declared. 10
0.0pt P
17 It seems obvious that Obomsawin would agree with Grierson’s ———
18 most general principles, such as a desire to use nonfiction film for so- Normal P
19 cial amelioration, to show structural forms of subjugation in place of PgEnds:
20 individual failings, and to celebrate common labor and working-class
21 grit. She recalled with admiration how Grierson “felt that poor peo-
[128], (7
22 ple, common people, should be able to see themselves on the screen,”
23 which would “make a better life for them and for people at large in
24 terms of understanding and feeling right about who they were.”11 Yet
25 how unusual are such desires in nonfiction circles? Few well-known
26 documentarians have eschewed these broad progressive tendencies,
27 which strike me as too general to account for Obomsawin’s unique
28 voice and vision. I suspect that a closer look might reveal funda-
29 mental contradictions between the Scottish propagandist for empire
30 and the dissident First Nations media activist, that is, might reveal
31 that Obomsawin represents not an indigenous reclamation of the
32 Griersonian project, but its outright rejection.
33 Consider these crucial differences: Grierson believed that portrai-
34 ture was what the nfb did best, while Obomsawin avoided biopics in
35 favor of exploring a subject across geography (Mother of Many Chil-
36 dren) or an event unfolding across time (Incident at Restigouche). 12
1 Grierson was willing to stage scenes in a way that hardly seems

2 documentary today, while Obomsawin relied on “actuality footage”
3 (uncontrolled footage of events unfolding) far more than most nfb
4 filmmakers. Grierson inadvertently gave birth to the hand-wringing
5 “tradition of the victim” that has plagued nonfiction cinema ever
6 since, while Obomsawin focused on the resistance, endurance, and
7 creativity of the oppressed. 13 This last point is worth exploring in
8 detail because it represents the deepest level of divergence between
9 the two filmmakers.
10 For more than three decades, Obomsawin’s work has run counter
11 to the characteristic Griersonian emphasis on downtrodden victims
12 [129], (8)
in need of liberal salvation. Unlike soot-faced Griersonian subjects
13 who languish in squalor until middle-class voters are roused into
14
political action, Obomsawin’s Native people are agents of their own Lines: 82 to
15
fate who reject a dependent relationship with the state. On occasions ———
16
when it is necessary to seek assistance from outside families and local 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
communities, her Native subjects do not turn to federal or provincial
18 Normal Page
governments for help. Instead, Obomsawin suggests, their personal
19 PgEnds: TEX
and collective struggles are best addressed within a First Nations
20
context, one that requires little from the outside world except the
21
removal of its foot from their neck. That is quite different than the [129], (8)
22
Griersonian model, where the problem is the inattention of the state,
23
24 which can best be remedied through an empathetic chain reaction:
25 public-spirited filmmaker presents social problem to middle-class
26 audiences, who then press their political representatives in Ottawa
27 (or London) to fix the situation with “expertly” crafted policies. In
28 Obomsawin’s world, of course, the problem is the attention of the
29 state and its white middle-class supporters, whose deleterious poli-
30 cies and attitudes present the gravest danger facing Native cultures.
31 When it comes to state intervention in the lives of Native people, the
32 implication of Obomsawin’s films is clear: benign neglect would be
33 a blessing. Barring that unlikely situation, Obomsawin fights to mit-
34 igate the damaging effects of the state and to enlighten the general
35 public as much as is possible, seeming to argue that Native people
36 need nothing more than the space to extricate themselves from the
1 colonialist gaze—ironically, the very gaze that Grierson perfected on

2 film.
3 The reason for his cinematic colonialism is simple: at heart Gri-
4 erson was literally a salesman for empire. Before coming to North
5 America to launch the nfb, he worked at the Empire Marketing Board
6 in London, producing documentary films to polish the tarnished im-
7 age of British colonialism around the world. As he conceded, his well-
8 crafted propaganda for the Empire Marketing Board was designed to
9 “change the connotation of the word ‘Empire’ ” in the minds of the
10 colonized; after all, their numerical majority in places such as India
11 was beginning to require a larger dose of persuasion to accompany
12 the old stand-by of military coercion. 14 It is no surprise that, when [130], (9
13 Grierson arrived in Ottawa in the late 1930s (the nfb moved to Mon-
14 treal only in the 1950s), he articulated a dominant cultural perspec-
Lines: 85
15 tive with little regard for minority claims of the sort that Obomsawin
———
16 would document in all her films. Thoughtful scholars like Jerry White
0.0pt P
17 might wish to expand Grierson’s conservative nationalism to include ———
18 Obomsawin’s dissenting, multicultural vision, but it seems to me that Normal P
19 the two perspectives are in fundamental opposition unless we engage PgEnds:
20 in considerable interpretive back-flipping.
21 We can see their contrasting positions even when Obomsawin and
[130], (9
22 Grierson crossed paths in the mid-1960s. They met when Grierson
23 returned to the nfb after an absence of two decades, serving in a
24 consulting role like a father meeting his now-grown children and of-
25 fering advice on the proper way in which to conduct their affairs. Ever
26 mindful of the political exigencies on which his institution rested, the
27 elder statesman often reminded his nfb heirs that they were neither
28 muckraking cine-journalists nor visionary artists: at root, they were
29 public servants whose most important relationship was with Ottawa,
30 the Canadian capital. But how could this make sense to Obomsawin?
31 Her most important relationship was with First Nations people across
32 North America. 15 Her work was (and is) for them, not for the crown.
33 This was not the only area in which Grierson’s underlying conser-
34 vatism might have placed him at odds with the Abenaki filmmaker,
35 who seems too gracious to make this point herself. When the Chal-
36 lenge for Change initiative brought a few Native faces into the nfb
1 filmmaking process for the first time on You Are on Indian Land
2 (Mort Ransen, 1969) and other projects, Obomsawin thought that it
3 was “wonderful” and part of a “very special time at the film board.”16
4 You Are on Indian Land created a remarkable opening for Native
5 filmmakers that, as Faye Ginsburg has written, “signaled a crucial
6 shift in assumptions about who should be behind the documentary
7 camera, one that has had a lasting effect on First Nations film and
8 video production in Canada.”17 The legendary filmmaker George
9 Stoney, then the executive producer of Challenge for Change (and
10 the force behind You Are on Indian Land), wanted the program “to
11 be more than a public relations gimmick to make the establishment
12 seem more in tune with the times.” He wanted the nfb to fulfill its [131], (10)
13 promise to “promote citizen participation in the solution of social
14 problems,” even if he had to rattle some cages in the process. 18
Lines: 90 to
15 As a new spirit of activism emerged in the Canadian mediascape,
———
16 Grierson had a much different reaction than Obomsawin. Sitting on
0.0pt PgV
17 the sidelines in his consulting role at the nfb, Grierson shook his ———
18 head in dismay at what he saw happening. Rather than supporting Normal Page
19 the spirit of grassroots agitation taking root in the media and other PgEnds: TEX
20 aspects of Canadian life in the 1960s, Grierson encouraged Canadians
21 to stop whining about their nation’s shortcomings and instead take
[131], (10)
22 quiet pride in their collective triumphs. Canada’s great problem was,
23 he maintained, not its government’s failed policies; rather, it was
24 the sour attitude of media professionals more interested in causing
25 trouble than appreciating the accomplishments of the status quo. 19
26 Grierson died in 1972, but, had he lived to see Obomsawin’s tough-
27 minded political films of the 1980s and beyond, he would, I expect,
28 have dismissed them as divisive and negative because she was will-
29 ing to expose the bitterest conflicts within Canadian society and to
30 rebuke the Canadian state for its failures. In the films she made after
31 his death, Obomsawin would often take controversial, even subver-
32 sive positions with regard to the Canadian state. Films like Incident
33 at Restigouche and especially later work like Kanehsatake and Is the
34 Crown at War with Us? would have infuriated the nfb founder, whose
35 chief interest in times of crisis was the preservation of national unity.
36 Although Grierson may have espoused the rhetoric of social uplift
1 to justify the intrusive documentary gaze, he always “stopped short

2 of describing reality when it became politically uncomfortable,” as
3 the Canadian journalist Robert Fulford has pointed out, noting that,
4 when the Second World War erupted, Grierson steered his filmmakers
5 around the controversial issue of conscription in Quebec. “To have
6 exposed tension in Confederation would have been, in the Grier-
7 sonian view, irresponsible,” Fulford writes. “Better to fill the movie
8 screens of the nation with legions of happy war workers, doing their
9 bit for democracy, and leave Quebec’s grievances for later.”20
10 Throughout his career Grierson folded under political pressure in
11 a way that Obomsawin could never countenance—for evidence, see
12 the earlier account of her refusal to listen to nfb superiors who told [132], (1
13 her not to interview government officials for Incident at Restigouche.
14 “When faced with real people caught up in real difficulties,” writes
Lines: 94
15 Brian Winston, “the Griersonian social activist and public educator
———
16 tended to be replaced by a dispassionate and distant journalist.”21 This
0.0pt P
17 inability to stand firm in its challenges to the status quo has led Robert ———
18 Fulford to question Grierson’s legacy to Canada filmmaking: “He left Normal P
19 behind a film culture that was simultaneously focused on ‘realism’ PgEnds:
20 and terrified of being so realistic that it might disturb someone.”22
21 Obomsawin would have no such qualms when it came to showing
[132], (1
22 the failures of the Canadian government.
23 I do not dispute the closeness of the filmmakers on a personal
24 level. One nfb producer recalls that Grierson was “absolutely spell-
25 bound by this woman. . . . I think he was a drum carrier on one
26 adventure to a reserve. He carried her drums for her. And they be-
27 came very good friends.” Near the end of his life, Grierson was even
28 asked to serve as godfather for the filmmaker’s daughter, Kisos. 23 Yet
29 underneath these warm personal relations were incompatible goals
30 for Canadian documentary cinema, and, if Obomsawin’s activism
31 behind the camera has earned her the generic label Griersonian, we
32 should remember that she was anything but Griersonian in the par-
33 ticulars. Long before she joined the nfb, Obomsawin realized that the
34 Canadian national imaginary was not a welcoming place for Native
35 stories, and she looked for new forms of indigenous cultural activism
36 that could challenge this situation. If Grierson had dreamed of “a
1 national use of cinema” that would allow Canadians to see them-

2 selves whole, Obomsawin would borrow his nationalistic fervor for
3 the benefit of First Nations and reveal the disturbing aspects of the
4 white Canadian project. 24 If Grierson invented an nfb where cele-
5 brating the benevolence and unity of the Canadian state was more
6 important than unflinching attention to the “creative depiction of
7 actuality,” to use his famous phrase, then Obomsawin would develop
8 a documentary counterdiscourse that stared straight into the heart
9 of state violence—and just how willing she was to insert herself into
10 dangerous and controversial situations was apparent in the making
11 of Kanehsatake. Grierson may have convinced her (and many other
12 Canadians) of the social power of documentary through his rhetoric [133], (12)
13 and his work at the nfb, but he seems to have had little influence
14 on her work after this initial moment of inspiration, which is why I
Lines: 98 to
15 think that her lifelong commitment to documentary has been more
———
16 than a function of intersecting biographies. In the next section I want
0.0pt PgV
17 to consider the pragmatic forces as well as the larger representational ———
18 impulses that have drawn Native media activists like Obomsawin Normal Page
19 toward nonfiction expression in recent decades. Only then can we PgEnds: TEX
20 make sense of the question, Why documentary?
21
[133], (12)
22 Allure of the Real
23 Part of the answer is obvious to those who know something about film
24 production: it’s cheaper. Fiction films often require higher produc-
25 tion values, greater length, expensive actors, equipment, and sets, and
26 more frequent hassles with investors who have too much money at
27 stake to wait quietly in the wings. Documentarians—not all, but many
28 of them—live in a different world, a down-market terrain where ac-
29 tivist motivations might be relevant, financial stakes are lower, sets are
30 inexpensive or even free, high-end cameras and lights are not always
31 needed, and the cast is whoever wanders into a shot and agrees to
32 sign a release. I exaggerate for effect, but the gist of what I am saying
33 is true—although it does not explain why Obomsawin has remained
34 devoted to the nonfiction form.
35 If some Native filmmakers have turned to nonfiction out of relative
36 poverty, Obomsawin has been something of an exception. Because of
1 her enviable role at the nfb, she has not had to worry about financing
2 as much as independent producers, whose more limited resources
3 and keen competition for an ever-diminishing pile of grant money
4 might give them no other option than low-budget video documen-
5 tary. Although Obomsawin has sometimes needed to hustle to find
6 coproduction funds outside the nfb, she has been able to make all the
7 projects she has envisioned in the past thirty years, something that
8 puts her in rare company among nonfiction filmmakers—perhaps
9 only Ken Burns or Frederick Wiseman in the United States could say
10 the same. 25 Her budgets may not have approached the approximately
11 $13,000,000 that Burns spent on Jazz (2001), but the sums involved
12 were not insignificant. In the 1990s, the nfb estimated that it spent, [134], (1
13 on average, over C$500,000 per on-screen hour, putting a two-hour
14 film like Kanehsatake in the million-dollar range. 26
Lines: 10
15 So if Obomsawin was not making nonfiction simply out of fi-
———
16 nancial necessity, what other motivations were at work? One ex-
0.0pt P
17 planation is that documentary made particular sense for her con- ———
18 text, both institutional and national. As most readers are aware, Normal P
19 the nfb has been steeped in documentary filmmaking for almost PgEnds:
20 three-quarters of a century, and any filmmaker in its ranks, whether
21 Native or non-Native, must feel the gravitational pull toward non-
[134], (1
22 fiction that emanates from its Montreal offices—it is simply what
23 the nfb does best. And the reason the nfb has been so invested in
24 nonfiction has to do with national context: documentary has spe-
25 cial significance in Canada, where the Griersonian project took root
26 more deeply than anywhere else in the world. For white Canadians
27 in particular, documentary has long been an essential mechanism for
28 cultural nationalism, prompting, according to David Hogarth, the
29 Canadian Television Fund to dub it “a profoundly Canadian form”
30 in 1999. Documentary television in particular has been heralded as
31 Canada’s “most distinguished contribution to televisual form, and
32 television’s most substantial contribution of a Canadian sense of
33 place,” as Hogarth puts it. In short, documentary has been a key
34 site for the production of Canadian identity, for generating a unique
35 sense of (white) Canadian peoplehood, which, in the eyes of some
36 critics, has made it a “hegemonic cultural apparatus par excellence.”
1 Because it has assumed such a “heavy rhetorical burden in Canadian

2 cultural discourse,” as Hogarth claims, it makes sense for opposi-
3 tional artist/activists such as Obomsawin to be drawn to it—where
4 else could she get such a sober hearing for Native points of view? If
5 documentary was at the heart of the Canadian public sphere, she was
6 going straight there to make her appeal. 27
7 Yet, as one factor bleeds into another, it becomes clear to me that the
8 answer to the question, Why Documentary? involves more than eco-
9 nomic determinism or even the particular institutional or national
10 cultures in which Obomsawin has worked. Rather, her reliance—
11 indeed, the general Native reliance—on nonfiction also stems, I think,
12 from documentary’s unique role in the contemporary mediascape of [135], (14)
13 North America. Offering a mode of address that seems almost as “se-
14 rious” as official reports or social scientific research, documentary has
Lines: 109 to
15 evolved into the most accessible of the discourses of sobriety, a loose
———
16 category that includes economics, education, foreign policy, science,
0.0pt PgV
17 and other “vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowl- ———
18 edge, desire and will,” as Bill Nichols puts it. Within the documentary Normal Page
19 arena, claims about the social are given more credence than with other PgEnds: TEX
20 forms of creative expression such as fiction film, poetry, or painting.
21 Unlike these other media, nonfiction film appears to bear the indelible
[135], (14)
22 imprint of the real, the apparent one-to-one link between event and
23 evocation that scholars describe as indexicality. Much of the power
24 of documentary comes from its ability to trade in potent fragments
25 of authenticity known as indexical images, which can spark the “you
26 are there” sense one gets when looking at a Robert Capa photograph
27 of a soldier dying on a Spanish battlefield—it is a gut feeling that this
28 image is utterly real and unfakeable (even if digital technology has
29 changed all that forever). As Nichols has suggested, indexical images
30 have a stickiness that binds them to the particular, the historical, the
31 real, and gives them additional social weight, far beyond what is war-
32 ranted. What Nichols calls the documentary effect pushes the viewer
33 “back toward the historical dimension and the challenge of praxis
34 with a forcefulness born of the text’s almost tangible bond to that
35 which it . . . represents.”28 Because of this representational force in
36 the imagination of many viewers, documentary has become a critical
1 site for making arguments about the world, albeit one whose power
2 is easily abused.
3 Although documentary is in many ways as artificial as its fictional
4 counterpart, viewers are often willing to accept it as an unproblem-
5 atic form of realist expression, which, as more than one government
6 agency has noticed, makes it very well suited to political persua-
7 sion. Homi Bhabha, Patricia Zimmermann, and other scholars have
8 pointed out that nations depend heavily on their ability to “nar-
9 rate themselves” and have relied on documentary as an important
10 resource in this self-defining process, with the most obvious result
11 being propagandistic films like The Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefen-
12 stalh, 1935) or Why We Fight (Frank Capra, 1943–45). (Less obvious, [136], (1
13 but no less pernicious, is how the corporate media have proved a wel-
14 coming home for official versions of reality.) Obomsawin and other
Lines: 11
15 dissenting artists have also recognized the power of documentary,
———
16 which they have used for opposite ends: to unravel the homogeniz-
0.0pt P
17 ing fictions of the nation and replace them with other visions that ———
18 have been ignored, repressed, shunted to the side in the past. The Normal P
19 result is the great tradition of activist documentary that tends to PgEnds:
20 build on (and feed) the work of existing reform movements—for
21 example, antiwar films often developed out of antiwar movements
[136], (1
22 that can support and disseminate them. Native nonfiction, at least as
23 Obomsawin practices it, is yet another aspect of this long tradition of
24 documentary expression as cultural activism, one that is predicated
25 on the perceived power of nonfiction discourse to change the world.
26 Some academic observers might raise an eyebrow at this contin-
27 uing faith in documentary’s power, the nature of which has been
28 closely questioned in the past decade. In summarizing some of the
29 main debates in contemporary documentary studies, David Hogarth
30 notes three potential problems for those who might put their media
31 hopes in nonfiction projects. First, in an image-saturated world in
32 which no one visual text is taken seriously as an object of contempla-
33 tion, documentary will inevitably lose its power to persuade. Second,
34 as the stylistic lines between documentary and fiction continue to
35 blur, viewers will lose sight of the real in the ever-expanding haze
36 of blurred boundaries. 29 Third, digital technologies will undermine
1 the indexical status of the photographic image in a way that makes

2 seeing is believing an ever more ludicrous proposition. Yet so far none
3 of these have poisoned the allure of the real for the average viewer.
4 As Hogarth points out, audiences remain largely immune to these
5 intellectual quandaries and continue putting stock in nonfiction dis-
6 course in a manner that prompts cnn and other media giants to
7 increase their investment in the form. 30 Somehow, even today, docu-
8 mentary retains much of its traditional power to inspire and inform,
9 and its privileged status among visual media remains largely intact.
10 This persistent allure of the real comes, I believe, from the illusion
11 that shrouds nonfiction discourse—the dubious principle seeing is
12 believing. [137], (16)
13 Many viewers believe that nonfiction means “nonfiction,” that the
14 prefix non- does, in fact, negate the subjectivities of the text. 31 The
Lines: 115 to
15 resulting hermeneutic of gullibility, in which authenticity is taken for
———
16 granted whenever a text is properly framed as “sober” nonfiction, has
0.0pt PgV
17 become the bane of media scholars everywhere, who assume, quite ———
18 rightly, that it opens viewers up to crude ideological persuasion. Such Normal Page
19 blind faith in the televisual may be fading somewhat in light of cyn- PgEnds: TEX
20 ical reality programming, in which the producer’s motivations and
21 manipulations are often too obvious to hide, but, in the meantime,
[137], (16)
22 the perceived authenticity of documentary has a silver lining. As long
23 as viewers tend to regard documentary as a more serious, more cred-
24 ible, more authentic reflection of the world, then we can do a world
25 of good if this faith is handled with appropriate care. Native activists
26 with camcorders can use documentary as an ideological solvent to
27 strip away the illusions of the dominant culture and reveal the under-
28 lying order of things—in effect, to create a cinema of decolonization,
29 or even what I will later describe as a cinema of sovereignty. This is
30 why, as Stephen Leuthold has suggested, Native people often regard
31 documentary as “a form of historical truth speaking . . . a way of
32 accurately recording and presenting both history and contemporary
33 lives in contrast to the fictitious world portrayed in popular imagery
34 [like Hollywood movies].”32
35 This decolonizing impulse has obvious appeal—and urgency—
36 for indigenous peoples, who have often turned to documentary as
1 part of a larger, and quite sensible, media strategy. According to two

2 Latin American filmmakers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,
3 a realist approach is a wise first step toward developing a cinema of
4 decolonization in any context. “Imperialism and capitalism, whether
5 in the consumer society or in the neocolonialized country, veil ev-
6 erything behind a screen of images and appearances,” they write.
7 “The restitution of things to their real place and meaning is an em-
8 inently subversive fact.”33 As a discourse of sobriety, at least in its
9 more credible manifestations (Obomsawin, Claude Lanzmann, de
10 Antonio, Marcel Ophuls, Kopple, Wiseman, Morris, etc.), documen-
11 tary has been a useful weapon in the culture wars of the West, in those
12 Gramscian battles of position to determine which ideas will flourish [138], (1
13 at the center of the national imaginary and which are exiled to the
14 margins. Getting one’s perspective taken seriously at the very center
Lines: 11
15 of things is crucial to activist filmmakers like Obomsawin; this desire
———
16 is what makes her a cultural broker between Native and white and
0.0pt P
17 what makes her an artist at war with the remnants of colonialism. ———
18 She wants to speak truth to power in the Chomskyan sense, and Normal P
19 documentary provides her with an ideal means of amplifying her PgEnds:
20 voice to an audience well beyond her own community.
21 Yet, again, this is just one of her motivations. When asked why doc-
[138], (1
22 umentary is so important to her, Obomsawin explained: “Because it’s
23 the life and history of all people. This is why documentary is impor-
24 tant for all—not just us [Native people].” Her belief is that Native
25 people cannot function effectively in the present without a profound
26 sense of their past: how can someone thrive in contemporary society,
27 she asks, if they are not allowed to know their traditions, where they
28 come from, what the world of their parents and grandparents and
29 great-grandparents was like? In answering such questions, she says:
30 “I think this is where documentary filmmaking becomes such an
31 important way of preserving and teaching and making sure people
32 have a place to speak. It changes society. It brings knowledge [about]
33 the others that you always call the others. And all of a sudden you
34 realize that they feel like you, and they have stories that are similar,
35 and they need you, and you need them. And I think the documentary
36 world does that very well.”34
1 In this statement as elsewhere, Obomsawin’s rationale for doing

2 documentary breaks down into at least three parts: documentary’s
3 historiographic ability to convey repressed knowledge about the past;
4 its perceived ability to effect social change; and its ability to convey
5 her own ethos of humane universalism across parochial divisions
6 such as those of race and culture. I cover these three points in some
7 detail as I see them as fundamental to Obomsawin’s documentary
8 practice.
9
10 Documentary/History
11 The first point, about the intersection of documentary and history,
12 is essential. Not only is Obomsawin connected to the indigenous [139], (18)
13 present, but she is also connected to its past in ways that most film-
14 makers would never contemplate. I have already written about the
Lines: 123 to
15 storyteller aesthetic that she brings from Abenaki culture and how
———
16 documentary cinema became an extension of what her tribal elders
0.0pt PgV
17 taught her in the oral tradition. Even when she was first struggling to ———
18 learn how to make movies in the late 1960s, she never had any doubt Normal Page
19 about her work’s significance to her tribal past “I felt I was pleasing PgEnds: TEX
20 my ancestors,” she said, “and I don’t mean just my village but where
21 I came from as an aboriginal woman.”35
[139], (18)
22 Through her documentaries, Obomsawin attempts to inscribe the
23 historical onto the contemporary, reminding us that the past has
24 special relevance for Natives, that it remains alive in ways that are
25 politically and socially significant. Obomsawin is not alone in her
26 reliance on documentary to connect viewers to the neglected histories
27 of Natives. Steven Leuthold has noted that indigenous documentaries
28 such as Kanehsatake “often tie the past to the present,” emphasizing
29 the linkage between historical events and contemporary concerns.
30 He points out that Native documentary cinema arose in the 1970s,
31 around the same time as “distinctly native still photography” and for
32 many of the same reasons. 36 He does not list the reasons, but I assume
33 that they include a newly emerging sensitivity to Native cultures on
34 the part of nonprofit and government agencies that might support
35 media activism, a growing sense of empowerment among Native
36 peoples in the wake of the Red Power movement, and greater access
1 to sophisticated representational technologies in places like Montreal,

2 Seattle, and Los Angeles as well as in remote locations across Canada
3 and the United States.
4 Leuthold suggests that, for Native filmmakers and audiences alike,
5 the documentary, with its familiar reliance on storytelling, offered a
6 compelling mechanism for preserving and publicizing Native histo-
7 ries, even to some extent pushing aside traditional oral histories as
8 “a way of creating familial continuity and cohesion.”37 One scholar
9 has described Obomsawin’s work as the cinematic equivalent of
10 “Amerindian autohistory,” a term coined by Georges E. Sioui (Wyan-
11 dot) to describe an approach to the past in which disparate forms
12 of Native recollection (oral, written, and artistic traditions) are given [140], (1
13 the same weight as official processes of memorialization, mainstream
14 academic discourse, and other non-Native forms of interpreting the
Lines: 13
15 past. 38 By revealing the moments of convergence between Native and
———
16 non-Native perspectives, “autohistories” can suggest the validity of
0.0pt P
17 Native accounts even to skeptical outsiders. ———
18 In Obomsawin’s case, her cinematic autohistories are very much at Normal P
19 odds with what is taught in the schools of Quebec, Calgary, Vancou- PgEnds:
20 ver, Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Boston. After all, the United States and
21 Canada, the two great imperial civilizing projects of North America,
[140], (1
22 have covered their tracks with the dust of myth since the moment of
23 their birth, leaving what really transpired on this continent unknown
24 to most citizens of both countries. At every turn in our education,
25 and underneath vast swaths of our public culture, we are given a
26 triumphal march of progress, a stirring drama called the conquest
27 of the West, with starring roles afforded to stock characters such as
28 individualism, materialism, capitalism, modernism, reason, progress,
29 and democracy. As the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart points out,
30 when we think about the settler-states on North America, we are so
31 inundated with the myths of nationhood that “an exegetical list of
32 traits comes to us as if from a news brief from Washington or from
33 the memory of a fourth-grade textbook on American Civilization,”
34 and I’m sure that a slightly altered version of that sentiment would
35 apply above the Forty-ninth Parallel. In her research, Stewart looks
36 for alternative narratives in what she calls a space on the side of the road,
1 where the Other can talk back to the mainstream mythos and open up
2 a gap in the “order of myth itself—the grand order of summarizing
3 traits that claim to capture the ‘gist’ of ‘things’ ” where we live. 39 This
4 spatial metaphor goes to the heart of Obomsawin’s project: for thirty
5 years, she has been creating a space for herself and other Native people
6 at the side of the road of the Canadian mass media, trying, not always
7 in vain, to get oppositional visions of the past taken seriously.
8
9 Documentary/Social Change
10 The second point about Obomsawin’s motivations—that documen-
11 tary can be an engine for change—is more controversial. Scholars,
12 filmmakers, and other onlookers have never agreed about the real- [141], (20)
13 world impact of cinema in general, let alone one as confusingly rooted
14 in reality as documentary. Some skeptics have even suggested that
Lines: 136 to
15 documentaries have no discernible impact on the world whatsoever
———
16 and that their real value lies only in the fleeting, individual stimulation
0.0pt PgV
17 of the interested viewer—or, even worse, only the filmmaker. ———
18 The legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman fits into this Normal Page
19 cynical camp. “Documentaries are thought to have the same rela- PgEnds: TEX
20 tion to social change as penicillin to syphilis,” he says acidly. “The
21 importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is
[141], (20)
22 stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evi-
23 dence.” Wiseman even refuses to distinguish between documentaries
24 and obvious works of fiction such as plays, poems, or novels, as if there
25 were no effective difference between Cats, The Night before Christ-
26 mas, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and documentaries like Shoah
27 (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio,
28 1969), American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1991), or Kanehsatake—all
29 are simply “fictional in form and have no measurable social utility,”
30 he says. 40
31 Wiseman’s point of view does not convince me, and I am not even
32 sure how he can make such an argument when his first film, Titicut
33 Follies (1967), caused such a political and legal uproar with its depic-
34 tion of gruesome conditions in a Massachusetts state mental institu-
35 tion. Unlike Wiseman, I believe that documentary filmmakers such
36 as Obomsawin do more than satiate our idle craving for interesting
1 information, for what Bill Nichols describes as wanton epistephilia—

2 learning about the world just for the heck of it. If such epistephilic
3 desire often leads nowhere other than our own couches and VCRs,
4 I still believe that a powerful argument can rouse us to action in a
5 way that Wiseman thinks impossible. On these rare occasions, at the
6 very least, documentary cinema has the power to move the viewer to
7 “confront a topic, issue, situation, or event that bears the mark of the
8 historically real,” as Nichols puts it. 41
9 Obomsawin shows how this confrontation can knock us off the
10 couch and spill into the streets in meaningful ways—indeed, much
11 of what I have already said about her career suggests that documen-
12 tary can get results, even clear and immediate results (if not entirely [142], (2
13 “measurable” in the sense that the lawyerly Wiseman might prefer).
14 Leading a camera crew behind the barricades at Oka to shoot what
Lines: 14
15 would become Kanehsatake, Obomsawin was told repeatedly that her
———
16 presence made a difference, that a Native person with a camera had a
0.0pt P
17 restraining effect on the military. Screening Incident at Restigouche in ———
18 the town where it was filmed, Obomsawin created a communal ex- Normal P
19 perience that seemed to provide the Mi’kmaq viewers with a greater PgEnds:
20 understanding of what had happened and even, in some cases, a sense
21 of personal dignity. In making No Address, the filmmaker encouraged
[142], (2
22 some small but concrete changes in welfare administration, such as
23 allowing people to use homeless shelters as their address for receiving
24 government aid, which had not been allowed before. “This is why I
25 make these films,” she has said: “to go for changes.”42
26 Perhaps the best example is Richard Cardinal, whose real-world im-
27 pact I mentioned earlier in passing. “One time I was in Edmonton,”
28 Obomsawin remembers, “and a man who had been the provincial
29 ombudsman presented me with two reports, saying that the Richard
30 Cardinal film had helped force new policies and laws in Alberta.”
31 When the ombudsman said as much to an audience, someone de-
32 manded to know why the government needed Obomsawin’s film to
33 rouse it from its bureaucratic slumbers? “Sometimes this is what it
34 takes,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Sometimes the general public
35 must put pressure on government for there to be a change.”43 In
36 addition, the viewing of Richard Cardinal became a permanent ad-
1 dition to the training of social workers in Alberta after the provincial

2 government bought the rights to use the film for this purpose. “Many
3 social workers in different departments see it now,” Obomsawin has
4 said with satisfaction. 44 Given these concrete results from her doc-
5 umentary practice, it is hard to understand the position that Wise-
6 man articulates. At least in a best-case scenario, such as Obomsawin’s
7 thoughtful, well-researched, and institutionally supported work, doc-
8 umentary does matter to the world at large.
9
10 Documentary/Universalism
11 This third point concerns Obomsawin’s ethos of humane univer-
12 salism, her passionate belief in extending dignity and basic rights [143], (22)
13 to all aspects of Canadian society, most especially those who have
14 been pushed to the margins—Native children in foster care, small
Lines: 151 to
15 bands of resisters against the encroachment of the state, the home-
———
16 less, and the addicted. Believing that all human beings deserve respect,
0.0pt PgV
17 self-determination, and a fair hearing, Obomsawin has applied her ———
18 personal doctrine of universal human rights to Native people in par- Normal Page
19 ticular, who have, she believes, been subject to a disturbing degree PgEnds: TEX
20 of abuse, intolerance, and ignorance. Her means of combating this
21 situation is through listening to those marginalized voices. “For me,
[143], (22)
22 every human story, every life matters,” she says. “I’m interested in
23 everyone’s life—what they’ve gone through, how they live, how they
24 feel, how their spirits are.”45
25 Such sentiments have long been associated with the documentary
26 form. At least in its more admirable aspects, documentary cinema has
27 always been a place for expressions of cross-cultural empathy, invo-
28 cations of human connection, and hopes for social amelioration—all
29 qualities that are fundamental to Obomsawin as a person and a polit-
30 ical artist. Given her political goals as an artist and activist as well as
31 her personal background, the humanizing discourse of documentary
32 suits her perfectly. Obomsawin comes from a humble background
33 little different from that of her Native subjects, which means that she
34 is more than another privileged observer engaged in studying down, as
35 the social scientists once put it. 46 In her documentary efforts, she ex-
36 tends her hand in solidarity to the kindred spirits around her and does
1 so in a way that sets her apart from many documentarians. As a result,

2 she never seems wracked with the debilitating self-consciousness that
3 afflicted, for example, James Agee, that great poet of human particu-
4 larity, in his collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans, Let
5 Us Now Praise Famous Men. For Agee, ever the pensive Christian, fear
6 and mystery were at the center of his foray into the unenviable lives
7 of Depression-era sharecroppers, about whom he transmitted a few
8 relevant bits of rural discomfort to better-heeled readers in New York
9 and San Francisco. As anyone who has read the first chapters of Agee’s
10 book will recall, he constantly threw up his hands in dismay at the
11 presumption, the impropriety, the impossibility of the documentary
12 task he had undertaken at the behest of Fortune magazine, whose [144], (2
13 simple assignment led, eventually, to an idiosyncratic work of genius
14 that has cast a long shadow over all subsequent nonfiction.
Lines: 16
15 Yet somehow Obomsawin stands outside its shadow. Because she
———
16 comes from such a different place than the famous Harvard/Exeter/
0.0pt P
17 Fortune magazine writer of midcentury—a different place, really, ———
18 than most of those who have attempted to document reality—she Normal P
19 expresses none of the bourgeois self-flagellation that Agee employed, PgEnds:
20 quite artfully, to excuse his privileged presence in an illiterate hollow
21 of Alabama sharecroppers. So often a cultural insider among the
[144], (2
22 people she is filming, Obomsawin has a far different relationship to
23 her subjects than most mainstream documentarians, for whom Agee
24 could be said to speak. If Agee was tortured by his sense of being
25 the outsider among the oppressed, Obomsawin seems to feel a deep
26 and gratifying bond of shared experience with her subjects, making
27 her as close to an insider as she could be without coming from the
28 specific village in question. “I don’t want to be the outside eye looking
29 in,” she says emphatically. 47 Always striving to honor the connections
30 between Native people, she has made lifelong commitments to the
31 communities she depicts on film, which gives her work, as Robert
32 Appleford has suggested, “a vital depth that is missing in many of the
33 films made by those unfamiliar with native life.”48
34 Her desire to look at indigenous issues “from within” has informed
35 all aspects of her documentary practice, creating a spirit of solidarity
36 with her indigenous subjects that follows her through the filmmak-
1 ing process. While Obomsawin was working on the final touches of

2 Incident at Restigouche, Mi’kmaq people from Restigouche drove to
3 Montreal to visit her in her editing suite. Her sense of connection
4 prompted her to hold the premiere for the film where it was shot,
5 rather than at a distant film festival. Such acts of reciprocity between
6 filmmaker and subject are essential to her view of documentary, and
7 she delights in how such moments bring the community together,
8 sometimes in a manner that is transformative. On the night of the
9 first screening in a Restigouche church hall, Mi’kmaq children were
10 running around until the film began and the marching boots of the
11 Sûreté du Québec boomed from the speakers—suddenly, the chil-
12 dren were silent and still, watching the film recount the traumatic [145], (24)
13 events that most of them had experienced firsthand. The power of the
14 moment extended beyond the children in the room, Obomsawin be-
Lines: 164 to
15 lieves. “The film gave people dignity,” she says, remembering:“There’s
———
16 one man who was badly beaten, and pulled by the hair, and paraded
0.0pt PgV
17 through the reserve—we see him on screen. And he told me that ———
18 his son had seen him being arrested and had heard what people Normal Page
19 were saying. I guess the young boy was humiliated and embarrassed PgEnds: TEX
20 about his father. The man said, ‘After the film, my son kept hanging
21 around and then told me he finally understood what had happened.’
[145], (24)
22 I brought dignity to his father, and so from feeling ashamed, the boy’s
23 feelings switched.”49
24 Unlike the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Obomsawin
25 has no reason to doubt her connection—personal, historical, tribal—
26 to her interviewees, and for this reason she does not swim in the
27 Ageean sea of guilt over the act of representation. Where she is
28 coming from is miles apart from the average documentarian (read:
29 white/male/middle class), and, while James Agee might well have
30 been from another planet for all he had in common with share-
31 cropper wives like Sadie Rickets and Annie Mae Gudger, Obomsawin
32 is usually toiling in her own backyard, figuratively speaking, as an
33 Abenaki woman exploring the lives of Mohawks and Mi’kmaqs, those
34 neighboring tribes to the east and west of her own people to whom
35 she has devoted at least seven of her more than twenty films. All
36 her work is a result of her profound sense of social responsibility to
1 her indigenous neighbors, a responsibility best fulfilled, she believes,

2 through documentary.
3 Obomsawin is not the only filmmaker with this contention. The
4 British director Ken Loach told Positif in the early 1990s that film-
5 makers with the means to address the general public must “expose
6 the lies and hypocrisy of politicians and the interests they represent.”
7 Documentary muckraking of this sort is a “responsibility,” Loach
8 claimed, because it has far more value than “a hundred self-absorbed
9 movies, however prettily shot.”50 Obomsawin seems to embody this
10 position, having decided that documentary is the best vehicle that
11 she can imagine for her particular cinema of duty, one that compels
12 her to stand with other Native people—indeed, with all oppressed [146], (2
13 people of decency—in opposition to the injustices of the world.
14
Lines: 16
15 Vargas Llosa’s Question
———
16 Earlier I mentioned the renaissance of documentary studies, a laud-
0.0pt P
17 able development that seems to be trickling back and forth between ———
18 film studies and adjacent fields such as English, sociology, American Normal P
19 studies, and anthropology. At that time I mentioned the enduring PgEnds:
20 power of documentary and suggested why it was useful to an ac-
21 tivist filmmaker like Obomsawin. But I do not want to paint too
[146], (2
22 rosy a picture about documentary today. All too often (and despite
23 the breakthrough success of a few recent titles by Michael Moore
24 and others), the thoughtful regard for nonfiction exists in academic
25 isolation, while the general public lets out a gaping yawn in the face
26 of nonfiction that seems the least bit challenging or serious. Docu-
27 mentary might be a significant discourse of sobriety that warrants
28 our attention as scholars, students, and filmmakers, but, frankly, it’s
29 not reaching every demographic: a good portion of the general pub-
30 lic is simply uninterested in what it has to say. To them—and their
31 numbers are legion—serious documentary is just plain old change-
32 the-channel boring, in part because its sobriety is so very much at
33 odds with the vast sea of infotainment and pseudorealities elsewhere
34 on the tube.
35 In a larger culture resistant to artistic seriousness of all kinds,
36 some hoary cultural prejudices still linger to keep documentary a few
1 steps beneath other art forms in the grand pecking order of creative
2 expression. Consider, for example, the recent question posed by the
3 novelist Mario Vargas Llosa: “Why literature?” In a widely quoted
4 essay of that title in the Atlantic Monthly, Vargas Llosa answers his
5 rhetorical question in a number of ways that he considers unique to
6 the written word. Yet his paean to the sagging shelf of literary classics
7 strikes me as too narrow, too parochial, and not just because it comes
8 from a celebrated novelist who is invested in the word in every way
9 imaginable. It is because much of what he says about literature could
10 be said of documentary cinema as well, at least as it is appears from
11 the imagination of someone like Alanis Obomsawin. Let me trace
12 some of the similarities that might prompt another question—Why [147], (26)
13 not documentary?—when looking to ordain one form of expression
14 as having particular value to the world.
Lines: 177 to
15 In his essay Vargas Llosa sounds the alarm about the declining
———
16 interest in the world of literature, arguing that a society without
0.0pt PgV
17 literature is “condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to ———
18 jeopardize its freedom.” En route to a rather defensive celebration of Normal Page
19 the word and its supposedly unique properties, he shoots past the PgEnds: TEX
20 reality of what other mediums (such as nonfiction film) can offer.
21 Consider how what he says about one could apply to the other. Just
[147], (26)
22 like literature, documentary film can offer a space for powerful evoca-
23 tions of the real (or what might be real) pulled from the recesses of the
24 human imagination. Just like literature, documentary has the ability
25 to serve as what Vargas Llosa calls a “common denominator of human
26 experience,” where disparate individuals can transcend the accidents
27 of race, class, and gender that plow through our identities and man-
28 gle our sense of common cause. Just like literature, documentary can
29 allow us to “understand each other across space and time,” perhaps
30 saving us from the sectarian sins of race and nation. And, quite unlike
31 literature, documentary often brings us into physical proximity with
32 other human beings, in a theater or a living room or a church hall in
33 a Mi’kmaq fishing village. One point for documentary. 51
34 Not that Vargas Llosa would notice: “Nothing teaches us better
35 than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness
36 of human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation
1 of humanity’s multi-faceted creativity.”52 Ironically, he elevates one

2 of those creative facets above the rest in his rush to assert the singular
3 glories of the word. Yet I wonder: would a fine novel about Oka
4 surpass what Obomsawin has accomplished there? I’m not sure it
5 would. As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, I can appreciate the
6 word fetish that goes into Vargas Llosa’s pronouncements (which may
7 reflect the wider cultural prejudice against the image that has its roots,
8 according to Mitchell Stephens, in the Protestant Reformation). 53 But,
9 in the age of literature’s great waning in terms of popular appeal, I
10 wonder if we should put aside our literary lamentations to practice
11 speaking across borders in the new lingua franca, in the images and
12 sounds that propel the most seductive cultural engines of the new [148], (2
13 millennium—cinema, television, and the Internet, the last of which
14 is struggling out of its textual shackles with every small expansion
Lines: 18
15 of bandwidth. When Vargas Llosa frets that a “totalizing and living
———
16 knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature,” that an
0.0pt P
17 “integrating vision,” a “universalizing discourse” exists nowhere else, ———
18 he is little more than an aesthetic reactionary. 54 Normal P
19 I have a more optimistic view, one in which visual culture has room PgEnds:
20 for something more than infomercials and Big Brother. Perhaps non-
21 fiction film and video can be understood—and nurtured—as another
[148], (2
22 forum for the literary impulse, rather than its looming replacement,
23 and documentary artists such as Obomsawin, who comb poetry and
24 provocation out of social facts, can be appreciated as literary artists
25 working in a new medium, as televisual Zolas. Tom Wolfe once asked
26 where the new Zolas would be found, now that postmodern games-
27 manship, as he saw it in the late 1980s, had killed off the great novels of
28 social change. Young novelists elbowed one another aside to counter
29 Wolfe’s charge, but few thought to look at videotape, that inelegant
30 sandwich of plastic and magnetism that holds the creative life of
31 people like Obomsawin. Certainly, no one thought to look at the far
32 end of the shelf reserved, somewhat begrudgingly, for independent
33 documentaries—those little films with little audiences, yet still larger
34 than the readership of many prizewinning novels.
35 We do not need to degrade the image to exalt the word, yet Vargas
36 Llosa does just this in his influential essay, claiming that film and
1 video cannot teach us “the extraordinarily rich possibilities that lan-

2 guage encompasses” because “the audiovisual media tend to relegate
3 words to a secondary level with respect to images.”55 Here he is just
4 wrong, and what he asserts must be the product of a busy writer’s
5 inattention to the more complex shadows on walls of cinema. As
6 mentioned in a previous chapter, Obomsawin begins her projects
7 by listening carefully to the spoken word, then recording stories in
8 multiple languages on plain audiotape, before even thinking about
9 images. Vargas Llosa is simply ill informed about the case of polyglot
10 filmmakers such as Obomsawin: documentary is not deaf to the nu-
11 ance of language and can be invested with the richness of the human
12 voice. [149], (28)
13 I love the celebration of literature as much as I love literature
14 itself, yet I would ask Vargas Llosa and his logocentric companions
Lines: 185 to
15 to make room on their shelves of leather-bound classics for some
———
16 migrants from another genre of creative expression, one that has
0.0pt PgV
17 literary qualities all its own. Although documentary filmmaking is ———
18 a young art form compared to most, it may have more in common Normal Page
19 with literature than we realize. Perhaps in a few hundred years, when PgEnds: TEX
20 Kanehsatake is as venerable as Don Quixote seems now, when the
21 documentary tradition has been nurtured, tortured, and creatively
[149], (28)
22 hijacked as much as the art of fiction, then we can put the two side
23 by side and better recognize the family resemblance. Not just the
24 sainted novel but also the documentary film is among what Vargas
25 Llosa describes as the “ways that we have invented to divest ourselves
26 of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life.”56
27
28 Redemption?
29 I focus on Obomsawin because I think that her work has uncommon
30 power—perhaps even enough to convince people of the merits of
31 documentary in its sanest and most compassionate form. In Beau-
32 tiful Losers, Obomsawin’s friend Leonard Cohen asks the question,
33 “What is a saint?” In a novel that one critic has described as the“some-
34 times perverse search for modern sainthood,” one of the characters
35 provides us with an answer: “A saint is someone who has achieved a
36 remote human possibility.”57 In her efforts to bring recognition to the
1 repressed and endangered aspects of First Nations’ life, Obomsawin

2 has become a kind of alternative media saint, at least in Canada, where
3 she has received accolades and admiration from many quarters. She
4 has been awarded the prestigious Order of Canada as well as honorary
5 doctorates from York, Concordia, Trent, Carleton, and other univer-
6 sities. She has won dozens of prizes and achievement awards for her
7 filmmaking career, including the Canadian Native Arts Foundation
8 National Aboriginal Achievement Award. She has served in leader-
9 ship positions at the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, the Canada
10 Council’s First Peoples Advisory Board, the Aboriginal Peoples Tele-
11 vision, and the Public Broadcasting Association of Quebec. Without
12 question she has been the most influential Native media figure in [150], (2
13 North America, and her films, as Zuzana Pick has claimed, “have
14 fundamentally altered the way in which the cause of First Peoples
Lines: 19
15 have been communicated to non-Native Canadians,” as I noted in
———
16 the first pages of the book. 58 Even Kateri Tekakwitha, the mute object
0.0pt P
17 of Cohen’s fetishistic reveries about Native sanctity, could not have ———
18 done more for Native people. Normal P
19 I suspect that James Agee would have been skeptical of such suc- PgEnds:
20 cess, having once fretted: “Official acceptance is the one unmistakable
21 symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign
[150], (2
22 of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”59 Yet somehow
23 Obomsawin has avoided the pitfall of co-optation, instead seeming to
24 grow bolder and more autonomous with every passing year. Rather
25 than caving in to the pressures of success, she has carved out a niche
26 that might be called the radical center, where an artist, once well
27 enough established, can forge some independence even inside a state
28 institution like the nfb. It is, once again, a middle ground of sorts, a
29 slender place between power and truth, that she occupies along with
30 a select few artists. Although her place may be at the symbolic center
31 of the Canadian mediascape, she still continues to draw her strength
32 from her experiences and interactions at the margins.
33 As Obomsawin and other creative people make quite clear, the
34 cultural margins are not lifeless places that artists must flee in des-
35 peration to find appreciative audiences for their work—far from it.
36 Ecologists have long suggested that the edge of the forest, where the
1 trees give way to pastures, can be the most rewarding destination for
2 foraging animals. Liminality and fecundity are not opposed to one
3 another in nature, nor are they, I hope, in the cultural life of a nation.
4 It almost goes without saying that some of the most interesting per-
5 spectives and developments exist around the bend from normative
6 cultural discourse and that isolation from the mainstream can be a
7 creative blessing. The great challenge, of course, is ensuring that art
8 on the edge is not associated with life on the edge, that creative and
9 economic marginalization do not go hand in hand, as so often is the
10 case. This double whammy against the creative impulse is a blow to
11 public life as well as to the life of the mind, and it deprives us of
12 whatever ideological redemption that political art can offer. [151], (30)
13 Yes, I have used the words redemption and saint in reference to
14 Obomsawin’s documentary project in the preceding pages, suggesting
Lines: 198 to
15 either that I have not outgrown my Catholic school training or (more
———
16 likely) that I have been up too long in the perversely religioliterary
0.0pt PgV
17 imagination of Leonard Cohen. Let me be clear about what I mean ———
18 by these words because I am quite certain that my definitions would Normal Page
19 disappoint the black-cassocked Christian Brothers who wandered the PgEnds: TEX
20 halls of my old New Jersey high school. One of Canada’s brightest
21 native sons, the literary critic Hugh Kenner, once commented in his
[151], (30)
22 book The Pound Era (1971): “Whoever can give his people better
23 stories than the ones they live in is like the priest in whose hands
24 common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul.”60
25 Aside from the gender of the pronouns, that is what I am talking
26 about. Perhaps saint is too strong a word, even in the limited manner
27 in which I am using it here, but I want to suggest a deeper role for
28 art in general and nonfiction cinema in particular—and suggest that
29 certain documentarians have embraced what might pass for a sacred
30 task in a secular age, namely, that of preaching parables of the real to
31 the politically unconverted who want for “better stories” (sometimes
32 without even knowing it). It is in the nature of art, at least where
33 it intersects with an activist’s intelligence, to dream of remaking the
34 world.
35 Perhaps I am being naive; perhaps it is too much to expect redemp-
36 tion of any kind from the ephemeral world of art, even from projects
1 as embedded in the real as Obomsawin’s. After all, the ideological

2 sins of nationhood in North America, where long-simmering anti-
3 Indianism and crudely masculinist visions of history have taken hold
4 for centuries, are not so easily cleansed from view. If so, I deserve a
5 trip to the theoretical woodshed for suggesting that a Native artist
6 could effect some small redemption within the national imaginary,
7 that her work might do something more than flicker past on-screen
8 and be gone—and I can think of at least one scholar who might be
9 inclined to doubt my words.
10 In her stunning book of nonfiction theorizing called States of
11 Emergency, Patricia Zimmermann even appears to strike preemp-
12 tively against my sort of musings. In her polemical engagement with [152], (3
13 our current media culture, Zimmermann disparages the “religious
14 conception of documentary redeeming the nation and the spectator
Lines: 20
15 through good works and good intentions, like a missionary to the
———
16 masses of the uninformed.” Lamenting the overdependence on texts
0.0pt P
17 that will “activate” our politics, she seems to scorn the Griersonian ———
18 state of affairs in which we need films like Richard Cardinal to get us Normal P
19 riled about Native foster care in Canada. Zimmermann argues that PgEnds:
20 this is what documentary tried in the past, and her implication is,
21 I think, that it was not enough. Instead, we need something edgier,
[152], (3
22 more challenging, something that ruptures the formal orthodoxies
23 to which political documentary has often been stuck. It is a powerful
24 critique, yet, in her “non-negotiable imperative” to reformulate in-
25 dependent documentary for the new millennium, she seems a little
26 too quick to dismiss the lessons of older nonfiction filmmaking as
27 out-of-date and theoretically retrograde. 61 No doubt, she is right that
28 we need new strategies for telling stories about the real world and
29 its most urgent problems, but I suspect that the best of these inno-
30 vations will be built on groundwork laid by Obomsawin and other
31 women whose documentary counterdiscourse is more subtle in its
32 subversions, more palatable to ordinary viewers, than supposedly
33 avant-gardist projects that make a show of pushing the envelope for
34 the benefit of six like-minded souls.
35 Still, I appreciate Zimmermann’s basic desire to rattle the status
36 quo and explore new forms of political mediamaking. Without ques-
1 tion, it is a shame that dull orthodoxies have turned documentary

2 into a sleep-inducing word for many people. As Louis Marcorelles
3 once wrote: “Thousands of bunglers have made the word [documen-
4 tary] come to mean a deadly, routine form of film-making, the kind
5 an alienated consumer society might appear to deserve—the art of
6 talking a great deal during a film, with a commentary imposed from
7 the outside, in order to say nothing, and to show nothing.”62 Yet, in a
8 time of excess information, indeed, a grotesque surplus of damaging
9 stimuli, well-crafted documentaries like Incident at Restigouche or
10 Spudwrench—uncontroversial in format, oppositional in content—
11 can focus public attention and move at least some people to reassess
12 their beliefs. Even if redemption for the nation at large is too much to [153], (32)
13 expect from any kind of creative act like cinema, individual salvation
14 is quite possible for those whose minds are not terminally closed. We
Lines: 206 to
15 need to have hope in this possibility.
———
16 Why? What do I mean by this? In a sense I am talking about faith af-
0.0pt PgV
17 ter all. Zimmermann chides those who adopt a “religious conception” ———
18 of documentary’s power, but what is wrong with a taste of that dubi- Normal Page
19 ous fruit if it inspires us to keep hacking at the web of mythologies in PgEnds: TEX
20 which we are forced to live? After all, we do not want to zap the cre-
21 ative metaphysic that propels good work into being, that productively
[153], (32)
22 deludes the artist (or perhaps not) into thinking that his or her work
23 will strike home with more than a few friends and critics. If Vargas
24 Llosa and so many others can find quasi-religious transcendence in
25 the literary act, then why not in documentary cinema as well? After
26 all, where else in the realm of expressive culture are we supposed
27 to turn for illumination? We need a redemptive force based on the
28 intellect in our systems of information; we need powerful antidotes
29 to the seductive mythologies of nation and capital; and we need them
30 in the realm of new media (cinema, television, the Internet) as much
31 as in the old (books, songs, sculptures). We need it more than we
32 realize.
33 This is not the time to debunk documentary for its epistemological
34 shortcomings, just as Native people are beginning to gain a foothold
35 in its production. We have taken the critique of representation far
36 enough in recent decades, whether it is the poststructuralist turn in
1 the academy since the 1970s or the reflexive documentaries beginning

2 with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961). To-
3 day we no longer have a pressing need to reveal the “constructedness”
4 of nonfiction to the point of demolishing its semiotic authority, given
5 that documentary is the one place within our electronic media that
6 allows some complexity and contemplation, not to mention some
7 oppositional edge. Instead, this is the time for muckraking documen-
8 tary projects, which are built, inevitably, on the precepts of realism
9 and positivism—on perceived facts and our faith in them. Without
10 utterly losing our heads in the slipperiness of representation, we must
11 critically reinvest our faith in a seemingly factual mode of commu-
12 nication where the reality of someone like Alanis Obomsawin can [154], (3
13 challenge the greater national imaginary and perhaps bring human
14 beings together across tiresome lines of division. Surely, there is some
Lines: 21
15 secular sanctity in the most passionate representations of the world
———
16 around us, in particular human visions that flagellate the national
0.0pt P
17 body and gesture toward political salvation. If we honor these other ———
18 visions, perhaps, as Tiziana Terranova has suggested, media activists Normal P
19 like Obomsawin might be able to “inject the media landscape with PgEnds:
20 enough impetus to collect the scattered postmodern subjectivities
21 into something that would be closer to the mass explosions of the
[154], (3
22 previous decades.”63 It is a hopeful thought in these dark days for
23 observers of the mass media and its perverse political economy.
24 Today, we are witnessing the trashing of the real, the willful dis-
25 tortion of actuality in the service of ideology and profit, and the
26 dissipation of truth in the black hole of commercial mass media.
27 What I am proposing as a form of resistance is a “return to the real”
28 that allows us to put stock in the other visions of Obomsawin and
29 other alternative media figures as something more than subjective
30 idiosyncrasies. Those who care about such things have long realized
31 that documentary is not real, but that it’s real enough to matter, and
32 that it matters very much right now. 64 To a degree that was unthink-
33 able in the past, “life experience,” as Todd Gitlin has pointed out,
34 “has become an experience in the presence of media,” one that is
35 essentially seamless in nature. “Even as we click around, something
36 feels uniform—a relentless pace, a pattern of interruption, a pressure
1 toward unseriousness, a readiness for sensation, an anticipation of

2 the next new thing.”65
3 Documentary as Obomsawin practices it can rupture this seamless
4 torrent of image and ideology. Instead of joining the torrent, it can
5 offer slow, serious, and even subversive points of view. I know that
6 I have learned—and felt—all sorts of things from documentaries.
7 When I was in college, Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse (1971) provided
8 me with my first visceral sense of the duplicity of American power
9 during the cold war, Ira Wohl’s Best Boy (1979) made me wonder
10 anew about the fragility of the human condition, and the Maysles
[Last Page]
11 brothers’ Salesman (1969) revealed the Lomanesque futility propping
12 up the great engines of capital. Documentary even schooled me in [155], (34)
13 its own limitations. Trinh T. Minh-ha unveiled the manipulations of
14 the Western gaze in her Reassemblage (1982), while How the Myth Was
Lines: 212 to
15 Made (1976), George Stoney’s critique of Robert Flaherty’s legendary
———
16 work in Ireland, revealed the elasticity of the visual record in a way
109.58002
17 that I had hardly imagined. So years later, when I saw Kanehsatake, ———
18 I was not surprised by its impact on my own thinking. The film Normal Page
19 gave me a glimpse of First Nations histories through the lens of a PgEnds: TEX
20 landmark event I had barely registered before, enough of a glimpse
21 that I wanted to overcome the provincialism of American studies
[155], (34)
22 (and Americans generally) to look north and learn something about
23 what was going on in places like Oka. I think that I have completed
24 that cycle—viewing and then doing—enough times in my own life to
25 know that nonfiction is more than a solipsistic exercise, that Wiseman
26 is wrong, that Obomsawin is right to keep making films, and that hers
27 is a model to which we might aspire. How this might be the case for
28 indigenous people in particular is the subject of the next chapter.
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
6
7
8 Cinema of Sovereignty
9
10
[First Pag
11
12 [156], (1
13
14
Lines: 0 t
15 As the start of the new millennium came and went, Alanis Obom-
———
16 sawin followed the path of more than one well-regarded artist: having
0.0pt P
17 reached a certain stage in a storied career, she turned her gaze ever ———
18 closer to home. Nearing and then surpassing seventy years of age, the Normal P
19 filmmaker did not slow down in the slightest but instead returned her PgEnds:
20 cinematic energies to the Wabanaki people, the cultural grouping of
21 Algonquin speakers composed of her Abenaki kin as well as Mi’kmaq,
[156], (1
22 Malicite, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot neighbors across the far
23 northeast. Once again it was the Mi’kmaq in particular who drew
24 her attention. Intending to document yet another encroachment of
25 state authority on Native rights, she went back to the Mi’kmaq fish-
26 ing village of Restigouche fifteen years after her original visit as well
27 as to the communities of Burnt Church and Estigouche. As in her
28 1984 documentary Incident at Restigouche, the problem was once
29 again related to the water, where a bitter dispute with government
30 authorities was brewing over Mi’kmaq fishing rights. Over a span
31 of several years between 1998 and 2002, the filmmaker visited the
32 impoverished fishing communities, carefully documenting the con-
33 flict and its aftermath. Having grown accustomed to working on a
34 grand scale with her sprawling series of Oka films, Obomsawin did
35 not limit herself to a single glance at the Mi’kmaq situation, instead
36 preferring to release an ambitious pair of ninety-minute documen-
CINEMA OF SOVEREIGNTY 157
1 taries called Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002) and Our Nationhood
2 (2003).
3 Even the titles of these films are unusually revealing about the film-
4 maker’s point of view, now marked by growing impatience and frus-
5 tration over the disregard of Native rights. “It was kind of a shock that
6 in the year 2000 we are seeing this thing happen again,” Obomsawin
7 said. 1 Perhaps more clearly than ever, her latest work illustrates her
8 response to such situations, namely, the development of a bold media
9 strategy that we might call an indigenous cinema of sovereignty. Before
10 explaining this concept through an examination of Obomsawin’s two
11 most recent documentaries, I want to provide some background on
12 the conflict itself and explain how fishing rights became so central to [157], (2)
13 contemporary Native politics, especially for coastal tribes such as the
14 Mi’kmaq. Like Obomsawin’s Abenaki relations, her Mi’kmaq neigh-
Lines: 33 to
15 bors are little known and often misunderstood even within their own
———
16 province, let alone in the broader sweep of North American politics. 2
0.0pt PgV
17 As does Obomsawin herself, their story deserves, I believe, greater ———
18 currency in the United States and Canada, both of which have fought Normal Page
19 hard against the tribe’s survival as a sovereign nation. PgEnds: TEX
20
21 Background to the Conflict
[157], (2)
22 That the great crisis of the Mi’kmaq people would flow from the
23 water in their midst—indeed, that water would once again symbolize
24 their lifeblood as a sovereign people—must have come as no surprise
25 to tribal citizens who had been schooled in the ways of Glous’gap,
26 the indomitable Mi’kmaq cultural hero from their mythic past. As an
27 embodiment of the Great Spirit, this legendary “elder brother” had
28 guided the Mi’kmaq into existence in the first chapters of their tribal
29 cosmology. Ever since, Mi’kmaq children who listened to tales of his
30 adventures would have learned about him creating the wide water-
31 ways and beautiful land all around them; battling Gitji’ Kwa’bit, the
32 Great Beaver, to prevent him from reshaping the world; and fighting
33 to free Mrs. Bear when a sorcerer kidnapped his forest friend. They
34 would also have learned about how the first Mi’kmaq village swelled
35 in numbers under his protection, as he taught their ancestors to catch
36 salmon, sew clothing, and build shelter alongside the icy stream he
158 CINEMA OF SOVEREIGNTY
1 had chosen for their benefit. “All was going well, just as Glous’gap
2 had intended,” says one contemporary Mi’kmaq storyteller on whose
3 work I am drawing here, “until, that is, the water ceased flowing.”3 In
4 a tale called “Glous’gap and the Water Monster,” Mi’kmaq children
5 would have learned what happened next.
6 For several anxious months, their ancestors waited in vain for the
7 water to return. At long last, the village elders decided to send one
8 of their young men north along the streambed, now littered with
9 dry leaves and dead fish. After an arduous journey, the young man
10 discovered the source of the stream and the problem itself. Somehow
11 a new village had sprung up, populated by a strange race of people—
12 [158], (3
not quite people, really, at least not by Mi’kmaq standards, for they
13 seemed selfish, cold, and unwelcoming. The young man noticed that
14
they lacked the hearts of real human beings and even polluted the Lines: 41
15
water with their own toxins. Pleading for a small cup of this foul ———
16
water to slake his thirst, the young man was denied even a drop, with 14.0pt
17 ———
the explanation that all the water was the exclusive province of their
18 Normal P
great chief.
19 PgEnds:
After asking how to find this great chief, the young man soon
20
encountered a warty, yellow-eyed beast the size of a mountain. He ap-
21
proached cautiously and told the beast about the Mi’kmaq dilemma [158], (3
22
downstream, but it gruffly replied that it did not care in the least. The
23
24 rapacious beast had already swallowed bears, trees, moose, and even
25 entire villages and now made motions to engulf the young man, who,
26 wisely, ran back to his village.
27 Glous’gap soon heard what happened and prepared himself for
28 battle: he grew to a height of twelve feet and shook the earth with
29 his stomping feet. Moving quickly through the woods, he located
30 the beast far upstream and demanded a return to the natural order
31 of things, but the response was the same: “All the waters are mine!
32 Go away! Go away! Or I’ll kill you today!” Not one to take no for an
33 answer, Glous’gap attacked the great beast and slit open its enormous
34 gut, spilling out a vast quantity of water that quickly refilled the
35 stream as far as the Mi’kmaq village and well beyond. The story
36 ended with Glous’gap punishing the beast for its greed by squeezing
1 it between his palms until it was shrunk into a humble, croaking

2 creature now known as a frog, which he then tossed into the swamp.
3 I tell this story not just because it a wonderful example of the
4 Wabanaki oral tradition in which Obomsawin herself was steeped or
5 because it establishes the centrality of water to the Mi’kmaq world-
6 view. I also share it because it provides a rich metaphor for the
7 situation that Obomsawin would document off the shores of Res-
8 tigouche and Burnt Church. No better allegory could be imagined
9 for the Mi’kmaq struggle to protect their ancient water rights against
10 the “imperial monster” of the modern state, that encapsulating and
11 polluting power that sought to ignore treaty obligations, choke off
12 the Mi’kmaq lifeblood, and hoard the sea’s natural resources for itself [159], (4)
13 and its non-Native constituents. And, even if one doubts that the
14 symbolic roots of the contemporary fishing disputes touch the core
Lines: 48 to
15 of tribal mythology, there is little doubt that they weave throughout
———
16 hundreds of years of Mi’kmaq history, especially after contact with
0.0pt PgV
17 Europeans. ———
18 Like the Abenakis and other tribes of the eastern seaboard, the Normal Page
19 Mi’kmaq had the historical misfortune of discovering Europeans in PgEnds: TEX
20 their midst not long after Columbus first set sail. In 1504, a “float-
21 ing island” (a ship) crawling with “bears” (strangely attired sailors)
[159], (4)
22 dropped anchor off the coast of Nova Scotia where the Mi’kmaq lived,
23 ending their age-old belief that they were the easternmost people on
24 the earth. 4 Within decades, these “floating islands” were a common
25 sight, as the Europeans established a permanent presence among the
26 Mi’kmaq and their neighbors. The European motivation was in the
27 sea itself, in particular, the abundant fisheries that had allowed the
28 Mi’kmaq to depend on the ocean for 90 percent of their diet. 5 By the
29 seventeenth century, Europeans were operating a booming fishing
30 trade that was even more profitable than the legendary fur trade of
31 North America, and each year their ships were bringing millions of
32 fish to markets in Paris and elsewhere across Europe. Prosperous as
33 the Europeans were, it was a difficult time for the tribe. Although the
34 Mi’kmaq were not often at war with these new arrivals from France
35 and elsewhere on the European continent, the tribe suffered a serious
36 population decline because of disease, falling from a high of perhaps
1 fifteen thousand at contact to just thirty-five hundred by the early

2 eighteenth century. 6
3 The situation grew worse over the course of the eighteenth cen-
4 tury with the arrival of English power in the Maritimes. The title of
5 Obomsawin’s Is the Crown at War with Us? comes from a Mi’kmaq
6 fisherman who asked a rhetorical question with a long and painful
7 history of his Abenaki interviewer. Blessed and cursed with enviable
8 natural resources and a location of strategic importance, the Mi’kmaq
9 soon found themselves engaged in centuries of enervating conflict
10 with the English crown and its Canadian successor. If the tribe had
11 sometimes been able to work out a satisfactory relationship with
12 the French, the Anglophone authorities seemed mostly interested in [160], (5
13 eliminating the Native presence in their midst and did all they could
14 to hasten the precipitous decline of the Mi’kmaq population well into
Lines: 51
15 the nineteenth century. Disease, alcohol, the encroachment of white
———
16 hunters, and other factors contributed to this demographic decline,
0.0pt P
17 as did the genocidal policies of the government and its white sup- ———
18 porters. As one historian has noted, the eighteenth-century English Normal P
19 colonials served poisoned food to Mi’kmaq guests, issued bounties PgEnds:
20 for Mi’kmaq scalps irrespective of victims’ sex or age, and inten-
21 tionally distributed disease-ridden cloth, resulting in the deaths of
[160], (5
22 three hundred Mi’kmaqs. The Mi’kmaq were even unlucky enough
23 to experience the wrath of the infamous Major Rogers himself, the
24 nemesis of the Abenakis who, as we have seen, had burned the homes
25 of Obomsawin’s ancestors. In 1759, the same year he attacked the
26 Abenakis, the major led a raid on a Mi’kmaq encampment in Nova
27 Scotia during which he followed the same gruesome protocol that
28 marked his appearance at Odanak. 7
29 Outright war with the crown devolved into various forms of in-
30 ternal colonialism in the nineteenth century. As white settlers kept
31 arriving on Mi’kmaq land in disturbing numbers, government au-
32 thorities pushed assimilationist policies that would shift the tribe
33 from “savagery” to “civilization,” as they saw it. 8 Much was lost from
34 the Mi’kmaq world over these decades, yet something essential was
35 preserved, in part because in 1853 the tribe secured a small but im-
36 portant portion of its traditional land base as a reserve. Despite the
1 limited refuge that the reserve offered, cruel tests of domestic de-
2 pendency marked the Mi’kmaqs’ lives in the late nineteenth century
3 and continued into the twentieth, as the Mi’kmaq people and their
4 children, including the future poet Rita Joe, were jerked between
5 modes of assimilation and resistance. The poet recalls being filled
6 with bittersweet fascination for the regal power of the metropole
7 in the 1940s and how easily that feeling was punctured by the drab
8 reality of colonial life. Describing an event from her time in an Indian
9 boarding school in Nova Scotia, she captured an emblematic moment
10 in her poetry: “I am happy / The King and Queen will pass by on a
11 train, they say / All the boys and girls on the reservation / Will receive
12 [161], (6)
pants, skirts and sailor blouses.” When the day is over, somehow the
13
royals have failed to appear, and she has lost her chance to wear the
14
new clothing. Disappointed, the child in the poem responds: “Gone, Lines: 55 to
15
my longing to see the King and the Queen.”9 ———
16
Later, as a teenager going to school in Halifax, Rita Joe experienced 14.0pt Pg
17 ———
the common alienation of Mi’kmaq children growing up far from
18 Normal Page
home, looking for their place in a modern white nation whose young
19 PgEnds: TEX
men yelled “squaw” at her on the streets of the small city (echoing
20
the treatment that Obomsawin received a few hours east in Three
21
Rivers). Joe remembers the scene in her verse: [161], (6)
22
23 Your buildings, tall, alien,
24 Cover the land;
25 Unfeeling concrete smothers, windows glint
26 Like water to the sun.
27 No breezes blow
28 Through standing trees;
29 No scent of pine lightens my burden.
30
31 By the 1970s, Rita Joe was on a poetic parallel to Obomsawin’s career.
32 She was finding her voice as a Mi’kmaq poet and directing it, often,
33 at the white Canadians who did not seem to understand her people.
34 “Your history tells our children / what you want them to learn,” she
35 complained, and she asked her imaginary listeners for a moment of
36 empathy in place of smug certitude: “Let us trade places just this once
1 / And you listen while I go on about my culture / Important just like

2 yours / But almost dead.”10
3 Until quite recently, most academics would have accepted this last
4 line at face value, pointing to the fact that 99 percent of Mi’kmaq land
5 had been lost since contact with Europeans. Yet the tribe was far from
6 “dead” in the twentieth century—its language was very much alive,
7 along with much of its cultural heritage, even if outsiders tended to
8 overlook these facts. 11 One of the by-products of the Mi’kmaq’s long
9 history of contact was a perception, quite common by the twenti-
10 eth century, that they were no longer “real Indians” (Abenakis have
11 encountered the same bias). White scholars and other onlookers as-
12 sumed that five centuries of cultural exchange, intermarriage, and [162], (7
13 assimilation had pushed Mi’kmaq identity to the breaking point. By
14 1958, one Canadian archaeologist had even declared: “The Mi’kmaq
Lines: 88
15 is faced with the unenviable choice of going out into the white man’s
———
16 world where he may find a future but must lose his past, or of remain-
0.0pt P
17 ing in the reserve where he may keep his past but have no future.” ———
18 Lamenting this situation in the kind of terms often associated with Normal P
19 the myth of “the vanishing Indian,” the archaeologist added: “Could PgEnds:
20 we not have spared a little dignity to their sunset?”12
21 Throughout the twentieth century this was the dominant per-
[162], (7
22 spective among white Canadians, who grew up learning little about
23 Mi’kmaq history and culture except its supposed disappearance.
24 Given this ignorance, it is no wonder that few Canadians would
25 understand why contemporary Mi’kmaq people would reassert
26 centuries-old treaty rights as their own. From such an inherently
27 imperial vantage, white Canadians might have been tempted to think
28 that an authentic Mi’kmaq nation was nothing more than a rhetorical
29 conceit, one that had evolved in the wake of 1960s liberation move-
30 ments into a desperate legal strategy to secure natural resources. Few
31 outsiders knew the truth as Obomsawin did. In preparing to make a
32 film about her northeastern neighbors, she was walking into a black
33 hole of public awareness—with few exceptions, the Mi’kmaq had
34 not been the subject of significant media attention. 13 Once again her
35 desire was to present the silenced voices, tell the neglected stories,
36 and show that the vital relation between the Mi’kmaq and the sea was
1 more than a nostalgic stereotype, that it was a legitimate and legally

2 binding attribute of their sovereign nationhood.
3
4 Is the Crown at War with Us?
5
Without fish they would have to endure evil days.
6
7 Seventeenth-century French
8 Jesuit describing the Mi’kmaq
9 Water between trees, water shimmering with sun, water as far as the
10 horizon. With each cut, a wider slice of the Mi’kmaq world appears
11 on-screen, and the images flow in this manner for nine of the first
12 [163], (8)
ten shots, none of them on-screen for more than a brief moment.
13
Sophisticated folk music on the sound track adds a note of languid
14
melancholy to the images, some well crafted, others more amateurish, Lines: 91 to
15
in an odd mix of video and sixteen-millimeter that has never marked ———
16
Obomsawin’s work before. (The video appears simultaneously crisp 13.0pt Pg
17 ———
and shallow in comparison to the richer film image.)
18 Normal Page
In addition to a poetic litany of water imagery, Obomsawin touches
19 PgEnds: TEX
on her usual preoccupations in the first moments of Is the Crown at
20
War with Us?—the vulnerability and resilience of Native children, the
21
rich and calming natural resources of Native land, the prominence [163], (8)
22
of Native women in tribal life. She even combines all three elements
23
24 in one quick sequence: Mi’kmaq children descend a staircase, then
25 the camera seems to gaze appreciatively up the trunk of a tree, all
26 while a Native woman’s voice is heard talking about the pain of what
27 happened to her people on the waters in the year before.
28 Cut to the distant past—a Catholic church, the voice of a priest,
29 snapshots of Mi’kmaq children after their first communion, the 1940s,
30 the 1970s, the 1990s. Even in the first minutes of the film, Obomsawin
31 moves several times between past and present, intertwining the two
32 in the way that has become customary for her. The temporal shuttling
33 continues into the next scene: a man in traditional garb addresses the
34 camera in his traditional language, before a young woman dances in
35 matching clothes as an off-screen voice explains in the language of
36 contemporary higher education how his world, the Mi’kmaq world,
1 is interwoven in deeper ways than social science or state bureaucrats

2 can understand.
3 We return to the water. An eloquent young Mi’kmaq man, wide
4 like a linebacker, pilots his small craft a mile from shore, while on
5 the sound track a voice explains: “We played and lived our whole life
6 around that water; it revolves around that water. It is integral to our
7 culture and our people and our livelihood.”Cut to the linebacker gen-
8 tly explaining how the Canadian government has robbed his children
9 of their right to fish. Cut to another fisherman, more hardscrabble
10 in aspect, calmly stressing his willingness to resist the efforts of the
11 government.
12 Even in the first moments of this documentary, most Canadian [164], (9
13 viewers would realize that Obomsawin is going against the grain of
14 mainstream press coverage. Across Canada during the late 1990s, the
Lines: 12
15 headlines in local, provincial, and national newspapers were filled
———
16 with language tipped in favor of the government’s position, with
0.0pt P
17 loaded words including illegal traps, warriors, extreme militancy, in- ———
18 transigence, and warpath. 14 “Polite Canada sits on its hands as Native Normal P
19 militants flout the law and demand the moon,” cried a headline in PgEnds:
20 the Alberta-based Report Newsmagazine. 15 One academic observer
21 named Paul Fitzgerald claimed: “The Canadian public were denied
[164], (9
22 extensive exposure to the views of the other side, that of the small
23 First Nations community directly affected.”16 According to Fitzger-
24 ald’s analysis, mainstream media went on a “vast fishing expedition”
25 for “quick and easily digested stories” about Burnt Church, leaving
26 the Canadian public in the dark about the deeper histories at work.
27 While Fitzgerald argued that too often the point of view that made its
28 way into the press was nothing more than a hastily digested version
29 of official press releases, another writer complained that the words of
30 government spokesmen were being elevated“to the status of objective
31 truth.”17
32 Certainly, few outside observers would have known that Burnt
33 Church had an unemployment rate that was more than double
34 the provincial average for New Brunswick (35.6 vs. 15.5 percent) or
35 that Mi’kmaq fishermen were dropping less than 0.5 percent of the
36 950,000 traps in the local waters, the rest being the property of non-
1 Natives, who reaped as much as C$100,000 a year for a few months’

2 work. 18 Nor would most viewers watching, say, cbc newscasts in their
3 living rooms have understood the underpinnings of the Mi’kmaq
4 case, which was formidable on both legal and moral grounds. Af-
5 ter all, the Supreme Court of Canada had supported most of the
6 Mi’kmaq treaty-based fishing claims in the 1999 Marshall decision,
7 and problems arose only when the federal Department of Fisheries
8 and Oceans (dfo) took a position that ran counter to the highest
9 court’s decision. Obomsawin’s documentary attempts to correct this
10 perceptual imbalance between what was right as she saw it and what
11 was widely understood about the Marshall ruling and its impact on
12 the Mi’kmaqs’ sovereign rights to the seas. [165], (10)
13 Not even ten minutes into Is the Crown at War with Us? Obom-
14 sawin reviews the legal situation of Donald Marshall and the land-
Lines: 130 to
15 mark case that bears his name. 19 According to the filmmaker, the
———
16 Canadian Supreme Court decided that the Mi’kmaq retained par-
0.0pt PgV
17 ticular fishing rights, rights that were based on eighteenth-century ———
18 treaties whose validity the government had tried to undermine. 20 Normal Page
19 Obomsawin lets a stuffy English voice read from the old treaty while PgEnds: TEX
20 black-and-white archival images move past—this film has the best
21 use of still photographs in her career. Next, she shows the joyous
[165], (10)
22 response in the streets of Burnt Church when the court decision
23 affirmed the Mi’kmaqs’ right to the waters, at least to the extent of
24 making a “moderate livelihood.” The film points out that a “moder-
25 ate livelihood” involves just four traps per Native person during a few
26 weeks each fall, which represents a small fraction of the total number
27 of traps in the waters and certainly far less than what non-Native
28 commercial operations were using.
29 In celebration of the decision, the Mi’kmaq take to the ocean in
30 their various boats, with Mi’kmaq women in the lead. “It took the
31 women of our community to make it happen,” says a Native man in
32 voice-over, making a characteristic Obomsawin point. But the film
33 shows how non-Native fishermen fought back almost right away, with
34 the result being that soon the communities were “at war,” as Obom-
35 sawin puts it. A flotilla of non-Native fishing boats, some 150 vessels,
36 crowds into Mi’kmaq waters, and burly fishermen begin storming
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [166], (1
13 figure 24. Mi’kmaq women with their lobster traps in Is the Crown at
14 War with Us? (2002). Directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Produced by Alanis Lines: 14
15 Obomsawin. Mi’gmaq fishermen Karen Somerville (left) and Miigema’gan.
———
16 Photograph by: Pamela Mitchell. © 2002 National Film Board of Canada. All -0.9100
17 rights reserved. Photograph used with the permission of the National Film ———
18 Board of Canada. Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20 into one another’s faces: the Mi’kmaq curse at the men trying to keep
21 them from fishing, while whites throw out racial slurs, shoot bullets
[166], (1
22 in the direction of Native boats, and vandalize dozens of Native traps.
23 Even worse is the official response, in which the dfo seems to
24 disregard the Marshall decision and instead clamp down on Mi’kmaq
25 fishing with a variety of bureaucratic pretexts. Claiming that the
26 decision gave them the obligation“to limit treaty rights in the interests
27 of conservation and fairness,” the dfo adopts an aggressive posture
28 toward the Mi’kmaq fishermen. In the film we see a sympathetic
29 white lawyer who explains to the camera that the state “brought its
30 full force to bear with helicopters, patrol boats, guns, dozens of [Royal
31 Canadian Mounted Police] cars, on the people of Estigouche.”In grim
32 echoes of Oka, Obomsawin shows armed police officers arriving in
33 powerful boats to harass the small Native skiffs that remain near the
34 shoreline. Between such raw, dramatic footage, Obomsawin cuts away
35 to show the state trying to defend its position, which, in the context
36 of her film, seems untenable. In a televised press conference, Robert
1 Nault, the minister of Indian affairs, explains, “We no longer have an

2 extinguishment policy” with regard to Native rights, but his words
3 do not seem persuasive when juxtaposed with the dfo’s actions on
4 the water.
5 As in many of Obomsawin’s earlier films, the voice of the state
6 seems at odds with the voice of the people, at least that of the Native
7 people, who come across as both earnest and reasonable. In one of
8 the film’s best interviews, Obomsawin sits down with James Ward,
9 a muscular, self-defined Mi’kmaq “warrior.” With a martial bearing
10 acquired during years of U.S. military service and a sophisticated un-
11 derstanding of the issues at stake that he honed in graduate studies
12 on the subject of aboriginal self-determination, Ward is both a pow- [167], (12)
13 erful physical presence and a highly articulate spokesperson for the
14 Mi’kmaq cause. As he describes the situation at length, Obomsawin
Lines: 145 to
15 cuts away to archival photographs that connect him with warriors of
———
16 the Mi’kmaq past, thereby casting an aura of historical legitimacy on
0.0pt PgV
17 his position. ———
18 The heart of the film is in the section after that in which we are able Normal Page
19 to witness violent confrontations between government officials and PgEnds: TEX
20 small Native fishing boats. Water splashes on the lens as we follow the
21 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) and dfo efforts to shut down
[167], (12)
22 what they call unlicensed Native fishing, even at the small-scale sub-
23 sistence level that the tribe insists is its sovereign right, an insistence
24 based on the Marshall decision and other historical reasons. Using
25 shaky amateur video footage that captures the Mi’kmaq point of view,
26 Obomsawin does a remarkable job of showing the tensions on the
27 water. Shouts and threats echo from both sides as government agents
28 ram into small Native fishing boats, capsizing several of them, and
29 even turning around to run over half-sunken vessels. Native mothers
30 watch from the shore, praying for their sons to make it through the
31 danger, while the rcmp shoots tear-gas canisters and seems to act
32 like “modern-day Indian fighters,” as one Native interviewee puts
33 it.
34 For anyone vaguely familiar with recent Canadian history, the
35 shadow of Oka must linger over these events, a fact that one Na-
36 tive spokesman makes explicit when he warns government ministers
1 about repeating what happened at Kanehsatake. Another Native fish-

2 erman shakes his head sadly and asks the eponymous question: “Is
3 the crown at war with us?” As if to suggest an affirmative answer,
4 Obomsawin cuts to the dfo’s capture of several Native fishermen,
5 including several who had been knocked out of their boats and into
6 the churning sea. The men seem overwhelmed and exhausted when
7 pulled from the water, yet we learn from a Mi’kmaq interviewee
8 that the rcmp charged them with “assault with a deadly weapon” for
9 brandishing a wooden paddle.
10 Obomsawin makes no secret that she is recording these events
11 from a Native point of view, and, even within the film itself, she hints
12 at the galvanizing power of what she is doing with her cameras. “I [168], (1
13 didn’t see how bad it was until I saw the tape of what happened,”
14 says one Mi’kmaq fisherman who had been on the waters during the
Lines: 15
15 clash. “That was when it was really scary,” he tells Obomsawin, who
———
16 cuts away to slow-motion images of the man’s boat being rammed.
0.0pt P
17 “Because I almost died out there,” he continues, “and I don’t want ———
18 to leave my kids yet. It’s hard to believe we have to fight this hard Normal P
19 for something that’s ours already.” Throughout Is the Crown at War PgEnds:
20 with Us? Obomsawin makes her activist position even more explicit
21 than it is in past films. “Hey, come closer, I want to talk to you,” she
[168], (1
22 yells at government officials from the stern of a Mi’kmaq boat, but
23 the officials seem wary of the camera and speed off. In a later scene a
24 Mi’kmaq elder asks her if the government position seems “crazy,” and
25 she says “yes” with a laugh. By choosing to leave such moments in the
26 film, it is clearer than ever that she includes herself in the first-person
27 plural that appears in the titles of her two newest films.
28 Is the Crown at War with Us? “is a gritty film [that is] not as aes-
29 thetically complex as some of [Obomsawin’s] other films,” Liz Czach,
30 a programmer for Perspective Canada at the Toronto International
31 Film Festival, has said. “It speaks of a certain urgency.”21 Czach is
32 probably right, although the film succeeds, I believe, on other fronts.
33 Not only does it provide a gripping account of a particular Mi’kmaq
34 crisis, but it also captures Obomsawin’s ongoing concerns about Na-
35 tive people. As do her earlier films, Is the Crown at War with Us?
36 documents the oppressive nature of the encapsulating state, the cre-
1 ativity and tenacity of Native resistance, the strategic importance of

2 pan-tribal solidarity, the political prominence of Native women in
3 contemporary First Nations, and the occasional willingness of pro-
4 gressive white supporters to cross racial lines to offer crucial support.
5 The film ends with an August 2002 agreement that affirms some as-
6 pects of Mi’kmaq sovereignty, although the real victories are apparent
7 only in the sequel, Our Nationhood.
8
9 Our Nationhood
10 Our Nationhood begins in much the same way as its predecessor,
11 although from the first moments it seems rougher in construction
12 and more militant in tone. In the opening scenes, we see camouflaged [169], (14)
13 Mi’kmaq men setting up a barricade across a highway—it is not quite
14 clear what is happening at first, although it soon becomes evident that
Lines: 155 to
15 the men are asserting their rights to ancestral woodlands. In wobbly
———
16 amateur video, we see these Mi’kmaq loggers working to establish
0.0pt PgV
17 their own claims to their traditional forests, while the Canadian gov- ———
18 ernment articulates other designs for the land. In the first half hour, Normal Page
19 the film does a good job of depicting the negotiation process between PgEnds: TEX
20 the parties, showing how the tribal leaders keep framing the issue as
21 a question of sovereignty, much to the government’s chagrin and/or
[169], (14)
22 incomprehension.
23 As usual, Obomsawin moves quickly to a historical overview of
24 Mi’kmaq history, one that emphasizes Native traditions of environ-
25 mental conservation in both logging and fishing. “It was nature that
26 taught them how to live,” Obomsawin says in a gentle voice-over that
27 seems a little too didactic in places. “Their territories and resources
28 were taken away from them,” she says, “and the fight continues to
29 this day.” Executing a very effective cut from historical maps of the
30 nineteenth century to contemporary video footage of Mi’kmaq men
31 in the woods, she suggests the continuity—and legitimacy—of the
32 struggle.
33 In the next section of Our Nationhood, Obomsawin moves between
34 logging and fishing, the woods and the sea, the two great natural
35 assets of the Mi’kmaq people, and draws comparisons between the
36 fishing crises at Restigouche in the early 1980s and the current logging
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [170], (1
13
14
Lines: 17
15
figure 25. Mi’kmaq roadblock in Our Nationhood (2003). Directed by Ala- ———
16
nis Obomsawin. Produced by Alanis Obomsawin. Photograph taken from 5.9119
17 ———
the production. © 2003 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.
18 Normal P
Photograph used with the permission of the National Film Board of Canada.
19 PgEnds:
20
21 dispute. Both situations were, she suggests, the result of government
[170], (1
22 infringement on Native sovereignty. To underscore the point, she uses
23 several minutes of footage from her classic documentary Incident at
24 Restigouche, before cutting to the traditional chief, Gary Metallic,
25 speaking in Mi’kmaq to a crowd of locals in the late 1990s (the chief
26 is traditional in the sense that his influence comes from lineage rather
27 than elections, which are invested with the authority of the state). The
28 chief refers to the events from the 1980s as if they are still very much
29 alive for his Mi’kmaq listeners and cites the historic precedent of
30 Restigouche to support his strategy of continuing civil disobedience
31 and unyielding resistance to the crown. His point of view appears
32 to have carried the day because the next sequence shows the tribe
33 setting up the giant barricade that appeared, with little context, in
34 the opening scenes. Massive front-end loaders dump upended cars
35 across the highway to stop traffic until Mi’kmaq demands are met.
36 Not surprisingly, protestors from neighboring white communities
1 are soon in the streets. “I don’t believe it’s their ancestral rights,” one
2 young female protestor complains to the camera in French. “Every
3 year they have new ones,” she adds in disgust, adding another char-
4 acteristically Obomsawin moment to the film.
5 Unsympathetic whites are not the only obstacle that the Mi’kmaq
6 encounter in Our Nationhood. As Obomsawin often does, she pays
7 careful attention to the inner workings of the mainstream media,
8 showing how white journalists were running amuck on the normally
9 quiet reserve, pointing cameras and microphones in every direction.
10 Seeing their backstage confusion is illuminating, to say the least, about
11 the construction of mainstream news coverage of important events
12 like the ones we see unfolding here. Yet uncomprehending journalists [171], (16)
13 are but a small obstacle compared to the Canadian government itself,
14 whose ministers display a surprising level of intransigence toward
Lines: 174 to
15 the Mi’kmaq in general and especially toward Chief Gary Metallic, a
———
16 former steelworker who comes across as both telegenic and truculent
0.0pt PgV
17 in his on-screen defiance of both the government bureaucracy and ———
18 the elected band leaders of the Listuguj First Nation, whom he sees as Normal Page
19 insufficiently autonomous from the state. In one press conference a PgEnds: TEX
20 high official talks about the absolute need to respect the democratic
21 process, but, when the Mi’kmaq community votes against one of
[171], (16)
22 his proposals, he then belittles them as small group of “dissidents”
23 with whom he cannot negotiate. In the end, however, he must ne-
24 gotiate with the tribe, which we see making a thoughtful, collective
25 decision to accept a partial victory regarding the logging woods. As
26 Obomsawin shows the Mi’kmaq beginning the peaceful removal of
27 the highway barricade, Chief Metallic and other leaders describe the
28 importance of such incremental steps in restoring tribal sovereignty.
29 “The land was taken illegally,” Metallic says to Obomsawin’s camera,
30 before explaining that his tribe will regain their ancient territories
31 “sooner than people think.”
32 The film might have ended with this comment somewhere near
33 the hour mark, but it is fortunate that it does not. Our Nationhood
34 gains considerable force in its last section, the final half hour of the
35 film. After a title announces “Part II: Three Years Later,” Obomsawin
36 explains that “changes did occur.” Creating a much more upbeat
1 tone than she did in part 1, Obomsawin shows a joyous Mi’kmaq

2 community gathered around a traditional drum, then a vast celebra-
3 tory march through the streets of the reserve, and finally a dedication
4 ceremony for an official Mi’kmaq fishing fleet and wharf. Leaving
5 behind the logging crisis almost entirely, part 2 focuses explicitly on
6 fishing and provides a sort of coda to Is the Crown at War with Us?
7 In several moving interviews, Obomsawin revisits the men injured at
8 Restigouche in the early 1980s. “From ’81 to now, it’s a giant change,”
9 says one, and Obomsawin takes pains to show how much the tribe
10 has transformed its own situation. By 2002, the Mi’kmaq had as-
11 sumed control of their waters without federal interference and had
12 even launched a commercial training program for young Mi’kmaq [172], (1
13 fishermen and -women. “Now we decide on how we are going to fish
14 and how everything is going to work,” says a Mi’kmaq man with his
Lines: 17
15 temples going gray. “And, like I said, twenty years ago we didn’t have
———
16 that.”
0.0pt P
17 In the highlight of the film, Obomsawin then dissolves to an image ———
18 from Incident at Restigouche of the same man as a teenager, standing Normal P
19 alongside the same water, with the same body language, lamenting PgEnds:
20 the original 1981 raid. This sort of diachronic analysis in the final third
21 of Our Nationhood is the most valuable aspect of the film because it
[172], (1
22 shows the fruits of a long-term process, a process that Obomsawin
23 has been documenting all along. The film soon comes to a close on a
24 positive note.“Instead of the white man controlling us, we can control
25 ourselves,” explains a fisherman who had been maimed in the 1981
26 raid. “The Mi’kmaq people are like a sleeping giant,” says another, in
27 the final words the film, “and the giant is finally waking up.”
28 Despite the power of its final scenes, Our Nationhood does not
29 have the impact of its companion piece, Is the Crown at War with
30 Us? The camera and sound are sometimes uneven, and the unfolding
31 events are not quite as dramatic. Also to its detriment, the film fo-
32 cuses on a few male figures rather than showing the broader Native
33 community, especially the women, who usually provide Obomsawin
34 with her ensemble cast. For all these reasons I can appreciate the
35 assessment of the Variety reviewer who decided that Our Nationhood
36 “doesn’t come close to the power of [Kanehsatake].”22 Other review-
1 ers have been more generous, one claiming that the film represents “a
2 work of great craft and art . . . [and] further proof of Obomsawin’s
3 place as a respected elder of Canadian documentary.”23 Whatever its
4 shortcomings, Our Nationhood, along with Is the Crown at War with
5 Us? provides an essential document of the changing Native situation
6 in Canada in the twenty-first century. “History is not going to look
7 kindly on how natives were treated in this episode,” one local observer
8 said about the fishing disputes in particular, and this is undoubtedly
9 true if Obomsawin’s work makes its way into the historical record. 24
10 For me, the importance of Obomsawin’s latest Mi’kmaq films,
11 aside from providing what at some point might become a histori-
12 ographic corrective, is in how they exemplify the powerful media [173], (18)
13 strategy that she has developed to support First Nations sovereignty.
14 In the sections ahead, I try to explain the broader significance of
Lines: 182 to
15 her work to Native sovereignty across Canada and the United States,
———
16 with lessons that might apply to indigenous people around the globe.
0.0pt PgV
17 But, to begin, I share some background on the representational ex- ———
18 ploitation that has dogged Native people from the earlier clicks of Normal Page
19 the camera, before positing a mode of resistance that I draw from PgEnds: TEX
20 Obomsawin’s work—a cinema of sovereignty.
21
[173], (18)
22 The Politics of Indigenous Representation
23
Philosophers tell us that it doesn’t matter what the world
24
thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are.
25
But philosophers don’t understand anything. As long as
26
we live with other people, we are only what other people
27 consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us
28 and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is
29 considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does
30 there exist another kind of direct contact between my
31 self and their selves except through the mediation of the
32 eyes?
Milan Kundera, Immortality
33
34 Although the sad history of Native depiction in photography and
35 cinema might suggest otherwise, ruthless photographic exploitation
36 was not an inevitable by-product of a Western technology set loose on
1 an unsuspecting people. Quite the contrary. At the very beginning of

2 photographic history, Native people exercised a surprising amount
3 of control over their own images. In Print the Legend, Martha A.
4 Sandweiss describes the case of Keokuk, the Sauk and Fox chief, who
5 visited the office of a St. Louis daguerreotypist in 1847. As the first
6 Native American to have his picture taken inside a portrait studio,
7 Keokuk might have seemed vulnerable to whatever unscrupulous
8 practices the photographer could dream up, such as coaxing the chief
9 into a degrading pose, hawking his image as a penny postcard, or even
10 turning over the photograph to government authorities to exploit
11 its propaganda value. All manner of mischief was possible, but, as
12 Sandweiss points out, “nothing embedded in the very concept of [174], (1
13 photography itself dictated such a use of the pictures.”25 Indeed, she
14 shows how, for a brief moment in the 1840s, Native people could seek
Lines: 21
15 out a camera to document their lives for their own (often unstated)
———
16 reasons, without fearing that their images would disappear into the
0.0pt P
17 outside world for reasons unknown except to commercial artists or ———
18 government agents. The daguerreotype was just too difficult to re- Normal P
19 produce for such unseemly endeavors, making it much simpler for PgEnds:
20 photographers to respect the wishes of their Native sitters and let
21 them decide the fate of their own portraits.
[174], (1
22 All this changed in the 1850s with the advent of the glass-plate
23 negative process. As Sandweiss argues, the new technology changed
24 the business of photographing Natives and, indeed, made it a true
25 business for the first time. Now that hundreds of copies of one image
26 could be created at low cost, white photographers began to conjure
27 up lucrative new possibilities for their prints, and their pecuniary
28 impulses transformed what their cameras were willing to “capture.”
29 No longer would Native people such as Keokuk have the ultimate
30 authority over the creation and dissemination of their own images.
31 Instead, portrait photographers began taking shots that prioritized
32 their own needs for salable images, deciding what was salable on
33 the basis less of indigenous realities than of hegemonic narratives
34 about Native people as an exotic or vanishing people. Not only did
35 this change the nature of the image itself, as photographers con-
36 torted their sitters to fit white cultural expectations, but it changed
1 the subsequent use of that image. Keokuk might have controlled his
2 solitary daguerreotype image until his death, but, once his likeness
3 was transformed into a copy negative, he had no say in its illicit
4 proliferation—which is how it ended up in an 1877 government cata-
5 log that described him as a “magnificent savage.”26 Losing control of
6 the physical object meant losing control of how it was presented—
7 and, more generally, that Native images were now ripe for commercial
8 and ideological exploitation. Thus, in the middle of the nineteenth
9 century, the photographic representation of Native people had begun
10 its long descent into exploitation and misrepresentation. It is a story
11 too obvious, too well-known, to warrant retelling here. Suffice it to
12 say that the camera would rarely serve the self-defined interests of [175], (20)
13 Native people in the century ahead.
14 Today, we have come full circle in at least some promising contexts,
Lines: 213 to
15 and, as one scholar notes, “the modern communications technology
———
16 that threatens indigenous peoples also provides them with the means
0.0pt PgV
17 to bargain for their cultural survival.”27 With Obomsawin in the fore, ———
18 Natives have entered the mass media on their own terms, attempting Normal Page
19 to do what Keokuk could not: have authorship and ultimate authority PgEnds: TEX
20 over their own image. As independent producers working with tribal
21 governments, commercial television outlets, state institutions such as
[175], (20)
22 the National Film Board (nfb), and nonprofits like the Native Amer-
23 ican Public Broadcasting Consortium, Native people have created
24 hundreds of titles, a fact to which I alluded in the previous chapter.
25 If there is a general tendency in this incredible surge of indigenous
26 media, it has been toward the reestablishment of representational
27 sovereignty, by which I mean the right, as well as the ability, for a group
28 of people to depict themselves with their own ambitions at heart. Is
29 there a role for non-Native people in this quest for representational
30 sovereignty? Yes, but not without serious qualification.
31 No matter how well intentioned non-Native documentarians,
32 ethnographic filmmakers, or Hollywood filmmakers might seem,
33 their work cannot speak for Native people in the same way that that
34 of cultural insiders can. I am not saying that only Native filmmakers
35 can produce good work on Native subjects—documentaries such as
36 Jay Rosenstein’s In Whose Honor? (1997) clearly suggest otherwise. 28
1 However, as a general rule, I suspect that cultural insiders have a

2 better vantage from which to tell their indigenous stories.
3 Let me be clear: I am not advocating a crude notion of biological
4 insiderism, in which expertise on vast racial or ethnic landscapes is
5 bequeathed to individuals by virtue of their genetic makeup. That
6 position has always struck me as a little strange, at least on a personal
7 level, because I realize how little I know of the Irishness to which I
8 am heir. Beyond the superficialities, I have never studied the Celtic
9 tradition with much care or interest and have not spent much time
10 in communities where it was the defining characteristic. Because
11 of this relative ignorance and isolation, I suspect that most Irish
12 people would rightly cringe if I began pontificating about “the Irish [176], (2
13 condition” or advertising my blood-borne expertise on “the troubles”
14 to television crews and book publishers.
Lines: 21
15 Given this skepticism about equating identity with expertise, I am
———
16 attempting to use cultural insider as something more than a racial
0.0pt P
17 position, as something that instead forefronts lived experience with- ———
18 out suggesting that race is irrelevant: experience, not blood, must be Normal P
19 the key factor, although I realize that the latter can shape the former PgEnds:
20 in powerful ways. 29 The religious studies scholar Christopher Jocks
21 (Mohawk) has put it this way: “One simply cannot gain an accurate
[176], (2
22 understanding of what goes on in Indian Country without living in
23 and around an Indian community for a long period of time. . . . In
24 fact, one really needs not just to reside but to reside as a relative,
25 since there are vast dimensions of meaning that are only acted out
26 in this way.”30 Residing “as a relative” is a function of indigeneity, of
27 having been embedded in some organic fashion within an aboriginal
28 community over the long haul, and not the sort of experience that
29 one can get from swooping into town with a film crew for several
30 weeks or even from living as a participant-observer on the edges of
31 a community for the length of a twelve- or eighteen-month grant.
32 If this gives the upper hand to those who grew up in a particular
33 community, I should note that it is not so simple—terms such as
34 relative or insider are not without wrinkles.
35 When moving from the particular to the general, it is tempting to
36 gloss over the contradictions on one’s way to the proverbial big point.
1 I admit that there are complications that I cannot explore here. For
2 instance, as more and more Native people take up camcorders and
3 sound recorders, Native media producers might argue about which
4 among them has the right to speak for a particular First Nation.
5 Some might attempt to disqualify certain filmmakers from speaking
6 on their behalf, arguing that the person in question is not sufficiently
7 Native on any number of grounds (the Indian Arts and Crafts Act
8 of 1990 resulted from the same controversies in other mediums). 31
9 Still others might direct their “sovereign gaze” in directions I can-
10 not imagine, including, in some circumstances, against other groups
11 of Native people. I leave such problems for Native communities to
12 work out on their own terms. Here I suggest simply that what Alanis [177], (22)
13 Obomsawin has done is worth considering as a model for a cinema
14 of sovereignty that could benefit many indigenous peoples in North
Lines: 223 to
15 America and elsewhere. Given her success with both Native and non-
———
16 Native audiences and what I see as the formal and ideological sophis-
0.0pt PgV
17 tication of her work, I believe that her career has lessons that extend ———
18 beyond her own immediate interests. To put it simply, a film such as Normal Page
19 Our Nationhood is about much more than fishing; it is about what PgEnds: TEX
20 the title implies on a number of levels. However, before I make this
21 argument in full, I need to pause for a brief note on the terminology
[177], (22)
22 involved.
23
24 Rethinking Sovereignty
25 Sovereignty is among the most potent and puzzling terms in Indian
26 country today. Some scholars dislike it altogether, arguing that it
27 represents a “cruel, mocking legalism” that has little weight in reality,
28 given the lopsided power relations between Indian nations and their
29 encapsulating states. 32 Some Native activists reject it as a term of
30 European origin that does not have a place in their own intellectual
31 history. For example, the Mohawk writer Taiaiake Alfred argues for a
32 radical “de-thinking” of the concept, which he sees as incompatible
33 with authentic Native politics. In his forceful Peace, Power, Righteous-
34 ness, he claims that sovereignty as it is usually understood has “no
35 relevance to indigenous values” and, thus, no place in “the language
36 of liberation.”33
1 Yet most observers, Native and non-Native alike, regard sovereignty

2 as an “indispensable tool”34 that cannot be tossed aside without
3 tremendous risk, given that “nearly every issue that Native Ameri-
4 cans face is overshadowed by it,” as one editorialist has observed. 35
5 At least in the foreseeable future of Indian country, sovereignty is
6 here to stay, and even its harshest critics seem open to the possibility
7 of indigenizing the concept. Alfred himself has written: “We need to
8 create a meaning for ‘sovereignty’ that respects the understanding of
9 power in indigenous cultures, one that reflects more of the sense em-
10 bodied in such Western notions as ‘personal sovereignty’ and ‘popular
11 sovereignty.’ ”36 In the past decade, Alfred and other Native intellec-
12 tuals have begun to do just what he proposes and have begun broad- [178], (2
13 ening the concept. Audra Simpson, a young Mohawk anthropologist,
14 has described indigenous sovereignty as “simply about being,” and, in
Lines: 23
15 a similar vein, the Mohawk political leader Atsenhaienton has talked
———
16 about sovereignty as a “state of mind.”37 Whereas in the Western
0.0pt P
17 understanding sovereignty is often localized in the institutions of the ———
18 state, Atsenhaienton argues that it defies such institutional contain- Normal P
19 ment and instead resides in the very people of First Nations. For these PgEnds:
20 Native intellectuals, the implication is that sovereignty is much more
21 than the province of the state in some legal or political sense; rather,
[178], (2
22 it is a profoundly diffuse, deeply ingrained, almost holistic sense of
23 governance that courses throughout tribal communities in elemen-
24 tal, and perhaps ineffable, ways. 38 If, as Atsenhaienton suggests, the
25 essence of sovereignty is in the Native ability to use “our terminology
26 to express our self-determination—how we will exist, how we relate
27 to each other and to other people”—then a cinema of sovereignty
28 must facilitate that process in the mass media in ways I will attempt
29 to outline. 39
30 “Access to the tools of creation and self-representation is the begin-
31 ning of self-determination,” Marjorie Beaucage, a Métis filmmaker,
32 has said. “For too long our stories have been told by others and our
33 dreams and visions misrepresented.”40 Some non-Native observers
34 might have difficulty imagining such a situation. As I noted in the
35 last chapter, white Canadians have long enjoyed their own sovereign
36 visions in the state’s use of documentary to create, refine, and pro-
1 mote a unique sense of Canadian peoplehood. At the same time to

2 the south, Hollywood has promoted a more diffuse, yet still potent,
3 sense of white American identity throughout much of the twentieth
4 century, with the result being a profound streak of nationalism that
5 surges through most Hollywood products. Obviously, as the story
6 about Keokuk might suggest, First Nations have faced very different
7 circumstances with regard to their own images. Denied access to the
8 mass media for most of the last century, Native cultures in North
9 America have not had the benefit of “imagining” their communities
10 in the electronic public sphere, a crucial forum for political self-
11 definition, one that can influence the views of cultural insiders and
12 outsiders alike. Although this situation is changing even as I write, the [179], (24)
13 origins of the process are several decades in the making, hidden in the
14 generally unwritten history of indigenous media on this continent. 41
Lines: 233 to
15 Certainly, most of the credit for developing “sovereign forms” of
———
16 indigenous media goes to Native figures such as Alanis Obomsawin,
0.0pt PgV
17 Sandra Day Osawa, Gerald Vizenor, Phil Lucas, George Burdeau, and ———
18 others who began making films in the 1970s and 1980s. Their work has Normal Page
19 been part of an agonizingly slow process of wiping the war paint off PgEnds: TEX
20 the lens, as Beverley Singer puts it, and it has not occurred in a creative
21 vacuum: sympathetic observers have played an important role, too.
[179], (24)
22 For example, non-Native media theorists like Eric Michaels began
23 asking the right questions in the early 1980s as part of a larger aca-
24 demic trend in which autonomous indigenous voices were afforded a
25 new level of respect outside their own communities. At the same time,
26 ethnographic filmmakers such as David and Judith MacDougall (Fa-
27 miliar Places, 1980) began to work collaboratively with Native people
28 in Australia, bringing them into the production process in ways that
29 heralded a new humbleness on the part of white filmmakers who had
30 long spoken on behalf of “their” Native objects of study. 42 Because
31 Native participants often received valuable technical training in these
32 collaborative projects, they have been useful stepping-stones to what
33 I am calling a cinema of sovereignty.
34 What do I mean by this seductive phrase? Simply put, for people
35 to have the opportunity to make films that tell their own stories, in
36 their own way, to the world. It is more than this, of course, as I will
1 soon enumerate, but the essence of the concept lies in the words of
2 Mokuka, a Kayapo leader and videomaker from deep in the Brazilian
3 Amazon, who addressed a crowd on the opening of the Centro de
4 Trabalho Indigenista in São Paulo in 1991: “Right! All over the world
5 people are looking at these videos we are making of ourselves. . . .
6 These videos will be seen in all countries. Tell your children and
7 grandchildren, don’t be deaf to my words, this [work] is to support
8 our future generations, all our people. This is what I say to you
9 today. . . . I am Kayapo doing this work. All of you in all countries
10 who see the pictures I make can thereby come to know our culture,
11 my culture of which I tell you today.”43
12 As my use of this quote might suggest, the cinema of sovereignty [180], (2
13 is about authority, autonomy, and accountability in the representa-
14 tional process. Like the work that Mokuka describes, it is the em-
Lines: 23
15 bodiment of an insider’s perspective, one that is attuned to cultural
———
16 subtleties in the process of imagemaking as well as in the final image
0.0pt P
17 itself. (This means that it does not pry into culturally prohibited ———
18 areas like so many films about Native people.) Its essential question Normal P
19 must be the same as the one that the Warlpiri people ask of their PgEnds:
20 own indigenous media in the Australian outback: “Can video make
21 our culture strong?”44 It is another version of the question asked by
[180], (2
22 Sam Yazzie, a tribal elder who was one of the Navajo participants in
23 a famous 1960s experiment in indigenous filmmaking: “Will making
24 movies do the sheep good?”45
25 Visual anthropologists and other scholars have debated the an-
26 swer to such questions for several decades, with some coming to the
27 disheartening conclusion that the Western technology called cinema
28 is inevitably corrosive to Native cultures. 46 I am not so technopho-
29 bic, nor do I see Native cultures as fixed entities that cannot adapt
30 creatively to new technologies. Instead, I believe that, with some at-
31 tention to the preconditions for representational sovereignty (which
32 I will soon describe), the answer to the Walpiri and Navajo questions
33 can be yes. I am not alone in my cautious optimism. In a general
34 sense, a diverse group of scholars including Faye Ginsburg, Terence
35 Turner, Steven Leuthold, Beverley Singer, and Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
36 seems to share the belief that autonomous Native media has become
1 a political and social necessity for indigenous people. Video can make
2 a culture strong, at least as part of a larger, multifaceted effort. It can
3 do the sheep some good—if we understand those animals in the way
4 that I think Sam Yazzie intended, namely, as an elegant metonym for
5 a traditional Native culture.
6 Let me concede up front, however, that sovereignty must be under-
7 stood as a relative term in the realm of cultural production. Given
8 the hybridized nature of neocolonial life for most indigenous people
9 in the Americas, it is impossible to create a pure alternative to the
10 chaotic, pulsating, omnivorous mainstream. Indeed, so difficult is it
11 to free oneself from overlapping influences (of style, technique, etc.)
12 that scholars have suggested that “the idea of a First World that is [181], (26)
13 neatly distinct from a Third World no longer makes sense”—and
14 vice versa. 47 This is especially true of a Native filmmaker like Obom-
Lines: 241 to
15 sawin, who finds herself in the midst of a state institution like the
———
16 nfb, in a cosmopolitan city like Montreal, in a polyglot nation like
0.0pt PgV
17 Canada. Yet, even if some cross-pollination is inevitable, a distinct ———
18 cinema of sovereignty can, I believe, still thrive in the hands of Native Normal Page
19 people working on behalf of First Nations. Using Obomsawin as a PgEnds: TEX
20 touchstone in the pages ahead, I lay out the main principles of the
21 potent media strategy that she has inspired.
[181], (26)
22 Such bold principles might seem absurdly prescriptive and pre-
23 sumptuous coming from a cultural outsider such as myself. I plead
24 guilty to this charge, offering only this defense: I merely drew these
25 insights out of the work of someone who knows what works and
26 what does not in the tricky realm of intercultural communication.
27 As I noted in the preface, at least one scholar has claimed that Obom-
28 sawin is single-handedly responsible for changing the perception of
29 Native people in modern Canada, and, for that alone, it seems rea-
30 sonable to ferret out the broader applications of her work. 48 She must
31 be doing something right, something pretty damn important, even if
32 it has fallen under the radar of most film scholars and teachers.
33
34 Strategies of Representational Sovereignty
35 What are the attributes of a cinema of sovereignty that can be teased
36 out of Obomsawin’s long career for the benefit of other indigenous
1 media producers? What qualities have allowed her to connect with

2 audiences both in small Native communities and at elite film festivals?
3 The first is that her work is the product of a sovereign gaze, one that
4 is imbued with the self-respect and unique ambitions of a self-defined
5 sovereign people, even if this sovereignty carries with it a complex and
6 contested legal status. Rejecting the encroachment of external media
7 nationalisms, her cinematic vision reflects an indigenous sovereign
8 gaze, a practice of looking that comes out of Native experience and
9 shapes the nature of the film itself. The gaze is sovereign, I argue,
10 when it is rooted in the particular ways of knowing and being that
11 inform distinct nationhoods. It is sovereign when cultural insiders
12 are the controlling intelligence behind the filmmaking process, no [182], (2
13 matter how much non-Natives might help in various capacities. It is
14 sovereign when Native people have, as Atsenhaienton puts it, the abil-
Lines: 25
15 ity to use “our terminology to express our self-determination—how
———
16 we will exist, how we relate to each other and to other people.” And
0.0pt P
17 it is sovereign when it works against what one scholar has dubbed ———
18 the “ ‘whiting out’ of the Indigene—the projection of white con- Normal P
19 cepts and anxieties about the primitive on to the Aboriginal Other— PgEnds:
20 effected by the white camera eye” in Hollywood and Canadian feature
21 films, mainstream documentaries, and traditional ethnographic cin-
[182], (2
22 ema. 49 By focusing attention on that which has been overlooked, con-
23 cealed, or distorted in the mainstream media, Obomsawin’s cinema of
24 sovereignty provides an ideological rebuke to dominant practices of
25 looking at Nativeness and, in this sense, troubles the visual impulses
26 of white settler cultures in the United States, Canada, Australia, New
27 Zealand, and elsewhere.
28 Another lesson that we can glean from Obomsawin’s work is that a
29 cinema of sovereignty must speak in the language of equals, assuming
30 a “nation-to-nation” relationship between historically unequal par-
31 ties such as between the Mi’kmaq nation and Canada. Neither defer-
32 ential nor hostile in this engagement with the citizens of another na-
33 tion, the filmmaker chooses instead the traditional diplomatic route
34 of mutually respectful dialogue, even when such rhetoric conceals
35 mutually distasteful ambitions. As befitting this middle-ground ap-
36 proach, she refuses to indulge in the simplistic demonization of all
1 things Western that, in the wake of 9/11, scholars have begun to call
2 Occidentalism. Occidentalism reduces the West to an inhuman malig-
3 nancy, thereby inverting Said’s classic notion of Orientalism, in which
4 Arab and Asian peoples were objectified and exoticized from afar. 50
5 So Obomsawin does not hate Canada or wish harm on its citizens—
6 far from it. She has a deep and perhaps surprising fondness for the
7 country in which she has lived for almost all her life. She merely wants
8 Native polities, whether Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, or Cree, to be placed on
9 an equal footing in the public imagination, the political process, and
10 the law within Canada and the international community. 51
11 To achieve this goal despite the contested nature of indigenous
12 sovereignty, Obomsawin includes a strong pedagogical element in [183], (28)
13 her documentaries. Like members of other minority groups, Native
14 people have often shouldered the burden of educating the world
Lines: 255 to
15 about their own histories and aspirations, and Obomsawin has been
———
16 no exception: for almost forty years her explicit goal has been to create
0.0pt PgV
17 a “learning place” in her cinema for Native and non-Native alike. 52 ———
18 In this sense her work provides a space for pedagogical engagement Normal Page
19 that runs parallel to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s notion of research as a PgEnds: TEX
20 “significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing
21 of the west and the interests and ways of knowing of the other.”53 In a
[183], (28)
22 moment I will discuss “ways of knowing” in Obomsawin’s work, but
23 first I want to touch on her presentation of Native “interests.”
24 As is apparent in all her films, Obomsawin believes that the eco-
25 nomic, political, and social interests of First Nations have been ne-
26 glected to the point of crisis, whether in James Bay, Restigouche, Oka,
27 or elsewhere. In response, she strives to fulfill what Ward Churchill
28 once called the imperative task of Native filmmaking, namely, to reveal
29 “the real struggles of living native people to liberate themselves from
30 the oppression which has beset them in the contemporary era.”54
31 Obomsawin has been an exemplar on this front since the early 1970s,
32 having never flinched from the harsh realities of Native-white rela-
33 tions. As the film curator Bird Runningwater has pointed out, her
34 major contribution in films like Is the Crown at War with Us? is her
35 exposure of the continuing brutality of state violence against First
36 Nations, a fact that most viewers would associate with the nineteenth
1 century, not the twenty-first. “The Native person as a victim of attack

2 is often described,” Runningwater has said. “[Obomsawin] shows
3 the images of these attacks happening in modern times.”55 Wisely,
4 Obomsawin seems to aim her exposure of such issues at more than
5 one audience, creating a cinema of sovereignty that is at once local,
6 national, and global in orientation. Citing the examples of the Waiapi
7 in Brazil and the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, scholars have written
8 about the many instances in which the empire “speaks back” as in-
9 digenous people use cultural products “to reaffirm ethnic and local
10 values over the homogenizing forces of global media networks.”56 For
11 politically minded Native filmmakers such as Obomsawin, the battle
12 is inevitably fought on multiple levels and with multiple publics in [184], (2
13 mind. It is local because her work respects the tribal particularities
14 at hand and seeks to assist in immediate, short-term efforts (such
Lines: 25
15 as the Mi’kmaq fishing crisis); it is national because it engages the
———
16 national imaginaries of a particular First Nation as well as of the
0.0pt P
17 Canadian state; and it is global because it is part of a larger insistence ———
18 on indigenous rights around the world that scholars have begun to Normal P
19 call international indigenism. 57 At all levels her goal is to demonstrate PgEnds:
20 the legitimacy of Native claims and to insert Native perspectives into
21 global mediascapes.
[184], (2
22 Embedded in the notion of Native perspectives is a question of phi-
23 losophy. I believe that Obomsawin’s desire to reveal the legitimacy of
24 Native claims rests on an unstated epistemological foundation, one
25 that is essential to any indigenous cinema of sovereignty: a profound
26 respect for Native ways of knowing and remembering. In each of her
27 films since Christmas at Moose Factory, Obomsawin has adopted a
28 posture of careful listening as she records Native voices and stories.
29 This is in keeping with her general tendency, noted in chapter 5, to
30 place Native oral traditions on the same level as non-Native forms
31 of writing and remembering the past. In this regard her films might
32 resemble the testimonial tradition in Latin America in working to
33 sanction the claims of alterity and the manner through which these
34 claims are voiced. Another analogue has emerged within recent Na-
35 tive American studies: her documentary project might serve as a
36 cinematic equivalent of what Eva Garroutte calls radical indigenism,
1 a “distinctly American Indian scholarship” that is radical, not in the

2 Marxist sense, but in the etymological sense of taking us to the root
3 (radix) of the “dominant culture’s misunderstanding and subordina-
4 tion of indigenous knowledge.” Garroutte argues that colonial lega-
5 cies have deformed the academy and made it an unwelcome home
6 to alternative ways of knowing: too often as scholars approach Na-
7 tive cultures, the exigencies of “rational inquiry” demand that they
8 strip away the sacred and the perplexingly unfamiliar to create “le-
9 gitimate” forms of intellectual knowledge. In opposition to this Eu-
10 rocentric standard, radical indigenism invites scholars to experience
11 “tribal philosophies” (rather than just studying them) and to discover
12 legitimacy and rationality where social scientists have often presumed [185], (30)
13 their absence. This experiential brand of scholarship also requires a
14 level of personal investment that goes well beyond the ethnographic
Lines: 261 to
15 norm of “field work” to an even deeper intimacy and investment with
———
16 “tribal relations” (what Jocks terms residing as a relative). Although
0.0pt PgV
17 this demanding ethos of radical indigenism would be open to Na- ———
18 tive and non-Native alike, Garroutte expects that it would resonate Normal Page
19 most deeply with Native scholars: “I believe it is their passion that PgEnds: TEX
20 can ignite the first flame—the flame that blazes up to illuminate a
21 radically new vision of scholarship and new possibilities for Indian
[185], (30)
22 communities.”58
23 I believe that Obomsawin’s cinema of sovereignty transposes the
24 humbling lessons of radical indigenism onto the sometimes arro-
25 gant art of filmmaking. In the spirit of what Garroutte describes,
26 Obomsawin works from a position of unqualified faith in the merits
27 of indigenous worldviews as well as from an enduring connection to
28 the communities where those worldviews hold sway. Also in the mode
29 of radical indigenism, Obomsawin respects what she hears in Native
30 communities and puts it at the center of her filmmaking practice,
31 instead of imposing the voice of academic experts, strikingly few of
32 whom appear in her films, even to offer sympathetic pronounce-
33 ments. Unlike documentarians who lean heavily on academic talking
34 heads to validate the points of ordinary people, Obomsawin has cre-
35 ated a cinema of sovereignty in which Native expertise is allowed to
36 stand on its own, free from patronizing attempts to buttress it from
1 the outside. She has always been critical of outside experts who mine
2 Native communities for data without really knowing or respecting the
3 world in which they are operating: “If you are going to a community
4 and you are learning and you want to write a thesis about what you
5 are learning, you have got to have some respect for the people you are
6 working with. . . . [You can]not think that they are inferior to you
7 because they did not go to university.”59
8 Her willingness to accept Native communities on their own terms
9 carries over into her presentation of Native individuality: Obom-
10 sawin refuses to homogenize Native subjectivities to create what one
11 might sarcastically call the universal, omni-purpose Indian. For exam-
12 ple, her latest films highlight the extraordinary diversity of Mi’kmaq [186], (3
13 people in terms of class, education, appearance, and attitude. Some
14 of the men in Is the Crown at War with Us? and Our Nationhood seem
Lines: 26
15 to fulfill stereotypes of defiantly macho, camouflaged warriors, while
———
16 others come across as soft-spoken, contemplative, and intellectual—
0.0pt P
17 and more than one fit into both camps. In acknowledging such com- ———
18 plexity Obomsawin captures the diversity of Native experience in a Normal P
19 way that confounds mass media stereotypes, replacing Native absence PgEnds:
20 with an unexpected presence. Her work is a passionate response to
21 the black hole in the mass media where the actual Native should
[186], (3
22 be but where instead there is only a strange simulation that Gerald
23 Vizenor calls an “indian.”60 Musing about the best-selling books in
24 which faux indians provide a decorative New Age motif, Vizenor has
25 suggested that “the tragic stories of an indian absence are worth more
26 to publishers than a real sense of presence and survivance.” In other
27 words, most audiences expect fulfillment of their hoary stereotypes
28 about Natives, and the “media simulation” of the indian serves this
29 purpose, saturating popular culture in Canada and the United States
30 despite lacking any real “native connection or constituency.”61 In the
31 hands of someone like Obomsawin, a cinema of sovereignty can at-
32 tempt to make this connection, to address this constituency, to fill in
33 the hole where the indian has lived with something more than ersatz
34 projections. It is about the creation of space for Native actuality.
35 Obomsawin’s rejection of the mythic indian provides an important
36 antidote to a problematic notion floating through recent anthropo-
1 logical discourse, the idea that films on indigenous people need to

2 indulge the preconceptions of outsiders in order to have an impact. In
3 making a documentary about the Mi’kmaq in the early 1980s, the an-
4 thropologist Harald Prins decided that “exotic imagery” is what gets
5 Native faces on television, and that, without a dose of primitivism,
6 a so-called cultural survival film would have little chance to appear
7 before a mass audience. For this reason, he argued in the pages of
8 Visual Anthropology in 1997 that such films must carefully pander to
9 the Western fetish for romantic Native stereotypes, if only as part of
10 a pragmatic media strategy that “promotes a people’s general public
11 appeal.” Barring such indulgence, Native people will have lost a rare
12 opportunity to engender much-needed sympathy among the domi- [187], (32)
13 nant society, where a quiet yearning for an Edenic alternative has cre-
14 ated an “ideological fund of goodwill towards indigenous peoples as
Lines: 267 to
15 ‘victims of progress’ ” struggling to hang onto a more “harmonious,”
———
16 “natural,”and“innocent”way of life. 62 Given these assumptions, Prins
0.0pt PgV
17 believed that a well-designed cultural survival film could tap into this ———
18 fund of goodwill as the first step toward political mobilization around Normal Page
19 Native issues. PgEnds: TEX
20 This is where the cinema of sovereignty must diverge from Prins’s
21 model of cultural survival filmmaking: it is not willing to accommo-
[187], (32)
22 date itself to Western norms for the sake of being heard, at least not
23 as Obomsawin has practiced it. Although Prins’s model might have
24 been a reasonable first step toward developing more autonomous
25 forms of indigenous media when it was first articulated in print in
26 the mid-1990s, even then it was based on some troubling notions.
27 Who would have advised civil rights leaders in the 1960s to draw on
28 the abundance of white goodwill reserved for African Americans who
29 seemed to fit Sambo or Stepin Fetchit stereotypes? How different from
30 that ugly scenario is the manipulation of Native primitivism for even
31 the best political motivations? Moreover, such pragmatic pandering
32 could have ill effects over the long haul, as Prins himself concedes
33 when he notes that, while “exotic imagery” in the cultural survival
34 film is politically potent, it could undermine the way of life that
35 it seeks to dramatize. Quoting Edmund Carpenter, Prins concludes
36 his article with these lines: “All this is good fun until one realizes that
1 some day [indigenous peoples] will know their heritage through such
2 films. . . . The power of film is such that they may someday accept
3 this as a valid account of their ancestry.”63
4 To me, Obomsawin’s career seems to suggest that primitivism is
5 not necessary for political impact or mass appeal, given that her work
6 has had demonstrable political effects in several instances as well as
7 significant audiences on television, in hundreds of schools and uni-
8 versities, and at dozens of film festivals in Canada and elsewhere.
9 As far as I can tell, her cinema has never accommodated Western
10 prejudices to make itself heard (even if it wisely avoids antagonizing
11 its largest potential audiences with a strident tone or a unnecessar-
12 ily militant posture). Rather than painting Native people as victims [188], (3
13 in need of Western salvation, her work makes its appeal on what
14 Obomsawin seems to regard as a universal playing field of reason,
Lines: 26
15 compassion, and decency—not some phony metaphysical plane on
———
16 which tree-hugging, spirit-questing, magical Indians are served up
0.0pt P
17 like an endangered species on the Discovery Channel. Her Natives ———
18 are never languishing away in a far-off disappearing world that some Normal P
19 white liberal viewers might like to preserve; instead, they are pre- PgEnds:
20 sented as citizens of an aggravated and increasingly organized sphere
21 of difference in the very backyard of mainstream Canada. Rather
[188], (3
22 than wielding Otherness as a tool to pry open a wellspring of West-
23 ern empathy, Obomsawin’s cinema of sovereignty instrumentalizes it
24 along the lines that Dick Hebdige has traced (perhaps foreshadowing
25 Garroutte’s concept of radical indigenism). The great cultural studies
26 scholar has talked about sites where the Western we is invited to learn
27 from the Native them with neither cynicism nor sycophancy. Accord-
28 ing to Hebdige, Otherness is instrumentalized when it is imagined
29 as a viable alternative, a living possibility, not as a colorful dead-
30 end on the byways of cultural diversity. 64 Obomsawin does just that,
31 on-screen and off-. In her career the refusal to indulge primitivist
32 expectations extends beyond the cinematic text to include the film-
33 maker herself, who—in her person as much as in her art—defies
34 and transcends the puerile fascination with the Native filmmaker as
35 a technological curiosity. In her public demeanor she is worlds apart
36 from the exotic novelty act that, according to Rachel Moore, some
65
1 have seen in the spectacle of a Native person with a movie camera.
2 As such, her work spurns rather than inspires neocolonial twitters
3 and patronizing glances. It commands respect rather than curiosity.
4 Thus far, Obomsawin’s career seems to offer ideal lessons in the cre-
5 ation of representational sovereignty, but things become somewhat
6 messier when we turn from the symbolic to the pragmatic, to the
7 realm of funding streams, mailing lists, and ticket prices. In an ideal
8 world a cinema of sovereignty would be autonomous in production
9 and responsible in distribution. 66 Obomsawin has a mixed, but in-
10 structive, record on this front. Like most indigenous media producers,
11 she has had limited success in maintaining the “sovereign” aspect of
12 making and showing her work. 67 For example, the Mi’kmaq nation [189], (34)
13 neither produced nor disseminated the two documentaries that I dis-
14 cussed earlier in the chapter—indeed, few First Nations would have
Lines: 271 to
15 the resources to make this material commitment to Obomsawin’s
———
16 work. Nor did the Mi’kmaq have final say over her films in a way that
0.0pt PgV
17 would place representational sovereignty fully in their hands. Never ———
18 willing to relinquish the ultimate authority for what appears on- Normal Page
19 screen, Obomsawin does not reach the Platonic ideal of egalitarian PgEnds: TEX
20 cooperation in the artistic process, although she comes reasonably
21 close in some ways. When it comes to documenting the lives of other
[189], (34)
22 Native people, she might not open up the process to absolute democ-
23 racy, but she is patient, she is respectful, she hires Native interns, she
24 is culturally appropriate as only a cultural insider can be, and she
25 zealously protects Native perspectives in everything she does at the
26 nfb. Some might quibble with her decision to remain at the nfb,
27 but I think that she has played her hand just right. Working within
28 the nfb is a golden sacrifice that she makes to ensure stable funding
29 and widespread distribution. Despite such a potentially problematic
30 arrangement, she has not had to compromise her ideals in ways that I
31 can detect, and I suspect that this is because of the uniquely privileged
32 role that she has created for herself at the nfb. Some combination of
33 her talent and the institution’s symbolic economy (i.e., the political
34 need to have a token Native person somewhere in its ranks at a time
35 when she was an almost solitary presence) has protected her over the
36 past three decades and counting.
1 What Obomsawin has created at the nfb under these conditions

2 is quite remarkable: a semisovereign realm for First Nations’ per-
3 spectives within the heart of the federal communications apparatus.
4 Hers is an exceptional situation, one not easily replicated, and she
5 has mined it for all it is worth, making all the projects that she has
6 dreamed up, and ensuring that her work does more than sit on li-
7 brary shelves: she takes pains to secure “responsible distribution” of
8 her work so that her films become more than hopeful messages in
9 bottles thrown into the sea of the mass media. As much as is feasible,
10 she follows her work into the world, arranging premieres of her films
11 in Native villages like Restigouche and Burnt Church, and using these
12 occasions as opportunities to talk with Native people whom she might [190], (3
13 not otherwise meet. Viewing her work as a prelude to conversation,
14 Obomsawin allows her films to serve as an extended invitation to Lines: 27
15 indigenous commentary, giving the Native subject an opportunity to
———
16 respond to the Native image—and the Native imagemaker—in a way 7.0pt P
17 that is all too rare. As she sets up a conversation around her work, ———
18 she helps create solidarity and insight within specific communities Normal P
19 as well as building a “counternational” audience for her cinema of PgEnds:
20 sovereignty.
21 The fruits of her approach are apparent in the comments of a [190], (3
22 Mi’kmaq woman named Miigam’agan, a mother of three who lives in
23 Burnt Church. Remembering how she felt when Obomsawin arrived
24 with her nfb crew to shoot Is the Crown at War with Us? as well as
25 the happy moment when her community was able to see the finished
26
film, Miigam’agan says:
27
28 During the fishing crisis, we had a number of people that
29 came and did stories, interviews, and documentaries. When
30 she did call I wasn’t open—I wasn’t rude or anything, but I
31 was already feeling a little bit overwhelmed with the media
32 here. . . . So she came, and then it was almost like we were
33 interviewing her. She was bringing her final work for us
34 to look at. It was a history here in the community to see
35 that many people in one room. People were laughing and
36 crying. Even for me, I’ve lived here for so long, but to be
1 able to hear voices from other community members that I

2 know normally would not talk as openly and comfortably in
3 public forums—it was such an awareness. (emphasis added)
4
Obomsawin has similar memories of the premiere, which she held
5
in a school gymnasium in Burnt Church. “It was just incredible,” she
6
recalls. “When you go to the communities it’s always so special.” She
7
remembers how the audience, including many people who had taken
8
part in the turmoil, watched the film with passion—crying, laughing,
9
talking loudly. 68
10
As this example suggests, a cinema of sovereignty should be based
11
12 on the principle of reciprocity. I have already noted how the rela- [191], (36)
13 tionship between imagemaker and Native subject has often veered
14 into rank exploitation. Only in recent decades have filmmakers and
photographers striven for a more egalitarian relationship with the Lines: 284 to
15
people in front of their lenses, and some have even hoped to become ———
16
mere instruments of their subjects’ will, thereby “facilitating their 7.0pt PgV
17 ———
18 objectives in representing themselves,” as Eric Michaels puts it. Yet, Normal Page
19 often, a patronizing element still undergirds this well-intentioned
PgEnds: TEX
20 exchange because the Western imagemaker must instruct the Native
21 subject in the pitfalls of the medium: Don’t sit like that unless you
[191], (36)
22 want to look silly. . . . Are you sure you want to pose like that? . . .
23 What is lacking, as Michaels points out, is instruction in the other
24 direction—the establishment of a reciprocal relationship in which
25 the photographer or filmmaker learns from the subject. 69
26 Native filmmakers like Obomsawin are unusual in this regard be-
27 cause in many cases they already possess traditional knowledge as
28 well as Western representational know-how yet they honor the po-
29 tential for a reciprocal arrangement. In Obomsawin’s case this takes
30 the form of an unwavering attitude of respect and openness toward
31 Native people. Obomsawin may have the ultimate authority over
32 the filmmaking process, but she does everything possible to avoid
33 setting herself up as the expert. Unlike the example of Keokuk cited
34 above, her cinema of sovereignty is predicated on an enduring eth-
35 ical relationship between media producer and subject. As Michaels
36 once pointed out, “literally millions” of pictures have been taken of
1 indigenous people, yet most have done little good for anyone except
2 the photographer 70—I think that this is because they were born out
3 of what I might call representational wedlock (i.e., there was no last-
4 ing bond between the parties). For this reason, Obomsawin strives
5 to maintain lifelong relationships with the people in her films, once
6 again working in something akin to the spirit of radical indigenism.
7 There is one last point that I have learned from Obomsawin’s
8 work: a cinema of sovereignty is an art, not a screed—that is to say,
9 its success in presenting an indigenous perspective depends on the
10 degree to which it is compelling cinema. No doubt, what is com-
11 pelling has a great deal of cultural specificity, but good art has a way
12 of transcending such boundaries to resonate with diverse audiences. [192], (3
13 What I am stressing should be obvious, although it often gets buried
14 at the chaotic intersection of art and politics: attention to cinematic
Lines: 29
15 artistry, however defined, is essential to getting one’s message into the
———
16 world. Only well-told stories will hold the attention of disparate au-
0.0pt P
17 diences that might include Mi’kmaq children in Restigouche, Anglo- ———
18 Canadian families in Alberta, Quebecois intellectuals in Montreal, Normal P
19 and media professionals at Sundance (where Is the Crown at War PgEnds:
20 with Us? had its U.S. premiere in 2003). This final point about the
21 role of artistry is crucial—without artistry, none of the others will
[192], (3
22 make a difference.
23
24 Conclusions
25 Somewhere in New Brunswick in the late eighteenth century, a loy-
26 alist officer wrote that the Mi’kmaq people “consider the English as
27 having taken away from them their hunting and fishing grounds,
28 which is their only means of support. They are not favourably dis-
29 posed towards us, and have been only kept in order by terror.”71
30 Perhaps a cinema of sovereignty can provide an antidote to that ter-
31 ror, both in its corporeal and in its ideological manifestations. As I
32 have tried to make clear throughout this book, the ability to control
33 one’s own image has bedeviled Native people such as the Mi’kmaq
34 for hundreds of years. One historian has described how nineteenth-
35 century British colonials rendered the Mi’kmaq powerless through
36 the control of information as much as anything else: “The Mi’kmaq
1 were relegated to the peripheries of colonial society, tethered by the

2 manipulation of incoherent messages from the white community.”72
3 In taking her Native activism behind the lens, Obomsawin demon-
4 strates that indigenous media can at the very least document, and
5 perhaps even counteract, the coercive force of the state that people
6 like the Mi’kmaq have faced for centuries.
7 What Obomsawin has endured and accomplished is fascinating
8 enough for its own sake, but I believe that the most generalizable
9 truths about her career are lurking in the last dozen or so pages,
10 waiting for someone to pick them up and try them out on a digital
11 camcorder and some Final Cut Pro software. Nowadays, it doesn’t
12 take much to implement grand cinematic principles—certainly, far [193], (38)
13 less than it did when Obomsawin got her start. Of course, one could
14 add any number of pragmatic considerations to the list—how to raise
Lines: 303 to
15 money, how to write grants, how to get low-cost gear, etc. But these are
———
16 addressed elsewhere, ad nauseam, in the literature on independent
0.0pt PgV
17 filmmaking. What I am attempting here is advice of a different order, ———
18 how-to at the quantum rather than the quotidian level. Normal Page
19 But caveat lectur: the list of strategies is neither exhaustive nor PgEnds: TEX
20 exact. The conditions in which art is made are too variable for precise
21 recipes to work on every occasion, and I do not expect the film-
[193], (38)
22 maker/reader to respond like a weekend chef thumbing through a
23 cookbook in search of a foolproof dish. As an occasionally reckless
24 practitioner as well as a more cautious theorist, I am well aware how
25 things can burn and fall, just as I am well aware that certain general
26 insights about cooking are worth knowing in every kitchen. It is in
27 this spirit that I have sought to deduce these various strategies for
28 representational sovereignty with the hope that they might end up
29 in the hands of indigenous mediamakers who can create something
30 brilliant, radical, and true, something that extends what Obomsawin
31 has been doing for more than three decades. What I have enumerated
32 is merely suggestive, hopeful, and always open to other possibilities
33 for counteracting the mind-numbing onslaught of various official
34 and corporate visions of the world. Perhaps Obomsawin’s moment
35 has passed, although it would still deserve recognition in hindsight.
36 Perhaps we need other visions that are more experimental and more
1 confrontational in nature. Perhaps Obomsawin’s insistence on realist

2 nonfiction is too narrow, at least for the rich Vizenorian puns, ironies,
3 and perplexities that seem to shape so much of Native life. 73
4 It is possible . . . but I doubt it. After looking closely at Obom-
5 sawin’s work for several years, I believe that there is something there,
6 something to challenge the presumptions of empire that hang over-
7 head for all of us—and, in the Mi’kmaq case, for the precisely five
8 hundred years since they first spotted Europeans on “floating islands”
9 in their harbors. What is that something? More than anything, it is a
10 renewed understanding of the Native past and present. In the hands
[Last Pag
11 of Native filmmakers like Obomsawin, a cinema of sovereignty might
12 lead to a broader appreciation of an essential truth that lines these [194], (3
13 woods and prairies and cities and suburbs of North America—that
14 “Natives,” as Gerald Vizenor says,“are the diverse visionary sovereigns
Lines: 30
15 of this continent.”Native filmmakers such as Obomsawin are creating
———
16 a cinema that gestures in the direction of that all-too-hidden reality. 74
277.58
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[194], (3
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8 Conclusion
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [195], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 3
15 Today, Alanis Obomsawin has come full circle in her creative work
———
16 to arrive at the very place where she started in the rural woods of
0.0pt PgV
17 Quebec and New Hampshire quite some time ago. In the process ———
18 of beginning a new documentary on Abenaki culture, she will soon Normal Page
19 add her voice to the burgeoning “Abenaki renaissance” whose arrival PgEnds: TEX
20 she has been hastening through song, story, activism, and now film
21 for most of her adult life. Once again her work will address the
[195], (1)
22 distortions in prevailing views of indigenous reality, in this case to
23 reveal the vibrancy of contemporary Abenaki culture in Canada and
24 the United States, something that might come as a surprise to the
25 general public and even to scholars whose knowledge of the tribe is
26 limited to academic readings. According to the historian Alice Nash,
27 most writing on the Abenaki people has centered on the seventeenth
28 and eighteenth centuries, to the exclusion of all else. The reason for
29 this is unsettling: “[The] implicit (and sometimes explicit) assump-
30 tion . . . has been that later generations of Abenaki people were too
31 assimilated, too acculturated, or too intermarried to compete with
32 the so-called ‘authentic’ Indians of the distant past.” To refute the
33 charge that the Abenakis are somehow inauthentic or have vanished
34 from the continent, Nash has pointed to the work of the anthro-
35 pologist A. Irving Hallowell, who visited Odanak in the 1920s to talk
36 with Théophile Panadis and other Obomsawin family members. Even
196 CONCLUSION
1 back then, in the decade just before Obomsawin’s birth, it was nec-
2 essary for Hallowell to argue against public perception with research
3 showing that Abenaki culture was far from dead—that in fact it had
4 proved itself remarkably resilient in the face of European American
5 encroachment. 1
6 Hallowell’s lesson remains true today, perhaps more than at any
7 time in the past two hundred years. After all, the fruits of the Abenaki
8 renaissance are readily apparent to tribal scholars such as Freder-
9 ick Matthew Wiseman, who notes that the new Wobanakik Heritage
10 Center opened its doors in northern Vermont in 1998, new Abenaki
11 bands have begun forming across New England, and new connections
12 [196], (2
spanning the U.S.-Canadian border have begun to be made between
13 Abenaki people. “The bear is awake, and Koluscap [Glous’gap] is
14
returning,” Wiseman says, firm in his belief that “the Anglo seats Lines: 31
15
of power finally comprehend that the greater Abenaki Nation will ———
16
realize its dreams of sovereignty.”2 The Abenaki have come a long 14.0pt
17 ———
way since racist depictions such as Northwest Passage marred Obom-
18 Normal P
sawin’s youth or even since the public school textbooks of the 1960s
19 PgEnds:
described her people as “very cold blooded and cruel” while noting
20
that the power of the Abenakis was “gone forever” once Major Rogers
21
attacked Odanak in 1759 and “killed most of the tribe.”3 Like the films [196], (2
22
that Obomsawin has made on behalf of her Mohawk and Mi’kmaq
23
24 neighbors, her documentary on Abenaki culture and history should
25 provide a useful corrective to this legacy of distortion and misrepre-
26 sentation.
27 Now in her early seventies, Obomsawin continues to lead a profes-
28 sional life whose pace would tax a far younger person. In addition to
29 her film projects, she has become involved with a number of Native
30 media organizations in leadership roles that reflect her stature as a
31 respected elder in her field. In recent years she has served on the
32 boards of Studio One (the Native production unit of the National
33 Film Board [nfb]), a radio venture called Aboriginal Voices, and
34 the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, which she views as an
35 important new forum for Native stories. “It’s a place for people to
36 come and have their stories told,” she says with high hopes. “We’ll see
CONCLUSION 197
1 stories that we’ve never seen before. There [is] such a high potential
2 for learning for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike.”4
3 For her service to such organizations as well as for her own creative
4 work, Obomsawin has continued to receive accolades in Canada and
5 abroad. In the new millennium, she has been chosen for Canada’s
6 prestigious Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts as
7 well as the inaugural Dr. Bernard Chagnan Assiniwi Prize at the
8 Montreal First Peoples’ Festival. She has been given several lifetime
9 achievement awards and honorary doctorates, and her work contin-
10 ues to garner prizes and enthusiastic showings at festivals around the
11 world, including in Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Oakland, Los
12 Angeles, New Orleans, Oklahoma, Ohio, New York, New Zealand, [197], (3)
13 France, Hungary, Spain, and Estonia. Somewhat closer to home, the
14 Saskatchewan school system has even designated her “an official role
Lines: 36 to
15 model” for Native youths, an honor she shares with such luminaries
———
16 as Sitting Bull, Pontiac, Maria Tallchief, and Leonard Cohen’s favorite
0.0pt PgV
17 saint, Kateri Tekakwitha. ———
18 Obomsawin has also been a great influence on Native filmmakers, Normal Page
19 although it is difficult to calculate the impact of someone whose PgEnds: TEX
20 career has lasted so many years and touched so many individuals—
21 at best I can share a few revealing anecdotes. Loretta Todd, one of
[197], (3)
22 the leading practitioners and theorists of Native filmmaking in the
23 past decade, has talked about Obomsawin’s importance to succes-
24 sive generations of filmmakers. “Alanis had been everyone’s hero,”
25 Todd says. “She had been making films for a long time, and telling
26 very sensitive stories, and obviously was very accomplished.”5 An-
27 other tribute comes from Katerina Cizek, a Czech-born filmmaker
28 who was a young student journalist when she saw Obomsawin be-
29 hind the barricades at Oka. “She was standing at the blockade with
30 her cameraman at her side, interviewing a Mohawk Warrior,” Cizek
31 remembers. “She looked proud, her hands planted firmly on her
32 hips, obviously devoted to her documentary mission. With army he-
33 licopters and madness swirling all around, she was an apparition of
34 hope. I knew that, whatever might happen that afternoon, history
35 was being chronicled, and that a true story would one day emerge.”
36 In observing Obomsawin at work, Cizek believed that she was “wit-
198 CONCLUSION
1 nessing the power of documentary firsthand.” “For the next decade,

2 it would be her images, her films, and her voice that would define the
3 world’s understanding of Kanehsatake, this decisive Mohawk stand
4 for justice.”6
5 Even after hearing these words of praise, the skeptical reader might
6 wonder why I have been so taken with Obomsawin’s work—I’m not
7 Native, I don’t live in Canada, and I was barely born when the nfb first
8 hired her. Frankly, I cannot help but prize an independent filmmaker
9 whose vision has held steady for thirty-five years of principled cul-
10 tural critique, who stands for something more than herself, and who
11 embodies the best media practices in the face of the worst. So, rather
12 than fetishizing the swoops and pans of well-known fiction film au- [198], (4
13 teurs, whose every pant and sigh seems to make it into print, I have
14 sought to scrutinize one of these poets of the real whose work goes
Lines: 39
15 unnoticed in all but the most exceptional cases (i.e., Michael Moore);
———
16 indeed, something strikes me as upside-down when our society’s
0.0pt P
17 fantasies are recorded with more care and expense, and shared with ———
18 more passion, than our realities. Consider this: the combined budget Normal P
19 of Obomsawin’s entire career plus those of all the documentaries PgEnds:
20 made in North America in the past five years would hardly match the
21 $200 million budget of a special-effects bonanza like Stephen Som-
[198], (4
22 mers’s Van Helsing (2004), whose imaginary demons somehow gener-
23 ate more curiosity than depictions of the world in which we actually
24 live. Although it is possible that the success of Moore’s Fahrenheit
25 9/11 will inspire both investors and imaginative people to look anew
26 at the untapped potential of nonfiction cinema, serious documen-
27 taries have rarely received the financing, promotion, distribution, or
28 appreciation that they deserve.
29 To put it bluntly, this is no way to run a visual culture, not with so
30 much at stake. A vast transformation in our public sphere is taking
31 place, one that puts images at the center of the understandings—or
32 misunderstandings—that govern our beliefs and behaviors. 7 Words
33 can flow for hundreds of pages, vividly well crafted, artfully chosen
34 words, but it is not until the image appears in front of us that the
35 event is seared in our imaginations forever—witness the sequence
36 of events in the Iraqi prison scandal in spring 2004, in which the
CONCLUSION 199
1 written reports were sloughed off until a few digital snapshots hit the
2 Internet and astonished viewers around the world. The pictorial turn
3 is what W. J. T. Mitchell has dubbed this shift from the word to the
4 image, a shift in emphasis away from one kind of information toward
5 another—perhaps the most profound reorientation of its kind since
6 Gutenberg. 8 If this transformation has been rupturing the older ways
7 of communication at least since the age of Chaplin, it has also inten-
8 sified and accelerated in the days of twenty-four-hour news cycles,
9 three-hundred-channel dish televisions, and broadband Internet ac-
10 cess. One of the operating principles of this book comes in the wake
11 of this transformation: the fact that visual culture has assumed an
12 ever-expanding role in the shaping of human consciousness carries [199], (5)
13 with it, I believe, a set of obligations for anyone interested in gazing
14 beyond the superficial. For those of us with the sadly uncommon lux-
Lines: 43 to
15 ury of a moment’s reflection, there is an obligation to swim against
———
16 the prevailing flow of information and seek out new channels, new
0.0pt PgV
17 currents, and new outlets that might convey some neglected truths ———
18 about the world. We cannot allow ourselves to be swallowed in the Normal Page
19 semiotic undertow of corporate media and government flacks, whose PgEnds: TEX
20 relatively unified way of seeing the world is fast inundating how we
21 see for ourselves. As their Manichaean simplicities and ideological
[199], (5)
22 homogeneity become the nightly norm for viewers anchored in front
23 of their televisions, other visions—such as Obomsawin’s brand of
24 personal, counternational, noncommercial art—have become a pre-
25 cious commodity.
26 The unfolding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have added a note of
27 urgency to this situation. Ten years ago, just after Operation Desert
28 Storm, W. J. T. Mitchell wrote: “cnn has shown us that a supposedly
29 alert, educated population (for instance, the America electorate) can
30 witness the mass destruction of an Arab nation as little more than a
31 spectacular television melodrama, complete with a simple narrative
32 of good triumphing over evil and a rapid erasure of public memory.”9
33 If it is too soon to claim that history repeated itself in the year 2006,
34 troubling echoes are not hard to find. Instead of weapons of mass
35 destruction, we are given narratives of gross simplification, many
36 rife with racist undertones, proliferating like wildfire since 9/11 and
200 CONCLUSION
1 leaving very little room for nuanced dissent and informed analysis.
2 Instead of offering hard questions and independent reporting, ma-
3 jor news networks have served as platforms for the administration’s
4 “saturation bombing” of the public sphere, especially in the months
5 leading up to war, and in the process have supplied some of the
6 necessary ingredients for a Middle Eastern quagmire.
7 I think that Native filmmakers like Obomsawin work to reverse
8 this sort of imperializing process, perhaps because many grew up
9 with a painful awareness of how indigenous people, whether in Iraq
10 or Kanehsatake, can fall victim to the deficiencies of the pictorial
11 turn. Talking about the importance of indigenous media in 2003,
12 Obomsawin said: “I learned that this is the most powerful place to [200], (6
13 be—because of the kind of culture we live in now, including our
14 own people and our own children. [They] don’t listen to just stories
Lines: 45
15 told by the old people anymore. They’re watching tv. . . . So, it’s very
———
16 important to have a presence in the images that they look at. That’s
0.0pt P
17 including education and certainly film. Now we have our own chan- ———
18 nel on television, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, that is Normal P
19 constantly showing videos and films made by our own people or PgEnds:
20 about them. . . . That’s where the power is right now. 10 Such alterna-
21 tive media projects, including Obomsawin’s own, offer the best sort of
[200], (6
22 cultural critique: one that builds toward something, instead of merely
23 stripping away what stands. As Bruno Latour has written, the best sort
24 of critic is “not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not
25 the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers [in
26 whatever popular orthodoxy] but the one who offers arenas in which
27 to gather.”11 I think that the gentle, inclusive critique of Obomsawin’s
28 work on the cinematic middle ground, whether literally in theaters or
29 metaphorically in our minds, creates this sort of space for gathering
30 and reviewing what we presume to know about the worlds of indige-
31 nous peoples. Obomsawin’s goal has always been to illuminate rather
32 than castigate, to connect rather than condemn, even in the turmoil of
33 Oka. Despite the racism that she encountered there across the razor
34 wire, Obomsawin told reporters: “There’s also a lot of people who
35 don’t know us, yet really have a lot of compassion and interest. They
36 want to find out more about the different nations here, and about
CONCLUSION 201
12
1 the Mohawks. And they want to do something to help.” Rather than
2 simply offering condemnation of the Canadian state or white racism,
3 her work points in the direction where something better might be
4 found, where understanding, tolerance, optimism, and social justice
5 are interdependent.
6 Throughout this book I have taken aim at the hypocrisy and insen-
7 sitivity of the Canadian state toward First Nations peoples—how can
8 it be otherwise when one is writing about Burnt Church, Kanehsatake,
9 or James Bay? However, I must follow Obomsawin’s lead in making
10 an important point in Canada’s favor. In occupying the radical center
11 with gravity and grace, Obomsawin has been a rare example of an
12 artist/activist from the margins who has gained access to the capital [201], (7)
13 of the center (i.e., the millions of state dollars that have gone into
14 her films), and her hard-won presence at the heart of Canadian so-
Lines: 47 to
15 ciety reflects a nation whose multicultural ideas are sometimes more
———
16 than hollow rhetoric. While her prominence says something quite
0.0pt PgV
17 striking about her own perseverance and talent, so too does it say ———
18 something about the nature of Canadian society that over time has Normal Page
19 embraced her. “That is the incredible part of this country,” Obom- PgEnds: TEX
20 sawin recently said. “There is a freedom that doesn’t exist everywhere
21 else. . . . [I]t is a very healthy place to be.”13 By contrast, I fear that
[201], (7)
22 her maneuvers on the radical center, that small patch of relatively
23 well-funded subversion, would have been next to impossible in the
24 United States, where media corporations have shown no interest in
25 indigenous points of view, and where right-wing politicians begin
26 fuming whenever a trickle of state funds ends up in the hands of an
27 artist smearing chocolate on her naked body or painting the Virgin
28 Mary with daubs of elephant dung. To my mind Canada is a better
29 place for having Obomsawin’s powerful—and even redemptive—
30 documentary discourse in its midst.
31 Obviously, Obomsawin strikes me as a special filmmaker, someone
32 who is doing something worthy of attention and perhaps even emu-
33 lation. Throughout this book, I have tried to recover her work from
34 the semiobscurity of video libraries and film festivals and to use it as
35 a lens onto the larger landscape of indigenous mediamaking and rep-
36 resentation. In particular I tried to show how her filmmaking practice
202 CONCLUSION
1 might be understood as a cinema of sovereignty with valuable lessons

2 for other indigenous mediamakers. I tried to show how her Abenaki
3 heritage, in particular her knowledge of its oral tradition, informed
4 her cinematic project in unique ways, as did her gendered position as
5 a Native woman. And I tried to show why the four films she fashioned
6 out of the Oka crisis represent a major achievement in the history of
7 nonfiction film. The risks she took, the passion of her storytelling,
8 and the importance of the event being captured all combine to mark
9 a special moment in the documentary tradition as I see it. Given her
10 rare ability to combine an uncompromising political stance with an
11 accessible mode of presentation that does more than preach to the
12 converted, I have been hard-pressed to suggest a better model for [202], (8
13 cross-cultural communication in the age of electronic media.
14 Such claims may seem overheated, given the almost complete ab-
Lines: 51
15 sence of her name from the standard histories of cinema, even those
———
16 devoted to nonfiction (Ellis, Barnouw, Barsam) or Native cinema
0.0pt P
17 (Kilpatrick, Singer), but I hope what I have written will support a ———
18 reassessment of Obomsawin’s place in the documentary canon. 14 Normal P
19 If a filmmaker of her stature does not appear somewhere in the PgEnds:
20 grand sweep of nonfiction that seems to run from Robert Flaherty
21 to Michael Moore, then the Native accomplishment in nonfiction
[202], (8
22 film must be even less visible, and less appreciated, than it is in the
23 world of literature, where Native writers have been cracking open
24 the canon at least since N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in
25 1969 for House Made of Dawn. My only response to this neglect of
26 thoughtful filmmaking is to write about it, to encourage others to use
27 it in their classes, to ask students to watch it. Indeed, I keep writing
28 about documentary in its most admirable aspects with the hope that
29 I will not stultify the thing I love. The bbc’s Nicholas Frasier once
30 seemed to suggest as much, complaining: “Academic criticism is the
31 death of the documentary impulse.”15 His lament is one that creative
32 people have always made about armchair critics, and I retain some
33 hope that exploration and desiccation are not conjoined at the hip.
34 So I hold up Obomsawin as a model of the documentary im-
35 pulse, of alternative media production at its best, of representational
36 sovereignty for indigenous people—if just one of many possibilities.
CONCLUSION 203
1 While she has excelled with films that are activist in origin, accessible
2 in tone, state financed in execution, polyglot in language, and coun-
3 terhegemonic in content, I know that others could suffocate under
4 these conditions: I realize that every creative artist must find his or her
5 own way. Someone else would have been stifled by the bureaucracy of
6 the nfb, by her insistence on forefronting the political, by her willing-
7 ness to privilege accessibility over experimentation, by her reliance on
8 a gentle tone instead of a caustic one. That’s fine. A thousand flowers
9 can bloom in our documentary cinema as long as not all of them are
10 the property of Mark Burnett (Survivor; The Apprentice) or Malcolm
11 Barbour (Cops), as long as we agonize appropriately over how reality
12 should be brought to the screen in the ways that Claude Lanzmann [203], (9)
13 has suggested. For the French filmmaker of Shoah, everything about
14 documentary poses a necessary conundrum: “How to transmit, how
Lines: 55 to
15 to instruct, how to interrogate, how to remain dispassionate while, as
———
16 we each desperately strove to do, methodically unveiling a hell; how
0.0pt PgV
17 to remain calm in the face of grief and tears, without letting oneself be ———
18 carried away by the emotion which would preclude all work, how to Normal Page
19 denounce in the truest manner injustice and crime?” His only answer PgEnds: TEX
20 was: “A thousand questions, a thousand paths!”16
21 Sadly, some paths are more comfortable than others, and the road
[203], (9)
22 to what Obomsawin is doing has always been quite narrow. Prolific,
23 conscientious, independent documentarians like her are a rare—and,
24 some would say, disappearing—sort, enough so that the myth of
25 the vanishing Indian seems to have given way to the lament over
26 the vanishing documentarian. Every few years we are reminded that
27 documentary is in a terrible condition, that it is suffering from a hard-
28 ening of the creative arteries, that it is in a dire state of emergency.
29 The last phrase comes from the title of Patricia Zimmermann’s re-
30 cent book, where she shows how the battle between official/corporate
31 visions of the nation and what I am calling “other visions” became
32 such a noisy part of our cultural politics. Writing just before the
33 unprecedented success of documentaries such as Moore’s Fahrenheit
34 9/11 (2004), Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), and Andrew
35 Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Zimmermann argued that
36 for twenty years conservatives had launched successful attacks on
204 CONCLUSION
1 public funding sources for independent documentary in Canada and

2 the United States, while corporate media showed ever-decreasing in-
3 terest in financing or broadcasting dissenting points of view, even
4 as the proliferation of cable channels would seem to auger the re-
5 verse. As a result, independent voices had become what she called
6 an endangered species. 17 Zimmermann was not alone in her concern.
7 When the editors of Imagining Reality wrote to the great filmmaker
8 Chris Marker to ask him about the future of the form, he begged off
9 answering the question while wishing them the best in their endeavor.
10 “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined,” he observed. 18
11 Documentary has always had more than its fair share of Cassandras—
12 and rightly so. It is a fragile business with little to support it except [204], (1
13 creative commitments, political hopes, and a keen sense of outrage.
14 Like any art of substance, it is inevitably endangered, fragile, under-
Lines: 57
15 appreciated.
———
16 All this is true, yet it goes on, and filmmakers like Obomsawin and
0.0pt P
17 her heirs keep pursuing their quiet democratization of the mass me- ———
18 dia. “For me,” Obomsawin says, “documentary will always be needed Normal P
19 because it’s the voice of the people.”19 If this phrase sounds out of step PgEnds:
20 with our times, it is more than a false echo of activist (or intellectual)
21 longing—it is something real out there, something distinct from the
[204], (1
22 synthetic voice of the corporation and the state, whose warped ver-
23 sions of reality suck us into Real World, mtv Cribs, Temptation Island,
24 or Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” News.
25 Shortly before he died in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu, the celebrated
26 French sociologist, talked about the importance of developing alter-
27 natives to the corporate global media and their illusion of choice.
28 Bourdieu argued for a more fundamental level of choice, one that
29 allows us to select something other than Coke or Pepsi, Ford or
30 Chevrolet, Survivor or Sixty Minutes. “If I say that culture is in danger
31 today, if I say that it is threatened by the rule of money and commerce
32 and by a mercenary spirit that takes many forms—audience ratings,
33 market research, sales figures, the best-seller list—it will be said that
34 I am exaggerating,” he suggests. “If I recall now that the possibility of
35 stopping this infernal machine in its tracks lies with all those who,
36 having some power over cultural, artistic, and literary matters, can,
CONCLUSION 205
1 each in their own place and their own fashion, and to however small
2 an extent, throw their grain of sand into the well-oiled machinery of
3 resigned complicities . . . [i]t will be said perhaps, for once, that I am
4 being desperately optimistic.”20
5 I do not think Bourdieu is asking too much from residents of the
6 creative world: the power of what he is suggesting has long been ex-
7 ploited at the margins of cultural discourse as well as in the precarious
8 radical center. Obomsawin, for one, has documented the world as she
9 sees it from both vantages, as cultural and gender outsider pushing
10 her positions into public view and, later, as an esteemed member
11 of the media establishment with the rare power to speak her mind.
12 With her uncommon commitment to documentary expression in its [205], (11)
13 most passionate form and her ability to develop this commitment
14 in the face of the insensate corporate juggernaut that reduces every-
Lines: 61 to
15 thing to measly product, Obomsawin continues to practice the art of
———
16 documentary in a way that gives me, at least, some reason to share
* 56.0pt Pg
17 Bourdieu’s unfashionable optimism. ———
18 With her thoughtful and poignant worldview, Obomsawin has Normal Page
19 made cinema into a productive middle ground where disparate peo- * PgEnds: Page
20 ple can recognize one another through whatever veils of prejudice
21 might otherwise keep them apart. In projecting her eloquent, un-
[205], (11)
22 compromising vision onto the Canadian national imaginary without
23 alienating those whom she has neither convinced nor converted, she
24 has gently placed more than a few grains of sand into “the well-oiled
25 machinery of resigned complicities” that works against the welfare
26 of Native people in various quarters of North America. Indeed, in
27 the chaos of modern Canadian life, where turbulent events such as
28 Restigouche and Oka can take place, and children like Richard Cardi-
29 nal can end their lives for the lack of understanding, Obomsawin has
30 brought unheard voices and new perspectives to audiences struggling
31 to understand the many paths of First Nations into the future of their
32 shared continent.
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [206], (1
13
14
Lines: 66
15
———
16
0.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[206], (1
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 appendix a
5
6
7
8 Filmography
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [207], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 7
15 All Obomsawin’s films are available for purchase on the Web site of the
———
16 National Film Board (nfb). Go to http://cmm.onf.ca/E/recherche/index.epl
11.0pt Pg
17 and enter the film title (or Obomsawin’s name) into the search engine to see ———
18 the nfb’s online catalog. Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
Christmas at Moose Factory
20
1971, 13 min., 7 sec.
21
director: Alanis Obomsawin [207], (1)
22
producer: Robert Verrall, Wolf Koenig
23
script and text: Alanis Obomsawin
24
images: Ben Low, Raymond Dumas
25
music: Sinclair Cheecho, Jane Cheecho, Arthur Cheecho
26
sound: Jacques Drouin, Roger Lamoureux, Bill Graziadei
27
producers: National Film Board of Canada
28
29 Mother of Many Children
30 1977, 57 min., 50 sec.
31 director: Alanis Obomsawin
32 producer: Douglas MacDonald, Alanis Obomsawin, Don Hopkins
33 script and text: Alanis Obomsawin
34 images: Don Virgo, Simon Leblanc, Laval Fortier, Jacques Avoine,
35 Bob Riddell
36 editor: John Laing
208 APPENDIX A
1 sound: Richard Besse, Raymond Marcoux, Bev Davidson,

2 Louis Echaquan, Bob Charlie, Christopher Tate, J. G. Normandin,
3 Bill Graziadei, Claude Hazanavicius
4 voice and narration: Alanis Obomsawin
5 producers: National Film Board of Canada
6 Amisk
7 1977, 40 min., 10 sec.
9 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Dorothy Courtois, Wolf Koenig
10 images: Buckley Petawabano, Bob Charlie
11 editor: Judith Merritt, Buckley Petawabano, Daniel Wapachee,
12 Jeanette Lerman [208], (2
13 sound: Albert Canadian, Bill Graziadei
14 producers: National Film Board of Canada Lines: 72
15
Canada Vignettes: Wild Rice Harvest Kenora ———
16
1979, 1 min., 0 sec. 5.0pt P
17 ———
director: Alanis Obomsawin
18 Normal P
producer: Robert Verrall
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[208], (2
22 Canada Vignettes: June in Povungnituk—Quebec Arctic
23 1980, 1 min., 0 sec.
25 producer: Robert Verrall
29 Incident at Restigouche
30 1984, 45 min., 57 sec.
32 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Adam Symansky, Andy Thomson,
33 Robert Verrall
35 images: Roger Rochat, Savas Kalogeras
36 editor: Alan Collins, Wolf Koenig
APPENDIX A 209
1 animation: Raymond Dumas

2 sound: Bev Davidson, Yves Gendron, Bill Graziadei
5
Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child
6
1986, 29 min., 10 sec.
7
also available in french: Richard Cardinal: Le cri d’un
8
enfant métis
9
10
producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Andy Thomson, Robert Verrall,
11 Marrin Canell
12 [209], (3)
cast: Leslie Miller, Betty Smith, Cory Swan, Pauline Kerik
14 images: Roger Rochat Lines: 143 to
15 editor: Rita Roy ———
16 music: Dario Domingues 11.5pt Pg
17 sound: Bernard Bordeleau, Raymond Marcoux, Hans Peter Strobl, ———
18 Jackie Newell Normal Page
19 voice and narration: David Mitchell PgEnds: TEX
21
Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place [209], (3)
22
23 1987, 29 min., 27 sec.
also available in french: La Maison Poundmaker—La voie
24
de la guérison
25
26
producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Andy Thomson, Robert Verrall,
27
Marrin Canell
28
29
images: Roger Rochat, Pierre Landry
30
editor: Rita Roy
31
music: Shannon Two Feathers, Dario Domingues
32
sound: Jean-Pierre Joutel, Raymond Marcoux, Paul Demers
33
34
35 No Address
36 1988, 55 min., 58 sec.
210 APPENDIX A
1 also available in french: Sans adresse

3 producer: Colin Neale, Alanis Obomsawin, Marrin Canell
5 images: Roger Rochat
6 editor: Marrin Canell
7 music: Dominique Tremblay
8 sound: Jacques Drouin, Hans Peter Strobl, Yves Gendron, Wojtek Klis
10
Le Patro Le Prévost 80 Years Later
11 1991, 29 min., 9 sec.
12 [210], (4
13 producer: Colin Neale, Alanis Obomsawin
14 script and text: Alanis Obomsawin Lines: 20
15 images: Roger Rochat, Jacques Avoine, Lynda Pelley, ———
16 Jean-Pierre Lachapelle 11.5pt
17 editor: Marrin Canell ———
18 music: Pierre Potvin Normal P
19 sound: Marie-France Delagrave, Jean-Pierre Joutel, Hans Oomes, PgEnds:
20 Yves Gendron, Claude Chevalier, Jackie Newell
21 producers: National Film Board of Canada [210], (4
22
23 Walker
1991, 13 min., 53 sec.
24
25
producer: Colin Neale, Penny Ritco, Wolf Koenig
26
cast: Kelly Ricard, Luis Brascoupe, Jamieson Boulanger, Chris Palin,
27
Eric Tadros, Ruby Marie Dennis, Serge Simon
28
script and text: Beatrice Mosionier
29
images: Susan Trow
30
editor: Meiyen Chan
31
music: Mack MacKenzie
32
sound: Ismaël Cordeiro, Robert Labrosse
33
34
35 Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
36 1993, 119 min., 15 sec.
APPENDIX A 211

2 producer: Colin Neale, Alanis Obomsawin, Wolf Koenig
4 images: Barry Perles, Roger Rochat, Jocelyn Simard, Susan Trow,
5 François Brault, Zoe Dirse, Philippe Amiguet, André-Luc Dupont,
6 Savas Kalogeras, Jean-Claude Labrecque
7 editor: Yurij Luhovy
8 music: Claude Vendette, Francis Grandmont
9 sound: Marie-France Delagrave, Jean-Pierre Joutel, Raymond
10 Marcoux, Catherine Van Der Donckt, Ismaël Cordeiro, Juan
11 Gutierrez, Tony Reed, Don Ayer, Serge Fortin, Robert Verebely
12 voice and narration: Alanis Obomsawin [211], (5)
14 My Name Is Kahentiiosta
Lines: 279 to
15 1995, 29 min., 50 sec.
———
16 also available in french: Je m’appelle Kahentiiosta
4.5pt PgV
17 also available under: Oka: Behind the Barricade: ———
18 The Kanehsatake Package Normal Page
19 director: Alanis Obomsawin PgEnds: TEX
20 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Don Haig
[211], (5)
22 images: Alanis Obomsawin, Roger Rochat, Susan Trow, Zoe Dirse,
23 Raymond Dumas, André-Luc Dupont, Jacques Avoine, Lynda Pelley,
24 Sylvain Julienne, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Pierre Landry
25 editor: Ruby-Marie Dennis
27 sound: Alanis Obomsawin, Jean-Pierre Joutel, Raymond Marcoux,
28 Hans Oomes, Ismaël Cordeiro, Don Ayer
30 Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man
31 1997, 57 min., 50 sec.
32 also available in french: Spudwrench: L’homme de Kahnawake
33 also available under: Oka: Behind the Barricade
35 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Don Haig
212 APPENDIX A
1 images: Zoe Dirse, Savas Kalogeras, Michel Bissonnette,

2 Yves Beaudoin, Lynda Pelley, Martin Duckworth, Pierre Landry
3 editor: Donna Read
5 sound: Alanis Obomsawin, Raymond Marcoux, Wojtek Klis,
6 Ismaël Cordeiro, Serge Boivin, Geoffrey Mitchell, Richard Lavoie
8
Rocks at Whiskey Trench
9
2000, 105 min., 18 sec.
10
also available in french: Pluie de pierres à Whiskey Trench
11
12 [212], (6
producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Sally Bochner
13
14
research and consultant: Denise Beaugrand-Champagne, Lines: 33
15
Alanis Obomsawin ———
16
art direction: Susan Phillips, Robert Verrall, Conway Jocks * 18.0pt
17 ———
images: Roger Rochat, Philippe Amiguet, René Siouï Labelle,
18 Normal P
Thea Pratt, Pierre Landry
19 PgEnds:
editor: Yurij Luhovy
20
music: Margaret Beauvais Jocks, Claude Vendette, Francis Grandmont
21
sound: Raymond Marcoux, Yves St-Jean, Ismaël Cordeiro, Tony Reed, [212], (6
22
Don Ayer, Jean Paul Vialard, Geoffrey Mitchell
23
voice and narration: Guy Nadon, Alanis Obomsawin
24
25
26 Is the Crown at War with Us?
27 2002, 96 min., 31 sec.
29 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Sally Bochner
31 research and consultant: Alanis Obomsawin
32 art direction: Sgoagani
33 images: Yoan Cart, Philippe Amiguet, Michel La Veaux,
34 Pierre Landry
35 music: Francis Grandmont
36 sound: Patrick Knup, Raymond Marcoux, Ismaël Cordeiro,
APPENDIX A 213
1 André Chaput, Serge Boivin, Jean Paul Vialard, Geoffrey Mitchell,

2 Sylvain Cajelais
3 voice and narration: Alanis Obomsawin, Tony Robinow,
4 Arthur Holden
6 Our Nationhood
7 2003, 96 min., 40 sec.
9 producer: Alanis Obomsawin, Sally Bochner
11 research and consultant: Alanis Obomsawin, Meilan Lam
12 art direction: Jean Dallaire [213], (7)
13 images: Yoan Cart, Alanis Obomsawin, Philippe Amiguet,
14 Michel La Veaux, Pierre Landry
Lines: 399 to
15 editor: Alison Burns
music: Francis Grandmont
———
16
sound: Raymond Marcoux, Glenn Hodgins, Ismaël Cordeiro,
* 227.0pt P
17 ———
18 André Chaput, Serge Boivin, Geoffrey Mitchell, Sylvain Cajelais Normal Page
19 voice and narration: Alanis Obomsawin, Jean-René Ouellet * PgEnds: Page
21
[213], (7)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [214], (8
13
14
Lines: 43
15
———
16
0.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[214], (8
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 appendix b
5
6
7
8 Native Documentaries
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [215], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 4
15 Because there is no comprehensive filmography of documentary films by
———
16 Native Americans, readers might benefit from the brief list of titles included
13.0pt Pg
17 below. I tried to come up with a list of significant documentary titles, by which ———
18 I mean projects of substantial length and/or creative significance, although Normal Page
19 this should be regarded as suggestive rather than comprehensive. Owing to PgEnds: TEX
20 the difficulty of obtaining some of the titles, I was not able to see all of them
21 and sometimes relied on descriptions I came across in catalogs, Web sites,
[215], (1)
22 and scholarly books to make what is, admittedly, a highly subjective decision.
23 That being said, in addition to Obomsawin’s many films, interested readers
24 might consider following:
25
26 Willie Dunn’s The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968). 1 (A short film that I list here
27 because of its historical importance as a Native first.)
28 Richard Whitman’s Red Reflections of Life: The Institute of American Indian
29 Arts (1973).
30 George Burdeau’s The Real People (a six-part series, 1976), Pueblo Peoples: First
31 Contact (1992), Surviving Columbus: The Pueblo People (1992; directed by
32 Diane Reyna), The Witness (1997), Backbone of the World: The Blackfeet
33 (1997).
34 Phil Lucas’s Images of Indian (a five-part public television series, 1979–81,
35 produced with Robert Hagopian), The Honor of All (1986), Healing the
36 Hurts (1991), Dances for the New Generation (1993).
216 APPENDIX B
1 George Horse Capture, Larry Littlebird, and Larry Cesspooch’s I’d Rather Be
2 Powwowing (1983).
3 Chris Spotted Eagle’s The Great Spirit within the Hole (1983) and Our Sacred
4 Land (1984).
5 Rick Tailfeathers’s Powwow Fever (1984).
6 Victor Masayesva’s Itam Hakim Hopiit (1985), Ritual Clowns (1988), Siskyavi:
7 The Place of Chasms (1991), Imagining Indians (1992).
8 Arlene Bowman’s Navajo Talking Picture (1986) and Song Journey (1994).
9 Sandra Osawa’s In the Heart of Big Mountain (1988), Lighting the Seventh Fire
10 (1995), Pepper’s Powwow (1995), Usual and Accustomed Places (1998), On
11 and Off the Res with Charlie Hill (2000).
12 Mona Smith’s Her Giveaway: A Spiritual Journey with aids (1988), Honored [216], (2
by the Moon (1990), That Which I Between (1991).
13
Zacharias Kunuk’s Qaqqiq/Gathering Place (1989), one of fifty nonfiction
14
videos he has produced about Inuit life since the 1980s. Lines: 46
15
Roy Bigcrane and Thompson Smith’s The Place of Falling Waters (1990). ———
16
Dean Bearclaw’s Warrior Chiefs in a New Age (1991). 4.0pt P
17 ———
Arvo Iho and Susan Stewart’s Crow Mapuche Connection (1991).
18 Normal P
Loretta Todd’s The Learning Path (1991), Hands of History (1994), Forgotten
19 PgEnds:
Warriors (1997), Today Is a Good Day: Remembering Chief Dan George
20
(1998), Two Days Away/Akaitapiiwa (2003).
21
Christine Lesiak and Matt Jones’s In the White Man’s Image (1992). [216], (2
22
Allen Jamieson’s Indigenous Voices (1992), Do:ge Gagwego o’jagwada’t: We
23
Stood Together (1993).
24 Ava Hamilton’s Everything Has a Spirit (1992).
25 Ruby Sooktis’s Season of Children (1992), Trek North 95 (1995).
26 Derron Twohatchet’s Detour (1993).
27 Beverly R. Singer’s He We Un Poh: Recovery in Native America (1993), A Video
28 Book (1994), Hozho of Native Women (1997).
29 Harriet Sky’s A Right to Be: The Story of an Indian Woman Who Took Back
30 Control of Her Life (1994).
31 Christine Welsh’s Keepers of the Fire (1995), The Story of the Coast Salish
32 Knitters (2000).
33 Barb Cranmer’s Laxwesa Wa: Strength of the River (1995), Qatuawas: Peo-
34 ple Gathering Together (1996), T’Lina: The Rendering of Wealth (1999),
35 Gwishalaayt: The Spirit Wraps around You (2001).
36 Daniel Prouty’s First Nation Blue (1996), Band-Aid (2000).
APPENDIX B 217
1 Paul Rickard’s Ayouwin: A Way of Life (1996), Finding My Talk: A Journey into
2 Aboriginal Languages (2000).
3 Lena and Aaron Carr’s War Code: Navajo Code Talkers (1996), Kinaalda:
4 Navajo Rite of Passage (2000).
5 Carol Geddes’s Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief (1994), Picturing a People: George
6 Johnston, Tlingit Photographer (1997).
7 Puhipau’s Stolen Waters (1996).
8 David H. Kalama Jr.’s Kaho’olawe (1997).
9 Gary Farmer’s The Gift (1998), Buffalo Tracks (2000).
10 G. Peter Jemison’s House of Peace (1999).
Jason Corwin and Janet Cavallo’s The Flickering Flame: The Life and Legacy
11
of Chief Turkey Tayac (1999). [217], (3)
12
James Fortier’s Alcatraz Is Not an Island (2000).
13
Annie Frazier-Henry’s Singing Our Stories (1998), To Return: The John Walkus
14
Story (2000), Spirit of the Game (2003). Lines: 92 to
15
———
16
* 298.822pt
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: Page
20
21
[217], (3)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [218], (4
13
14
Lines: 11
15
———
16
0.0pt P
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[218], (4
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 notes
5
6
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [219], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 7
15 Preface
1. Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 90. ———
16
2. White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 364.
0.5pt PgV
17 ———
18 3. Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 78.
Normal Page
19 4. Loft, “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Social Action.”
PgEnds: TEX
20 5. Bird Runningwater quoted in Harewood, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
6. Zimmermann, States of Emergency, 197.
21
7. George Pevere quoted on the back cover of Beard and White, eds., North [219], (1)
22
of Everything.
23
8. Fiske, “Act Globally, Think Locally,” 277.
24
9. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, 9.
25
10. Olson, Silences, ix.
26
11. Kalafatic, “Knots,” 68.
27
12. Jaimes-Guerrero, “Savage Erotica Exotica,” 209.
28
29 1. Abenaki Beginnings
30 Epigraph from Alanis Obomsawin: Comment made in a public
31 talk after a film screening, Norman, Oklahoma, spring 2002.
32 1. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 10.
34 3. The Abenaki language is divided into Eastern and Western, which are
35 distinct languages. By the 1970s, there were only twenty-one fluent speakers
36 of Western Abenaki, all elderly (Day, “Western Abenaki” [1998], 221).
220 NOTES TO PAGES 2–8
1 4. Background on Abenaki history and land comes from Day, “Western

2 Abenaki” (1998), 205.
3 5. Obomsawin, Bush Lady, liner notes.
4 6. Day, “Western Abenaki” (1978), 153.
6 8. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002.
7 9. Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn, 144.
9 11. See Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters; and Perkins, “Review of
10 Eugenics in Vermont.”
11 12. Fisher, quoted in Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn, 146 (for more on
12 Fisher, see 146–47). [220], (2
13 13. Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn, 148 (on the Eugenics Survey, see
14 generally 146–49). According to Wiseman: “The German scholars interested
Lines: 73
15 in eugenics found Vermont’s Eugenics Survey useful for crafting the Final
———
16 Solution that was later pursued by the Nazis” (227).
* 17.5pt
17 14. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002. ———
18 15. Vermont’s Sterilization Law of 1931, Laws of Vermont, 31st biennial sess. Normal P
19 (March 31, 1931), no. 174, pp. 194–96. PgEnds:
20 16. Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn, 149.
21 17. Greer, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 27. Put into law in 1876, the Indian Act
[220], (2
22 remains one of the most important pieces of legislation affecting Native
23 peoples in Canada. In addition to bringing together existing legislation, the
24 original act set controversial new standards for claiming Indian identity.
25 Over the last 130 years, the act has been subjected to a number of important
26 modifications. See Roy with Alfred, “Legislation Affecting Canada’s Native
27 People,” 550.
29 19. Information from Gordon M. Day cited in Foster and Cowan, eds.,
30 New England’s Native Past, 73, 231.
33 22. The “dossier” (the 1940 Positio of the Historical Section of the Sacred
34 Congregation . . . ) is quoted in Dauria, “Kateri Tekakwitha,” 67–68. Dauria’s
35 is the best article that I have found on Tekakwitha.
36 23. Dauria, “Kateri Tekakwitha,” 68.
NOTES TO PAGES 9–17 221
1 24. For more on Drums along the Mohawk, see Wilson, “Celluloid Sover-
2 eignty,” 204–7.
3 25. Anderson, Crucible of War, 188.
4 26. Rogers, Journals, 107–9, quoted in Foster and Cowan, eds., New Eng-
5 land’s Native Past, 129.
6 27. Atlantic Monthly, August 1937, excerpted in James and Brown, eds.,
7 Book Review Digest, 837; New Republic, July 14, 1937, 287.
8 28. The film seems to have elicited equally little concern for the Abenaki.
9 One present-day reviewer, not atypical among the comments I found online,
10 wrote the following: “ ‘Noble savages’ they ain’t in Northwest Passage. Critic
11 Pauline Kael didn’t seem to like this bad attitude toward our Native American
12 brethren but then again, Kael probably never had a hostile indian [sic] coming [221], (3)
13 at her skull with a raised tomahawk”(Candidus, review of Northwest Passage).
14 29. Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians, 48–49.
Lines: 126 to
15 30. Bruchac, Bowman’s Store, 43–44 (quotations), 8.
———
16 31. Chief Leonard George quoted in Wilson, “Confronting the ‘Indian
* 17.5pt Pg
17 Problem,’ ” 55. ———
18 32. Information from Gordon M. Day cited in Foster and Cowan, eds., New Normal Page
19 England’s Native Past, 133. According to a recent article: “[Panadis] was also PgEnds: TEX
20 a husband and a father, an artist and an active member of his community
21 who wanted people to remember the old ways. . . . Panadis left behind a
[221], (3)
22 detailed documentary trail of Abenaki language, history, and culture” (Nash
23 and Obomsawin, “Theophile Panadis,” 76). In particular, Panadis was an
24 important informant in the late 1950s for Gordon M. Day, one of the first
25 academics to work on Abenaki culture and history (and to do so in a respect-
26 ful manner that resulted in a body of work that remains useful and interesting
27 today). See Day’s writing in Foster and Cowan, eds., New England’s Native
28 Past.
30 34. Harewood, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
33 37. Nadel, Leonard Cohen, jacket flap.
34 38. Information about Cohen’s sources comes from Nadel, Leonard Cohen,
35 71.
1 40. Cohen, Beautiful Losers (hereafter bl, 16. Page numbers for subsequent
2 citations will be given parenthetically in the text.
3 41. At one point in the novel, when several white men violently confront the
4 young girl, she urinates in terror, just like the schoolgirl Obomsawin attacked
5 in her elementary school classroom, and creates a sound, “a monolithic tu-
6 mult in eight ears,” that causes the four men to pause in their violence. “It was
7 the pure sound of impregnable nature and it ate like acid at their plot,” Cohen
8 writes. “It was a sound so majestic and simple, a holy symbol of frailty which
9 nothing could violate” (bl, 61). After the novelist’s (problematic) association
10 of a Native girl with nature and simplicity, he goes on to describe how the
11 four men “could not bear to learn that Edith was no longer Other, that she
12 was indeed, Sister,” because of this raw human act of urination. Yet, after a [222], (4
brief pause, their violence continues unabated.
13
42. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 11.
14
43. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 13. Lines: 15
15
44. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 10. ———
16
45. Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 7. 4.0pt P
17 ———
46. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002.
18 Normal P
47. Dickinson and Young, A Short History of Quebec, 270, 313. Dickson and
19 PgEnds:
Young have two excellent chapters on the Quiet Revolution and its origins.
20
48. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 10.
21
49. Quoted in Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 8. [222], (4
22
50. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002.
23
51. Obomsawin, Bush Lady, liner notes.
24 52. Chamberlain, “She’s Informal but Captivating.”
26 54. Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 8.
27 55. Robert Verrall and Obomsawin quoted in Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
28 56. Mandate quoted on the nfb Web site: http://www.nfb.ca/atonf/organ
29 isation.php?idcat=72&v=h&lg=en.
30 57. de Rosa, “Studio One,” 331.
31 58. Evans, In the National Interest, 325.
32 59. This catalog description was posted on the Nativenet archive: http://na
33 tivenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9610/0007.html.
34 60. See http://www.nfb.ca and search the film title under “Collections.”
35 61. Barsam, Nonfiction Film, 328.
36 62. William Sloan of the Museum of Modern Art made this statement
1 about Greaves, which appears on the filmmaker’s home page: http://www.will

2 iamgreaves.com/biography.htm.
3 63. Information about Greaves’s career comes from Arthur, “Springing
4 Tired Chains,” 290.
5 64. John Grierson quoted in Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
6 65. Jones, The Best Butler, 191–93.
7 66. Obomsawin quoted in Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
8
2. Early Films
9
1. The issue of children as political symbols that can be wielded in the
10 mass media has been explored in Low, nfb Kids.
11 2. Scott,Weapons of the Weak, 326. In this passage, Scott is summarizing, but
12 [223], (5)
not endorsing, a more limited construction of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.
14 4. Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 14. Lines: 213 to
15 5. The multiplicity of female voices in Mother of Many Children is one ele- ———
16 ment of the film that evokes what Julia Lesage has called the political aesthetics 11.0pt Pg
17 of feminist documentary (see her classic “The Feminist Documentary Film”). ———
18 Although in chapter 3 I suggest where Obomsawin diverged from feminist Normal Page
19 cinematic conventions of the 1970s, it is worth noting this aural similarity. PgEnds: TEX
20 6. The film uses Ojibway, the older name of the Anishinabe, which is why
21 I am using it in discussing the film. [223], (5)
22 7. The backwoods aspect must have appealed to the filmmaker on a per-
23 sonal level.
24 8. Bill c-31, sec. 15, chap. 1, was a landmark modification of the Indian Act.
25 Passed in April 1985, c-31 ended discrimination against women with regard
26 to tribal citizenship. For more in this bill (r.s.c. 1985, c. 32 [1st supp.]), see
27 Roy with Alfred, “Legislation Affecting Canada’s Native People,” 577.
28 9. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 313.
29 10. Treaty Six was signed in 1876 with Plains Indians of central Saskatche-
30 wan and Alberta. It was one of the key treaties numbered one through eleven
31 that were signed between 1871 and 1921, setting the terms of the relationship
32 between the Canadian government and its indigenous peoples (Dickason,
33 Canada’s First Nations, 252–57).
34 11. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 397.
36 13. Wendell Berry quoted in “Speaker Offers Some Good Ideas.”

9 22. Métis Population Betterment Act, Statutes of Canada 1938, c. 6, s. 2;
10 Métis Settlement Act, Statutes of Alberta 1990, c. m-14.3, ss. 1, 111–29, sched. 3.
11 23. Sawchuk, “Negotiating an Identity,” 75. See also the Web sites of the
12 Metis Settlements General Council (http://www.msgc.ca) and the Métis Na- [224], (6
tional Council (http://www.metisnation.ca), the latter of which includes a
13
helpful overview entitled “Who Are the Métis?” I am grateful to Jerry White
14
for suggesting these Web sites. Lines: 25
15
24. Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 86. The exception for the 1990s, if ———
16
not for Obomsawin’s entire career, is a strange little documentary called Le 4.0pt P
17 ———
Patro Le Prévost: 80 Years Later (1991). As her only film that does not deal
18 Normal P
with Native issues, Le Patro was a bit of a departure. In a well-meaning but
19 PgEnds:
blandly informative style that has made the nfb easy to lampoon, it profiles
20
a Christian community center in Montreal that for the filmmaker seems to
21
represent another “healing place” for children of all backgrounds. Perhaps [224], (6
22
Le Patro’s limited appeal is a result of the filmmaker’s motivations: it is a
23
film with more local aspirations. “I live in Montreal, and I love Montreal,”
24 Obomsawin has said. “I felt that the film was something I could do for my
25 own city” (Greer, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 27).
26 25. Waugh, ed., “Show Us Life,” xxii.
27 26. Obomsawin quoted in Steven, Brink of Reality, 185. One addendum:
28 Waugh’s notion of the committed documentary might be interpreted as a
29 requirement for filmmakers to collaborate with their subjects in the making
30 of the film, à la the ethnographic films of David and Judith MacDougall,
31 in which camera work, editing, and other tasks are often shared between
32 filmmaker and subject. Obomsawin has a deep commitment to and sense of
33 solidarity with her subjects, but, like most filmmakers, even those within the
34 “committed” ranks, she is not willing to give over the reigns in this manner.
35 When asked if she would let a community member dictate what would be shot
36 or how, Obomsawin replied, “No, I can’t have that,” before adding that she
1 remains open to suggestions during the research phase of a project (Steven,

2 Brink of Reality, 39, 181).
3 27. Bailey, “What the Story Is,” 38, quoted in Woods, “Srinivas Krishna,”
4 206.
6 29. Jones, “Brave New Film Board,” 29.
7 30. White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 366, 371.
8 31. Merata Mita quoted in “Indigenising the Screen—Film-Maker Merata
9 Mita.”
10 32. Obomsawin quoted in Steven, Brink of Reality, 179.
11 33. White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 370.
12 34. Panadis worked in the 1920s with A. Irving Hallowell from the Univer- [225], (7)
13 sity of Pennsylvania and in the 1950s and 1960s with Gordon M. Day from
14 Dartmouth College (see Nash and Obomsawin, “Theophile Panadis”).
Lines: 289 to
15 35. Foster and Cowan, eds., New England’s Native Past, 131–32.
———
* 17.5pt Pg
17 37. Dorris, “Native American Literature,” 156–57, quoted in Cruikshank, ———
18 “Oral History, Narrative Strategies and Native American Historiography,” Normal Page
19 163. PgEnds: TEX
20 38. Foster and Cowan, eds., New England’s Native Past, 219.
21 39. Steven, Brink of Reality, 180.
[225], (7)
22 40. Leslie Marmon Silko quoted in Arnold, ed., Conversations with Leslie
23 Marmon Silko, 47.
24 41. Jerry White too eschews the“simple”reading of Obomsawin’s work. For
25 instance, he makes the fascinating observation that Obomsawin has more in
26 common with the avant-garde than is commonly realized: the poetic, rather
27 than pedantic, mode of address that characterizes her one-minute Canadian
28 Vignettes (1980) and her willingness in No Address to blur the line between
29 “actuality footage” and “re-creation” in a way that is reminiscent of the “per-
30 formative documentaries” that Bill Nichols (Introduction to Documentary,
31 137) describes (a category that includes films such as Marlon Riggs’s Tongues
32 Untied [1989], which one might not otherwise associate with Obomsawin’s
33 work) (“Alanis Obomsawin,” 370).
35 43. White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 366.
36 44. Baudrillard, Simulations, 119.
1 45. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6, cited in Keefer, “Postmodern Anx-

2 ieties over Hypermedia.”
3 46. Carol Geddes quoted in de Rosa, “Studio One,” 331.
4 47. Loretta Todd quoted in Silverman, “Uncommon Visions,” 389. Silver-
5 man’s essay is a useful introduction to Todd’s work.
6 48. Obomsawin quoted in Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 9. “Animals have histo-
7 ries just like us,” she has said. “They know their friends, and they know their
8 enemies” (Alioff and Levine, “The Long Walk,” 10).
9 49. Bruchac, Bowman’s Store, 46.
12 52. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 50. [226], (8
13 3. A Gendered Gaze?
14 Epigraph from Obomsawin, “Bush Lady,” on Bush Lady, side 2. Lines: 32
15 1. See Giguére, “Women Filmmakers in Quebec.” ———
16 2. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002. 11.0pt
17 3. Merata Mita quoted in “Indigenising the Screen—Film-Maker Merata ———
18 Mita.” Normal P
19 4. Liz Garbus interviewed in “Liz Garbus,” 123. PgEnds:
20 5. I am drawing here on the fascinating work of Bird, “Savage Desires.”
21 As she writes about westerns: “Indian women disappear or surface as minor [226], (8
22 plot devices” (82).
23 6. Klein and Ackerman, eds., Women and Power, 3.
24 7. The stereotypes run the gamut from “the erotic ‘pagan nymphoma-
25 niac’ to the picturesque erotic ‘Cherokee princess’ to the objectified ‘Indian
26 squaw,’ ” as Jaimes-Guerrero (“Savage Erotica Exotica,” 187) has claimed.
27 8. Bird, “Savage Desires,” 79.
28 9. Kaplan, Looking for the Other, xix.
29 10. Mihesuah, American Indians, 61.
30 11. Jeannette Armstrong quoted in Miller and Chuchryk, eds., Women of
31 the First Nations, ix, xi.
32 12. Information about traditional Abenaki life comes from Calloway, The
33 Abenaki, 30–33.
34 13. Giguére, “Women Filmmakers in Quebec,” 378, 380, 383–84. One film-
35 maker who is something of an exception here is Anne Claire Poirier, who
36 was the best-known woman working in French Canadian cinema in the
NOTES TO PAGE 78 227
1 1970s. Born in 1932, the same year as Obomsawin, Poirier joined the nfb
2 in 1960; she and Monique Fortier were the only women making films at
3 the nfb during the 1960s. Her turn toward more personal, activist projects
4 began in 1967 with the documentary De mère en fille and continued with
5 consciousness-raising films such as Les filles du Roy (1974), an examination
6 of Quebecois women that seemed to prefigure Obomsawin’s Mother of Many
7 Children. According to André Louselle, Les filles du Roy looks at the traditional
8 roles afforded women in Quebecois society though an “effective mixture of
9 historical reconstruction and personal commentary [that paints] a vibrant
10 picture of a subject systematically ignored by male cinéastes” (A Scream from
11 Silence, 6). However, Poirier’s best-known work, the 1979 Moirir à tue-tête
12 (also known as A Scream from Silence), shares little with Obomsawin’s oeuvre [227], (9)
13 aside from a desire to liberate and illuminate the lives of women in Canada.
14 Unlike Obomsawin’s more quiet documentaries of the 1970s, Poirier’s rape
Lines: 394 to
15 docudrama pushed formal experimentation to great extremes to unsettle the
———
16 audience, even to the point of visceral horror as the viewer endures a fifteen-
* 17.5pt Pg
17 minute rape sequence from the victim’s point of view. Louselle (A Scream ———
18 from Silence, 6) points out that, as if to acknowledge the pain inflicted on Normal Page
19 the audience in this sequence, the filmmaker and her editor next appear on- PgEnds: TEX
20 screen to discuss the challenges of such graphic filmmaking, before cutting
21 to a sequence built around documentary footage of women maimed in war
[227], (9)
22 in Vietnam and elsewhere—a powerful, if hardly subtle, critique of the price
23 of patriarchy that connects the personal to the global. If Obomsawin shared
24 the engagé sensibility, the extrapolation from the personal to the social, and
25 the desire to respect a multitude of female voices, she never took the aesthetic
26 risks that marked—and perhaps marred—Poirier’s most influential film.
27 14. If I have just suggested that issues of race and gender are enmeshed
28 throughout Obomsawin’s creative life, I think that we sometimes need to
29 separate them for a moment to underscore a simple point: what Obomsawin
30 is doing has a broader application than the Native woman categorization
31 might suggest to some readers and viewers. At times that designation can
32 marginalize her cultural production, as if Native film were important only to
33 Native people—perhaps this is why a book called Feminism and Documentary
34 would fail to mention her and other female Native filmmakers such as Sandra
35 Day Osawa, Loretta Todd, Carol Geddes, Lena Carr, or Arlene Bowman, none
36 of whom appear in the index to this otherwise excellent book (see Waldman
1 and Walker, eds., Feminism and Documentary). Somehow their gender has
2 been subsumed into their race, even for academics who should know better.
3 15. French, ed., Womenvision, 44, 55.
4 16. One generalization about aboriginal filmmakers that fits Obomsawin
5 without qualification comes from the visual anthropologist Faye Ginsburg:
6 “Indigenous media producers acknowledge the traumas of contact history
7 and the contradictions of life in the present and, most importantly, take
8 these stories as a means to envision a cultural future for Indigenous people
9 both locally and as part of larger social formations” (Ginsburg, “Mediating
10 Culture,” 5, quoted in Langston, “Grounded and Gendered,” 47). Also, it is
11 interesting to note that, unlike some successful documentarians, Obomsawin
12 has expressed no interest in the idea of an autobiographical project. [228], (1
13 17. Merata Mita is discussed in, and both quotations taken from, “Indi-
14 genising the Screen—Film-Maker Merata Mita.”
Lines: 39
15 18. MacDonald, “An Ugly Side of New Zealand,” 10. Regarding indigenous
———
16 children, Mita started a media training program for Maori youths (Billens,
* 17.5pt
17 “Merata Mita”). ———
18 19. Other than Billens’s “Merata Mita,” from which I take most of my Normal P
19 information, and Lamche’s “Interview with Merata Mita,” I have been able * PgEnds:
20 to find little that has been written about Mita outside New Zealand. When
21 I asked Obomsawin about Mita, she told me: “Mita is equal to me in terms
[228], (1
22 of fighting to make films and make documentaries—she is a very strong
23 woman”(Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002).
24 20. Loretta Todd quoted in Silverman, “Uncommon Visions,” 385.
25 21. Barb Cranmer quoted in “Barb Cranmer—Messenger of Stories.”
26 22. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema, 267.
27 23. “My initial goal was to make a portrait of my grandmother,” Bowman
28 has said to those who might find Navajo Talking Picture more solipsistic than
29 biographical (Smith, “Filmmaker Makes the Most of a Disappointing Visit,”
30 j-20).
31 24. The credits indicate that Obomsawin provided “original research” for
32 The Learning Path.
33 25. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, 87.
34 26. National Film Board Film and Video Catalog, 54.
35 27. Trinh, Woman Native Other, 141, 72 (quoting Bronislaw Malinowski’s
36 Argonauts of the Western Pacific [1922]).
1 28. Trinh, Woman Native Other, 141.

2 29. For an analogous discussion of the controversial “ethic of care,” see
3 McLaughlin, Feminist Social and Political Theory, 77–89.
4
4. Documentary on the Middle Ground
5
1. York and Pindera, People of the Pines, 78, 45 (see also 84).
6
2. York and Pindera, People of the Pines, 78 (on calling in the sq), 21, 27.
7
3. David, preface, 11.
8
4. McFarlane, “Stolen Land,” quoted in Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 5.
9
5. York and Pindera, People of the Pines, 37.
10 6. York and Pindera, People of the Pines, 41.
11 7. York and Pindera, People of the Pines, 68.
12 [229], (11)
8. Saxberg, “Kanehsatake,” 34.
13 9. David, preface, 12.
14 10. Quoted in Alioff, “Dream Magic,” 5. Lines: 435 to
16 12. Grant, “Kanehsatake,” 18. 11.0pt Pg
18 14. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002. Normal Page
19 15. Grant, “Kanehsatake,” 20 (Obomsawin quote), 20 (review). PgEnds: TEX
20 16. Yurij Luhovy quoted in Lysak, “Luhovy Named Best Editor,” 10.
21 17. Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 80. [229], (11)
22 18. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 34.
23 19. See Restoule, “How Indians Are Read,” 72.
24 20. Béla Bálazs, Theory of Film, excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds.,
25 Imagining Reality, 31.
26 21. Saxberg, “Kanehsatake,” 34.
27 22. Came, “Behind the Barricades,” 58.
28 23. Obomsawin quoted in Loft, “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Social Ac-
29 tion.”
30 24. “Standoff on Kanehsatake,” 12.
31 25. “Standoff on Kanehsatake,” 12.
32 26. Saxberg, “Kanehsatake,” 34.
33 27. Ellen Gabriel quoted in Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
34 28. See “Assigning the Blame.”
35 29. Jones, “Brave New Film Board,” 36.
36 30. Quoted in White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 370. The progressive history
1 textbook to which I allude is Lichtenstein, Strasser, Rosenzweig, Brier, and

2 Brown, eds., Who Built America?
3 31. Obomsawin quoted in Stangel, “Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin,” 10.
4 32. Obomsawin quoted in Hays, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
5 33. Chase,“Thugs of the World Unite,” 35. The right-wing analyst was John
6 Thompson, then assistant director of the Mackenzie Institute, which Chase
7 describes as “an independent Toronto think tank that examines conflicts”
8 (35). Jerry White, who teaches at the University of Alberta, has encouraged
9 me to note the reactionary nature of the Alberta Report/Newsmagazine as
10 well as its distance from mainstream public opinion in Canada.
11 34. I am aware of but one real exception, a negative, defensive response
12 to Kanehsatake: Marsolais, L’aventure du cinéma direct revisitée, 292–93. I am [230], (1
13 grateful to Jerry White for finding and translating Marsolais’s comments. See
14 White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 368 (White’s translation), 374n12 (Marsolais’s
Lines: 50
15 original French).
———
16 35. White, The Middle Ground, x, 52. To describe films on what I consider
* 17.5pt
17 the middle ground of mass media, Laura Marks has coined the term intercul- ———
18 tural cinema to describe what she sees as a place to “challenge the separateness Normal P
19 of cultures and make visible the colonial and racist power relations that seek * PgEnds:
20 to maintain this separation.” In this way such texts can pollute ideas of pure
21 cultural distinction and “effect a transformation in the audience” (The Skin
[230], (1
22 of the Film, xii).
23 36. Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds, 21.
25 38. Hyer, “Pablita Velarde,” 273.
27 40. Hyer, “Pablita Velarde,” 292.
29 42. Data from Curry, “Half of Canadians Disbelieve Land Claims,” citing
30 the annual survey Portraits of Canada. (It should be noted that the Na-
31 tional Post, for which Curry writes, is more conservative than mainstream
32 Canadian public opinion and may have highlighted aspects of the survey
33 that would undermine the land claims as part of a radical agenda without
34 meaningful public support.) Quotation from Nancy Pine, a spokesperson
35 for the Assembly of First Nations chief, Phil Fontaine.
1 44. Berry, “Two Minds,” 22.

3
5. Why Documentary?
4
Epigraph from Solanas and Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,”
5
22, quoted in Armes, Third World Film Making, 83.
6
1. Obomsawin quoted in Greer, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 27.
7
2. Beaver, “Producers’ Forum I,” quoted in Leuthold, “Historical Repre-
8
sentation,” 728.
9
3. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, 33. The number is mentioned
10 in passing, with no indication of how it was derived.
11 4. I have not included specific tribal affiliations for the filmmakers be-
12 [231], (13)
cause this information is not always available. I am categorizing them as
13 Native productions in some substantial sense on the basis of descriptions
14 of the films in the scholarly literature, e.g., Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthet- Lines: 549 to
15 ics, 211–13. Weatherford, ed., Native Americans on Film and Video, has ———
16 also been a useful resource, certainly one that warrants updating in the 11.0pt Pg
17 way that the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai) is now ———
18 doing online. A listing of Native productions broken down by tribe, re- Normal Page
19 gion, and director is available from Native Networks, the nmai’s Web site: PgEnds: TEX
20 http://www.nativenetworks.si.edu/eng/orange/index.htm. The nmai list is
21 somewhat confusing in that the vast majority, but not all, of its titles are [231], (13)
22 the work of Native producers or directors. Much to its credit, however, it
23 includes some Latin American and Pacific Islander contributions that are
24 generally ignored in discussions of Native filmmaking.
25 5. Unless a director chose to keep his or her Native ancestry out of public
26 view. Certainly, such maneuvers occurred at a time when visual artists did
27 not want the racist stigma of primitivism attached to their work. For an
28 exploration of the intersection of private Native identity and public creative
29 expression, see my “The Native Roots of Modern Art.”
30 6. Presently, it is available only from the filmmaker’s Web site: http://www.
31 naturallynative.com.
32 7. The Chirac and New York Times quotations, as well as others, are
33 reprinted on the film’s official Web site: http://www.atanarjuat.com/media
34 centre/index.html.
35 8. White, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 364, 366. I take issue with White’s char-
36 acterization of Obomsawin as Griersonian but otherwise admire his “Alanis
1 Obomsawin,” which is part of an outstanding collection that deserves greater

2 currency in the United States.
3 9. John Grierson excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds., Imagining
4 Reality, 96.
5 10. John Grierson excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds., Imagining
6 Reality, 96, 101.
7 11. Obomsawin quoted in Harewood, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
8 12. Evans, In the National Interest, 230. Among Obomsawin’s films, Ka-
9 hentioosta is closest to a biopic, but, like her other films with an individual’s
10 name in the title, it is less a standard profile than a springboard to a larger
11 issue. As such, it is more thematic than biographical in nature.
12 13. Brian Winston calls the tradition of the victim Grierson’s “most potent [232], (1
legacy” (Claiming the Real, 40).
13
14. Winston, Claiming the Real, 33.
14
15. Evans, In the National Interest, 104. Lines: 58
15
16. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002. ———
16
Challenge for Change (and its Francophone equivalent, Société nouvelle) is 4.0pt P
17 ———
often mentioned as an early attempt to use film as an engine of social change,
18 Normal P
but few writers have gone beyond this obvious abstraction to describe the
19 PgEnds:
deeper motivations at work behind the program, which existed at the nfb
20
from 1969 to 1980. As Ron Burnett has suggested, Challenge for Change grew
21
out of a desire on the part of “politically committed cultural workers . . . [t]o [232], (1
22
connect with, and better understand, the audiences and communities they
23
were addressing” (“The Politics of Culture and Community,” 295). Although
24 Obomsawin was passionate about connecting with disenfranchised commu-
25 nities as a filmmaker, she did not quite share the decentralized vision of
26 media production that the program also espoused, one in which, according
27 to Burnett, “ ‘directors’ were no longer directors, but ‘media counselors’ in
28 charge of helping the local citizens use the media most effectively” (295)—she
29 was never willing to relinquish her personal vision in the idealized manner of
30 Challenge for Change rhetoric and (at times) practice. It is important to note
31 that much more research is needed on the subject of Challenge for Change
32 and its influence. Burnett claims that the only sustained analysis is Moore,
33 “Canada’s Challenge for Change.” For more on Challenge for Change, see
34 Burnett, “The Politics of Culture and Community,” 295. For a useful, but
35 brief, bibliography on the subject, see Mackenzie, “Société nouvelle,” 82.
36 17. Ginsburg, “The After-Life of Documentary,” 63.
1 18. Stoney, “You Are on Indian Land,” 346, quoted in Ginsburg, “The
2 After-Life of Documentary,” 66. Not only does George Stoney’s long career
3 as a producer and teacher of nonfiction film warrant greater attention from
4 scholars, but You Are on Indian Land in particular deserves an in-depth look.
5 19. Evans, In the National Interest, 172–73.
6 20. Fulford, column on Grierson and the documentary.
7 21. Winston, Claiming the Real, 46.
8 22. Fulford, column on Grierson and the documentary.
9 23. nfb producer quoted in and biographical information from Cizek,
10 “Alanis Obomsawin.”
11 24. John Grierson quoted in Macdonald, “Chairperson’s Message.”
12 25. The assertion that Obomsawin has made all the projects she has envi- [233], (15)
sioned is true with one exception: a documentary mixture of live action and
13
animation about children was postponed in the very early stages because of
14
technical challenges and rapidly mounting expenses; she hints that someday Lines: 619 to
15
she might return to it (Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, ———
16
August 2002). 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
26. C$1 million is a sizable budget, although still less than half what it cost
18 Normal Page
to make Smoke Signals, The Doe Boy, or Atanarjuat.
19 PgEnds: TEX
27. Hogarth, Documentary Television in Canada, 3, 4, 10.
20
28. Nichols, Representing Reality, 4, 263.
21
29. See Nichols, Blurred Boundaries. [233], (15)
22
30. Hogarth, Documentary Television in Canada, 139.
23
31. The indistinct line between fiction and nonfiction in everyday speech
24 is always evident to me when my students insist on referring to biographies,
25 memoirs, or works of journalism as novels.
26 32. Leuthold, “Historical Representation,” 728.
27 33. Solanas and Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” 22, quoted in Armes,
28 Third World Film Making, 83.
31 36. Leuthold, “Historical Representation,” 730, 733.
32 37. Leuthold, “Historical Representation,” 730.
33 38. Georges E. Sioui quoted in Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 83.
34 39. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road, 3.
35 40. Wiseman, “Editing as a Four-Way Conversation,” excerpted in Mac-
36 Donald and Cousins, Imagining Reality, 282.
1 41. Nichols, Representing Reality, 178

4 44. For example, in a public presentation on the University of Oklahoma
5 campus following a spring 2002 screening of her films.
7 46. In“Up the Anthropologist,” Laura Nader talked about“studying down”
8 in her classic exhortation for anthropologists to “study up” and look at people
9 more powerful than they themselves are.
11 48. Appleford, “Coming Out from Behind the Rocks,” 116.
12 49. Obomsawin quoted in Steven, Brink of Reality, 180. [234], (1
13 50. Loach, “Death of a Nation,” excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins,
14 eds., Imagining Reality, 303.
Lines: 66
15 51. Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” 32.
52. Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” 32. ———
16
53. See Stephens, The Rise of the Image.
11.0pt
17 ———
18 54. Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” 32. Normal P
PgEnds:
21 57. Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 95; Nadel, Leonard Cohen, 73.
58. Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 78. [234], (1
22
23 59. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 14.
24 60. Hugh Kenner quoted in White, The Middle Mind, 1.
25 61. Zimmermann, States of Emergency, 124, xxiii.

62. Marcorelles, Living Cinema, 37.
26
63. Tiziana Terranova quoted in Holmes, ed., Virtual Globalization, 104.
27
64. See Bruzzi, New Documentary, 5–7.
28
65. Gitlin, Media Unlimited, 7, 20.
29
30 6. Cinema of Sovereignty
31 The epigraph to the section “Is the Crown at War with Us?” is
32 taken from Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 29. The epigraph to the sec-
33 tion “The Politics of Indigenous Representation” is taken from
34 Kundera, Immortality, 127.
36 2. Mi’kmaq people live in both the United States and Canada, but, because
1 Obomsawin is dealing with towns in the latter, I am focusing on Canadian-

2 Mi’kmaq relations in this chapter.
3 3. Runningwolf and Smith, On the Trail of Elder Brother, 57–63.
4 4. Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 44.
5 5. Miller, “The Mi’kmaq,” 326.
6 6. Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 55–56.
7 7. Miller, “The Mi’kmaq,” 343, 346. See also chapter 1 above.
8 8. Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 167.
9 9. Joe, Song of Rita Joe, 30.
10 10. Joe, Song of Rita Joe, 30, 64, 97, 101.
11 11. Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 11, 17.
12 12. J. S. Erskine quoted in Prins, The Mi’kmaq, 9. [235], (17)
13. Harald E. L. Prins, an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker who
13
has worked on Mi’kmaq subjects in both capacities, has compiled a list of
14
the few films on the tribe (see The Mi’kmaq, 237–38). Lines: 743 to
15
14. Fitzgerald, “Fishing for Stories.” ———
16
15. Bunner, “Back on the Warpath.” 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
16. Fitzgerald, “Fishing for Stories,” 29.
18 Normal Page
17. Donham, “Lobster Wars and the Media,” 7.
19 PgEnds: TEX
18. Unemployment rates from Fitzgerald,“Fishing for Stories,” 32. Number
20
of traps from DeMont, “Beyond Burnt Church,” 35.
21
19. R. v. Donald John Marshall Jr., [1999] 3 S.C.R. 456, 1999 CanLII 665 [235], (17)
22
(S.C.C.), was issued by the Supreme Court of Canada on September 17,
23
1999. Two months later, on November 17, 1999, because of intense public
24 controversy, the Court offered a clarification of its decision, R. v. Donald
25 John Marshall Jr., [1999] 3 S.C.R. 533, 1999 CanLII 666 (S.C.C.).
26 20. Entire books have been written on the Marshall case, including
27 Wicken’s excellent Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial.
29 22. Eisner, “Our Nationhood.”
30 23. Vancouver International Film Festival blurb quoted on http://www.
31 cinematheque.bc.ca/JanFeb04/obomsawin.html.
32 24. Sidney Pobihushchy, a retired political science professor from the Uni-
33 versity of New Brunswick in Fredericton, quoted in DeMont, “Beyond Burnt
34 Church,” 35.
35 25. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 215.
36 26. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 217. For a fascinating in-depth look at the
1 relationship between a nineteenth-century Native American and the white

2 photographers for whom he sat, see Goodyear, Red Cloud.
3 27. Prins, “Paradox,” 248.
4 28. Obviously, I am coming to Native American studies as an outsider
5 who hopes that he can add something new to the conversation, although,
6 unlike some filmmakers, I am not claiming to represent an entire people.
7 Nonetheless, there are certain parallels of which I am awkwardly aware.
8 29. Blood may shape experience, but it cannot substitute for it, as the work
9 of the dislocated Navajo filmmaker Arlene Bowman makes clear. Her Navajo
10 Talking Picture (1986) is a film that painfully demonstrates how much being
11 a cultural insider depends on lived experience, not simply blood relation.
12 30. Jocks, “Combing Out Snakes,” quoted in Garroutte, Real Indians, 105. [236], (1
31. See Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, Public Law 101-644, U.S. Statutes
13
at Large 104 (1990): 4664.
14
32. Wilson, “Celluloid Sovereignty,” 222. Lines: 80
15
33. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 54. ———
16
34. Pico, “Sovereignty Is Absolute,” a5. 4.0pt P
17 ———
35. Ivey, “Sovereignty,” 3.
18 Normal P
36. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 54.
19 PgEnds:
37. Audra Simpson and Atsenhaienton quoted in Alfred, Peace, Power,
20
Righteousness, 65 and 109, respectively.
21
38. Even if political sovereignty is limited in its real-world application, [236], (1
22
as a term it still has value if we understand it as an aspect of indigenous
23
nations that was their inherent right before (and after) contact, not a result of
24 postcontact negotiations with a settler-state (see Mohawk, “On Sovereignty,”
25 8).
26 39. Atsenhaienton quoted in Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 111.
27 40. Beaucage, “Films about Indigenous People,” 29.
28 41. I say generally unwritten for this reason: despite the research of
29 Leuthold, Kilpatrick, Singer, and other scholars, the subject of indigenous
30 media in North America has many aspects that still warrant investigation.
31 42. The new spirit of collaboration even reached the Mi’kmaq, never the
32 most studied or photographed tribe. When the anthropologist/filmmaker
33 Harald E. L. Prins approached them in the early 1980s, he was careful to ask
34 them how they wanted to be depicted in his film. The tribal leader Donald
35 Sanipass told him that they wanted a film “in which our voices can be heard
36 and in which we show how we live, how we work, and where we have chosen
1 to continue the life of our forefathers and mothers” (“Paradox,” 55). Accord-
2 ing to Prins, the result, Our Lives in Our Hands (1985), made considerable
3 strides toward showing the Mi’kmaq as they hoped to be represented to the
4 world, and he argued that it provided a valuable means for attracting media
5 attention to Mi’kmaq concerns (“Paradox,” 67).
6 43. Mokuka quoted in Turner, “Indigenous Video,” 75.
7 44. Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art, 120.
8 45. Sam Yazzie quoted in Worth, Adair, and Chalfen, Through Navajo Eyes,
9 290.
10 46. For more on indigenous media as a problematic response to hegemonic
11 media forces, see Weiner, “Televisualist Anthropology.” One of the scholars
12 who comes under fire in this highly charged polemic is Faye D. Ginsburg, who [237], (19)
has responded:“We argue that far from being subsumed by contact with mass
13
cultural forms, as these critics have argued, indigenous media-makers have
14
taken on Western media technologies to defend themselves against what they Lines: 845 to
15
see as the culturally destructive effects of mass media, producing work about ———
16
their own lives, a strategy that some have called ‘innovative traditionalism.’ 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
A more poetic phrasing, ‘Starting Fire with Gunpowder,’ used for the title of
18 Normal Page
a film about the [Inuit Broadcasting Corporation] . . . , captures the sense of
19 PgEnds: TEX
turning a potentially destructive Western form into something useful to the
20
lives of indigenous people” (Ginsburg, “Screen Memories,” 54).
21
47. Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 327. [237], (19)
22
48. See Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance,” 76–93.
23
49. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema, 198.
24 50. Buruma and Margalit (Occidentalism, 5, 11) describe Occidentalism as a
25 “cluster of prejudices”and a“venomous brew”that results in a“dehumanizing
26 picture of the West.”
27 51. That is, she merely wants recognition of the notion of indigenous na-
28 tionhood, on which see Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 47.
29 52. On Obomsawin’s notion of film as a learning place, see the section
30 “Documentary Film on Middle Ground” in chapter 4 above.
31 53. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2.
32 54. Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race, 246, quoted in Wilson, “Cellu-
33 loid Sovereignty,” 222.
35 56. Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 330–31.
36 57. Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism. The term national imaginary comes
1 from, among others, Annette Hamilton (“Fear and Desire”), who uses it to
2 describe the formation of imagined communities (à la Benedict Anderson)
3 via the visual mass media.
4 58. Garroutte, Real Indians, 101, 105, 102. See also Jocks, “Combing Out
5 Snakes.”
7 60. Vizenor defines what he means by “indian” in, among other places,
8 Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 84.
9 61. Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 165, 160.
10 62. Prins, “Paradox,” 256, 263.
11 63. Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow, 99–100, quoted in Prins, “Paradox,” 263.
12 64. See Hebdige, foreword, xix. [238], (2
65. See Moore, “Marketing Alterity,” 127.
13
66. Singer (Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, 92–99) has written on the
14
pragmatic side of indigenous media production. She notes: “Native Ameri- Lines: 87
15
cans have begun to take over the business end of film and media production, ———
16
thus lessening our reliance on grants and other institutional support from 4.0pt P
17 ———
outside our companies” (92). However, some of the examples that she cites
18 Normal P
were unsuccessful, including Valerie Red Horse’s Naturally Native (1997), a
19 PgEnds:
project funded by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation that never made
20
it past very limited release. Perhaps more promising has been the develop-
21
ment of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada, a nationwide [238], (2
22
network that premiered in 1999 with Obomsawin on its board of directors.
23
67. An almost ideal situation in this regard would be the local video pro-
24 duction and distribution of the Inuit Broadcast Corporation, although even
25 this has been the beneficiary of federal funding, as have indigenous media
26 efforts among aboriginal people in Australia.
27 68. Miigam’agan and Obomsawin quoted in Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
30 71. Daniel Lyman’s “Remarks on the Province of New Brunswick” (1792)
31 quoted in Reid, Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter, 108.
32 72. Reid, Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter, 98.
33 73. What I said in the previous chapter should offer some solace to those,
34 like me, who hope to make strategic use of the “truth effects” that shroud
35 documentary artifice—although much of what I call a cinema of sovereignty
36 should function just as well in fiction or experimental realms.
1 74. Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 180.

2
Conclusion
3
1. Nash, “Odanak durant les années 1920s,” 31. I would like to thank Pro-
4
fessor Nash for kindly sending me an English version of her article, in which
5
the quotation in question appears on p. 34.
6
2. Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn, 193.
7
3. Excerpts from the textbook Vermont Our Own State quoted in Wiseman,
8
The Voice of the Dawn, 151.
9
4. Obomsawin quoted in Monastyrski, “Aboriginal Peoples Network,” b6.
10 5. Loretta Todd quoted in Silverman, “Uncommon Visions,” 382.
11 6. Cizek, “Alanis Obomsawin.”
12 [239], (21)
7. For more on this, see chapter 5.
13 8. See Mitchell, Picture Theory.
14 9. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 15. Lines: 923 to
15 10. Obomsawin quoted in Augustine, “Filming Aboriginal Voices.” ———
16 11. Latour, “The Last Critique,” 20. 11.0pt Pg
17 12. Obomsawin quoted in Greer, “Alanis Obomsawin,” 25. ———
18 13. Alanis Obomsawin, interview with author, Montreal, August 2002. Normal Page
19 14. Beverley Singer does mention Obomsawin but devotes only two pages PgEnds: TEX
20 to her (see Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, 58–59). In noting Obomsawin’s
21 absence from the standard histories—Ellis, The Documentary Idea; Barnouw, [239], (21)
22 Documentary; Barsam, Nonfiction Film; Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians; Singer,
23 Wiping the War Paint off the Lens—I should point out that I am not endorsing
24 the notion of canon formation, only suggesting that, if we must have canons
25 of great films, as the exigencies of higher education seem to require on some
26 level, then Obomsawin’s absence is unacceptable. Also, it is worth noting
27 that Obomsawin fares much better in the latest books on Canadian cinema
28 such Beard and White’s North of Everything, where she is the subject of Jerry
29 White’s “Alanis Obomsawin,” and Christopher Gittings’s Canadian National
30 Cinema, which includes an interesting subchapter on her work.
31 15. Nicholas Frasier excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds., Imagining
32 Reality, 367.
33 16. Lanzmann excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds., Imagining Re-
34 ality, 374. Lanzmann made his remarks on appearing at a joint retrospective
35 of his work and that of the Japanese documentarian Noriaki Tsuchimoto in
36 Tokyo, May 1996.
1 17. See Zimmermann, States of Emergency.

2 18. Chris Marker excerpted in MacDonald and Cousins, eds., Imagining
3 Reality, 381.
4 19. Obomsawin quoted in Loft, “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Social Ac-
5 tion.”
6 20. Bourdieu, Firing Back, 64–65.
7 Appendix B. Native Documentaries
8 1. Although important in symbolic terms, the Native input in other nfb
9 projects during the late 1960s seems too limited to warrant inclusion here.
10
[Last Pag
11
12 [240], (2
13
14
Lines: 96
15
———
16
373.32
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 PgEnds:
20
21
[240], (2
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 bibliography
5
6
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [241], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 4
15 Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
———
16
Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Don
12.5pt Pg
17 ———
18 Mills on: Oxford University Press, 1999. Normal Page
19 Alioff, Maurie. “Dream Magic: Alanis Obomsawin after Oka.” Matrix (Que- PgEnds: TEX
20 bec) 33 (spring 1991): 5–9.
21 Alioff, Maurie, and Susan Schouten Levine. “The Long Walk of Alanis Obom-
[241], (1)
22 sawin.” Cinema Canada, June 1987, 10–15.
23 Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Year’s War and the Fate of Empire
24 in British North America. New York: Vintage, 2001.
25 Appleford, Robert. “Coming Out from Behind the Rocks: Constructs of the
26 Indian in Recent U.S. and Canadian Cinema.” American Indian Culture
27 and Research Journal 19, no. 1 (1995): 97–118.
28 Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
29 University of California Press, 1987.
30 Arnold, Ellen L., ed. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Jackson: Uni-
31 versity Press of Mississippi, 2000.
32 Arthur, Paul. “Springing Tired Chains: Experimental Film and Video.” In
33 Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and
34 Video, ed. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler, 268–97. Bloomington:
35 Indiana University Press, 1999.
36 “Assigning the Blame.” Maclean’s 108, no. 35 (August 28, 1995): 23–32.
242 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Augustine, Christine. “Filming Aboriginal Voices: An Interview with Alanis

2 Obomsawin.” Fred: The Capital’s Independent Voice (Fredericton nb),
3 [September] 2003.
4 Bailey, Cameron. “What the Story Is: An Interview with Srinivas Krishna.”
5 CineAction! 28 (spring 1992): 38–43.
6 Bálazs, Béla. Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. 1945. Trans-
7 lated by Edith Bond. London: D. Dobson, 1952. Excerpted in Imagining
8 Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, ed. Kevin MacDonald and
9 Mark Cousins. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
10 “Barb Cranmer—Messenger of Stories.” First Nations Drum, winter 2000.
11 http://www.firstnationsdrum.com/biography/wint00 cranmer.htm.
12 Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: [242], (2
Oxford University Press, 1974.
13
Barsam, Richard. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. 1973. Rev. ed. Bloom-
14
ington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Lines: 49
15
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. ———
16
Beard, William, and Jerry White, eds. North of Everything: English-Canadian 4.0pt P
17 ———
Cinema since 1980. Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2002.
18 Normal P
Beaucage, Marjorie. “Films about Indigenous People.” Fuse, winter 1992, 27–
19 PgEnds:
29.
20
Beaver, Tom. “Producers’ Forum I: Uncovering the Lies.” Paper presented at
21
a symposium at the Two Rivers Native Film and Video Festival, Min- [242], (2
22
neapolis, October 10, 1991.
23
Berry, Wendell. “Two Minds.” The Progressive, November 2002, 21–29.
24 Billens, Sarah. “Merata Mita.” Bonza, 1988. http://bonza.rmit.edu.au/ floyd/
25 essays/1998/merata mita/index.php.
26 Bird, S. Elizabeth. “Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the Amer-
27 ican Indian in Popular Media.” In Selling the Indian: Commercializing
28 and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer
29 and Diana Royer, 62–98. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
30 Bourdieu, Pierre. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. New York:
31 New Press, 2001.
32 Bruchac, Joseph. Bowman’s Store: A Journey to Myself. New York: Lee & Low,
33 1997.
34 Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: An Introduction. New York: Routledge,
35 2000.
36 Bunner, Paul.“Back on the Warpath: Polite Canada Sits on Its Hands as Native
BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
1 Militants Flout the Law and Demand the Moon.” Report Newsmagazine
2 (Alberta ed.) vol. 27, no. 10 (2000): 12–13.
3 Burnett, Ron. “The Politics of Culture and Community.” In Resolutions: Con-
4 temporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, 283–
5 303. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
6 Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its
7 Enemies. New York: Penguin, 2004.
8 Calloway, Colin G. The Abenaki. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
9 Came, Barry. “Behind the Barricades: A Native Film Director Puts Oka in
10 Context.” Maclean’s 107, no. 5 (January 31, 1994): 58.
11 Candidus. Review of Northwest Passage (1940). The Colonial Movie Critic.
12 http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1015268/reviews.php?crit [243], (3)
13 ic=all&sortby=default&page=1&rid=13754.
14 Carpenter, Edmund. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! New York:
Lines: 81 to
15 Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.
———
16 Chamberlain, Bob.“She’s Informal but Captivating.” Guelph Mercury, [1960].
* 17.5pt Pg
17 Chanan, Michael, ed. Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema. ———
18 London: British Film Institute, 1983. Normal Page
19 Chase, Steven. “Thugs of the World Unite.” Alberta Report/Newsmagazine 20, PgEnds: TEX
20 no. 33 (August 2, 1993): 34–35.
21 Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the
[243], (3)
22 Colonization of American Indians. Monroe me: Common Courage, 1992.
23 Cizek, Katerina. “Alanis Obomsawin: Dream Magic.” Horizon Zero, no. 9
24 (2003). http://www.horizonzero.ca. An interactive Web tribute with
25 video and text by Cizek.
26 Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1993.
27 Cruikshank, Julie. “Oral History, Narrative Strategies and Native American
28 Historiography: Perspectives from the Yukon Territory, Canada.” In
29 Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, ed.
30 Nancy Shoemaker, 2–28. New York: Routledge, 2002.
31 Curry, Bill. “Half of Canadians Disbelieve Land Claims.” National Post,
32 November 27, 2003. Available at http://www.orwelltoday.com/indians
33 disbelieved.shtml.
34 Dauria, Susan R. “Kateri Tekakwitha: Gender and Ethnic Symbolism in the
35 Process of Making an American Saint.” New York Folklore 20, nos. 3–4
36 (1994): 55–73.
244 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 David, Dan. Preface to People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka,
2 by Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera, 9–14. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1991.
3 Day, Gordon M. “Western Abenaki.” In Handbook of North American Indi-
4 ans, vol. 15, ed. Bruce G. Trigger, 148–59. Washington dc: Smithsonian
5 Institution, 1978.
6 ———. “Western Abenaki.” In In Search of New England’s Native Past: Se-
7 lected Essays by Gordon M. Day, ed. Michael K. Foster and William
8 Cowan, 202–22. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
9 DeMont, John. “Beyond Burnt Church.” Maclean’s 112, no. 42 (October 18,
10 1999): 34–35.
11 Denvir, John, ed. Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts. Urbana: University of
12 Illinois Press, 1996. [244], (4
13 De Rosa, Maria. “Studio One: Of Storytellers and Stories.” In North of Every-
14 thing: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed. William Beard and Jerry
Lines: 11
15 White, 328–41. Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2002.
———
16 Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples
* 17.5pt
17 from Earliest Times. 1992. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, ———
18 2002. Normal P
19 Dickinson, John, and Brian Young. A Short History of Quebec. 1993. 3rd ed. PgEnds:
20 Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
21 Donham, Parker Barss. “Lobster Wars and the Media.” Canadian Dimension
[244], (4
22 34, no. 5 (September/October 2000): 7.
23 Dorris, Michael.“Native American Literature in an Ethnohistorical Context.”
24 College English 41, no. 2 (1979): 147–62.
25 Eisner, Ken. “Our Nationhood.” Variety, December 22, 2003.
26 Ellis, Jack C. The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language
27 Documentary Film and Video. Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
28 Evans, Gary. In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board
29 from 1949 to 1989. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
30 Fiske, John. “Act Globally, Think Locally.” In Planet tv: A Global Television
31 Reader, ed. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar, 277–85. New York: New York
32 University Press, 2002.
33 Fitzgerald, Paul. “Fishing for Stories at Burnt Church: The Media, the Mar-
34 shall Decision, and Aboriginal Representation.” Canadian Dimension
35 36, no. 4 (July/August 2002): 29–33.
36 Foster, Michael K., and William Cowan, eds. In Search of New England’s
BIBLIOGRAPHY 245
1 Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day. Amherst: University of

2 Massachusetts Press, 1998.
3 French, Lisa, ed. Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia.
4 Victoria: Australian Catalogue Co., 2003.
5 Fulford, Robert. Column on Grierson and the documentary. National Post,
6 October 3, 2000. Available online at http://www.robertfulford.com/John
7 Grierson.html.
8 Gallagher, Nancy L. Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the
9 Green Mountain State. Hanover nh: University Press of New England,
10 1999.
11 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native Amer-
12 ica. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. [245], (5)
13 Giguére, Nicole. “Women Filmmakers in Quebec: Documentaries and Fea-
14 ture Films.” In Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, ed. Jacqueline Lev-
Lines: 144 to
15 itin, Valerie Raoul, and Judith Plessis, 373–85. Vancouver: University of
———
16 British Columbia Press, 2002.
* 17.5pt Pg
17 Ginsburg, Faye D.“Mediating Culture: Aboriginal Media and Social Transfor- ———
18 mations of Identity.” 1996. http://www.usc.edu/dept/ancntr/pdcomm/ Normal Page
19 ginsburg.html. PgEnds: TEX
20 ———. “The After-Life of Documentary: The Impact of You Are on Indian
21 Land.” Wide Angle 21, no. 2 (March 1999): 60–67.
[245], (5)
22 ———. “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Me-
23 dia.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Gins-
24 burg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 39–57. Berkeley and Los An-
25 geles: University of California Press, 2002.
26 Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. Media Worlds:
27 Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
28 California Press, 2002.
29 Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Over-
30 whelms Our Lives. New York: Holt, 2002.
31 Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema. New York: Routledge,
32 2002.
33 Goodyear, Frank H., III. Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief. Lincoln:
34 University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
35 Grant, Agnes. “Kanehsatake.” Canadian Dimension 28, no. 2 (March/April
36 1994): 18–21.
246 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Greer, Sandy. “Alanis Obomsawin.” Turtle Quarterly, spring/summer 1991,

2 22–27.
3 Hamilton, Annette. “Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians, and the National
4 Imaginary.” Australian Cultural History 9 (1990): 14-35.
5 Harewood, Adrian. “Alanis Obomsawin: A Portrait of a First Nation’s Film-
6 maker.” take one, June–September 2003. An interview with Alanis
7 Obomsawin. http://www.findarticles.com/cf dls/m0JSF/42 12/1047321
8 73/p1/article.jhtml.
9 Hays, Matthew. “Alanis Obomsawin Returns to Oka with Rocks at Whiskey
10 Trench.” Montreal Mirror, September 28, 2000. Available online at http://
11 www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2000/092800/film5.html.
12 Hebdige, Dick. Foreword to Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Tech- [246], (6
nological Horizons, by Eric Michaels, ix–xxv. Minneapolis: University of
13
Minnesota Press, 1994.
14
Hogarth, David. Documentary Television in Canada: From National Pub- Lines: 17
15
lic Service to Global Marketplace. Montreal: McGill-Queens University ———
16
Press, 2002. 4.0pt P
17 ———
Holmes, David, ed. Virtual Globalization: Virtual Spaces/Tourist Spaces. New
18 Normal P
York: Routledge, 2001.
19 PgEnds:
Hulan, Renée, ed. Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives.
20
Toronto: ecw, 1999.
21
Hyer, Sally.“Pablita Velarde: The Pueblo Artist as Cultural Broker.”In Between [246], (6
22
Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell
23
Szasz, 273–93. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
24 “Indigenising the Screen—Film-Maker Merata Mita.” Media Resources/
25 Tourism New Zealand, n.d. Available at http://media.newzealand.com/
26 index.cfm/purenz page/5E4AC01C-5DAB-46DB-B8D1-BCCDFEE907
27 F0.html.
28 Ivey, Roy. “Sovereignty—the Real Issue.” Sho-Ban News 21, no. 18 (May 3,
29 1996): 3.
30 Jaimes-Guerrero, Marianette. “Savage Erotica Exotica: Media Imagery of Na-
31 tive Women in North America.” In Native North America: Critical and
32 Cultural Perspectives, ed. Rénee Hulan, 187–210. Toronto: ecw, 1999.
33 James, Mertice M., and Dorothy Brown, eds. Book Review Digest, 1937. Vol.
34 33. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1938.
35 Jocks, Christopher. “Combing Out Snakes: Violence and the Construction
36 of Knowledge in Longhouse Traditions.” Paper presented at the annual
BIBLIOGRAPHY 247
1 meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Native Traditions in

2 the Americas Group, session “Knowing the World: Native American
3 Epistemologies,” Chicago, November 21, 1994.
4 Joe, Rita. Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaq Poet. Lincoln: Univer-
5 sity of Nebraska Press, 1996.
6 Jones, D. B. Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretative History of the National
7 Film Board of Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute/Deneau, 1981.
8 ———. The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board
9 of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
10 ———. “Brave New Film Board.” In North of Everything: English-Canadian
11 Cinema since 1980, ed. William Beard and Jerry White, 19–45. Alberta:
12 University of Alberta Press, 2002. [247], (7)
13 Kalafatic, Carol. “Knots.” In As We Are Now: Mixed Blood Essays on Race and
14 Identity, ed. William S. Penn, 67–81. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
Lines: 197 to
15 of California Press, 1997.
———
16 Kalant, Amelia. National Identity and the Conflict at Oka: Native Belonging
* 17.5pt Pg
17 and Myths of Postcolonial Nationhood in Canada. New York: Routledge, ———
18 2004. Normal Page
19 Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. PgEnds: TEX
20 New York: Routledge, 1997.
21 Keefer, Don. “Postmodern Anxieties over Hypermedia.” Paper presented
[247], (7)
22 at the conference “Computing and Philosophy,” New Haven ct, 1990.
23 Available at http://faculty.risd.edu/faculty/dkeefer/web/anx.htm.
24 Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln:
25 University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
26 Klein, Laura F., and Lillian A. Ackerman, eds. Women and Power in Native
27 North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
28 Kundera, Milan. Immortality. 1988. Translated by Peter Kussi. New York:
29 Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.
30 Lamche, Pascale. “Interview with Merata Mita.” Framework, no. 25 (1984):
31 2–11.
32 Langston, Marcia. “Grounded and Gendered: Aboriginal Women in Aus-
33 tralian Cinema.” In Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in
34 Australia, ed. Lisa French, 43–56. Victoria: Australian Catalogue Co.,
35 2003.
36 Latour, Bruno. “The Last Critique.” Harper’s, April 2004, 20–24.
248 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Lesage, Julia. “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film.”

2 Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 4 (fall 1978): 507–23.
3 Leuthold, Steven. “Historical Representation in Native Documentary.” Eth-
4 nohistory 44, no. 4 (fall 1997): 727–41.
5 ———. Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity. Austin: Uni-
6 versity of Texas Press, 1998.
7 Levitin, Jacqueline,Valerie Raoul, and Judith Plessis, eds. Women Filmmakers:
8 Refocusing. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002.
9 Lewis, Randolph. Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America.
10 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
11 ———. “The Native Roots of Modern Art: Rereading the Paintings of Leon
12 Polk Smith.” American Indian Quarterly 25 (winter 2001): 93–113. [248], (8
Lichtenstein, Nelson, Susan Strasser, Roy Rosenzweig, Stephen Brier, and
13
Joshua Brown, eds. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s
14
Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Lines: 22
15
“Liz Garbus—Confronting Humanity.” In Documentary Filmmakers Speak, ———
16
ed. Liz Stubbs, 109–26. New York: Allsworth, 2002. 4.0pt P
17 ———
Loach, Ken. “Death of a Nation.” Excerpted in Imagining Reality: The Faber
18 Normal P
Book of Documentary, ed. Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, 302–3.
19 PgEnds:
London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
20
Loft, Steve. “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Social Action: The Films of Alanis
21
Obomsawin.” Available at http://conseildesarts.ca/prizes/ggavma/xh127 [248], (8
22
240204281875000.htm ? subsiteurl = % 2fcanadacouncil%2farchives%2f
23
prizes%2fggvma%2f2001%2f2001–06-e.asp.
24 Louselle, André. Moirir à tue-tête/A Scream from Silence. Wiltshire: Flicks
25 Books, 2000.
26 Low, Brian L. nfb Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of
27 Canada, 1939–1989. Waterloo on: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2002.
28 Lysak, A. “Luhovy Named Best Editor.” Ukrainian Weekly 62, no. 5 (January
29 30, 1994): 10.
30 MacDonald, Kevin, and Mark Cousins, eds. Imagining Reality: The Faber
31 Book of Documentary. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
32 MacDonald, Robert. “Film Shows an Ugly Side of New Zealand.” Sydney
33 Morning Herald, July 17, 1984, 10.
34 Macdonald, Sandra. “Chairperson’s Message.” Available at http://www.nfb.
35 ca/publications/en/annualreports/rep1999–2000/04presidente00.html.
36 Mackenzie, Scott. “Société nouvelle: The Challenge for Change in the Alter-
BIBLIOGRAPHY 249
1 native Public Sphere.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 5, no. 2 (fall

2 1996): 67–84.
3 MacLaine, Craig, and Michael Baxandale. This Land Is Our Land: The Mo-
4 hawk Revolt at Oka. Montreal: Optimum, 1990.
5 Marcorelles, Louis. Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-
6 Making. Translated by I. Quigly. New York: Praeger, 1973.
7 Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
8 the Senses. Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2000.
9 Marsolais, Gilles. L’aventure du cinéma direct revisitée. Laval: Les 400 Coups,
10 1997.
11 Mayne, Judith. The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema.
12 Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. [249], (9)
McFarlane, Peter. “Stolen Land.” Canadian Forum, November 1990, 18–21.
13
McLaughlin, Janice. Feminist Social and Political Theory. New York: Palgrave,
14
2003. Lines: 259 to
15
Meyer, Carter Jones, and Diana Royer, eds. Selling the Indian: Commercializ- ———
16
ing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures. Tucson: University of 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
Arizona Press, 2001.
18 Normal Page
Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Hori-
19 PgEnds: TEX
zons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
20
Mihesuah, Devon A. American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities. Atlanta:
21
Clarity, 1997. [249], (9)
22
Miller, Christine, and Patricia Chuchryk, eds. Women of the First Nations:
23
Power, Wisdom, and Strength. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press,
24 1996.
25 Miller, Virginia P. “The Mi’kmaq: A Maritime Woodland Group.” In Na-
26 tive Peoples: The Canadian Experience, ed. R. Bruce Morrison and C.
27 Roderick Wilson, 324–52. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
28 Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
29 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
30 Mohawk, John. “On Sovereignty.” Akwesasne Notes 1, nos. 3–4 (December 31,
31 1995): 8.
32 Monastyrski, Jamie. “Aboriginal Peoples Network Adds Some Color to Tube.”
33 Indian Country Today (Lakota Times) 19, n. 29 (January 12, 2000): B6.
34 Moore, Rachel. “Marketing Alterity.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays
35 from V.A.R., 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 127–39. New York: Routledge,
36 1994.
250 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Moore, Rick. “Canada’s Challenge for Change: Documentary Film and Video
2 as an Exercise of Power through the Production of Cultural Reality.”
3 PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1987.
4 Morrison, Andrea P., ed. Justice for Natives: Searching for Common Ground.
5 Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
6 Morrison, Kenneth M. The Embattled Northeast: The Illusive Ideal of Alliance
7 in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
8 of California Press, 1984.
9 Nadel, Ira. Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art. London: Robson, 1994.
10 Nader, Laura. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying
11 Up.”In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell H. Hymes, 284–311. New York:
12 Random House, 1972. [250], (1
Nash, Alice. “Odanak durant les années 1920s: Un prisme reflétant d’histoire
13
abénaquise” (Odanak in the 1920s: A prism of Abenaki history). Trans-
14
lated by Claude Gélinas. Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 31, no. 1 Lines: 29
15
(2002): 17–33. ———
16
Nash, Alice, and Réjean Obomsawin. “Theophile Panadis (1889–1966): An 4.0pt P
17 ———
Abenaki Guide.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33, no. 2 (2003):
18 Normal P
75–91.
19 PgEnds:
National Film Board Film and Video Catalog, 1999–2000. Montreal: National
20
Film Board of Canada, 1999.
21
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. [250], (1
22
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
23
———. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture.
24 Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
25 ———. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University
26 Press, 2001.
27 Niezen, Ronald. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of
28 Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
29 Obomsawin, Alanis. Bush Lady. Wawa Productions, 1988. lp.
30 Olson, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delacorte, 1978.
31 Parks, Lisa, and Shanti Kumar, eds. Planet tv: A Global Television Reader.
32 New York: New York University Press, 2002.
33 Perkins, H. F. “Review of Eugenics in Vermont.” Vermont Review, Septem-
34 ber/October 1926, 56–59.
35 Pertusati, Linda. In Defense of Mohawk Land: Ethnopolitical Conflict in Native
36 North America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
1 Pick, Zuzana. “Storytelling and Resistance: The Documentary Practice of

2 Alanis Obomsawin.” In Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cin-
3 ema, ed. Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine
4 Marchessault, 76–93. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
5 Pico, Anthony R. “Sovereignty Is Absolute for Native Nations.” Indian Coun-
6 try Today 17, no. 1 (July 7, 1998): A5.
7 The Positio of the Historical Section of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on
8 the Introduction of the Cause for Beatification and Canonization and on
9 the Virtues of the Servant of God Katharine Tekakwitha the Lily of the
10 Mohawks—Being the Original Documents First Published at the Vatican
11 Polyglot Press Now Done into English and Presented for the Edification of
12 the Faithful. New York: Fordham University Press, 1940. [251], (11)
Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context.
13
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
14
Prins, Harald E. L. The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Lines: 327 to
15
Survival. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996. ———
16
———. “The Paradox of Primitivism: Native Rights and the Problem of 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
Imagery in Cultural Survival Films.” Visual Anthropology 9 (1997): 243–
18 Normal Page
66.
19 PgEnds: TEX
Reid, Jennifer. Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter: British and Mi’kmaq
20
in Acadia, 1700–1867. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995.
21
Restoule, Jean-Paul. “How Indians Are Read: The Representation of Abo- [251], (11)
22
riginality in Films by Native and Non-Native Directors.” ma thesis,
23
Department of Communication Studies, University of Windsor, 1997.
24 Roberts, Kenneth. Northwest Passage. Garden City ny: Doubleday, Doran,
25 1936.
26 Rogers, Robert. Journals of Major Robert Rogers. London: J. Millan, 1765.
27 Rosenthal, Alan, ed. The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Mak-
28 ing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
29 Roy, Audrey Jane, with Taiaiake Alfred. “Legislation Affecting Canada’s Na-
30 tive People.” In The Native North American Almanac, ed. Duane Cham-
31 pagne, 548–60. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2001.
32 Runningwolf, Michael B., and Patricia Clark Smith. On the Trail of Elder
33 Brother: Glous’gap Stories of the Mi’kmaq Indians. New York: Persea,
34 2000.
35 Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West.
36 New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 2002.
252 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Sawchuk, Joe. “Negotiating an Identity: Métis Political Organization, the

2 Canadian Government, and Competing Concepts of Aboriginality.”
3 American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 2000): 73–92.
4 Saxberg, Kelly. “Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance.” Canadian Dimension
5 27, no. 5 (September/October 1993): 34.
6 Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance. New
7 Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1985.
8 Silverman, Jason. “Uncommon Visions: The Films of Loretta Todd.” In North
9 of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed. William Beard
10 and Jerry White, 376–89. Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2002.
11 Singer, Beverly. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens. Minneapolis: University of
12 Minnesota Press, 2001. [252], (1
Smith, Leo. “Filmmaker Makes the Most of a Disappointing Visit with Her
13
Navajo Grandmother.” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1991, j-20.
14
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Lines: 35
15
People. London: Zed, 1999. ———
16
Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “Toward a Third Cinema.” In 4.0pt P
17 ———
Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael
18 Normal P
Chanan, 17–29. London: British Film Institute, 1983.
19 PgEnds:
“Speaker Offers Some Good Ideas.” Goshen in News, September 20, 2002.
20
Available online at http://www.goshennews.com/news/files/2002/9/9–
21
20-2002/edit.html. [252], (1
22
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
23
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge ma: Harvard University
24 Press, 1999.
25 “Standoff on Kanehsatake.” Maclean’s 106, no. 40 (October 4, 1993): 12–14.
26 Stangel, Foster. “Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin Brings New Documentary to
27 Minnesota.” The Circle 22, no. 2 (February 28, 2001): 10.
28 Stephens, Mitchell. The Rise of the Image and the Fall of the Word. New York:
29 Oxford University Press, 1998.
30 Steven, Peter. Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video.
31 Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993.
32 Stewart, Kathleen. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an
33 “Other” America. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1996.
34 Stoney, George. “You Are on Indian Land.” In The Documentary Conscience:
35 A Casebook in Film Making, ed. Alan Rosenthal, 346–58. Berkeley and
36 Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
1 Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to

2 Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
3 Szasz, Margaret Connell, ed. Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural
4 Broker. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
5 Torres, Sasha, ed. Living Color: Race and Television in the United States.
6 Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1998.
7 Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Femi-
8 nism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
9 Turner, Terence. “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in
10 Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples.” In Media
11 Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-
12 Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 75–89. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University [253], (13)
of California Press, 2002.
13
Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Why Literature?” New Republic, May 14, 2001, 31–36.
14
Vetromile, Eugene. The Abenaki and Their History; or, Historical Notices on Lines: 387 to
15
the Aborigines of Acadia. New York: James B. Kirker, 1866. ———
16
Vizenor, Gerald, and A. Robert Lee. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: Uni- 4.0pt PgV
17 ———
versity of Nebraska Press, 1999.
18 Normal Page
Waldman, Diane, and Janet Walker, eds. Feminism and Documentary. Min-
19 PgEnds: TEX
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
20
Waugh, Thomas, ed. “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the
21
Committed Documentary. Metuchen nj: Scarecrow, 1984. [253], (13)
22
Weatherford, Elizabeth, ed. Native Americans on Film and Video. New York:
23
Museum of the American Indian, 1981.
24 Weiner, James. “Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Pol-
25 itics.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 2 (1997): 197–236.
26 White, Curtis. The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves.
27 New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
28 White, Jerry.“Alanis Obomsawin, Documentary Form, and the Canadian Na-
29 tion(s).”In North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed.
30 William Beard and Jerry White, 364–75. Alberta: University of Alberta
31 Press, 2002.
32 White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
33 Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press,
34 1991.
35 Wicken, William C. Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial: History, Land, and Donald
36 Marshall Junior. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
254 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Wilson, Pamela. “Confronting the ‘Indian Problem’: Media Discourses of

2 Race, Ethnicity, Nation, and Empire in 1950s America.” In Living Color:
3 Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres, 35–61. Durham
4 nc: Duke University Press, 1998.
5 Wilson, Terry. “Celluloid Sovereignty: Hollywood’s ‘History’ of Native Amer-
6 icans.” In Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, ed. John Denvir, 199–224.
7 Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
8 Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its
9 Legitimations. London: bfi, 1995.
10 Wiseman, Frederick. “Editing as a Four-Way Conversation.” In Imagining Re-
ality: The Faber Book of Documentary, ed. Kevin MacDonald and Mark [Last Pag
11
Cousins, 278–82. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Originally published in [254], (1
12
Documentary Film Quarterly, no. 1 (spring 1994): 4–6.
13
Wiseman, Frederick Matthew. The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the
14
Abenaki Nation. Hanover nh: University Press of New England, 2001. Lines: 41
15
Woods, Lysandra. “Srinivas Krishna and the New Canadian Cinema.” In ———
16
North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed. William 150.32
17 ———
Beard and Jerry White, 206–15. Alberta: University of Alberta Press,
18 Normal P
2002.
19 Worth, Sol, John Adair, and Richard Chalfen, eds. Through Navajo Eyes: An PgEnds:
20 Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Albuquerque:
21 University of New Mexico Press, 1997. [254], (1
22 York, Geoffrey, and Loreen Pindera. People of the Pines: The Warriors and the
23 Legacy of Oka. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1991.
24 Zimmermann, Patricia. States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democ-
25 racy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1
2
3
4 index
5
6
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [255], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 1
15 Abenakis: eugenics and, 5–6, 220n13; Bowman, Arlene, 79–84, 126
gender roles among, 76; history of, Bruchac, Joseph, 13, 67 ———
16
2–9, 61–64, 195–96; language of, 2; Burdeau, George, 124, 179 0.0pt PgV
17 oral tradition of, 61–64 Burns, Ken, 134 ———
18 Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, Normal Page
19 196–97, 238n66 Came, Barry, 102 PgEnds: TEX
20 Ackerman, Lillian A., 74 Canada: documentary’s role in national
Acts of Defiance (MacLeod), 116–17 identity of, 134–35; Obomawin’s frus-
21
Agee, James, 143–44, 150 tration with mainstream attitudes of, [255], (1)
22 Alexie, Sherman, 125–26 46, 119, 200; Obomsawin’s praise for,
23 “Amerindian autohistory,” 140 201; stereotypical image of, xiv, 108;
24 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 104 treatment of Native people of, xiv,
Appleford, Robert, 144 46, 48, 50–55, 58, 88–95, 108, 159–60,
25
Armstrong, Jeannette, 76 171
26 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Kunuk), Canadian film studies, xiv
27 125 Canadian television, 91–94, 109, 165, 171
28 Atsenhaienton, 178, 182 Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki), 203
Cardinal, Gil, 30
29
Bailey, Cameron, 58 Cardinal, Tantoo, 81
30 The Ballad of Crowfoot (Dunn), 30 Carr, Lena, 79–84, 125–26
31 Baudrillard, Jean, 66 Challenge for Change (nfb program),
32 Beaucage, Marjorie, 178 31, 130–31, 232n16
33 Beautiful Losers (Cohen), 13–22, 149 Chirac, Jacques, 125
Berry, Wendell, 46, 120–21 Ciaccia, John, 88–89
34
Bhaba, Homi, 136 cinema of sovereignty, xxii, 137, 173,
35 The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 9 179–92
36 Bourdieu, Pierre, 204–5 Cizek, Katerina, 197
256 INDEX
1 Cohen, Leonard, 13–22, 149 Flaherty, Robert, 155

2 Cold Journey (Defalco), 32–33 Forgotten Warriors (Todd), 80
Coles, Robert, 36 Fulford, Robert, 132
3
Concert for the People of Kampuchea
4 (McMillan), 46 Gabriel, Ellen, 96, 97, 99, 108, 110
5 Cranmer, Barb, 79–84 Garroutte, Eva, xvi, 184–85
6 Cross, Ronnie (“Lasagne”), 101 Geddes, Carol, 66, 79–84, 126
Crothers, Leo, 54 Getino, Octavio, 138
7 Czach, Liz, 168 Giguére, Nicole, 77
8 Ginsburg, Faye, 131, 180, 237n46, 228n16
9 David, Dan, 91 Gitlin, Todd, 154–55
Day, Gordon, 61 Goodine, Agatha Marie, 45
10
de Antonio, Emile, xix, 141, 155 Greaves, William, 31
11 Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief (Geddes), Grierson, John, 29, 126–33
12 81 Gwishalaayt: The Spirit Wraps around [256], (2
13 documentary film: and the “allure of You (Cranmer), 82
the real,” 133–39; as “Amerindian
14
autohistory,” 140; Bálazs on, 101; Hallowell, A. Irving, 195 Lines: 12
15 compared to literature, 147–49; di- Hands of History (Todd), 82
———
16 dacticism of, 60; as employed by Harlan County, U.S.A. (Kopple), 108
indigenous people, xv, 122–26; as Harold of Orange (Vizenor), 125
0.0pt P
17 ———
extension of oral tradition, 64–65; Hebdige, Dick, 188
18 Short Pag
Griersonian approach to, 127–33; as Hogarth, David, 134, 136–37
19 historiography, 139–41; independence Hollywood: depictions of Native peo- PgEnds:
20 of, xx–xxii; as limitations of, 136–38, ple, 13; depictions of Native women,
21 146; literature on, 126, 146; “middle 73–74
ground,” 117–21; and national iden- Horne, Randy (“Spudwrench”), 106, 111 [256], (2
22 tity, 134–35; Obomsawin’s faith in,
23 120; power of, 146–49, 198; reputa- Indian Act of 1876, 7, 43–44, 220n17,
24 tion of, 153; and social change, 55, 223n8
25 142–43 Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, 177
documentary studies, 126, 146, 180 indigenous aesthetics, 69
26 Dorris, Michael, 64 indigenous media: dominance of doc-
27 Dunn, Willie, 30 umentary in, 122–26; growth of,
28 175; interest in, xviii–xix, 236n41;
epistephilia, 142 by Native women in North Amer-
29
eugenics, 5–6 ica, 79–84; in New Zealand, xiii,
30 Eyre, Chris, 125 72; Obomsawin’s belief in, 200; and
31 primitivism, 188; in South America,
32 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore), 198, 203 180. See also cinema of sovereignty;
feminism, 40–41, 71–72, 227n14 documentary film; representational
33
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 6 sovereignty
34 Fiske, John, xxii indigenous representation, politics of,
35 Fitzgerald, Paul, 164 173–77
36
INDEX 257
1 international indigenism, 184 Marcorelles, Louis, 153

2 In the Heart of Big Mountain (Osawa), Marker, Chris, 204
81 Marks, Laura, 97–98
3
Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, 238n67 Marshall decision, 165
4 In Whose Honor? (Rosenstein), 175 Masayesva, Victor, xvi, xxiii
5 Metallic, Gary, 170–71
6 Jaimes-Guerrero, Marianette, xxvi Métis, 55
Jarecki, Andrew, 126 Michaels, Eric, 179, 191
7 Jocks, Christopher, 176 Miigam’agan, 190
8 Joe, Rita, 161–62 Mi’kmaq: history of, 157–60, 193; im-
9 Jones, D. B., 59, 111 portance of fishing to, 156–63; in In-
cident at Restigouche (Obomsawin),
10
Kahentiiosta, 96–97, 108, 110–11 48–53, 172; in Is the Crown at War
11 Kalafatic, Carol, xxv with Us? (Obomsawin), 163–69;
12 Kaplan, E. Ann, 75 mainstream attitudes toward, 162; [257], (3)
13 Katadotis, Peter, 53 Marshall decision and, 165; in Our
Kenner, Hugh, 151 Nationhood (Obomsawin), 169–73;
14
Keokuk, 174–75 poetry of, 161 Lines: 247 to
15 Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn, xix, 12, 180 Millhouse (de Antonio), 155
———
16 Kinaalda: Navajo Rite of Passage (Carr), Minh-ha, Trinh T., 84–85, 126, 155
81–82 Mita, Merata, xiii, 60, 72, 79
0.0pt PgV
17 ———
Klein, Laura F., 74 Mitchell, W. J. T., 199
18 Short Page
Kopple, Barbara, 108, 141 Mohawks: Oka crisis, 88–95; in Ka-
19 Kundera, Milan, 173 nehsatake (Obomsawin), 95–110; in PgEnds: TEX
20 Kunuk, Zacharias, 124–25 My Name is Kahentiiosta (Obom-
21 sawin), 110–11; in Rocks at Whisky
Latour, Bruno, 200 Trench (Obomsawin), 114–15; in [257], (3)
22 Lavell, Jeannette Corbiere, 43 Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man
23 Laxwesa Wa: Strength of the River (Obomsawin), 111–14
24 (Cranmer), 81 Mokuka, 180
25 The Learning Path (Todd), 81 Moore, Michael, xix, 126, 198, 203
Lessard, Lucien, 48, 51–52 Moore, Rachel, 188
26 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee), Mulroney, Brian, 104
27 144–45
28 Leuthold, Stephen, 137, 139, 140, 180 Nash, Alice, 195
Lighting the Seventh Fire, 80, 82–83 National Film Board (nfb): Challenge
29
Little Big Man (Penn), 74, 125 for Change, 31, 232n16; didactic films
30 Loach, Ken, 146 by, 60; discourages Obomsawin from
31 Luhovy, Yurij, 95, 107 interviewing whites, 49; Obomsawin
32 criticizes, 48; Obomsawin joins, 28–
MacDougall, David, 179 35; Obomsawin praises, 53; Studio D
33
MacDougall, Judith, 179 of the, 30, 72
34 MacLeod, Alex, 116 National Native Women’s Conference,
35 A Man Called Horse (Silverstein), 74 43
36
258 INDEX
1 Native image in photography, 173–75 mainstream Canadians, 46, 119, 200;

2 Native women: films by 73, 79–84; funding her films, 40, 134; gendered
mainstream representations of 73– gaze of, 70–87; giving back to Native
3
74; Obomsawin on, 39–45, 71–73, 81, communities, 180–81; and impact
4 111, 165–66; as teachers, 76 of her films, 55, 142–43; and John
5 Naturally Native (Red-Horse), 125 Grierson, 32, 126–33; and Leonard
6 Nault, Robert, 166–67 Cohen, 16–22; linguistic abilities of,
Navajo Talking Picture (Bowman), 81, 23; and “media warfare” at Oka, 104,
7
83–84 200; “middle ground” approach of,
8 Neale, Colin, 109 xviii, 117–21; on Native men, 38; on
9 Nichols, Bill, 126, 135, 142 Native women, 39–45, 71–73, 81, 111,
10 Niro, Shelly, 125 165–66; at nfb, 28–35, 48–49, 53; as
Northwest Passage (Vidor), 9–13, 196 nonfiction auteur, 71; on objectifica-
11 tion, 22; and pan-tribalism, 47, 64,
12 Obomsawin, Alanis: and the Abenaki 100; parents of, 3, 6, 14, 15, 45; and [258], (4
13 renaissance, 195–96; and Aboriginal problems with cbc, 109; and pro-
14 Peoples Television Network, 196– duction values, 47; racism and, 6, 8,
97, 238n66; accomplishment of, xv; 9–13, 16, 39; on “radical center,” 150, Lines: 37
15 adolescence of, 14, 15, 18–22; as ad- 200; reception of, 109–10; reputation ———
16 vocate for children, 36–38; 53–55, of, xii–xiii; as singer, 14, 24–28, 47;
0.0pt P
17 63, 86–87; aesthetic strategies of, 51; skepticism toward experts, 185–86;
———
on animals, 28, 226n48; awards and sound’s importance to, 64, 149; on
18 Normal P
honors, xv, 109, 150, 197; band sta- sovereignty, 52–53; as storyteller, 58–
19 tus of, 3; birth of, 1; in bohemian 69; and Studio One, 196; as subject PgEnds:
20 Montreal, 23–24; challenges public of Alanis!, 28; on substance abuse,
21 memory, 79; childhood of, 5, 7–8, 44–45, 55–57; thematic emphases of,
12; cinematic vision of, 57–58, 87; 100, 163, 168–69; universalist message [258], (4
22
and classical rhetoric, 69; compas- of, 37, 143–46; use of ironic juxtapo-
23 sion of, 86–87; compared to Native sition, 99; use of Native language by,
24 women filmmakers, 78–79; compared 42; work as model, 22–23
25 to non-Native women filmmak- ——— Works: Amisk, 45–48, 58;
ers in Canada, 77–78; compared to Christmas at Moose Factory, 36–
26
William Greaves, 31–32; as consultant 38; Incident at Restigouche, 48–53,
27 for nfb, 32; courage at Oka, 93–95; 156, 172; Is the Crown at War with
28 criticism of cinematic style of, 59; Us? 163–69; Kanehsatake: 270 Years
29 as culture broker role, xviii, 118–20; of Resistance, 88–110, 155; Le Patro
daughter Kisos and, 40, 132; dis- Le Prévost: 80 Years Later, 224n24;
30
couraged from interviewing whites, Mother of Many Children, 40–45,
31 49; and distribution of her films, 71; My Name is Kanehtiiosta, 110–12;
32 108–9, 189; dreams of, 66–68; edu- No Address, 57; Our Nationhood,
33 cational kits of, 33–34; emphasis on 169–73; Poundmaker’s Lodge, 57;
women’s voices, 81; even-handedness Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary
34
of, 99, 103, 116; and faith in docu- of a Métis Child, 53–55, 68; Rocks at
35 mentary, 120; feminism and, 40–41, Whisky Trench, 114–15; Spudwrench—
36 71–72, 227n14; and frustration with Kahnawake Man, 111–14
INDEX 259
1 Obomsawin, Olivine, 61–63 Rogers, Major Robert, 9–13, 15, 22, 62–
2 Occidentalism, 183, 237n50 63, 160
Odanak, 2, 7, 34, 62–63 Rosenstein, Jay, 175
3
Oka Crisis: background on 88–95; me- Rouch, Jean, 154
4 dia coverage of, 91–92; Obomsawin Runningwater, Bird, xv, 183
5 becomes involved in, 92–95
6 Olson, Tillie, xxiii Salesman (Maysles), 155
On and Off the Res with Charlie Hill Salmon, Wilma, 43
7
(Osawa), 82 Sandweiss, Martha, 174
8 Osawa, Sandra Day, 79–84, 126, 179 The Searchers (Ford), 75
9 othering (as process), xvii, xxii Siddon, Tom, 91, 99–100
10 “other visions,” xvii, xxvi, 136, 154, 199, Silko, Leslie Marmon, 65
203 Simpson, Audra, 178
11 Ouellette, Jean, 88–90, 107 Singer, Beverley, xix, 180
12 [259], (5)
Sioui, Georges E., 140
13 Panadis, Théophile, 7, 8, 14, 61, 64, 69, Skidders, Robert (“Mad Jap”), 96, 105
14 195, 221n32, 225n34
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 183
Patu! (Mita), 79 Lines: 398 to
15 Smoke Signals (Eyre), xvi, 125
Pepper’s Powwow (Osawa), 81 ———
Solanas, Fernando, 138
16 photography, Native image in, 173–75
Song Journey (Bowman), 81, 83–84 0.0pt PgV
17 Pick, Zuzana, xiv, xv, 51, 57, 96–97, 121,
sovereignty, Native, 170, 177–81. See also ———
150
18 cinema of sovereignty; representa- Normal Page
pictorial turn, 199–200
19 Picturing a People: George Johnston,
tional sovereignty PgEnds: TEX
20 Starowicz, Mark, 109
Tlingit Photographer (Geddes), 82
States of Emergency (Zimmerman), 152–
21 primitivism, 188
Prins, Harald, 187–88
53 [259], (5)
22 Stephens, Mitchell, 148
Poirier, Anne Claire, 226n13
23 Potts, Lillian, 44
Stewart, Kathleen, 140
24 Stoney, George, 31, 131, 155, 233n18
Qutuwas: People Gathering Together Supersize Me (Spurlock), 203
25
(Cranmer), 80
26 Taiaiake, Alfred, 177–78
27 radical indigenism, 184–85 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 8, 17–19, 150
28 reality programs, xxii, 121, 126, 203, Terranova, Tiziana, 154
204. See also documentary film Titicut Follies (Wiseman), 141
29
Reassemblage (Minh-ha), 155 T’line: The Rendering of Wealth (Cran-
30 mer), 81
reciprocity, 191
31 Red Horse, Valerie, 125 Today is a Good Day: Remembering
32 Redroad, Randy, 125–26 Chief Dan George (Todd), 80–82
33 representational sovereignty, 175, 181– Todd, Loretta, 66, 197
92, 202 Tracy, Spencer, 11
34
residential schools, 42 Traverse, Bill, 100
35 Return of the Country (Hicks), 125 Triumph of the Will (Reifenstahl), 126
36 Roberts, Kenneth, 10 Turner, Terence, 180
260 INDEX
1 Usual and Accustomed Places (Osawa), White, Richard, xvi, 117

2 80 Wiseman, Frederick (filmmaker), 141,
155
3
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 146–49 Wiseman, Frederick Matthew (writer),
4 Velarde, Pablita, 119 5, 7, 196
5 Verrall, Robert, 28–29, 32–33 Wolfe, Tom, 148
Vidor, King, 9, 11 Wounded Knee, 88
6
Vizenor, Gerald, 125, 179, 186, 194
7 Yazzie, Sam, 180
8 Ward, James, 167 You are on Indian Land (Stoney), 31,
9 Watson, Patrick, 109 100
Waugh, Thomas, 58, 224n26
10
White, Jerry, xv, 58–60, 65–66, Zimmermann, Patricia, xvi, xix, 136, [Last Pag
11 127 152–53, 203, 204
12 [260], (6
13
14
Lines: 54
15
———
16
345.68
17 ———
18 Normal P
19 * PgEnds: P
20
21
[260], (6
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
1 In the American Indian Lives series
2
3 I Stand in the Center of the Good Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer
4 Interviews with Contemporary A Story of Survival
Native American Artists By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
5
Edited by Lawrence Abbott
6 Essie’s Story
7 Authentic Alaska The Life and Legacy of
Voices of Its Native Writers a Shoshone Teacher
8
Edited by Susan B. Andrews and By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally
9 McBeth
John Creed
10
Dreaming the Dawn Song of Rita Joe [First Page]
11
Conversations with Native Artists Autobiography of a Mi’kmaq Poet
12 [261], (1)
and Activists By Rita Joe
13
By E. K. Caldwell Viet Cong at Wounded Knee
14 Introduction by Elizabeth Woody The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist Lines: 0 to 2
15 By Woody Kipp
Chief ———
16
The Life History of Eugene Catch Colt 0.0pt PgV
17 ———
Delorme, Imprisoned Santee Sioux By Sidner J. Larson
18 Edited by Inéz Cardozo-Freeman Normal Page
19 Alanis Obomsawin:
* PgEnds: Page
Winged Words The Vision of a Native Filmmaker
20
American Indian Writers Speak By Randolph Lewis
21
Edited by Laura Coltelli Alex Posey [261], (1)
22
Life, Letters and Speeches Creek Poet, Journalist, and
23
By George Copway Humorist
24 By Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.
(Kahgegagahbowh)
25
Edited by A. LaVonne Brown First to Fight
26 Ruoff and Donald B. Smith By Henry Mihesuah
27 Edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah
Life Lived Like a Story
28
Life Stories of Three Yukon Mourning Dove
29
Native Elders A Salishan Autobiography
30 By Julie Cruikshank in Edited by Jay Miller
31 collaboration with Angela Sidney,
I’ll Go and Do More
32 Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned
Annie Dodge Wauneka, Navajo
33 LaDonna Harris Leader and Activist
34 A Comanche Life By Carolyn Niethammer
35 By LaDonna Harris
36 Edited by H. Henrietta Stockel
1 Elias Cornelius Boudinot No One Ever Asked Me
2 A Life on the Cherokee Border The World War II Memoirs of
3 By James W. Parins an Omaha Indian Soldier
By Hollis D. Stabler
4 John Rollin Ridge
Edited by Victoria Smith
5 His Life and Works
6 By James W. Parins Blue Jacket
Warrior of the Shawnees
7 Singing an Indian Song
By John Sugden
8 A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle
9 By Dorothy R. Parker I Tell You Now
Autobiographical Essays by
10 Crashing Thunder
Native American Writers [Last Pag
11 The Autobiography of an
Edited by Brian Swann and
12 American Indian [262], (2
Arnold Krupat
Edited by Paul Radin
13
Postindian Conversations
14 Turtle Lung Woman’s
By Gerald Vizenor and Lines: 25
15 Granddaughter
A. Robert Lee
By Delphine Red Shirt and ———
16
Lone Woman Chainbreaker 0.0pt P
17 The Revolutionary War Memoirs ———
18 Telling a Good One
of Governor Blacksnake Normal P
The Process of a Native American
19 As told to Benjamin Williams * PgEnds: P
Collaborative Biography
20 Edited by Thomas S. Abler
By Theodore Rios and
21 Kathleen Mullen Sands Standing in the Light [262], (2
22 A Lakota Way of Seeing
Sacred Feathers
23 By Severt Young Bear and
The Reverend Peter Jones
24 R. D. Theisz
(Kahkewaquonaby) and the
25 Mississauga Indians Sarah Winnemucca
26 By Donald B. Smith By Sally Zanjani
27 Grandmother’s Grandchild
28 My Crow Indian Life
29 By Alma Hogan Snell
30 Edited by Becky Matthews
Foreword by Peter Nabokov
31
32
33
34
35
36

Alanis Obomsawin - The Vision of A Native Filmmaker PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alanis Obomsawin - The Vision of A Native Filmmaker PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

r a n dolph lewis

29 isbn-13: 978-0-8032-2963-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1 “Really?” It seemed so improbable—Obomsawin’s ﬁlms had al-

1 Costnerian operas or Michael Eisner’s animated minions. If colorful,

1 sawin’s signiﬁcance. Jerry White praised her as “a true social ﬁlm-

1 ketry, painting, and sculpture—all of which might seem in synch with

1 book follows a rather traditional chronological sequence. Here in the

1 and visual anthropology communities. Several books have appeared

1 retrenchments, attacks against cultural difference, and conservative

1 on documentary expression now growing within American studies,

1 powerful culture in the equation is able to represent itself, rather

1 to something more than mere stereotype, as I hope this book will

1 there, where I fulﬁll the inevitable curiosity of the reader, where

1 tionality, whose tropes I have already exploited to decent effect, I can

1 what is now called Vermont, a woman was washing clothes in the

1 Native presence. For example, the popular writer Dorothy Canﬁeld

1 the most conservative traditionalists in the tribe. Panadis was such a

1 Native girls like Obomsawin sat in their churches and classrooms.

1 years, the Atlantic Monthly exclaimed that it was “a great historical

1 ﬁlled with uncertainties when in 1944, after several agonizing years in

1 Abenaki girl in the back row. “I made my stand there,” Obomsawin

1 lyrical richness that seems out of place in contemporary popular

1 Cohen imagines the Native female body as a symbol of cultural and

1 the Collective Will to which we all contribute?” he asks in assessing

1 affront, an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract,

1 pushing a larger cultural transformation soon to sweep Canadian cul-

1 even a whisper for a painfully long moment. “You know on stage a

1 lifelong vegetarian. Performing in schools for both white and Native

1 minority position in terms of race), and their similarities extend

1 The drawings continue to ﬂip past, and the voices continue to

1 Mother of Many Children

1 The ﬁlm that received this praise, Mother of Many Children, is a

1 to an Ojibway grandmother making a doll from leaves that will turn

1 would have no trouble deciphering the original voice on the sound

1 ing in 1981 to an ofﬁcial condemnation from the un Human Rights

1 many ways a turning point for Native resistance against government

1 The result was a far more aggressive form of political documentary

1 situation in another way]?” The camera pans with agonizing slowness

1 remembered for generations, a sentiment that will be borne out in her

1 prompt a change in attitude toward Native children under the care

1 overlap). In Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987), Obomsawin

1 uses the same language as Bailey to describe her motivation. “I love

1 her ongoing project. In a brilliant summation of her stylistic accom-

1 [F]ather gathered everyone—it was dark, of course—in the

1 passing images, as in Incident at Restigouche, or as the main subjects,

1 inﬂection, facial expression, and dramatic gesture in a protocinematic

1 seem more appropriate to ﬁction ﬁlmmakers like Fellini or the Coen

1 government’s mistreatment of Native youths like Richard Cardinal.

1 political commitment than a product of her generational and class

1 the soft-focus romanticism of Ramona and Pocahontas, while the

1 At ﬁrst Obomsawin was sui generis. I have already suggested that,

1 day.”10 If women’s roles in Native cultures have been too diverse to

1 most of her white counterparts in Quebec in the mid-1970s, she made

1 and their continuing legacies in the lives of Native people. Almost

1 Dan George (1998), Osawa’s Pepper’s Powwow (1995), or Obomsawin’s

1 narrates her thirteen-year-old niece’s experience of a sacred ceremony

1 Trinh has taken some shots at certain scholars such as anthropologists

1 documentarians who have pointed their cameras at, say, underprivi-

1 consulted or compensated, and that, in my opinion, is unfair and un-

1 nawake and Akwesasne.”4 In response to Mohawk deﬁance, the local

1 shooting of Corporal Lemay, bringing in the armed forces seemed

1 Warriors with their noms de guerre like Spudwrench, Wiz-

1 ness to remain inside the barricades to record the unfolding events,