Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context (Film and Media Studies) 1554583357, 9781554583355

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
PART I: DREAM MAKERS
INTRODUCTION: Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media
ONE: He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film
PART II: DECOLONIZING HISTORIES
TWO: Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices
THREE: Taking Pictures B(l)ack: The Work of Tracey Moffatt
FOUR: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/Colonial Cinema
FIVE: Australian Indigenous Short Film as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair’s The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk
SIX: "Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away”: Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes
PART III: MEDIATING PRACTICES
SEVEN: Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/New Zealand
EIGHT: Superhighway across the Sky ... Aboriginal New Media Arts in Australia: A Remix and Email Conversation between Adam Szymanski and Jenny Fraser
NINE: On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South
PART IV: DOCUMENTARY APPROACHES
TEN: The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project: Matching Product with Process in New Forms of Documentary
ELEVEN: "Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone”: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew
TWELVE: Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro
THIRTEEN: "I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are”: Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd’s Hands of History
PART V: OTHER PERSPECTIVES
FOURTEEN: Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette’s Heater
FIFTEEN: Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk
Glossary
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P
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T
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Bibliography
Index
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Citation preview

Reverse Shots

Film and Media Studies Series Film studies is the critical exploration of cinematic texts as art and entertainment, as well as the industries that produce them and the audiences that consume them. Although a medium barely one hundred years old, film is already transformed through the emergence of new media forms. Media studies is an interdisciplinary field that considers the nature and effects of mass media upon individuals and society and analyzes media content and representations. Despite changing modes of consumption—especially the proliferation of individuated viewing technologies—film has retained its cultural dominance into the 21st century, and it is this transformative moment that the WLU Press Film and Media Studies series addresses. Our Film and Media Studies series includes topics such as identity, gender, sexuality, class, race, visuality, space, music, new media, aesthetics, genre, youth culture, popular culture, consumer culture, regional/national cinemas, film policy, film theory, and film history. Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submissions. For further information, please contact the Series editors, all of whom are in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University: Dr. Philippa Gates Email: [email protected] Dr. Russell Kilbourn Email: [email protected] Dr. Ute Lischke Email: [email protected] Department of English and Film Studies Wilfrid Laurier University 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5 Canada Phone: 519-884-0710 Fax: 519-884-8307

Reverse Shots Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context

Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, editors

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Reverse shots : indigenous film and media in an international context / Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, editors. (Film and media studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-55458-335-5 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-55458-425-3 (pdf).— ISBN 978-1-55458-426-0 (epub) 1. Indigenous films—History and criticism. 2. Indigenous peoples in motion pictures. 3. Indigenous peoples and mass media. I. Knabe, Susan, 1962–, author, editor II. Pearson, Wendy Gay, 1954–, author, editor III. Series: Film and media studies series PN1995.9.I49R49 2015

791.43’63529

C2014-903397-4 C2014-903398-2

R

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover image: Coyote o:t Ku’ty (Haute Couture) Series, #1 (mixed media, 2008), by Renée E. Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design. The chapter “Ka Whawhai Tonu Māou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoar/New Zealand,” by Jo Smith and Sue Abel, appeared in different form in the New Zealand Journal of Media Studies 11.1 (June 2008). © 2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy. Printed in Canada Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

pa rt i

IX XI

dr e a m m a k er s i n t roduc t ion

Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe

3

on e

He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film Michael Greyeyes

pa rt ii

41

dec ol on i z i ng histor ie s t wo

Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices 6 1 Ernie Blackmore three

Taking Pictures B(l)ack: The Work of Tracey Moffatt Susan Knabe

81

V

VI

CONTENTS

f ou r

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/ Colonial Cinema 1 0 3 Kerstin Knopf five

Australian Indigenous Short Film as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair’s The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk Colleen McGloin

131

si x

“Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away”: Representations of the Pre-Colonial Wor d in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes 1 4 3 Wendy Gay Pearson

pa rt iii m edi ati ng pr ac tices se v e n

Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/ New Zealand 1 7 5 Jo Smith and Sue Abel e igh t

Superhighway across the Sky ... Aboriginal New Media Arts in Australia: A Remix and Email Conversation between Adam Szymanski and Jenny Fraser 1 8 9 Jenny Fraser and Adam Szymanski nine

On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South 1 9 9 Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove

pa rt i v doc um e n ta ry a pproach e s ten

The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project: Matching Product with Process in New Forms of Documentary 2 2 1 Stephen Foster and Mike Evans

CONTENTS

VII

eleven

“Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone”: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew 2 3 3 Ute Lischke t w e lv e

Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro 2 4 7 Maeghan Pirie t h i rt e e n

“ I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are”: Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd’s Hands of History 2 6 5 Gail Vanstone

pa rt v

other perspecti v e s f ou rt e e n

Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette’s Heater 2 8 5 Tanis MacDonald fifteen

Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk 3 0 1 Davinia Thornley Glossary 3 1 5 Bibliography Index 3 4 5

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List of Illustrations

1.1 1.2

Kent Monkman, Crowfoot re-creation photo 5 2 Kent Monkman, untitled installation with screening of A Nation Is Coming (1996) 5 6

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Apak accepts the gift of the salt 1 1 8 Avva relates Inuit intellectual knowledge Nuqallaq and Umik preach 1 2 6 The converted sing hymns 1 2 7

6.1

An unnamed warrior (Johnny Buniyira) holds the camera and stares into the lens 1 5 3

8.1

Aroha Groves, detail from Connections2, virtual reality installation 1 9 2 Burning Daylight, Marrugeku Company, 2009 1 9 4 r e a, detail from maang (messagestick), three-channel DVD and sound installation 1 9 5 Jason Davidson, Falcon Wings for Hope, detail from Street Machine, 2010 1 9 6 Jenny Fraser, detail from Indian Cowboys / Cowboy Indians, video installation, 2009 1 9 7

8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

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10.1 Schematic diagram of interactive structure of DVD 2 2 9 10.2 Screen shot from DVD Studio Pro during production, illustrating interactivity among elements 2 3 0 10.3 Screen shot from Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Lac St. Anne interview 2 3 1 10.4 Screen shot from Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Elder’s introduction 2 3 1 IX

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the hard work, patience, and collegiality of all of the contributors to this book. It’s been a long road, but we are very proud of the results. We also want to thank Ute Lischke, David McNab, and Gail Vanstone for their part in the organization of the conference that was the inspiration for this book—“Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context,” held at Wilfrid Laurier University in May 2007. In particular, we want to thank our editor, Lisa Quinn, for her hard work and invaluable advice, as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose generous and helpful comments were an inspiration in getting to the finish line. We would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support of both the conference and this edited collection. Finally, we would like to thank Renée Bédard for allowing us to use one of her artworks on the cover of the book.

XI

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Part I Dream Makers

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Introduction

Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media W E N D Y G AY P E A R S O N A N D S U S A N K N A B E

My work is to educate our people . . . to put them back on the ground where they come from, and also to educate the outside world, to tell them we don’t live in igloos anymore and we’re as involved in highspeed Internet as you are. And when we cry, ice cubes don’t come out of our eyes. — Zacharias Kunuk, qtd. in Sonia Gunderson “Running Fast to Preserve Inuit Culture”

The Past in the Present: On Taxidermy, Zombies, Resistance, and Reappropriation Very shortly after the motion picture camera was invented, along with the technology to process film and to screen the results before audiences, Indigenous peoples all over the world suddenly found themselves in front of the lens, their lives and cultures subject to the camera’s apparently indexical relationship to the truth.1 The “truth” produced by these early cameras and the filmmakers behind them was, by and large, a visual exploration and commemoration of what were assumed, at the start of the twentieth century, to be rapidly vanishing Indigenous lives and cultures.2 This is the story behind, for example, Robert Flaherty’s famous—perhaps infamous— Nanook of the North (1922). Fatimah Tobing Rony writes that in film history, Nanook is, importantly, “seen as a point of origin: it has been called the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film” (99). But, as Rony and other contemporary scholars examining Nanook have revealed, this well-known narrative of Indigenous peoples and film is at best partial and at worst inaccurate. Rony argues that in their hunt for “authenticity,” ethnographers like Flaherty produce “frozen images” that are “akin 3

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to cinematic taxidermy” (99). She notes that “since indigenous peoples were assumed to be already dying if not dead, the ethnographic ‘taxidermist’ turned to artifice, seeking an image more true to the posited original. When Flaherty stated, ‘One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit,’ he was not just referring to his own artistry but to the preconditions for the effective, ‘true’ representation of so-called vanishing culture” (102). At its most negative, ethnographic film might be said to produce Indigenous peoples as zombies, simultaneously dead and alive (reflecting as well the spirit of taxidermy, which is to make the dead object look alive), or perhaps alive despite having been declared dead. That, too, is the result of colonization, which from the mid-nineteenth century worked hard in most settler/invader countries to produce non-Indigenous people inside Indigenous skins. The zombie image, more popularly accessible than the more academic notion of taxidermy, has a real power, one very successfully exploited in Lisa Jackson’s short film Savage (2009), where a young girl delivered to a residential school in the 1950s arrives to find that her classmates-to-be have been transformed into zombies. The whiteness of their faces reflects the “whitening” of their self-understanding as cultural subjects—something the film emphasizes through irony when the children dance, ahistorically, to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Regardless of how the audience understands the whitening of Michael Jackson’s own face, his image undergirds Lisa Jackson’s short film in order to further ironize the colonializing and racializing effects of deculturation. Without disputing the charge of taxidermic practice made against nonIndigenous ethnographic filmmakers or the zombie effects of deculturation, Michelle Raheja has also argued that it is at least as important “to foreground the ways in which the Inuit instructed [Flaherty] on how to work collaboratively, according to their views of social and cultural interaction, as a form of aesthetic and technical diplomacy” (Reservation Reelism, 195). Raheja goes on to argue that the collaborative tradition begun by the Inuit in the 1920s has “carried forward to the present as the collaborative filmmaking projects of artists such as [Chris] Eyre and [Shelley] Niro suggest” (195). It is important to keep in mind Raheja’s thoroughly documented recuperation of Indigenous agency, not only in terms of their own filmmaking practices but also in their collaborations with non-Indigenous artists and filmmakers and even in their attempts to influence and correct the steamroller that is Hollywood’s influence on representation. Thus people interested in Indigenous representation in film and video no longer need to concentrate solely on the “taxidermic” nature of ethnography or the influential stereotype-driven and stereotype-creating effects of the mainstream film industry; instead they can focus on resistance from

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Indigenous people within mainstream and national cinemas even before turning to the filmmaking history of Indigenous peoples themselves. The partiality and inaccuracy of the narrative that positions Indigenous peoples only and always as the ethnographic subjects of the supposedly “white” technology of the motion picture can thus be explored in a number of different directions. That Indigenous peoples have not vanished, despite the fervent wishes of much of the European settler/invader populations (and others, in other parts of the world), seems self-evident. Nevertheless, what is evident to Indigenous peoples themselves and to their allies may not be overtly visible in populist discourse, or may simply prove unpopular with populations that have yet to come to terms with their racist past, let alone acknowledge a racist present. The desire for Indigenous disappearance from what is claimed to be no longer Indigenous land is reinforced by the evidence of both populist and governmental panic when censuses in the early twentieth century began to reveal that, at least in Canada, the Indigenous population was actually growing. Panics over First Nations, Métis, and Inuit population growth have continued throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first century in relation to the fact that, despite having a lower life expectancy, Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing group in Canada (in fact, outside of immigration, they are the only group experiencing population growth). Similar increases in Indigenous populations have been noted in Australia, the United States, and parts of Latin America.3 In the Canadian context, Warren Cariou trenchantly asks what this means for Canadians’ ideas of themselves: It is ironic that the entire project of colonialism in North America was predicated upon a very different population prediction: a belief that Native peoples of this continent would inevitably die out when they were faced with the putative superiority of European civilization. The fact that North America’s Native people are not dying out, then, creates a crisis in western culture’s idea of itself. If the Indians are still here, and are even increasing in number, then what does that mean for the legal and moral legitimacy of a colonial culture that has displaced them from their land? The desire for Indigenous disappearance from Canada also reflects historical changes in the relations between First Nations people and settlers. Prior to the War of 1812 (the point at which Indigenous numbers in central Canada began a rapid decline), First Nations people were regarded as valuable allies. By the mid-1850s, however, the paternalistic approach to governing First Nations people was firmly in place: Olive Dickason calls the

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First Nations “the most regulated peoples in Canada . . .; their lives would be interfered with at every turn, down to the personal level” (283). Residential schooling was the most effective (and symbolic) result of the shift from regarding First Nations people as sovereign allies (or, indeed, sovereign enemies) to wards of the Crown. In Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, residential schooling, to one degree or another, became the most direct form of deculturation and the locus of governments’ genocidal intent.4 Whether by means of warfare, starvation of Native peoples on inadequate reservation lands, cultural genocide (represented in the United States by the common saying, “Kill the Indian, save the child”), or the Australian “breed the black out” policy, Indigenous peoples in many settler-colonial nations were effectively under attack.5 Acknowledgement and tacit (or overt) approval of the methods and motives of such attacks underlie the taxidermic impulse that Rony identifies. At the same time, however, public racism and/or indifference as well as government policies found themselves confronted by many forms of Indigenous peoples’ resistance. Indigenous film today reflects a tradition begun by the earliest Indigenous filmmakers and by those who saw themselves, even if they were not seen in return, as collaborators in cinematic representation; it is also deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the histories and historical traumas that inform the lives of contemporary Indigenous peoples. In relation to film itself, Raheja’s Reservation Reelism (2010) is an excellent example of the ways in which the common perception that Native Americans were merely Hollywood’s victims, or perhaps its dupes, starts to be dismantled by a more detailed, more complex perspective of the role of “Indians” in Hollywood. Raheja details how Hollywood Indians attempted to take control of their own depictions on film, from the early directorial efforts of James Young Deer (Ho-Chunk) and Edwin Carewe (Chickasaw) to the work of actors like Jay Silverheels (Mohawk) and Lillian St. Cyr (Winnebago). All of these people attempted to influence how Native Americans were represented on screen. Raheja builds on earlier work by scholars such as Faye Ginsburg who have investigated the actual roles that, for example, the Inuit played in the making of Nanook; they not only appeared in front of the camera (which is all that audiences then saw and all that most audiences see even today) but also served as “technicians, camera operators, film developers, and production consultants” (“Screen Memories” 39). Ginsburg also investigates a more institutional shift towards self-representation by Indigenous peoples in her work on the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) documentary You Are on Indian Land (1969). While most film histories attribute the film to director Mort Ransen, Farbod Honarpisheh has pointed out that even Ransen himself

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maintained that “the Indian Film Unit6 in general, and [Mike] Mitchell in particular, [were] the main creative forces behind” the documentary (82).7 Ginsburg, however, is more concerned with the historical perspective and particularly with producer George Stoney’s effect on the creation of the Indian Film Unit at the NFB. Ginsburg argues that You Are on Indian Land signaled a crucial shift in assumptions about who should be behind the documentary camera, one that has had a lasting effect on First Nations film and video production in Canada. Stoney’s strong support at the time for the training and equipping of Canada’s first Native film crew, under the leadership of Mohawk activist Mike Mitchell, was a catalytic message to Canada’s First Nations communities, underscoring their concern to represent themselves both politically and in the media. (“The After-Life of Documentary” 66) Ginsburg notes the particular synchronicity of both You Are on Indian Land and the founding of the Indian Film Unit: “It is significant that the timing of the film coincided with the first wave of the modern movement for Aboriginal political rights in Canada and clearly helped to make those efforts visible” (66). This was as true in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, where Indigenous political activism was marked by governmental and populist resistance but also by specific gains, primarily in the areas of citizenship and the right to vote.8 In the political turmoil of the 1960s, issues of representation came to the forefront everywhere. Victor Masayesva Jr., the Hopi photographer and videographer, notes that “the turmoil of Indian activism in the late sixties and early seventies played a major part in exposing Native American peoples to the role of the media and how it could be used to advantage . . . ‘By-for-and-about’ became the criteria by which everything about Indians was to be judged” (qtd. in Younger, 36). The 1960s and 1970s were a time of Indigenous protest movements around the globe—for example, the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the battle with the US government at Wounded Knee, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, and Sámi protests against the planned dam at Alta-Kautokeino. That this period still resonates for Indigenous communities in North America can be seen in recent documentaries like Trudell (USA, 2005) and A Good Day to Die (USA, 2010), about, respectively, AIM activists John Trudell and Dennis Banks, and like Oaivveskaldjut (Give Us Our Skeletons) (Norway, 1999), which tells stories interwoven through Alta dam protester Nils Somby’s relationship to the leaders of the nineteenth-century Kautokeino rebellion. In Canada,

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the Oka Crisis of 1990 has inspired a number of Indigenous documentaries, most famously Alanis Obomsawin’s award-winning Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which used Obomsawin’s on-the-spot footage along with news photography and other sources to create an extraordinarily powerful depiction of what it was like for the protesters. Obomsawin followed this up with three more films about the Oka Crisis: My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995), Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man (1997), and most recently Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000). The advent of digital film technology and of home computers capable of running editing software has made some aspects of filmmaking even cheaper and more accessible in most parts of the settler-colonial world. For others, however, particularly people in remote or inaccessible regions, access to technology is still limited. This lack of access has been combated to some extent by a number of initiatives, from the long-running Video in the Villages project, which provides cameras and training to peoples along the Amazon basin and which was initiated in Sao Paulo by the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Centre for Indigenous Advocacy) in 1987, to the online distribution project that is Isuma.tv, which enables Indigenous film producers from anywhere in the world to upload their films to be viewed freely by everyone.9 Indeed, these two projects have come together in films like A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors), where Chief Waiwai of the Waiãpi documents his visit to the newly contacted Zo’é (2008). That film can be viewed on Isuma.tv via streaming video or, alternatively, in a low-bandwidth version. The desire to use video technology to contact and learn about others is evident in another Video in the Villages film, From the Ikpeng Children to the World (2001), a documentary made quite literally by Ikpeng children, who explain their everyday lives and ask the children in the imagined audience if they too share these day-to-day experiences of school, chores, and play. The Ikpeng children made their film in response to a video-letter from the children of Sierra Maestra in Cuba, who similarly documented everyday life in their village. The Ikpeng children demonstrate how clearly they understand the transformations occurring in village life, referring constantly to how tasks like hunting, fishing, and food preparation were done by their grandparents and how they are done now. The result is an extraordinary, breathtaking act of self-ethnography, one that preserves for these children and their future aspects of their own cultural heritage and evidence of their continuity as a people who are, indeed, threatened by settlers’ increasing incursions into Ikpeng lands. Within Indigenous cinemas, shorts, experimental films, and documentaries all thrive, sometimes without and sometimes alongside full-scale dramatic productions.10

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From the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the production of Indigenous documentaries grew tremendously. Like most marginalized cultures, Indigenous people worldwide had access to documentary film in ways they did not to the production of dramatic features. Documentary requires a camera, some film processing technology, and some degree of editing skill. Fiction, by contrast, requires a developed script, actors, and a great deal more industrial apparatus. Similarly, experimental short films can be made for very little money: the Museum of Modern Art includes in its display films by the non-Indigenous artist Sadie Benning shot on Fischer-Price’s PixelVision toy camera for less than $200. Indigenous artists in the West have historically had similar access to the technology required for documentaries and experimental film, but not, unless they were involved with Hollywood or with their own national cinemas, to more expensive dramatic filmmaking. While documentary cinema thrives everywhere, dramatic filmmaking matters because it is what most people associate with cinema; it is what people in the West and elsewhere where cinemas exist are still primarily prepared to pay to see. The recent commercial and popular success of a very small number of documentaries (Bowling for Columbine and other films by Michael Moore, March of the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth) is an ironic testament to the dominance of dramatic features in most spectators’ understanding of the cinema. It is also, perhaps, one reason why Indigenous films are not well known to nonIndigenous audiences, despite the success of Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes. Indeed, even a dreadful Hollywood adaptation has not brought the Sámi film Ofelas (Veiviseren or Pathfinder [1989]) to the consciousness of nonIndigenous audiences.11 Even today, few Indigenous films are dramatic features. Houston Wood counted fifty-one Indigenous feature films, worldwide, in Native Features (2008), and we can add perhaps another fifty films that have been produced since the publication of Wood’s book or that were not included at the time.12 The lack of dramatic features is striking. Obviously, this is partly a consequence of the relative poverty of many Indigenous populations (in the documentary that begins his second feature film, Skins [2002], Chris Eyre makes the point that the film’s setting, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, had the lowest individual income in the United States in 2006—less than $3,500 per capita).13 In part, though, it is also driven by access to training: more feature films come from places where Indigenous people have had access to education in filmmaking, whether by attending film schools or through dedicated training facilities, such as the NFB’s Studio One and Aboriginal Filmmaking Program.14 Until the advent of the Internet and digital streaming, yet another cause was lack of access to

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films that might serve as models (or as incitements to response, in the case of Hollywood and other forms of stereotyping and misinformation). In addition, if we consider Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s argument that Western cinema production has divested itself of many earlier functions (which still resonate for many emerging Indigenous traditions), and that “cinema no longer happens in the cinemas” (166), we cannot escape the irony that, for many Indigenous people, cinema has never happened in the cinemas.15 Atanarjuat’s director, Zacharias Kunuk, notes that when the filmmakers wanted to screen the film for their own community after it was completed in December 2000, they showed it in a gymnasium because there are “no theatres in Igloolik” (“Public Art” 18). They also “made a thousand VHS copies and sent them to the co-op stores in other communities to distribute it throughout Nunavut. Nunavut doesn’t have a theatre system” (18). The dearth of commercial cinema-going experience, where films were available first via satellite television and then on various home screening technologies (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, now 3D)—combined with the historical emphasis on documentary and short filmmaking, suggests that Indigenous people’s relationship to film differs from that of non-Indigenous Westerners, even before we introduce issues of cultural aesthetics, oral storytelling, narrative convention, and politics—both the politics of representation and politics in relationship to sovereignty, land claims, and cultural and linguistic survival. Today, as more and more cultures begin to make dramatic features in addition to documentaries and short films, visions of Indigenous life proliferate. So, too, do visions of the effects of the past on the present. While relatively few Indigenous dramatic features attempt to represent pre-colonial history directly,16 virtually all Indigenous films reflect the ways in which the colonial past and the still-colonial17 present affect the lives and stories of Indigenous peoples. Sherman Alexie’s Arnold Joseph in Smoke Signals (1998) imagines that he could do away with the colonial past: “Poof, wave my hand! The white people are gone, sent back to where they belong. Poof! London, Paris, Moscow. Poof, poof, poof! Wave my hand and the reservation is gone. The trading post and the post office, the tribal school and the pine trees, and the drunks and the Catholics, and the drunk Catholics. Poof!” While some Indigenous filmmakers and audience members share Arnold Joseph’s fantasy, others concentrate on representing the consequences of colonial history and the enduring effects of what Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart calls Historical Trauma—“cumulative social-cultural trauma spanning across generations which stems from massive cataclysmic events such as the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 or the Holocaust” (Chang et al.)18

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Historical trauma manifests itself in Indigenous films in many ways. In Chris Eyre’s Skins, two brothers, the police officer Rudy and the alcoholic veteran Mogie, find themselves reliving not only their familial past, through flashbacks and moments when the past comes to haunt them, but also the past of Wounded Knee. When Rudy revisits the location where two drunken youths killed another Native man, Corky, he trips and hits his head on a rock; his visions include images from both the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) and the Wounded Knee Occupation (1973), images that indicate the extent to which Rudy is affected by massive cultural trauma across generations. Structures of repetition and dualism abound throughout the film. Chang, Donohoe, and White note that although Rudy seems to come to a personal confrontation with historical trauma in losing his brother, the greater cultural trauma caused by alcoholism and its link with colonialism remains a toxic, repetitive presence in the community as Rudy learns that not only is the liquor store being re-built, but is going to be twice the size and have two drive-thru windows. They conclude that in trauma theory, abreaction is the process of narrating the original trauma in order to confront and “heal” that trauma. Abreaction becomes the act of the film itself as it narratively and structurally struggles to deal with the intrusive repetition of trauma and healing through coherent representation, and Chris Eyre becomes a kind of Rudy figure, a “vigilante” attempting to benefit his community through honest narration. The theme of being haunted by the past is not uncommon in Indigenous art. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to escape the irony that the first ever film of First Nations’ peoples was Thomas Edison’s Sioux Ghost Dance in 1894 (Knopf, Decolonizing 55). In literature, the haunting of the present by the past is exemplified by Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, where the narrator is haunted by a number of aspects of the recent colonial past, including the sexual abuse he suffered in residential schools and the brutal and for a long time unsolved murder of Helen Betty Osborne. Ultimately, however, in coming to terms with the death of his brother from AIDS—a death portrayed as sad but at the same time as joyous, life-affirming, and intensely funny (particularly in the ways in which First Nations people keep the Catholic priest out of the hos-

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pital room)—Highway’s fiction ultimately embraces a model of healing that, as in Skins, remains deeply conscious of the nature of the original traumas. Within Indigenous cinemas, we see similar narrative patterns of repetition and historical trauma in films as diverse as Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993), Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994), Shirley Cheechoo’s Bearwalker (2000), Oliver Hermanus’s Shirley Adams (2009), Armand Garnet Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale (2010), and Yves Sioui Durand’s Mesnak (2011). Moffatt says of beDevil that “Bedevil is a very playful, oldfashioned word that no one really uses any more. It means ‘to haunt and taunt.’ The style of the film is teasing. You’re following characters who are haunted by something, and I suggest perhaps we’re all a little haunted in a way, and we probably don’t ever come to terms with it” (qtd. in Summerhayes, “Haunting Secrets,” 14). Catherine Summerhayes analyzes the three separate stories that make up beDevil, each of which is based on a “ghost story” told within Moffatt’s family and each of which relates a story involving Aboriginal, mixed-race, white, and “other” immigrant Australians, and argues that the film “performs a specific intercultural communication between indigenous and non-indigenous people that suggests that there are ‘secret’ stories embedded in this relationship” (22). Summerhayes concludes that through her persistent juxtaposition of the easily visible against the difficult to see and the easily heard against the difficult to hear, Moffatt is concerned with the exposure of “secrets.” But this exposure does not necessarily provide resolution in the sense of offering answers, nor does it suggest a resolution that gives a sense of social “healing” as described in E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of how film can be used in order to reverse the “imperial gaze.” (22) In contrast to Skins, beDevil refutes the possibility that we can use film to come to terms with and to “heal” from traumas, be they historical or contemporary. It is useful to contrast these two films, for they remind us that Indigenous filmmaking comprises a wide spectrum of political positions, anti- and post-colonial ideologies, and, indeed, attitudes towards embracing or rejecting particular forms of identity (which can include gender and sexual identities, as well as varying Indigenous and mixed-race identities). By contrast, the notion of shared secrets both created and hidden through encounters with the non-Indigenous provides a commonality between the two films, in that both rehearse the experience of living in a world where colonization itself can become a shared secret, denied if not by the colonized then certainly by the colonizers.

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Gail Valaskakis argues that “Native reality is grounded in the experience of being inscribed as subaltern in the history of Others and as subjects in one’s own heritage” (Indian Country 71). She notes that the “distinction between Native North America heritage and ‘real’ history situates Indians ‘outside history,’ where they can be erased, displaced, reified, and named” (76). Furthermore, colonialism has coded many Indigenous peoples, particularly those in settler-colonial countries, as “always already in the past” (Raheja, Reservation Reelism 15), thus complicating an already complex relationship to history and Historical Trauma. Indeed, the very notion of Historical Trauma rejects the limiting of Indigenous peoples to a precolonial past and emphasizes a reality grounded in the present notwithstanding “‘real’ history.” Nevertheless, Indigenous filmmakers and their audiences, as Raheja states in the context of Native Americans in Hollywood, have been “forced to examine themselves through the eyes of others, [which] necessitated a looking backward through the mists of history because Indigenous peoples had been written out of the present and the future of the United States through various forms of discursive genocide” (15). In part because of the crucial political and cultural importance of recoding themselves as present, many Indigenous films invoke contemporary settings and narratives to show the enduring nature of Indigeneity and to refute a long history of colonial practices that have “ascribed the value of absence and disappearance” to Indigenes (15). Thus some of the bestknown Indigenous films have contemporary settings, although they are arguably not without reference to the past and, particularly, to the historical encounter with colonialism. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals is perhaps the foremost example of this; other such films are Rachel Perkins’s Radiance (1998), Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds (2002), Shirley Cheechoo’s Johnny Tootall (2005), Sterlin Harjo’s Barking Water (2009), and Richard Franklin’s Samson and Delilah (2009), to name just a few. That the present carries the past around “like a child on its shoulders” is not a new insight, nor is it unique to Indigenous peoples. (Indeed, the above quotation is from Robert Lepage’s Le confessional [The Confessional], where the context is the Québécois exhortation to remember the past, memorialized even on the province’s licence plates with the slogan “je me souviens”—I remember.) Nevertheless, the effects of history mark contemporary Indigenous lives and cultures in very particular ways—ways that are shared among Indigenous peoples and at the same time locally specific, for not even the experience of residential schools was the same for everyone everywhere. Furthermore, the experiences of, say, the Khoi San of South Africa, the Quechua of the central Andes, and the Sámi of northern Scandinavia all reflect significantly different relations to the history of

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colonization, which stretches over one thousand years for the Sámi but is quite recent for the Khoi San and the Quechua and even more so for some of the tribes of the Amazon Basin. Not surprisingly, we see both similarities and differences in films from these regions; that said, it is only from the very recently colonized that we see films that argue for the retention of traditional lifestyles and the avoidance of much of today’s technology. Two examples come to mind: Kanakan Balintagos’s Busong (2011), which is in part about the effects of the mining industry on the lives of the Philippines’ Palawan peoples; and El Grito de la Selva (The Cry of the Forest, 2008), a re-enactment of the true story of Indigenous people’s fight against logging companies in Bolivia. In both cases, the filmmakers see only partial, small benefits to embracing contemporary industrial technologies and commercial/urban ways of life at the cost of more traditional lifestyles, even if, like the Ikpeng children, they know that change is inevitable. Nevertheless, the very fact that these peoples have turned to cinema to express these preferences indicates the utility of some new technologies for Indigenous purposes. As our epigraph from Zacharias Kunuk indicates, Indigenous peoples adapt contemporary technologies to their own purposes, even if one of those purposes is to remind their own people about where they have come from. It is often difficult for Indigenous people to make choices regarding their interactions with technologies, particularly in the face of commercial and political pressure to allow logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, and large-scale agribusiness to encroach on Indigenous lands. Ironically, both of these films demonstrate that another use of film technology can be to resist, or at least to negotiate the costs and benefits of, these very encroachments on Indigenous lands and ways of life. Indigenous dramatic features have gained a lot of ground in the last decade, going from a scattered handful to a dozen or so a year. The first Indigenous feature film, House Made of Dawn, was released in the United States in 1972; it was more than a decade before four more Indigenous dramatic features appeared—two from New Zealand and one each from Papua New Guinea and Norway. Compared to Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, or even the national film production of many countries, this is a small number of dramatic films in a relatively short span of history. Nevertheless, it is remarkable, especially given the extent to which Indigenous peoples are scattered in small numbers around the globe and have rare and decidedly uneven access to funding, production facilities, and promotion and distribution deals (very few Indigenous dramatic features receive a theatrical release outside the film festival circuit). Furthermore, precisely because Indigenous films (at least in the West) come under the rubric of independent or art house cinema, at least in relation to dramatic films,

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Indigenous cinematic practices express different relationships to history, including the history of film, and often deliberately introduce an aesthetic that Indigenizes any or all of Hollywood, European art house, or Third Cinema.19 In addition, Indigenous films often embrace not only specific local cultural practices, languages, and narrative styles, but also a documentary aesthetic that responds, in part, to the history of ethnographic filmmaking to which many Indigenous groups have been subjected and to which, as Arnold Krupat points out, individuals and cultural groups may respond in remarkably diverse ways.20 In this way, Indigenous cinemas produce their own particular modern Indigenous subjectivities. Barry Barclay’s attempt to organize all Indigenous cinemas under the heading of “Fourth Cinema” is a riff both on the growing use of “Fourth World” to designate Indigenous peoples (and to distinguish them from indigenous peoples such as the English in England, the Thai in Thailand, or even settler descendants in Australia, Canada, and the United States) and on the idea that Hollywood constitutes a First Cinema, European art films a Second Cinema, and anti-colonial films (originally from Latin America but now from all over the developing world) a Third Cinema. Barclay introduced the idea of Fourth Cinema in a talk at the University of Auckland in 2002, during which he concluded that, while some Indigenous practitioners might make films that sit within existing forms of cinema, “others may seek to rework the ancient core values to shape a growing Indigenous cinema outside the national orthodoxy” (qtd. in Columpar, Unsettling Sights xi). Christine Columpar points out in the preface to Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film that “as the linchpin of a polemic, Fourth Cinema, like the most politically uncompromising definitions of Third Cinema, speaks persuasively to the ideological and aesthetic stakes of Indigenous cinema. As an actual taxonomic category, however, it inherits a problem fundamental to the three-cinema model from which it derives,” which is to say, the difficulties of delineating clear differences between the three forms of cinema given the complex interactions between them and between them and national cinema cultures (xiv). The issue of Fourth Cinema as a taxonomic category becomes even more complex when one considers the interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers and the difficulties of deciding exactly who is, and who isn’t, Indigenous.21 Some of these complexities become apparent when one compares the reception given Whale Rider (written by Māori novelist and academic Witi Ihimaera and directed by Pākehā [non-Māori] Niki Caro) and Rabbit Proof Fence (based on a book by Aboriginal Australian Doris Pilkington and directed by the non-Aboriginal Phillip Noyce) with the reception given Ten Canoes (written and directed by Rolf de Heer, with additional directing credits

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going to Peter Djigirr) and Skinwalkers and A Thief of Time (both directed by Cheyenne-Arapaho Chris Eyre, but based on novels by the non-Indigenous writer Tony Hillerman). Of these five films, only Ten Canoes is generally regarded as Indigenous and thus as part of an emerging Fourth Cinema. Yet this identification has been made based largely on the creative role of Djigirr and other Aboriginal members of the cast and crew in shaping Ten Canoes, rather than on aesthetics and/or politics. Nevertheless, Michelle Raheja notes that Indigenous film “has its roots in specific Indigenous aesthetics with their attendant focus on a particular geographic space, discrete cultural practices, notions of temporality that do not delink the past from the present or future, and spiritual traditions” (Reservation Reelism 16, 17). Although some—perhaps many—Indigenous filmmakers debunk the notion of a common Indigenous filmmaking aesthetic, Barclay’s attempt to define the commonalities of Indigenous film is still valuable for its recognition of the political and the historical in Indigenous filmmaking, including its revaluation of the human relationship to land, its differing relation to temporality, and, most importantly, its reappropriation of the ethnographic and taxidermic gaze with which we began. Reverse Shots: Turning the Camera Around While the reality of Indigenous filmmaking is complex and the historical picture much more complicated than admitted by contemporary populist discourse (and, often, by official national historical texts), both in terms of the survival and enduring presence of Indigenous peoples and in terms of their representation within the dominant genres of ethnography and the western, there remains some basic truth to the notion that, for most of the twentieth century, Indigenous peoples were situated in front of, not behind, the lens. We have called this anthology Reverse Shots as a way of bringing to bear several observations about Indigenous cinemas, including that the ways in which Indigenous filmmaking reverses or modifies the relationship between camera and subject are commonly reflected in titles of books about Indigenous films: Beverly R. Singer’s Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, Kerstin Knopf’s Decolonizing the Lens of Power, Corinn Columpar’s Unsettling Sights. Titles like these emphasize how Indigenous peoples in many different regions around the globe have seized control of the camera and its attendant technologies to create “reverse” representations as projects of unsettling and decolonizing settler-colonial cultures. The title of this volume also refers to how the “reverse shot” in filmmaking is used to frame a character’s response or to track a conversation. The “reverse shot” is a shot from the position at which the audience was previously looking. When Indigenous people move behind the camera,

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even while (perhaps especially while) remaining in front of it, they are in a sense creating reverse shots—that is, films that reverse and revise from within their own perspective the dominant culture’s view of Indigenous people. Such a structural reversal can be used in all seriousness, as a declaration of Indigenous presence as filmmakers and of what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance”—that is, a continuous process of survival; it can also be used with humour and irony, in part because of the degree to which audiences have learned to interpret the reverse shot in very particular ways. For example, an editorial device commonly used in filming conversations is the “shot/reverse shot,” where the editing moves between opposing views (such as two people facing each other in a dialogue). Audience familiarity with the shot/reverse shot structure, in which we move from Person A’s view of Person B to Person B’s view of Person A (and perhaps continue that back and forth for some time) means that filmmakers can use it to create intimacy between two people who are not present in the same narrative or chronology. These techniques are creatively appropriated and often subverted by Indigenous filmmakers—and in highly diverse ways. To give a single, but striking, example, take Cree artist and filmmaker Kent Monkman’s recent short film, Dance to Miss Chief (2010). Monkman is probably best known for his witty and often scathing re-creations of both the “empty” landscapes of nineteenth-century American and Canadian landscape artists and the ethnographic paintings and photographs of people like George Catlin (1796–1892) and Edward Curtis (1868–1952), paintings that he painstakingly re-creates before (re)placing First Nations people in the landscape, generally in overtly homoerotic relationships with pioneer figures, including the artists themselves. In Dance to Miss Chief, which is filmed as a music video, Monkman humorously queers the relationship between the Indigene and non-Indigenous representation by cutting between images of Miss Chief (Monkman in postmodern Native drag) and shots of actor Pierre Brice (born Pierre Louis Baron de Bris in Brest, France) in the 1960s series of Winnetou films based on the novels of German writer Karl May. Instead of commenting directly on the obvious inauthenticity of an “Indian” played by a Frenchman in a German Western, Monkman both deconstructs and queers Brice-as-Indian by remaking him as the object of Miss Chief’s desiring gaze. Shot after shot switches between Brice’s lingering looks and those returned by Miss Chief, constructing a romantic and potentially sexual relationship through careful cutting between the contemporary footage of Miss Chief and the archival footage of Brice that creates the appearance that the two are staring lovingly into each other’s eyes. Yet the foregrounding of Monkman as artist simultaneously undoes this reciprocally loving relationship: it is clearly

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satirizing the notion of Brice as Indian while at the same time reinstating Monkman’s own queer Indigenous subjectivity. Rather than the subject of his own desires, stereotypically for the Native woman, Brice becomes the object of queer Indigenous desire, just as Indigenous peoples have historically been the objects of the colonizers’ desires. With humour and without belabouring the point, the film thus cannily refers to a whole history of the effects of colonization on First Nations concepts of gender and sexuality and the recent reclamation by Indigenous peoples in North America of a Two Spirit identity.22 While the title of this anthology thus refers to the multiple uses of the “reverse shot” as a concept for thinking about Indigenous filmmaking, the subtitle refers to the 2007 conference Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, held at Wilfrid Laurier University, at which many of these chapters were first presented.23 The conference was meant to bring together people working on Indigenous films from many different perspectives and from many different geographical and cultural spaces. While the conference was primarily academic in focus, the organizers invited a number of Indigenous filmmakers as keynote speakers, including Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki), a director of the NFB and perhaps Canada’s premiere documentary filmmaker; Shelley Niro (Mohawk), an artist and filmmaker from the nearby Six Nations community; and Michael Greyeyes (Plains Cree), a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and academic. Participants at the conference came from Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Europe, and Central and South America; most were academics or graduate students, but some were—or in some cases, were also—film practitioners. The films they discussed were produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Norway, and the United States, among other places. Some of these were filmed in English, French, or Spanish, others in a variety of Indigenous languages, from Inuktitut to Gunalbingu to Sámi; most of the latter had subtitles. The range of topics reflected the history of Indigenous filmmaking itself, in that most Indigenous films have been made by peoples living within English-speaking settler/invader countries (with the exception of Quebec, where many of the filmmakers speak French, either as a first or second language). Other areas with fairly significant Indigenous film and video production include northern Europe—the Sámi predominantly, but also the Nenet, Komi, and Kvens—and Central and South America, including the Amazon Basin, which has produced numerous documentaries through the Video in the Villages Project, but also including Mexico, Panama, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, among others. Groups from other countries besides these have only recently joined the Fourth World’s film and video efflorescence; these new countries

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include the Philippines, where a remarkable number of Indigenous films have been produced in a short time, largely due to the efforts of Kanakan Balintagos (aka Auraeus Solito); Taiwan, where Taiwan Indigenous Television provides a venue for documentary filmmaking; Nepal; and so on. Not all of these areas of Indigenous film and video are represented in this book, which, like the conference itself, focuses more on film than on video, although various authors address both (and the difficulties of clearly distinguishing between them in Indigenous practice). The anthology also includes work on New Media, notably Adam Szymanski’s interview with Aboriginal New Media practitioner and curator Jenny Fraser. Indeed, rather than focusing on either media or film genres as categorical ways of thinking about Indigenous practices, we have organized this book more thematically—again, a reflection of the conference itself, during which organizers deliberately placed artists and academics in conversation with one another across both geographies and media. The first section is introductory and consists of this introduction and the script of Michael Greyeyes’ keynote address, “He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film.” Greyeyes (Plains Cree) is a dancer, choreographer, actor, and faculty member in the Department of Theatre at York University, where he teaches movement for actors. In “He Who Dreams,” Greyeyes reflects on his career in film and the contortions asked of Indigenous actors. Inevitably, his autobiographical reflections shed light on questions of representation and the complex, fraught history of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous cinemas, particularly Hollywood. His chapter also traces the evolution of roles for Indigenous actors, including work for Indigenous filmmakers, but also the growth of new mainstream stereotypes, such as the “slick, self-assured lawyer representing the interests of a wealthy, Casino-owning Tribal Nation” (53). While this is a change from roles that situate Indigenous peoples firmly in the past (roles for which Greyeyes had to learn to ride a horse and “shoot” a buffalo), it is questionable whether it is an improvement. Greyeyes’s film career also includes work in Canadian films, including roles in several films now considered canonical in Canadian national cinema—notably Clement Virgo’s Rude (1995), Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside (1994), and Paul Gross’s Passchendaele (2008).24 The question of positionality raised by Greyeyes’s career, which moves between the United States and Canada, among TV, mainstream film, independent film, and video, and between non-Indigenous and Indigenous work (Greyeyes is one of the dancers in Monkman’s Dance to Miss Chief), encapsulates to a significant degree the complex relationship between Indigeneity and the movie camera (whether commercial or independent, film or digital).

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The remainder of the book is organized into four major thematic areas: “Decolonizing Histories” (both histories of decolonization and histories that decolonize); “Mediating Practices,” which looks at ways in which Indigenous film and video mediate between diverse audiences and spectatorial demands through a variety of media, including feature films, television, and New Media Arts (NMA); “Documentary Approaches,” which looks at the widespread use and availability of documentary, again across geographic regions, Indigenous identities, and media; and, finally, “Other Perspectives,” which includes two chapters examining particular nonIndigenous portrayals that are sympathetic to Indigenous aims and ways of thought and deeply critical of colonial (and supposedly “post”-colonial) practices. This section reflects the ways in which Indigenous filmmaking and other forms of self-representation can change, and have changed, at least some non-Indigenous representational practices. “Decolonizing Histories” begins with Ernie Blackmore’s “Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices.” Blackmore (Gamilaroi) looks at two short films, Sally Riley’s Confessions of a Headhunter (2000) and Wayne Blair’s Djarn Djarns (2005), and two feature films, Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds (2002) and Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes (2006). Djarn Djarns tells the story of a young Aboriginal dancer (djarn djarn) who has to come to terms both with the loss of his father and with his sexual abuse by his mother’s white boyfriend. Blackmore uses a close reading of this powerful (and remarkably good-humoured) short film to note how the “juxtaposition between contemporary life and traditional culture [in the film] calls into question existing historical narratives about Aboriginality and demands for authenticity, while at the same time asserting the way Frankie is sustained through the love and commitment of his fellow djarn djarns” (61). In turn, this allows Blackmore to look at the way Aboriginal films interrogate dominant histories, reassert an Indigenous perspective through self-representation, and complicate discourses about authenticity (particularly the location of “authentic” Aboriginal people in the past). For Blackmore, an important part of the decolonizing work of Indigenous film involves finding an Aboriginal “voice,” a term Blackmore defines in relation to self-representation and counter-histories. “Voice” summarizes both the ability to speak and the ability to be heard, as in the example of Frankie Dollar, Blair’s young protagonist, whose voice “would not normally be audible within the dominant culture, [but which has] the capacity to speak to all races, to speak to those seeking understanding” (64) through the film’s telling of a counter-history. Blackmore’s examples look at a number of ways of making that voice audible and representing that counter-history to both Indigenous and non-

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Indigenous audiences. Locating his argument in Marcia Langton’s statement that “Aboriginality arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience” (77), Blackmore uses his readings of Blair’s and Riley’s short films and of the much better-known Beneath Clouds and Ten Canoes to demonstrate the need to find an Aboriginal voice—which he literalizes in asserting the validity of Aboriginal dialect English (blak talk)—to produce Aboriginal self-representation and to decolonize dominant historical as well as contemporary populist understandings of Aboriginality. These films, Blackmore notes, “assert an Indigenous visibility, both within Australian film and within the Australian nation-state, by ‘speaking out blak’” (78). The connection between visibility and the blak voice links Blackmore’s discussion of films by relatively new Aboriginal filmmakers to Susan Knabe’s discussion of an Australian art icon: Tracey Moffatt. While Moffatt’s work is discussed mainly in the context of her place in the contemporary art world, some studies have looked specifically at the (self)-representation of Aboriginality in her films and artworks, focusing particularly on her earlier works (from Nice Coloured Girls [1987] to beDevil [1993]). Knabe notes that “much of the criticism explicitly and very productively interrogates Moffatt’s work on the intersections of gender, race and representation, often through the lens of feminist film theory,” but builds on that scholarship “to consider how we might look queerly at these works and what we might see when we do” (82). Knabe’s analysis locates Moffatt’s work, in part, as a response to the historical similarities between productions of racial and sexual “others”— those whose otherness was located in their nakedness, their assumed sexual perversity, and their bodily pathologization (as Knabe points out, here one need only think of Saartje Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus”). Knabe notes that, in cases of both racial and sexual otherness, “the photographs operate as a means through which racialized and sexually diverse bodies are produced as abject to the ostensibly white, heterosexual subject—a colonizing subject—who is formally addressed by these images” (86). Making a case for the historical and colonial connections between racialization and sexualization, Knabe examines four of Moffatt’s works: the short film Nice Coloured Girls and the three photo series, Something More, Scarred for Life, and Scarred for Life II. In each of these texts, Knabe interrogates the interrelations among race, gender, sexuality, and the legacies of colonialism (including the epistemologies that allow for othering on the basis of race and sexuality and, particularly, of their intersections, as with Moffatt’s various depictions of interracial desire).

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Knabe shows that in “taking pictures black,” Moffatt also takes pictures back—most explicitly, in terms of heteronormative colonialist photography, whether historical or contemporary. Knabe concludes that “Moffatt’s reappropriations in these works range from taking b(l)ack colonial images and tropes to reworking the techniques of classification and control to suggest alternative histories” (99). As with the more recent films that Blackmore examines, Moffatt’s works depend on the possibility of imagining history differently—indeed, of queering history. Kerstin Knopf’s “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/Colonial Cinema” moves the reader from Aboriginal Australia to the Canadian Arctic in the 1920s and to the second feature film produced by the Igloolik Isuma collective (best known for Atanarjuat). The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) is a direct encounter with colonial history, indeed with one of the iconic moments of colonial ethnography: Rasmussen made six exploratory trips to the Arctic (the First to Sixth Thule Expeditions) and meticulously documented his ethnographic and archaeological findings. Around the same time, however, Christian missionaries were using periods of hardship and starvation to enforce conversion and to bring an end to traditional Inuit spirituality. The film is in part an attempt to come to grips with the fact that work like Rasmussen’s provides one of the few archives of Inuit history and spirituality before colonization and Christianization. Both Rasmussen’s writings and drawings and the artifacts he and his expedition mates collected are thus (perhaps ironically) part of the source material for the film itself, which is, quite literally, based on Rasmussen’s journals from the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–24) and thus puts Rasmussen’s ethnographic work into dialogue with Inuit oral history. Knopf notes that, despite his desire to put himself on an equal footing with his Inuit subjects, Rasmussen betrayed “a romantic nostalgia for traditional Inuit life, the vanishing of which he witnessed first-hand” (111), and thus demonstrated a taxidermic impulse not entirely dissimilar to Robert Flaherty’s. Knopf contrasts Rasmussen and his journals and collections of artifacts as a historical source for The Journals of Knud Rasmussen with what she identifies as its second source, the history of self-controlled media making in the Arctic with reference to oral and cultural traditions and consideration of Inuit information and entertainment needs. This history includes the formation of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) in 1981 and the 1999 creation of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN). Igloolik Isuma Productions was founded midway between these two important media events, in 1990, and was organized by Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik, and Norman Cohn (the only non-Inuit member of the collective) specifically to counter images

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from the south that were flooding Inuit airwaves. Reading the colonial and missionary encounters represented in The Journals, Knopf concludes that while its first source is colonial, it is really driven by oral tradition and Inuit perspective. Much of its critique focuses on the speed and coercion involved in the Inuit’s conversion to Christianity; in this regard, the film notes that Rasmussen himself was not entirely innocent of the very changes in Inuit lifestyles that he lamented. The Journals decolonizes history by slowly eliminating Rasmussen’s perspective until, in the end, it focuses solely on the point of view of the Inuit themselves, as they struggle to survive physically and culturally against huge odds. The film itself becomes, in the end, a testament to survivance through the very circularity that allows its production and its counter-historical view of the period. Colleen McGloin’s “Australian Indigenous Short Films as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair’s The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk” returns us to Australia in order to examine at de- and re-historicizing practices in two of Wayne Blair’s short films. Situating her discussion in a pedagogical practice that involves using short films to emphasize the importance of Aboriginal self-representation, McGloin argues that humour is important in Blair’s films in that it allows him to “effectively, and yet subtly, shift the focus of race back to the non-Indigenous viewer” and so to invite him or her “to reconsider pre-conceived cultural assumptions, and to think carefully about the colonial arrogance of speaking for, and assuming understandings of Indigeneity based on Western colonial privilege” (132). Indigenous films commonly adopt this tactic of making whiteness (or other non-Indigenous identities) visible as race, thus revealing the normalizing and hierarchizing assumptions that allow white people the privilege of assuming that only “others” have race. Like others in this volume (notably Blackmore and Pearson), McGloin notes that contemporary Aboriginal filmmaking in Australia engages with a governmental return to nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury politics of “protection,” resorting mainly to the alibi of “saving the children” taken up by the Howard government in 2007 following the “Little Children Are Sacred” report (and continued by Howard’s successors). The Northern Territory Emergency Response was inherently draconian (sending in the armed forces to ensure forcible medical inspection of children) and ignored the report’s own recommendation that responses to the “crisis” in child sexual assault in Aboriginal communities be local, not centralized, and that the government take responsibility for child welfare in a broad range of areas, including education, housing, and employment.25 Set against this contemporary, as well as historical, colonial context, McGloin investigates the ways in which Blair uses humour and subtle mockery to show Frankie Dollar’s ability to survive and the role of the

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djarn djarns, the traditional dancers, in providing an alternative family and community to support him. Part of Blair’s mockery lies in showing how the “authentic” cultural practice of Aboriginal dance is a reclamation of culture for its Aboriginal participants and at the same time a mockery of non-Indigenous notions of Aboriginal authenticity—the didgeridoo player (that quintessential icon of Aboriginality) is actually a Samoan immigrant. The death of Frankie’s father reminds the viewer that early mortality is the common lot of Aboriginal people, especially Aboriginal males,26 while Frankie’s sexual abuse by his mother’s white boyfriend emphasizes that the sexual abuse of children is not simply or solely an Aboriginal issue. In her analysis of Black Talk, McGloin notes the similar use of humour to offset and represent urgent cultural issues: this film shows two young Aboriginal men, Tim and Scott, sitting and talking on a church bench as they await a funeral—only to reveal that Tim is attending Scott’s funeral. McGloin argues that the mocking humour with which Blair infuses his films provides powerful lessons for non-Indigenous students, who are forced to confront their own ideas about identity, Aboriginality, and Australianness in the face of the politics and counter-histories Blair foregrounds in his narratives. McGloin concludes that self-definition is “an act of agency whereby Indigenous textual producers seize and rework the frames of reference that discursively define and regulate what Aboriginality(s) are or can be” (142). The final chapter in this section is Wendy Gay Pearson’s “‘Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away’: Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes.” Pearson examines the decolonizing and rehistoricizing work of three films that are set prior to the colonial encounter: the Sámi film Ofelas (Pathfinder), the Inuit film Atanarjuat, and the Aboriginal Australian film Ten Canoes. Pearson notes that, although they were produced by three very different Indigenous cultures over a period of twenty years, these three films share decolonizing and rehistoricizing aims, with an emphasis on the viability (indeed, in some ways, the superiority) of Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies that see the wholeness of the world and the unity of humans within it. Pearson notes that the films have significant narrative commonalities; for example, all three begin with the intrusion of a stranger or strangers, who bring evil to the community, and all three end with “the restoration of harmony in the community through the refutation of the consequences of the stranger’s appearance on the land” (168). Also, each film insists on the validity of local Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, particularly in relation to the question of how to live well with others and with the land. The cross-cultural comparative approach in Pearson’s chapter raises questions about what Maori scholar Witi Ihimaera has called “the com-

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parative turn” in Indigenous textual studies. A symposium at the University of Auckland in 2006 noted that “[i]t has manifestly been possible to read diverse indigenous works in the light of the interests of a colonizing power or a monocultural institution.” Among the questions raised at this symposium were, “How else might indigenous literatures be read alongside each other? Is it possible, for example, to read writing by Maori with reference to Native American traditions, and vice versa?”27 The conference on which this book is based took as one of its organizing principles the idea that placing analyses of films and media from different Indigenous cultures in dialogue with one another would raise interesting questions about comparing texts produced during the colonial period with texts produced after decolonization, besides highlighting questions about the nature of Indigenous identity and the differences and similarities between diverse Indigenous peoples as these are borne out through representation. Because the history of colonization and decolonization is so central to the experience of many if not most Indigenous peoples, the movement between Australian Aboriginal, Inuit, and Sámi experiences that takes place not only in Pearson’s chapter but also between the chapters in this section allows for an exploration of the similarities and differences embedded in the colonial experience, particularly in relation to each dominant culture’s attempt to erase the Indigenous present and to locate Indigenous peoples only in the past or, alternatively, as experiencing a present only of social malaise (alcoholism, unemployment, domestic violence, etc.). Each of the chapters in this section shows the range of ways in which Indigenous film and media makers represent Indigenous people’s ability to adapt to the present while also reclaiming the histories that colonialism attempted to erase and the voices it attempted to silence. More recently, this idea of allowing works from different Indigenous cultures to speak to one another has been taken up by Chadwick Allen in relation to global Indigenous literary studies. Situating the comparative method in terms of introducing “Great Book from Tradition A” to “Great Book from Tradition B” so that “they can exchange vital statistics, fashion tips, and recipes under the eye of the Objective Scholar,” Allen argues instead that other projects—less foreordained, less forcibly balanced—are more intellectually stimulating, more aesthetically adventuresome, more politically pressing. Scholarship outside established formulas embraces difficulty and assumes risk, but these projects will be more productive within an academic field that increasingly defines itself as sovereign from the obsessions of orthodox studies of literatures in English.

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With regard to the study of Indigenous film and media, the genealogy and contemporary lineaments of scholarship may be considerably less clear and, indeed, may bear a less clear relationship to “orthodox studies” of film or media than is the case with literary studies. Indeed, one could argue—and this section may well do so—that this book is part of a current process of establishing these relationships both within and outside of academic work. Where Indigenous film and media studies clearly diverge from the orthodoxies of film and media studies more generally is precisely in those regions to which the chapters in this section point: the emphasis on the material consequences of representation, the need to decolonize approaches and methodologies, and the recognition of Indigenous realities as being contemporary, meaningful, and diverse. In Section Three of this book, “Mediating Practices,” the chapters examine ways in which Indigenous media of various kinds mediate between disparate audiences and spectatorial expectations. As we saw in the previous section, many Indigenous films try to speak both to a local Indigenous audience and to a presumed non-Indigenous audience, often also local or at least national. Yet Indigenous films, in part because of their relative lack of distribution channels, are often screened in internationally oriented Indigenous and other film festivals, producing willy-nilly a juxtaposition that highlights “the theoretical and practical problems that arise when indigenous literatures and other art forms are compared with each other, and when the reader or viewer is removed from the indigenous text’s cultural and political circumstances of production” (“Comparative Approaches”). Thus the diverse audiences for any Indigenous media may well include the local Indigenous peoples to whom it speaks directly, but also people from other Indigenous cultures who have a common experience of Indigeneity yet no local knowledge of culture, language, history, or cosmology, in addition to non-Indigenous people from a similarly wide variety of cultures. Some Indigenous media makers adopt Mohawk writer Beth Brant’s position that “I do not write for you who are white. I write for my own” (52). Yet others adopt positions similar to that of Zacharias Kunuk and the Igloolik Isuma collective in targeting their films both to Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. Arnold Krupat notes, for instance, that Atanarjuat “first and foremost addresses a local and quite specific indigenous community for whom it will help provide answers to the question, Who are the Inuit today?” (132). But he adds that “Atanarjuat also wishes to address a southern—French and English Canada and the United States, but also a more generally metropolitan—audience which it challenges to see with a Native eye, to relativize its usual perspectives, and indeed, to move the center” (132–33). Krupat makes the point that film

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and other visual media allow for this dual address somewhat more easily than does literature, noting that many artists and critics simply “throw up our hands” in the face of intransigent non-Indigenous audiences who refuse to enter into an exercise of thinking differently (132). Few Indigenous cultural producers manifest much desire to cater to such an audience, and when they do so, it is usually through humour (a technique we will discuss in Section Four). However, Krupat also notes that, unlike those films or media productions that adopt a similar both/and approach to audiences, “the filmmakers [of Atanarjuat] also and quite unusually seem to welcome and willingly acknowledge a third audience . . . [which] consists of southerners who are either unwilling or unable to alter their habits of perception” (133). He argues that Igloolik Isuma does this by providing an accessible aesthetic experience that allows non-Indigenous spectators to translate the film “into familiar (but largely irrelevant) Western categories” (133). He trenchantly notes that the films which most appeal to critics are those which appeal to the second audience, the non-Indigenous audience willing and even eager to enter into and engage with unfamiliar perceptions and perspectives, particularly when those perceptions and perspectives reflect differently on things already deemed familiar—which may, of course, also include the expectation that the non-Indigenous spectator has authoritative knowledge of Indigenous peoples, their histories (as told by the colonizer), and their ways of life. Jo Smith and Sue Abel’s “Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/New Zealand” looks at the position of Māori Television, a channel founded in 2004 to broadcast in both Māori and English with the presumption of both Māori and Pākehā (European-descendant) audiences. Smith and Abel establish the presence of Māori Television as a victory borne from a long history of struggle over rights to adequate representation that derive from the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which guaranteed Māori people absolute authority over their own resources. Abel and Smith quote Derek Tini Fox’s argument that “like the land, the public broadcasting system is a vital present-day resource, and as such Māori are legally entitled to an equal share of it” (176). While Māori Television hardly represents an equal share, it does present a significant improvement over the 1 percent of television programming that had been allotted to Māori concerns in the late twentieth century. Questions of audience and questions of language are both addressed by the Act which set up Māori Television. Indeed, Smith and Abel note that “the channel’s tagline (mā rātou [for them]; mā mātou [for us, but not them]; mā koutou [for you]; mā tātou [for everyone]) addresses an array of possible viewers that includes

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Māori and non-Māori, native speakers and non-native speakers” (180). The use of te reo Māori in broadcasting is, of course, important in keeping the language alive and ensuring new generations of native speakers, but it is also, by its very nature, a decolonizing strategy, as is representation of Māori culture and history.28 Smith and Abel note both the bilingualism and biculturalism of some Māori television programming, such as the sports show Code, which is broadcast in English but includes lessons in Māori vocabulary along with its sports reportage. The popularity and success of Māori Television, however, raises its own issues in the context of post-colonial relations, as Smith and Abel demonstrate; in particular, they argue that “we have to remember that Māori Television functions within a wider mediascape where Māori differences have often sustained, enhanced, and demarcated the national differences of New Zealand on the global market” (181). Thus the seeming embrace of Māori culture by some Pākehā is not always innocent; it can sometimes function as a colonizing strategy. Nevertheless, by addressing Māori rather than Pākehā models of identity—notably, by basing identity on the iwi rather than on ideas of citizenship—Māori Television serves as an important tool for mediating the fraught political and cultural relationships between Māori and Pākehā. The following chapter, Adam Szymanski’s interview with Jenny Fraser, an Aboriginal Australian NMA producer and curator, takes a similar approach in interrogating the ways in which Aboriginal use of NMA necessarily mediates between the visions and practices of Aboriginal artists, on the one hand, and non-Aboriginal expectations of what Aboriginal art should mean and be, on the other. Aboriginal New Media artists are often not recognized as creating Aboriginal art even when they include in their work, for example, references to traditional dot painting techniques. Dot painting, which originated with the Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, has come to be almost universally recognized as Aboriginal art to the exclusion of many other art practices, especially those that are more contemporary or Western-influenced. Fraser notes that even among many Aboriginal people themselves, the strength of these expectations leads to questions like, “Why can’t artists just stick with traditions? How can new, challenging art be contextualized in terms of Aboriginality? If it doesn’t look like Aboriginal art then surely it isn’t a real cultural practice?” (189). The idea of authentic cultural practices, of course, like the idea of authentic Indigeneity itself, ties Indigenous people firmly to an unchanging and unchangeable past. Like the filmmakers and television producers discussed elsewhere in this book, Aboriginal New Media artists use new artistic media to produce artistic work that reflects their own concerns as contemporary and often urban Aboriginal people. Fraser notes that, despite the difference

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in medium, many Aboriginal New Media artists share much with more traditional art forms: connections to place and language issues, but also multi-layered narratives that often involve historical archives, family photographs, and other ways of reclaiming the silenced and invisible histories of Aboriginal peoples. One problem for Aboriginal New Media artists is that their art is recognized neither by those interested in Aboriginal art nor by a mainstream art community that associates contemporary art practices entirely with non-Indigenous people. Szymanski and Fraser discuss specific artworks by the Marrukegu Company, r e a, Jason Davidson, and Fraser herself. Fraser concludes that building strong Aboriginal communities requires recognition of work that is both culturally specific and artistically diverse and that mediates between divergent visions of Aboriginal life and identity, as well as between diverse audiences and their expectations. The final chapter in this section is Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove’s “On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South.” Morton and Sirove explore their experience as part of a graduate student group curating a screening of Inuit documentaries at the Alice Etherington Art Gallery in Kingston, Ontario. Reflecting on the experience, which was not entirely what the group had expected, they interrogate the ways in which the collective experience of art encompasses not only the collaborative approach embraced by the Arnait and Isuma collectives in Igloolik, but also the films’ reception by a Southern audience. In their reflections on the project’s failure to match the group’s didactic expectations—they refer to their desire to educate Southern audiences about the Inuit as “naive”—the authors turn to the debate between Laura Marks and Michael Robert Evans in Fuse about the Southern/Western tendency to attribute authorship to Zacharias Kunuk, despite Igloolik Isuma’s commitment to collectivity. Moving beyond the position espoused by Marks’s and Evans’s criticism, which circulates around the importance of consulting—either in person or through interviews and other written sources— the opinions of the filmmakers themselves, Morton and Sirove turn to an early piece by Kass Banning to locate a notion of Inuit hybridity. This position is reflected in Kunuk’s own statement that “[t]oday we are living two lives.” Different audiences, and indeed different members of a single audience, may understand those two lives differently; the authors argue that these differences in interpretation, rather than foreclosing conversation about the film, may instead open up productive spaces for dialogue that do not necessarily espouse obvious, if perhaps artificial, lines between Indigenous/non-Indigenous, Northern/Southern, and so on. In Section Four, “Documentary Approaches,” the focus is on four very different approaches to documentary filmmaking, albeit all by Canadian

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filmmakers and all on Canadian subjects. The chapters in this section examine variations in both form and content in Indigenous documentary, exploring the nature of documentary filmmaking, the diverse ways in which it can be approached, the very different uses to which it can be put, and the narrative and aesthetic choices of the films’ directors and creators. In examining the Prince George Métis Elders documentary project, Stephen Foster and Mike Evans begin by commenting on the fact that documentary filmmaking has reached a point of radical transformation caused by shifts towards digital video technologies and new forms of broadcasting, which include not only the Internet but other digital wireless devices as well. They note that “innovations in aesthetic form and broadcast capacity allow documentary to reach new audiences in new ways, diversifying the level of audience engagement and participation, blurring lines between subjectivity, authorship, and audience, and potentiating the development of participatory and community-based documentary methodologies” (221). Taking the Prince George Métis Elders documentary project as an example of these shifts in technologies, audiences, participants, and filmmakers, they examine the ways in which these new forms of documentary filmmaking also facilitate new forms of collaboration, both within Indigenous communities and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Foster, as artist, and Evans, as social scientist, examine both the process of producing the documentary and their involvement with the project, which was initiated by the community Elders themselves. As was the case with Jenny Fraser, Foster and Evans point out the ways in which new media technologies enable new aesthetic and technological approaches to older art forms—in this case, documentary. Like Blackmore, Foster and Evans also contemplate processes of Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration that not only empower individuals and communities to document their own stories but also work at different levels of what cultural critic Donna Haraway calls situated knowledges—that is, the idea that all of our knowledge is related to our particular embodied perspective. The multiple screens and interactive approach of the finished documentary allow viewers entirely different experiences of the material, experiences that more closely reflect their own relationships to their community and its varying knowledges and perspectives. Foster and Evans conclude that “with a new approach rooted in new technologies and new methodologies, our project extends the challenge imagined by the NFB when they created CFC” (232). In this way, Foster and Evans link their collaborative experience with Indigenous documentary film back to the works of the Indian Film Crew and forward to the Indigenous new media world imagined also by Jenny Fraser.

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By contrast, Ute Lischke’s “Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone”: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew” looks at a far more conventional documentary style. Taylor’s approach to documentary filmmaking would be familiar to almost any documentary spectator: in this 2000 film, he uses “Voice of God” narration (although, since Taylor, the humorist, is himself the narrator, this choice is not without its own rather ironic humour), interviews, various forms of archival footage, and so on, with an emphasis on shots of performances by the First Nations and Inuit comedians who are his subjects. The emphasis in Lischke’s argument is on the power of humour in Indigenous art and especially on its quite deliberate use by comedians as a tool for healing the wounds of the past, from colonization generally to the specific evils of residential schools, alcoholism, rampant diabetes, and so on. Lischke notes that “Taylor has established his own tradition within the genre of Indigenous humour by combining a sense of drama with acerbic wit to carve out a space in which Indigenous peoples share the world with Euro-Americans, but on their own terms” (234). At the same time, however, like the other comedians and humorists whom he interviews, Taylor relies on particular common tropes within First Nations humour, notably storytelling and Trickster narratives. These forms of humour are culturally specific, since they rely, like the Elders’ documentary project, on situated and embodied knowledges of the effects of colonialism; at the same time, though, they constitute a bridge both to spectators from other Indigenous cultures and to non-Indigenous audiences. Lischke points out that, perhaps due to stereotypes of the “stoic Indian” and the “noble savage,” Native humour has received little critical attention until very recently. In Taylor’s documentary, the question of non-Indigenous critical approaches is moot, since Taylor approaches Indigenous humour from an insider perspective, not particularly caring whether non-Indigenous audiences “get it” or not. Lischke concludes that “by interweaving the personal stories of his subjects with their performances, Taylor has created a documentary that discusses humour from the perspective of Indigenous people, and explores how humour originates in the past to influence the present and point to the future. But, above all, Taylor has succeeded in showing that humour has been an essential tool in the healing process of Indigenous peoples, who are beginning to liberate themselves from the legacy of colonization” (245). In “Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro,” Maeghan Pirie draws on extensive interviews she conducted with the two directors to examine the ways in which these Iroquoian women filmmakers reclaim Indigenous female subjectivity by talking back to colonialism. Obomsawin is primarily a documentary filmmaker,

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with more than thirty-seven films to her credit; Niro is also an artist and photographer, and her films are often dramatic and/or experimental shorts. In many ways, the work of each of these filmmakers has much in common with the films and photographs of Tracey Moffatt discussed by Knabe earlier in this book: all three examine the intersections of Indigeneity and gender identity in relation to colonialism. Pirie examines one film by each director: Obomsawin’s autobiographically inspired Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (2006), and Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper, a dramatic short she made with Anna Gronau in 1992. She explores these films in the context of “situated knowledges,” a concept from cultural theorist Donna Haraway that attempts to reconcile the need for objective knowledge of the world with deconstructionist principles that demonstrate the partiality and often incommensurability of all knowledge systems. Drawing on earlier work on feminist standpoint theory, notably that of Sandra Harding, Haraway proposes that emphasizing situated knowledges allows recognition of a multiplicity of voices rather than a dichotomous emphasis on dominant/oppressed and other binary systems. Both Niro and Obomsawin demonstrate the validity and importance of Indigenous women’s knowledge of the world and of their own history. This allows for a multiplicity not only of voices but also of tactics for change. Pirie concludes that “film is not only a mechanism for resistance but also recuperation and catharsis, capable of carving out hopeful spaces in which peripheral bodies bear witness to ongoing colonial violence as well as continuity and renewal” (261). In a way not dissimilar to the movement in Taylor’s work between comedy performance and the documentary that records and examines it, Gail Vanstone’s chapter “‘I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are’: Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd’s Hands of History” views Indigenous filmmaking and Indigenous art as reciprocal practices intervening in the politics of colonization and decolonization. Todd’s Hands of History looks at the art practices of four First Nations women artists: Rena Point Bolton (Stol:o), Doreen Jensen (Giksan), Joane Cardinal-Schubert (Blood), and Jane Ash Poitras (Mikisew Cree). Between them, these artists practise diverse arts: weaving, carving, button blanket making, printmaking, installations, mixed media, and collage. Some of the more traditional Indigenous arts, like their equivalents in non-Indigenous culture, have been demoted by the art world to “crafts”—a judgment reinforced by the gendering of most crafts as female (and/or ethnic) and of most serious art as male, in clear distinction to Indigenous practice. Indeed, Vanstone begins her discussion of Hands of History by quoting Jensen’s comment in the film that “in my language there is no word for art. This is not because we are devoid of art. It

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is because art is so powerfully integrated within all aspects of life that we are replete with it” (265). This is a very powerful comment on the ways in which “art” has been designated in most Western cultures as interesting and accessible in the main only to the elites and thus isolated from daily life, in part through the clear distinction between “art” and “entertainment” on the one hand and “art” and “education” on the other. As a documentary, Hands of History falls primarily into the category of education and only to a lesser extent into the category of entertainment. Vanstone exposes the extent to which Todd’s film is, like her subjects’ practices, a work of art. Like Blackmore, Vanstone emphasizes issues of Native voice and perspective, of connections between past, present, and future, and of the interrelations among peoples and between people and the planet. For Todd, the spirituality expressed through all forms of Indigenous art practice, including documentary filmmaking, has a strong healing power. Like many other Indigenous documentaries, Hands of History engages in a decolonizing practice that directly reverses ethnographic film practices, where Indigenous arts are often viewed as mere artifacts, concrete evidence of a “dying” culture. Instead, Todd shows Indigenous women artists who are deeply connected to their cultural roots even when their art practice is influenced by contemporary Western practices. Whether engaged in traditional quillworking or in painting informed by the history of twentieth-century art, Indigenous women artists, including the filmmaker, bring their own Indigenous aesthetics to the project of self-representation. In this way, Todd’s documentary looks forward to the new media works explored by Fraser and Szymanski and by Foster and Evans while retaining a conventional documentary form not dissimilar to Taylor’s—and for not dissimilar purposes (perhaps reminding us that comedy, too, is an art form). Section Five of this book, “Other Perspectives,” looks at two films, one from Canada and one from Aotearoa/New Zealand, both directed by nonIndigenous people but both deeply influenced by Indigenous cinemas and each asking questions about identity, knowledge, and strategies for selfrepresentation. In “Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette’s Heater,” Tanis MacDonald looks at the ways in which walking in the city can signal homelessness, poverty, and mental illness and yet retain aspects of the “flânerie” of the nineteenth-century urban flâneur, who walks—or perhaps strolls—to experience the city in all its colourful multiplicity. A quintessential figure of modernity, the flâneur is both celebrated and ironized in Heater, which also takes liberties with familiar Hollywood genres, such as the road movie (Heater’s tagline is “A road movie without a car”) and the buddy movie. The buddies in Heater are an unlikely alliance: a temporarily homeless Indigenous man

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(Gary Farmer), whose wallet has been stolen, and a schizophrenic white man (Stephen Ouimette), who has come into possession of the electric heater for which the film is named. The plot revolves around the two men’s efforts to turn the heater, which is useless without a place to plug it in, into cash, a quest that takes them from downtown Winnipeg to a suburban mall and back again. MacDonald notes that “in Heater, the act of walking in a Winnipeg winter enunciates an economic silence surrounding poverty and racism that is historically imbedded in the city’s treatment of its Indigenous population” (287). She adds that “a great deal of Heater’s value as a film and as a social comment lies in Odette’s hands-off approach to interpreting Indigenous culture” (288); instead, the film functions as a portrait of both historical and contemporary racism. Noting the multiple layers of reference in the film, particularly to other films starring Gary Farmer and to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, MacDonald carefully unpacks the relationships between the Indigenous man (Farmer) and the schizophrenic man and between them and an urban environment created by colonialism and sustained by systems of racism and oppression—an environment that includes the poverty and homelessness associated with mental health issues. However, MacDonald notes that the film’s seeming equivalency between its two homeless characters is dissipated in the end. Odette’s scathing criticism of the prevalence of racism in the Prairies today highlights the fact that “a crazy white man” is less disadvantaged than “a sane Indigenous man.” In Heater, “Odette’s signature renders the Indigenous flâneur as someone who passes through space in search of space to call home, but remains unrecognized: homeless, comfortless, and subject to interrogation. The flâneur as social suspect becomes an ‘Instant Indian’: just add surveillance” (299). Although MacDonald does not address the question of audience, Heater is a remarkable film that deserves to be much better known by Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. Indeed, it too raises questions of collaboration (and its costs) in its vision of the temporary cooperation between its two homeless subjects—thus returning us to issues raised by Blackmore and Foster and Evans, in particular. This book’s final chapter is Davinia Thornley’s “Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk.” Like Heater, The Price of Milk is not a well-known film, although somewhat more mainstream in the New Zealand context. In contrast to the relentless realism of Odette’s film, however, director Harry Sinclair uses magic realism as a subversive strategy to interrogate stereotypes of race relations between Māori and Pākehā and to focus on thorny questions around land and its ownership. Also unlike Heater, The Price of Milk is, at least in part, an improv work, with Sinclair rewriting the script and rearranging the shooting order

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throughout in order to avoid the confinement of conventional narrative filmmaking. Thornley notes that the film belongs to a “slender sub-genre” of “magical realist feature film comedies that deal with indigenous issues” (302). The central subversive strategy in The Price of Milk is role reversal. In this narrative, it is the Pākehā who must give up the thing they most value in order to get back what belonged to them in the first place—a very obvious metaphor for the contemporary situation of the Māori in relation to land claims and cultural preservation. Thornley notes that “by forcing Pākehā to abandon a central spectatorial position in order to identify with Rob and Lucinda (the film’s main Pākehā characters), the film occupies a kind of liminal space between Māori-made film and the vast majority of mainstream (read white-produced) cinematic products from this country. Given this, while The Price of Milk is not an indigenous film, it by no means sits easily with the latter category either” (302). She concludes that Sinclair produces a decolonizing effect by “taking the national debate into an entirely different paddock: one that introduces the audience to hard questions about power through magically inflected soft comedy.” While the subversion invoked by the role reversal, and indeed the idea of role reversal itself, may not necessarily be apparent to all audiences, Sinclair’s film, like Odette’s, finds ways to argue in favour of decolonization and against the stultifying effects of racism and discrimination as nation-building strategies. Both films offer, as do the Indigenous films and media discussed in this book, visions of another world, one in which the dominant hierarchy of Western epistemologies has been dismantled in favour of recognizing the validity of Indigenous perspectives and knowledges.

Notes 1 “Indexical” refers to the degree to which an image and its referent can be taken as identical. For example, we assume portrait photography to have an indexical relationship to its subject (most of the time) in ways that a painting might not. Digital technologies and particularly CGI have made it increasingly difficult for filmgoers to assume an indexical relationship between what is on screen and reality. While the Na’vi in Avatar are obviously fictional, the deceptive potentials of CGI and other technologies become obvious when a girl clutching a bag of chips in a studio can become a refugee with a kitten, as is illustrated in the (fortunately fictional) Wag the Dog. 2 We refer here to the wish fulfillment discourse of the “vanishing Indian,” not to the much more complex reality. 3 According to Statistics Canada, “previous censuses have shown that the Aboriginal population is growing much faster than the total population,

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a trend which will continue through to 2017. The Aboriginal population is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.8%, more than twice the rate of 0.7% for the general population” (“Canada’s Aboriginal population in 2017”). Similarly, the Australian Bureau of Statistics notes that “the latest ABS projections of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population show an increase from 517,000 people in 2006 to between 713,300 and 721,100 people in 2021. The projected average annual growth rate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population between 2006 and 2021 is 2.2%, much higher than the same rate for the total Australian population (1.4%)” (“Measures of Australia’s Progress,” 2010). Similarly, Shumway and Jackson point out that “Native Americans are the ethnic group in the United States whose population is expanding most rapidly solely through natural increase” (186). For Latin America, see also McSweeney and Arps. For an excellent general overview of the genocide of Indigenous peoples around the globe, see Totten and Hitchcock, Genocide of Indigenous Peoples. See also Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide against Indigenous Peoples”; Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide; and Milloy, A National Crime. This government policy was elucidated by successive “Chief Protectors” of Aborigines, including A.O. Neville (who makes an appearance in RabbitProof Fence, complete with his early slide projection show of how to “breed the black out,” and Dr. Cecil Evelyn Cook, who told a 1933 newspaper that “the Australian native is the most easily assimilated race on earth, physically and mentally. A blending with the Asiatic, though tending to increase virility, is not desirable. The quickest way out is to breed him white” (Jopson online; see also Austin, “Training for Assimilation”; and McGregor, “‘Breed out the Colour.’” It is important to note that a similar mentality affected Indigenous people in the United States, illustrated by residential training school founder Captain Richard Pratt’s statement that it was necessary to “Kill the Indian” to “save the man,” Utilizing education as a tool of cultural genocide produces a quite different effect than the race politics encapsulated in the “one-drop rule” that structured black/white relations in the United States (Churchill, Kill the Indian). The Indian Film Unit (or Indian Film Crew) was the NFB’s first program specifically aimed at training First Nations people as filmmakers. For more information on the IFC, see Stewart, “The Indian Film Crews of Challenge for Change.” As an interesting side note, the final edit was done by Kathleen Shannon, a non-Indigenous director at the NFB who went on to found Studio D, the women’s film unit. In Canada, the federal law that prevented people with Indian status from voting was changed in 1960; in Australia, Aboriginal people gained the right to vote federally in 1967; and in the United States, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted all Native Americans citizenship and the right to vote federally, although some states in the Southwest restricted Native American voting

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well into the 1960s. In New Zealand, all Māori men were enfranchised in 1867, while European men did not receive the universal franchise until 1879; Māori women won the vote alongside European women in 1893, making New Zealand the first country to give women a vote in national elections. A useful discussion of non-Indigenous objections to the Video in the Villages project (the contention being that the purity of Amazonian Indigenes was being corrupted with Western technology), and of the ethics of the project in general, can be found in Caixeta de Queiroz, “Politics, Aesthetics, and Ethics in the Project Video in the Villages.” A different discussion of the non-Indigenous demand for Indigenous “authenticity” and its political consequences can be found in Conklin, “Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs,” in relation to strategic alliances between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous environmental activists. There are far more Indigenous peoples than there are Indigenous film cultures (the UN estimates some 370 million Indigenous individuals in 70 countries); this is particularly true of dramatic feature films, where the eighty or so films made to date represent only a handful of Indigenous cultural groups. Directed by Marcus Nispel in 2007, the widely panned American version turns Nils Gaup’s Sámi into Native Americans and his evil strangers into Vikings. Whereas Ofelas focuses on the Tchudes’ destruction of harmony and proper ways of life, Pathfinder celebrates violence. Gaup’s film is sometimes referred to by its Sámi title, sometimes by its Norwegian title (Veivseren), and sometimes by its English title. Nispel’s film is also known as Pathfinder: The Legend of the Ghost Warrior. Films that were not listed in Wood’s filmography include a small number of South American films, notably Marianne Eyde’s La Vida es una sola (You Only Live Once; Peru 1992), El Regalo de Pachamama (The Gift of Pachamama; Bolivia 2008) and Burwa Dii Ebo (The Wind and the Water; Panama 2009), as well as the films of Kanakan Balintagos (aka Auraeus Solito) and other Indigenous filmmakers from the Philippines. To date, Balintagos has made six dramatic features, several short films, and a documentary. For a global overview of Indigenous peoples and poverty, see “Still Among the Poorest of the Poor,” a policy brief to the World Bank on the economic situation and future of Indigenous people around the world. See also Hall and Patrinos, Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Development. The NFB ran Studio One in Edmonton from 1991 to 1996. Following the model of Studio D, which produced only films by women, Studio One produced only films by Indigenous filmmakers. In 1996, it was closed and replaced by the Aboriginal Filmmaking Program. See Gil Cardinal’s brief history on the NFB website: https://www.nfb.ca/playlists/gil-cardinal/ aboriginal-voice-national-film-board. “The role of the cinema has become that of providing a showcase for feature films, leaving to television and video the wider range of reportage, instruction, propaganda, introspection, entertainment, etc., which the cinema

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formerly shared with radio and newspapers” (160). Nowell-Smith wrote this in 1990, and it is noteworthy that many of these functions of radio and newspapers have in turn been taken over by the Internet and social media. See Blackmore’s chapter in this book for a discussion of Ten Canoes in the context of contemporary Aboriginal filmmaking. See also Pearson’s chapter for a comparative discussion of Atanarjuat, Ofelas, (Pathfinder), and Ten Canoes. While this period is often referred to as “post-colonial,” the term is deeply problematic, and we prefer here to emphasize the degree to which Indigenous peoples still experience many forms of colonialism in their everyday lives. Wendy would like to acknowledge that she was introduced to Braveheart’s work by members of her Worldwide Indigenous Cinemas class in 2009, particularly David Chang, Sinead Donohoe, and Matt White. Chang, Donohoe, and White usefully summarize Braveheart’s understanding of HTR: “Historical Trauma Responses are characteristic reactions to historical trauma, including depression, self-destructive behaviour, substance abuse, identification with the ancestral pain, fixation to trauma, anxiety, guilt, low selfesteem, anger, chronic bereavement, difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, and suicidal thoughts” (Chang et al.). “Third Cinema” refers to the overtly political filmmaking practices of Latin America. The term was coined by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in an influential article published in 1969. Third Cinema is often experimental and always anti-colonialist. Krupat points out, for example, that many Inuit, and Kunuk in particular, speak with some fondness of Nanook of the North, a response that is neither the wholehearted acceptance of it as an accurate ethnographic portrait of the Inuit in the early 1920s (an acceptance that was common among nonIndigenous audiences) nor an absolute dismissal of it for its inaccuracies and manipulations. Krupat’s argument does not go quite as far as Raheja’s in locating the invisible “Indians” in the casts and crews of non-Indigenous films or in detecting their influence on the resulting depictions, but it is important in that it recognizes that Indigenous responses even to the most stereotypical of representations are not homogeneous. Like Thomas in Smoke Signals, an Indigenous person may choose to watch Dances with Wolves two hundred times and even find some value in it in relation to his own identity. For example, the 2005 ImagineNative catalogue describes Lars Göran Petterson, director of Bázo, as Sámi; but Houston Wood identifies him as a nonSámi dweller in northern Norway in Native Features (140). In relation to the two films Eyre directed based on novels by Tony Hillerman, Sherman Alexie has clearly stated his opinion that “we Indians love to talk about and fight for our (artistic) sovereignty, but there can be nothing sovereign or aboriginal about a movie based on a Tony Hillerman book” (53). Indigenous film scholars seem, by and large, to have followed Alexie’s opinion on this topic.

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22 For an academic approach to the topic of Two Spirit people, sistagirls and takatapui, see Driskill and colleagues’ anthology Queer Indigenous Studies. A valuable function performed by the contributors to this book is to place Indigenous systems of sexuality and gender at the centre of academic discourse rather than at the margins. The editors note, citing Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies, that “‘indigenous methodologies’ represent the intellectual work Indigenous people can take up in order to decolonize both knowledge and the methods that produce it” (4). 23 This anthology was originally to be edited by three of the conference organizers, Ute Lischke, David T. McNab, and Wendy Gay Pearson. However, after McNab unfortunately became ill several months before the actual conference, he and his partner, Lischke, withdrew from active organizing and from their positions as editors. Susan Knabe, one of the original conference presenters, kindly stepped in as the new co-editor following the conference. 24 Although Dance Me Outside is about First Nations people, it is neither written nor directed by Indigenous people and thus is not generally considered to be an Indigenous film. 25 Pearson points out that at least one report has found the same rate of sexual abuse of children in non-Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia as in Indigenous communities. And Claire Smith, professor of archeology at Flinders University, noting that the government intervention policy is failing, also points out that 31 of the children in the community of 452 people she is affiliated with have attempted or committed suicide and that “some of these young people had been the victims of white pedophiles.” See Smith, “The Aboriginal Intervention Policy Is Failing.” 26 Although estimates vary, it is commonly accepted that the life expectancy of Aboriginal Australian males is eighteen years less than that of non-Aboriginal Australian males. 27 See the original call for papers at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/ node/7793. 28 Translation, and especially the demand that everything be accessible in English, is a very particular issue that Smith and Abel raise in their chapter, in part by asserting the validity of Māori terminology for Māori concepts. As a way of negotiating the different needs of different audiences for this book, we have opted to provide a multi-language glossary at the back, rather than asserting a hegemonic demand for translation on Smith and Abel’s argument.

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He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film MICHAEL GRE YE YES

Stage directions are in brackets. The keynote requires the performer to stand in front of a blank white screen, upon which projections will appear throughout the address. Greetings and welcome colleagues, friends. Tansi and Boozhoo filmakers, directors, screenwriters, critics, and scholars. Hello cineastes, film junkies. [slyly] You know who you are. [beat] If a movie comes on at 2 a.m.—even if you’re dead tired—you’ll watch it all the way to the bitter end, all the way to the final fade-out and credits! (Even if it’s terrible. Even if you’ve seen it before.) [sheepish AA first-timer] “Hi, my name is Michael. I’m a film addict.” [using various voices, overlapped]: “Hi Michael. Hi, Mike.” Ladies and Gentlemen. This is a map of a human heart. This is a chalk outline. These are footprints in the snow . . . leading to . . . EXT. NIGHT. WINTER. The air has a deadly chill. Lights from nearby houses and cottages cast an eerie glow through a stand of trees. THREE MEN are walking down a country road. The snow is hard-packed underfoot. Their breath comes churning out of their mouths. Their BOOTS SQUEAKING against the snow.

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One of the MEN, a NATIVE man in his mid-20s, motions the others to stop. He HEARS something. They all stop. CLOSE ON NATIVE MAN. NATIVE MAN Do you hear that? WIDE SHOT. The other MEN shake their heads. The NATIVE MAN listens. He hears only winter silence. NATIVE MAN (shaking his head) It’s gone. They start walking again. Eager to get back inside to the warmth.

(Sound: Trees cracking in the wind. Likes bones breaking.) NATIVE MAN That! The other two MEN halt, again listening intently. NATIVE MAN Something’s out there. It’s following us. I can hear it when we’re walking. But when we stop. It stops. CUT TO: POV from behind the trees. CAMERA dollies through the woods. The trunks of trees passing in front of the lens. Thick black rectangles moving Right to

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Left across the screen. The THREE MEN, not altogether unaware they are being watched, start walking quickly towards the house down the road. (Sound: Bones breaking.) The air was so cold and clear that night that the sound of our shoes hitting the hard-pack snow was echoing in the trees . . . Just our own footsteps bouncing off tree after tree. That’s all . . . It was better when I thought it was breaking bones. National Ballet School. Maitland Street. Distorted mirrors and wooden floors. “First Native boy, a Cree from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, accepted into Canada’s National Ballet School, after extensive auditions across Canada.” Betty O. Broken bones. Toronto, 1987. National Ballet. 70 Dancers. Full Orchestra. Powdered wigs. Frederick Ashton and Petipa. Fake moustaches and tambourines. Bones breaking. Swan Lake. Breaking bones as I fell from the sky. Eliot Feld. July. So hot that I sweated through black leather ballet shoes. Leaving black footprints on the marley dance floor. Nancy. Walking hand in hand down 18th St. Astoria. Union Square. East Village. I saw Dances With Wolves on Broadway and 14th. Brown faces ten feet tall. Told her I wanted to be an actor. She didn’t bat an eyelash. Hollywood. Franklin. The 101. La Cienega. Sepulveda. Burbank. Darryl Marshak. Harry Gold. First class airfare. Scripts arriving FED EX. Breaking bones. “Slate myself?” [using a woman’s tonality] “Yes, just look into the camera. Tell us your name and the part you’re reading for.” [some confidence, but still mostly tentative.] “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of Red Cloud.”

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The image of the Indian is a site of contest. Within this arena, theories of identity, racism, history, language, authenticity, essentialism, post-colonialism, etc., vie for dominance, each providing an entry point into the debate but none offering a complete picture of it. Two recent documentaries: The Bronze Screen and The Slanted Screen bring into focus the idea that our—and I am speaking as an actor—our participation in an industry devoted to emptying us out, reinscribing us as they see fit is . . . problematic. That the cards are stacked against us. That the way out of the trap is to write, direct, and produce our own work. Subjectivity is the answer. This is, of course, right. Taking the reins, as it were, is a no-brainer. But being armed with a digital camera doesn’t make you accomplished. How do we develop the skill sets to make lasting work? The ability to create cinema and television that can change the world doesn’t usually spring from the womb. There is a system of training required. Some will call it programming, inculcation, indoctrination—but however you take it, whatever you name it, the training is needed before you have the right to call yourself a filmmaker, a writer . . . an actor. You can’t walk onto the arena floor at Schemitzun and call yourself a dancer, just because you’ve got brown skin, black hair, [under the breath] and a flat ass. I would think that you’d need to practise a bit, learn the songs, earn the right!? Me? I had two systems of training: a conservatory model, with a good dose of on-the-job training, and the classic Indigenous model: mentorship. But we’ll talk more about that later on. Okay, so you’ve got your diploma in hand, or experience under your belt. This isn’t your first barbecue. Before you run out the door, to write, direct, and produce your own work, I need to mention something. I don’t want to be a drag or bring you down, but let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. How are you going to get your film out there? [encouraging] You’ve got the thing in the can. Great! I know how hard it was to raise the money. Believe me. A movie about Indigenous people, made entirely by Indigenous people. Hell. They probably wanted to give you ten dollars to go away!

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Ahh, great! The film festival route is excellent. American Indian Film Festival in San Fran is a great place to start. Dreamkeeper! Fantastic. Sundance. South by Southwest. Cannes! Go for it. Shop it around. [change of tone/ ugly and condescending] Dress it up nice, while you’re at it! Put a wig on it, a nice pair of shoes. Redo the poster. Look you’ve got a hunk in the lead. Have him take his shirt off. Show off those pecs. That gorgeous brown skin! What’s the matter with you? What? It’s an art film? What does that mean? Lots of dialogue, no plot—that you want to lose money. [strident, lecturing] This is a marketplace. We work on commission . . . [beat] [sudden change of tone/ somewhat ashamed] I apologize. I didn’t mean to bring him out. What I meant to bring up is that without distribution, the fine work of Indigenous filmmakers—our hard-won subjectivity—will remain unseen, unheard. Without the imprimateur of studio distribution, I might never have seen Once Were Warriors, Tsotsi, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Whale Rider, to name but a few international films. No problem. Making the film is the hard part. (It is.) Distribution, by comparison, is cake. Witness the much-heralded collaboration between Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals. It was the darling of the festival film circuit. A Miramax film with all the trimmings. And it was ground-breaking. Indian characters were complex, fully problematized, and compelling. No white hero trope to bring a large-scale (read white) audience inside the story and our communities.1 By 1999, Variety had announced that Miramax has signed a deal with Alexie to bring his own novel, Reservation Blues, to the screen. Months later— after swimming in the shark-infested waters—Sherman announced, “He was quitting the movie business” (Lyons 1). Reservation Blues replaced the forgiving tone of Smoke Signals with a more violent, angrier, and strident vision. When push came to shove, Miramax wanted no part of actual Native subjectivity.

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In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Alexie commented wryly: There is a perception in Hollywood that Smoke Signals was a noble failure . . . In meetings I had, everyone had seen it, but the tone was, “I wish it would have done better.” I always say that in the year it came out, it did better than Pi, Buffalo 66, and The Slums of Beverly Hills put together. It was easier to get $ 2 million to make Smoke Signals than $ 200,000 to make Fancy Dancing. I couldn’t get anyone to give me $ 50,000. (“Sherman Leaving Hollywood”) As a countermove, Alexie—as big a name in the Indigenous firmament as anyone—began making films on DV (his first The Business of Fancydancing) and seeking distribution outside of the major studio infrastructure. The move towards true Indigenous subjectivity within Hollywood remains a dream, despite promising press releases, “Indie” film awards, and public pronouncements to the contrary. The control of the Indian image remains contested. Given this reality, I propose that the work of Native actors in mainstream films and television are akin to the work of undercover cops, like double agents in a LeCarré´ novel. Moles deep in the studio system, working from the inside. “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of Crazy Horse.” This is the chalk outline of a Native actor at the crossroads of internationalism, free trade, and false consciousness. What’s a Cree boy from the Qu’Appelle Valley to do? Ella Shohat and Robert Stam write that

For [Donald] Bogle, the history of Black performance is one of battling against confining stereotyped and categories . . . Thus subaltern performance encodes, often in sanitized, ambiguous ways, what [James C.] Scott calls “the hidden transcripts” of a subordinated group . . . At best, Black performance undercuts stereotypes by individualizing the type, slyly standing above it. [Furthermore,] Bogle emphasizes the resilient imagination of Black performers obliged to play against script and studio intentions, their capacity for turning demeaning roles into resistant performance. (196)

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Breaking bones to fit into tight shoes. This is a map of an actor’s heart. One man’s perspective; not typically myopic and narcissistic, we—as actors of colour—don’t have that luxury. We have burdens to carry. But it’s not all uphill. We have gifts too. We have mentors. Trail cutters. Those who have walked before us. Into the deep drifts, so that we might journey more easily. This is a woefully incomplete list of previous generations of Native performers, who opened, and in some cases, broke down doors for my generation. Their names are: Jay Silverheels, Chief Dan George, August Schellenberg, Tantoo Cardinal, Will Sampson, George Clutesi, Lois Red Elk, Gary Farmer, Denis Lacroix, Margo Kane, Gordon Tootoosis, Michael Horse, Jimmy Herman, Graeme Greene, Johnny Yes No, and many others. Their contributions to changing cinema are perhaps not fully documented, but in time, should be recognized as analogous to the work that other performers of colour, such as Sessue Hayakawa, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge, Mako, Dolores Del Rio, and Sidney Poitier did for their own communities. I am fortunate to have already worked with many of these Aboriginal actors, and their role in my career development has been substantial and ongoing. In fact, my relationships with three of them in particular—Schellenberg, Cardinal, and Lacroix—exemplify the benefits of emerging from within Aboriginal culture and from a Native acting community. Foremost is that all three embrace their roles as mentors and teachers—as they were taught, so too have they taught in turn. August Schellenberg, for example, has taken me under his wing from the first film we worked on together. Within an hour of meeting him, Augie taught me how to hit a “mark” (back then, I didn’t even know what a mark was, let alone how to hit it) and shared with me his understanding of the differences between acting for stage and film. They, in turn, were influenced by the previous generation, especially Chief Dan George. Lacroix recalls seeing Dan George, as Old Antoine, on Caribou Country:

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I’d been to Lilloet and I remember the people from the bush . . . I remember how they walked and talked. I says, “My God, they got this on film. Finally! They’re smiling, joking, their little asides, the physical way they relate to each other.” And so much of the mannerism is still from the culture, the heritage, even though they may have gone to residential school. But you could see . . . from the parents to the children, you could still see it, you could still see the connection—closer to the grandparents. It wasn’t wiped out.2 Here, the expression of social dynamic—so often and dramatically absent in subsequent representations of Native people—was a clear subversion by these native actors, revealing the “hidden transcripts” of that community, piggybacked on radio waves into mainstream homes and minds. These actors, friends, emerged as artists during the late 1960s. This, of course, was the time of the revisionist Western. The time of Little Big Man and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. It doesn’t take a Master’s degree to figure out that during this period, the Savage/Noble Indian was being emptied out—[full of ennui]—again. Replaced this time by a radical deconstruction of the Indian image by writers and filmmakers from the counterculture. But just as colonial America used the Indian in its search for a national identity, so too did Vietnam-era America seek to recast themselves and invoke a hoped-for regeneration through the Indian symbol (Sandos and Burgess 113–19). Resist the reinscription. Subvert the stereotype. Restate the truth that was displaced by the stereotype. Tantoo Cardinal: What I’d do then is go back to my community, back to my experience, back to the women that raised me—the women I knew growing up. They’ve always been the inspiration for what I’ve done, and sometimes I would feel images that were coming from other places, that were not from the community. Constantly, you have to watch what’s been programmed (into you) before you even know that there was such a thing as programming.3

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The grammar of this reinscription appears in many forms. The most common—of course—comes from “period” movies: the cultural misinformation, the stilted dialogue, the recycled—often inaccurate—costumes, wigs, and war paint . . . . . . the clichéd settings, the ponderous, solemn physicality, all of which has become accepted and unchallenged behaviour. This is the overt transcript that piggybacked on radio waves to Poland, England, France, Australia, Korea, South Africa. As if that wasn’t bad enough. These tropes have proven especially damaging when a Native actor is unconsciously influenced by it. Lacroix notes, “People kept taking away from their strength, what made them. They dissolved it slowly, and it becomes like a ghost of themselves.”4 The tactics of subversion by Native actors are numerous and sophisticated. A prime example of this is the action taken by the Native cast, the cultural advisers, and even some of the non-Native cast in changing the script for Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film Black Robe. Both Schellenberg and Cardinal remember turning down the project numerous times because of the script before finally accepting. Their reason for ultimately accepting was pragmatic: both actors knew that the film was going to be made with or without their participation and they believed it was better to allow their status and reputations to guide the film towards a more accurate representation, a decision prompted by the assurances of the filmmakers that key changes would be made before filming.5 This change on the part of the producers should be recognized as unique. Perhaps the discourse of resistance was more familiar to these filmmakers, who live in Australia, where the Aboriginal cultures are themselves involved in a very public struggle to recuperate elements of their culture. Or perhaps it was the willingness for the Native cast, the cultural advisers, and the entire community of background actors to walk off the set if their contributions were ignored. Clearly, each instance of subversion must be weighed in the context of the project itself, but Lacroix, Cardinal, and Schellenberg all agree that it is vital to establish and protect dialogue as the principal means of opening the minds of the director, the writers, and the producers.6 It is there that a vital negotiation can take place, a negotiation that can drag an entire production, sometimes kicking and screaming, towards Native subjectivity. “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m auditioning for the role of Grey Eagle.”

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Making “period” movies is a tricky thing. First of all, it is an exercise in absurdity from morning till night. Even finding a place to film such a thing is problematized. For example, where does one go to find untouched prairie nowadays? The pristine. Where do you find open prairie, without power lines and cell towers? Well, there is “open” prairie in the Dakotas and Montana, but it lies on gigantic ranches owned by a few powerful ranchers. [increasingly furious and strident] As for being “untouched,” one might easily argue the “owners” touched it all right. Stole it! If we can speak frankly, with their grubby pink little fingers, piece by piece. [beat, slow realization that the performer was caught up again] [ashamed, contrite] I apologize. I didn’t mean to bring him out. What I meant to bring up was that it was a beautiful morning, as we drove down a rutted road. And there were five tall, gorgeous tipis walking along a ridge. Like upside-down ice-cream cones. [with romantic awe] The tipis were painted with striking geometric designs and pictographs, with their tops open and blackened by the smoke from many fires. [snapping out of it, an aside really] Yes, I said walking. Magically . . . Actually, upon closer inspection, we could see about five pairs of feet inside each tipi, shuffling along. Talking to the crew later, I found out that that was the easiest way to transport the tipis from one filming location to the next. And, hey, you’ve got to have tipis! Tipis and horses. If you’ve got Indians, you better have horses—even if none of the cast knows which end is which. “My name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of Man Afraid of His Horses. Pardon me? Can I ride? [exhale derisively, then in arrogant, western-REZ-enese] Yeah, I can ride. I broke horses for a living.

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[aside] This is not entirely a lie, as I used to drop miniature plastic horses down our toaster. I had to learn how to ride horses for all the period films I did. My dance background helped me immensely. I became good at it. I remember we filmed a sequence where my character, Crazy Horse, was hunting buffalo. They herded a small group of buffalo (about twenty or so), which were meant to stand in for thousands. [beat] Imagine a prairie made black by their sheer numbers. My blood was up. There were five cameras rolling on this shot. I had to ride bareback, shoot a bow and arrow, and control my horse—who was made extremely skittish by the buffalo (who apparently are very unpredictable and ornery). Since it took about a half hour to round up the buffalo (they used pickup trucks), every shot was doubly precious. My horse was a movie horse . . . Let me explain. He knew all the calls that announced an upcoming shot: [shouted] “Quiet on the set.” “Pictures up!” By the time they called “Rolling” or “Action,” he was apoplectic and would nearly buck me off. They had to develop silent hand signals to announce “Action,” etc., so we could get the shots we needed. His name was Whiskey. Playing Crazy Horse, for Turner Network Television, I rode a horse called Whiskey! [right hand up, earnest expression, Scout’s Honour!] True story. When the buffalo came over the edge, the stunt riders formed a phalanx around me, but it didn’t matter. My horse knew what to do, as if it was programmed for this. It flew across the prairie grass. Its speed was absolutely terrifying. When I let the reins down on the horse’s neck to shoot my bow, it realized it was free and went into an even higher gear, an altogether and hitherto unimaginable speed. The horse tracked down one of the lead buffalo. I was riding next to it—fifteen feet away. I shot my arrow. It flew just inches above the animal’s back—just as I’d intended it—burying itself deep into the soft ground near the cameras. The buffalo chase sequence lasted maybe forty seconds . . . It was the most intensely satisfyingly “Indian” experience I’d ever had. The other stunt riders were just as flushed as I was. We had recaptured something. Something authentic.

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Figure 1.1 Crowfoot re-creation photo. Artist: Kent Monkman. Reproduced with permission.

Later, I saw one of the Indian stuntmen, Scotty, one of the serious horse riders from around Browning, Montana, fall to the ground during a shot. Something went wrong and a horse fell on top of him. Hundreds of pounds laying on him. The crew began to panic. He stayed completely calm, until the end of the shot. The horse was lifted off of him and he stood up, dusting himself off. I realized in that moment that this Indian man had a skill set—a way of knowing and acting—which I couldn’t even begin to approach. The authenticity of my portrayal, my identity, fell away from me, like a rag. I acknowledged my tourist’s gaze. Rosemarie Bank, in her examination of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, described ethnographic re-enactment as “a conflation of real and faux” (589–606). There is no better way to describe Indian period films. An uneasy mix of the authentic and the plastic. Given their druthers, I don’t imagine many Aboriginal filmmakers would make period films, but the studios still do. “The western is cyclic. It comes and goes,” they tell us. But conversely (and publicly unacknowledged) is that the historical Indian image doesn’t go anywhere. It has been commodified

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and entrenched. Emptied out, reinscribed — but at least, now as performers in these re-enactments, we are co-writers in the event. The continual process of reinventing the Indian doesn’t only occur in the period films. The modern transformations are equally loaded with assumptions, bald-faced ignorance, or simple wishful thinking. “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of Thomas Harris.” In the audition rooms of LA (actually, the hallways outside the casting office or the parking lots), the group I affectionately refer to as the usual suspects congregate, trade information, gossip. It is here that our community is reformed, (literally) outside of the studio gaze. It was here one morning that Michael Horse was talking to me—mentoring me. He said, “Back in the seventies, it was me, Joe Running Fox, and a few others. We were the young guns then. And we’d meet out here too. You didn’t even have to read the breakdown, ’cause it was the same thing all the time. [beat] ‘Hey Joe, what’s the deal?’ [different voice, resigned] ‘Indian Radical protesting the desecration of ancient burial grounds—what else?!’”7 [as Michael Horse nodding head] Today, Michael Horse told me, it’s the same thing—just a slightly different setting. Now it’s all about casinos. We’re lawyers, floor managers, bankers, tribal chairmen, heads of security, and we’re divided by it. Some of us want the casinos, some of us don’t. Does the mainstream public honestly believe that our internal discourse is reduced to such a simple binary? I don’t know. Maybe they do. “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of a slick, selfassured lawyer representing the interests of a wealthy, casino-owning Tribal Nation.” This is an actual breakdown for a role I recently auditioned for. The following contains meeting information for CSI: Miami: Role: Reggie Vance Late 30s/early 40s, NATIVE AMERICAN, ELEGANT Southwest attire, he’s the CEO of a Casino who’s being blackmailed by Scott

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O’Shay into being a silent partner in a major casino investment scheme. He is murdered by his wife, Adrian, after she discovers he’s been seeing the call girl, Anna Sivarro . . . GUEST STAR Nan Dutton, Casting Director.8 When I read the breakdown to my wife, Nancy, she just shook her head. I got the part. In the end, though, they couldn’t meet my quote (my asking price). [blinks] Whatever that means. It’s one of the richest shows on television. Jerry Bruckheimer is one of the producers! They probably went Hispanic. Which brings me to another point. How does this casting thing work exactly? The American audience wants tall, lean Indians with brown faces and high cheekbones. Translation: Plains-types. Crees, Blackfeet, Crow, Lakota. This has been the case since the colonial period. The Plains cultures have always fired the imagination of the public, here at home and abroad. A few years ago, I, and the usual suspects, auditioned for a film project called The Crow: Wicked Prayer, cast by Mackey/Sandrich Casting. The two leads were “Native”: [reading] Lily Ignites-The-Dawn, 21 years old, stunningly beautiful with raven black hair and radiant blue eyes, of mixed Native American, Hispanic, and European heritage . . . A traditionalist, Lily is disgusted by her father’s attempt to build an “Aztec Pyramid Resort Casino” Tanner, Mid 20’s, Lily’s brother, Tanner is the local sheriff on the reservation, of Native American, Hispanic, and European heritage . . .9 [blinks] Nowhere in the script is there a reference to the mixed heritage of this supposed tribe, so, for all intents and purposes, an audience will perceive this community as bona fide or “authentic.” The filmmakers are having their cake and eating it too. They provide local colour to their film by bringing their audience to an exoticized locale and exotic, beautiful characters, but have the right to cast absolutely anyone in the roles of the Indians.10

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The big problem with such casting is that non-Native actors, with no vested interest in the depiction of this community (since they do not belong to it, nor have to return to it later to explain themselves), will allow their characterizations to be shaped wholesale by a writer or director. The burden of responsibility has been removed, and resistance to or even outright subversion of stereotypes and other tropes has been compromised by the removal of Native actors in Native roles. INT. DAY. CASTING OFFICE. A self-absorbed director and pompous producer of The Crow: Wicked Prayer sit opposite a NATIVE man in his early 30’s. A casting assistant operates a camera. The Los Angeles sunshine comes streaming through the window, casting a pleasant glow upon the proceedings. DIRECTOR So what did you think of the script? NATIVE ACTOR It was a piece of shit. (disbelief) Why? Did you think it was good? The Director and the Producer look shocked that the Native “talks back.” They don’t know what to say. CUT TO: REALITY. I actually—and sadly—told them I loved the script. Wrong answer, even to them. They knew it was shit. Everybody knew. Acting is about speaking the truth—particularly when no one else dares to. The authenticity of my identity—as an artist—fell away from me like a rag. Why do we do it? Put ourselves through it? Well, it’s not all a drag. It’s fun, actually. And the money’s great.

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Figure 1.2 Untitled installation with screening of A Nation Is Coming (1996). Artist: Kent Monkman. Reproduced with permission.

The Chinese have a proverb about marriage, which holds true for the pay of the movie business. They say, “When you marry for money, you earn it.” But . . . there is a tremendous nobility to our role as performers. We join a long line of resistance fighters: deflecting or absorbing prejudice . . . [with growing intensity and vigour] subverting misguided intentions, or encoding our performances with our “hidden transcripts.” So that when these images come across your televisions or grace the screens of your movie houses, the site of the Indian remains hotly contested. And we neither give nor take any quarter. “Hi, my name is Michael Greyeyes. I’m reading for the part of . . .” [performer takes a single step back, away from the podium, now framed fully by the image on the screen]

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Notes The author would like to thank writer/director Vincent Ward and writer Louis Nowra for the use of their film title, Map of the Human Heart (1993), quoted in this address, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena for inspiring and beguiling me with his body of work. 1 Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals (Los Angeles: Miramax Home Entertainment, 1997). 2 Denis Lacroix, interview by author, 4 January 2003, tape recording. 3 Tantoo Cardinal, interview by author, 5 January 2003, tape recording. 4 Lacroix. 5 Cardinal. August Schellenberg, interview by author, 5 January 2003, tape recording. 6 Cardinal, Lacroix, and Schellenberg. 7 Michael Horse, conversation with author, February 1996, Los Angeles. 8 Alan Mills, “Self o[n] tape for: Michael Greyeyes—CSI: Miami,” 5 February 2007, personal e-mail (4 April 2007). 9 Casting notice for The Crow: Wicked Prayer. 31 January 2003. http://www .breakdownservices.com, 8 February 2003). 10 See Shohat and Stam, 189, 190, on the “triple insult” of casting outside of a minority group.

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Part II

Decolonizing Histories

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Two

Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices ERNIE BL ACKMORE

Cinema is performance, that’s how us blackfellas have connected with it. It’s where we come from, with our storytelling. A lot of dreaming stories are about moral stories and news and teaching . . . That’s the way Indigenous filmmakers are thinking. —Warwick Thornton, “Shot from the Heart”

Wayne Blair’s 2005 short film The Djarn Djarns tells the story of a single day in the life of a young Aboriginal boy, Frankie Dollar, whose experiences encompass familial grief and betrayal but also the loyalty and support of his friends and community.1 While the narrative brings into stark relief Frankie’s domestic life since the death of his father (specifically, the absence of his mother and his subsequent sexual abuse by her white “boyfriend”), the story is “set against the contrasting razzle-dazzle showbiz worlds of the ‘Dreamtime Centre’ where Frankie is a traditional dancer—or djarn djarn” (Runcie).2 The juxtaposition between contemporary life and traditional culture calls into question existing historical narratives about Aboriginality and demands for authenticity, while at the same time asserting the way Frankie is sustained through the love and commitment of his fellow djarn djarns. “It is that mateship between boys that makes the Djarn Djarns a hopeful film that is, by turns, poignant, disturbing, satirical and funny” (Runcie). This film encapsulates many of the themes that I set out to explore in this chapter. These include the relationship between cinema, performance art, and commodification (the spectacle of the commodified “Dreamtime Centre”) as well as how the everyday lives of Aboriginal people 61

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(the djarn djarns, especially Frankie) are structured both by the legacy of colonialism and demands for the performance of pre-colonial Aboriginality. The audience attending the “Dreamtime Centre” seem to expect a performance which that is “authentic” (pre-colonial); however, through the performances of the djarn djarns—a crew of four young boys who identify as Aboriginal and their Samoan didgeridoo player—they are offered alternative interpretations of cultural truth in the face of colonialism. Blair’s film, by foregrounding questions of performance and authenticity, examines, interrogates, and subverts the assumptions of colonialism while recording cultural differences. The Djarn Djarns, in telling Frankie’s story, complicates the relationships between representation, history, and Aboriginality. It insists on telling a story about Aboriginal lives (primarily Frankie’s story, but also the story of his father, his mother, and his djarn djarn mates) in ways which both make explicit (although without sentimentality) the legacy of colonial violence and help audiences to understand the ways that contemporary Aboriginal lives are shaped by complex connections to story, history, and culture. As such, The Djarn Djarns emphasizes the possibility and importance of cultural survival in ways which have everything to do with telling the stories of contemporary Aboriginal Australian lives. In doing so, Blair’s film engages with a larger debate around Aboriginal filmmaking that is currently unfolding with regard to what kinds of stories need to be told and by whom. In challenging the past and present implications of colonization, Indigenous peoples have utilized different art forms as modes of expression. This has allowed for the critique of hegemonic structures within society; enabled Indigenous self-representation to find at least a foothold in modern society, providing opportunities for works by Indigenous film professionals. This chapter investigates the ways in which emerging Aboriginal filmmakers are developing an Indigenous “voice”—a very important “voice”—which allows them to critique and analyze the historical and ongoing effects of colonialism and, through self-representation, to empower a variety of contemporary Aboriginal identities, both traditional and urban. Thus, it is possible for the writers, directors, and producers of film to interact with different forms of colonial production, in particular the colonizer’s technologies. None of these technologies is more telling than filmmaking. Filmmaking comes into its own in the hands of the colonized. In making films, we are able to commit ourselves to a particular mode of explanation and production that explores various modes and theories of self-representation. The commodification of Indigenous cultures, which Blair’s re-creation of the “Dreamtime Centre” gestures towards in The Djarn Djarns (and

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which is exemplified in earlier “Aboriginal” films like Jedda [1955, dir. Charles Chauvel], with its undeniably racist appropriation and misrepresentation of Aboriginal culture), is a reminder that we live by our choices, both past and present. This reminder extends to the racial stereotypes that persist within the dominant culture, stereotypes that question the understanding and acceptability of the “real” or “authentic” Aboriginal peoples. These stereotypes are inextricably linked with the canon of decolonization, counter-narratives, and representational politics. Frantz Fanon pointed out that “colonization is not satisfied merely with a hold on the people in its grasp” (170). It has perverted, twisted, disfigured, and—in many cases, such as with Indigenous languages and cultures—destroyed the people it grasps. Edward Said suggested that the legacy of imperialism and colonization always produces “counterstories” (Orientalism 3). The counterstory, as Hilde Lindemann Nelson explains in Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, “positions itself against a number of master narratives: the stories found lying about in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared understandings” (6). The films I discuss here—The Djarn Djarns, Confessions of a Headhunter (2000, dir. Sally Riley), Beneath Clouds (2002, dir. Ivan Sen), and Ten Canoes (2006, dir. Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr)—are the counterstories to history as narrated by the colonizers. Young and/or emergent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers, like Blair, are driven not only by their desire to succeed in their chosen profession but also by the desire to tell the counterstory, to tell history from the point of view of those who have been vanquished or whose lives are assumed to be invisible—but more on that later. The questions are now and always will be: Whose history gets told and how? Whose “voice” gets precedence in a post-colonial environment? It became evident to me, when I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation, that I had trouble making others understand what I meant by “voice.” For those whose voices have always been authorized by the dominant culture, it seems a difficult concept to grasp. My concerns, like those of Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, are that the spiritual “voice” of Indigenous peoples has not been heard or understood and that we have “struggled since colonisation to be able to exercise what is viewed as a fundamental right, that is to represent ourselves” (Smith 150) and to have our “voices” be heard. That is, Indigenous artists desire to represent the “counterstory,” to retell history in an Indigenous “voice.” According to anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, “history is a selective process. We do not, cannot, and need not remember all who contributed to making the past. Most of what really happened will never be documented” (qtd. in Prins and Bishop 110). Carpenter’s statement cuts both ways: on the one hand, it is possible to see the rationale by

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which a selective retelling of “History” is authorized—“we do not, cannot, and need not remember”; on the other hand, in articulating the resulting erasure, the statement makes apparent the ways it might be possible to remember the past differently. What some see as unnecessary to their version of history is absolutely necessary to others. As Smith suggests, what counts as history is always political and always has material consequences. She argues that alternative histories produce alternative knowledges “which can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things” (34). This possibility prompts me to ask: What about the vast majority of traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history? Does it not deserve to be brought to voice? And what might it look like? Although much of this history has never seen the light of day in the hands of the colonizer, counterhistories are currently being exposed through the lenses of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers like Blair. Moreover, these counter-histories, like the narrative in The Djarn Djarns, which is told largely through the voice of Frankie Dollar, a voice that would not normally be audible within the dominant culture, have the capacity to speak to all races, to speak to those seeking understanding (Blackmore, Speakin’ Out 4). Blair’s film also helps underline the potential for the cinematic form to operate as a contemporary site of storytelling. As “storytellers” of old, our Elders held much influence over our peoples, for whom they were ultimately responsible. Colonization changed all that. Contemporary Indigenous authors, playwrights, and filmmakers who accept the mantle of “storyteller” have to negotiate the way their stories have been—and in many cases continue to be—rendered invisible. This and related matters, including how narration makes certain things apparent while hiding others, are starting to be addressed though a newer and more potent form of “storytelling” which has emerged in Fourth World film production: “speakin’ out blak” resists the impacts of colonization even while making apparent the price that colonialism has extracted from Indigenous peoples.3 Australian cinema in the new millennium is dealing with a range of spectres that haunt our society; the films discussed in this chapter can be read as interrogating the ghosts of a colonial settler past and its post-colonial present. Filmmakers like Wayne Blair, Sally Riley, and Ivan Sen are generating an open conversation as a way of showing how texts can become a powerful tool for re-educating people and supporting Indigenous identity; their short and long works assert Indigenous culture and defy perceptions created by “ignorant” pigeonholing. Like Tracy Moffatt and Rachel Perkins before them, these filmmakers exemplify this new trend in “speaking out blak.” They are taking up the challenges posed by Indigenous filmmaking, which include the need for honest self-examination and to engage, like

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Sen, in a dialogue on Aboriginal identity with various audiences while also incorporating issues of cultural and class inequality. The relationship between Indigenous self-representation and the art of storytelling is perhaps most explicitly addressed in my discussion of Ten Canoes (2006), where I focus on how co-directors Peter Dijirr and Rolf de Heer use Indigenous self-representation to reclaim identity through storytelling. The current crop of Indigenous filmmakers have learned from Moffatt and Perkins to resist presenting Indigenous history as spectacle, as commodity. Instead of presenting history with a “capital-H,” these artists trace Indigenous peoples’ everyday lives as they struggle with the legacy of colonialism. As playwright and director David Milroy expresses it, “It’s like we’re writing and then re-writing Aboriginal history . . . It’s as if we’re trying to replace one history with another. A history from the Indigenous people’s point of view. One that hasn’t been taught” (Blackmore, Speakin’ Out 270). Film plays an important role in exposing that history. Milroy argues that the time is past for the “softly, softly” approach. He claims that all those persons engaged in the telling of Indigenous stories, whether theatre or film writers, directors or producers, are at a turning point. He warns that “there are a lot of young people coming up . . . that don’t get the opportunity to speak out. It’s almost like they’re shackled by their Aboriginality at times . . . They think or believe they have to fit into these roles that we’ve created with this catch up theatre or historical theatre that we do” (Speakin’ Out 270). In his terms, being enmeshed in “catch up” cultural production risks foreclosing the telling of different stories and different relationships: the catch-up response to the history of dominant (post)colonial Australia remains, in many ways, caught within that colonial relationship. The expectations inherent in this relationship to history and Aboriginality are gravely important. I suggest that some of the responsibility for “exposing” this untaught and often invisible history rests on the shoulders of our emerging filmmakers, in part because filmmakers have the greatest impact in projecting images that present an ongoing reinterpretation of that “historical past” in ways which reflect it as Indigenous lived history, as self-representation. In discussing Indigenous self-representation in contemporary texts, it is particularly important to examine how self-representation redefines our lives and our Aboriginality by undermining negative stereotypes instigated and built up over time by Aboriginalism. Borrowing from Said’s theory of Orientalism,4 and following the lead of Ben Hodge and Bain Attwood, I draw on the concept of Aboriginalism as a hermeneutics of the way in which colonization has constructed a particular set of images about Indigenous Australians based on the colonizers’ belief that they are superior and

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therefore more qualified to represent Indigenous peoples than Indigenous peoples are themselves. Aboriginalism has been used to create a white history, one that excludes and subverts the repercussions of colonization. Over time, Aboriginalism has created specific images and expectations of Indigenous behaviour, ultimately casting Indigenous people as the “other” (Attwood i) and, I would add, creating an image of Aboriginality through the politics of looking, a politics in which film is heavily implicated. This process has been extremely damaging, particularly to the generations of Indigenous people who are already suffering from the breakdown of the family unit and loss of culture, a breakdown that can be directly attributed to the extreme ways in which Australia was colonized.5 As a direct implication of the encounter with colonization and subsequently with Western conceptions of modernity, Indigenous Australians are faced with an identity crisis. This ought not to be interpreted in the sense that Australia’s “First Nations” peoples do not know who they are. Rather, it is a reflection of a broader Australian community that has a seemingly insatiable desire to rationalize and categorize Aboriginal peoples and cultures and that strives, seemingly without end, for absolute control of the country’s Indigenous population. Through its past actions, white culture has dominated and transformed Australian civilization, which has been inextricably linked to Western notions of power and control. The effect of this white hegemony has been to create the idea of white culture as a liberating agent, “as the holders of true humanity” bringing civilization to the rest of the world (Moreton-Robinson, “Whiteness” 78). Hence, the dominant presence of “whiteness” lends itself to (mis)representations of the Indigenous “other” (78). This explains why Aboriginality is constantly the object of analysis and critique, and why it creates contention in society as mainstream white “norms” treat Aboriginality as a subject of racial difference. Michael Dodson, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, notes that white representations of Aboriginal people have changed over time: “Initially we appeared as the noble, well-built native, heroic, bearded, loin clothed, one foot up, vigilant with boomerang at the ready. Later, after we had fallen from grace, we appeared bent, distorted, overweight, inebriated, with bottle in hand” (27). Thus for “mainstream” Australia, “authentic” Aboriginal culture and identity are located in the past, whereas contemporary Aboriginal life is degraded, inauthentic, and unable to negotiate the modern world. Dodson describes how Indigenous Australians are incessantly defined as “other” but “are never permitted to be genuinely independent or genuinely different” (36). The genus culture is classified and categorized through the perspective of white culture, white hegemony is emphasized and Indigenous culture is

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limited and destabilized. Dodson explores the extent to which representations of Aboriginality are “both weapons and symptoms of the oppressive relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and colonizing states” (32). In this sense, Aboriginal culture has served a purpose for the colonizing culture—that is, to reflect what it needs to see in itself, contributing to images and representations of national identity. Aboriginal culture serves hegemonic Australia as a marker both for the superiority of the colonizing culture and for internal critique of the dominant society. In past observations of Indigenous culture, pejorative terms like “full blood,” “half-caste,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” were employed as a form of management and control; government authorities applied them to maintain the “social status” (Langton, “Well, I Heard It on the Radio” 28). Representations of Indigenous culture formed by colonizing states in earlier times have silenced Indigenous peoples’ expressions and representations of their own identity. Moreover, Aboriginal identity has been appropriated to serve the needs of those within the dominant culture who seek something they can understand as more “authentic,” as is the case with many New Age appropriations of Indigenous icons from around the world. In contemporary society, in part as a corollary to Western cultural dissatisfactions, there exists a dichotomy in which only traditional Aboriginal culture is considered authentic whereas “urban” Indigenous populations are seen as “empty vessels, drained of their content by European culture” (Jennings 12). Blackfella Perspectives: Recording History from Behind the Camera In Australia today there is a real expectation that Aboriginal people should be making films about Aboriginal people and that they should be steering the rest of the Australian filmmaking community with regard to how Indigenous people have been represented in the past on the big screen. In the past ten years in Australia, representations of Indigenous history have largely fallen to a small but growing number of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers who are eager to record their own particular history from a “blackfella’s” perspective—that is, to tell counterstories that offer (a) writing that empowers and (b) writing that liberates individuals. This perspective is in direct contrast to the type of history that was favoured by John Howard. Howard was Australia’s prime minister from 1996 to 2007, 6 [who] “came to office mounting an assault on ‘political correctness’ . . . and critical of the ‘black armband’ view of relations with Aborigines” (Grattan 1–2).7 Howard’s policies contributed to a whole raft of disadvantages against which Australia’s Indigenous peoples continue to struggle; these disadvantages have been brought to bear by successive government policies supported by the unstated or unacknowledged complicity

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of successive generations of Australians (Thomas 141). These are the same Australians who are duped by defective versions of history as produced by some historians, like Keith Windschuttle,8 and who are fed a daily dose of conservatism through the 70 percent monopoly over the print media in Australia held by News Limited (Jason Wilson). The urgency of responding to this situation is what drives screenwriters and filmmakers, many of whom, like Sally Riley, take up multiple roles within related artistic practices around filmmaking and who have made it their business to provide that other “history” that neoconservative-driven government policy and national discourse wish to keep under erasure. Riley is a proud Wiradjuri woman who worked through a succession of jobs, such as head of Screen Australia’s Indigenous unit, where she was integral to the development of Indigenous Australian filmmaking, prior to her recent appointment to the newly created position of head of ABC TV’s Indigenous Department. Riley’s talents thus traverse multiple disciplines, although film is her passion. Riley’s multiple-award-winning film, Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), co-written with Archie Weller, explores the reverberations of a historical event into the present day.9 The film is thus exemplary in using the lens of a contemporary event to explore a silenced and occluded Aboriginal history in ways that are both literal and allegorical, but that importantly do more than simply retell history. In her film, Riley juxtaposes the colonial violence of the original story of Yagan, a Nyoongah warrior, with the contemporary and symbolic violence implicit in the late-twentiethcentury desecration of Yagan’s statue. Yagan was born in 1795, the son of a respected Aboriginal elder of the, Midgeroo of the Nyoongah people, who lived in the southwestern part of Western Australia. As “a resistance fighter” he was punished, incarcerated, and eventually killed after he attempted to exact justice following the death of a young Aboriginal boy. After his death, Yagan’s head was removed, preserved by smoking, and taken to England, where it was placed on display in the Royal Institute in Liverpool. Yagan’s head was finally returned to the Nyoongah people for a traditional burial 164 years later. The contemporizing of the story in the film is centred on the statue of Yagan erected as a monument to celebrate the return of the warrior’s head in 1997 and the subsequent acts of decapitation of the statue. Riley’s film uses the tension between historical (colonial) and contemporary (post-colonial) violence towards Aboriginal bodies to interrogate the importance of articulating alternative historical experiences. The film’s interrogation of the legacies of violence and silence, which underwrite both the historical incidents and the contemporary ones, firmly positions Riley’s work as part of a new approach to history among the current generation of Aboriginal screenwriters, directors, and producers.

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Riley has strong views about authenticity and historical accuracy in Aboriginal films, because she has been listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. In a conversation with fellow Aboriginal filmmakers Wayne Blair and Catriona McKenzie, Riley has said, “I think what Indigenous people have said is, ‘We want to tell our stories, we want to get them onscreen and we want to tell them the way we want to tell them. We don’t like the way that non-Indigenous film-makers, some of them, are portraying us. It’s time that we took control of that.’ And I think that’s been [my] key driving force” (Negus). Riley’s films have had some success. Ivan Sen, by contrast, “has been hailed as the Great Black Hope of Australian cinema—the Indigenous director most likely to follow in the footsteps of notable Australian directors of the calibre of Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Baz Luhrmann” (Naglazas). During his time at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School, Sen immersed himself in making and directing highly regarded short films. However, Sen has found that conventional film production practices do not allow the kind of artistic authorship that appeals to him; furthermore, he resists the pressure to produce the particular kind of missing historical narrative that Milroy talks about. Instead, he feels a need to tell counterstories that speak specifically to and for him. Sen sees the production of art in its various forms as empowering Indigenous people, as providing them with a stage on which artistic expression as well as social, cultural, societal, and political commentary is possible. He went to some trouble to shape his narrative film Beneath Clouds as a social reflection of identity, spirituality, race, the environment, and interracial relationships in a more contemporary environment with an “urban” face, yet he does not see himself as setting out to create a political statement. For him, the politics are simply a “by-product” of making films about the lives and identities of Indigenous Australians. “I never meant . . . films to be political,” he says. “These issues come up because of who they are and where they are from. I don’t make this stuff up for the fun of it. It is a living, breathing part of people’s lives, not issues to be kicked around” (Dunn). Several of his films have been marked as political, although he does not acknowledge this as his intention. He also resists the pressure to produce a particular kind of missing historical narrative: “Films told from a Black perspective are quite new so it’s understandable that journalists are looking to put a label on the phenomenon,” he explains. “But I’m not interested in using cinema to talk about social issues. For an artist it is far too restricting. My passion is for characters and stories—and if they happen to be about Aboriginal issues so be it” (Naglazas). Rather than trying to speak to a political issue, Sen claims to be solely interested in recounting the lived

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experiences of many Indigenous Australians—something which, despite his disclaimers, is hard to separate from the already politicized nature of everyday life for Aboriginal people. In creating his work, Sen draws from his Indigeneity and inherent insight into the experiences of Aboriginal youth in country towns. He claims to be “always interested in people searching for something that makes them believe they belong somewhere” (Walsh 13). In Sen’s films, belonging is tied closely to location and land. This sense of location and land makes a political statement about the way in which Aboriginal belonging to the land transcends the colonial apparatus of legal ownership. This counters colonial attitudes; it also contrasts colonial power in modern Australia with resistance to that power. Sen utilizes visual commentary to portray and illuminate colonial history and its progress in the context of modernity, resistance, mixed descent identities, and the formation of nationhood. Similarly, although his potential audience for Beneath Clouds is both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, the film provides the non-Indigenous spectator with an understanding of some of the hardships and crises that young Indigenous Australians face. But, given that many non-Aboriginal Australians find Aboriginal people an inconvenience in their bid for geographical and cultural ownership of the continent, any cultural production that calls attention to the continued existence and presence of Aboriginal people cannot help but be political in the larger sense—that is, in the sense of intervening in the politics of nation formation and the production of a national monoculture. In Beneath Clouds, Sen explores two themes that he claims are close to his heart—purpose and identity—through a framework of dramatic realism (Tudball and Lewis). The film is about two teenagers, Lena (Dannielle Hall) and Vaughn (Damian Pitt), both of whom are “escaping” from situations in which they have no real sense of belonging. Both have begun a journey in search of something better and accidentally meet up on the road to Sydney. Vaughn is a young but volatile Aboriginal man who has absconded from a detention centre in order to visit his dying mother; Lena, a schoolgirl of Aboriginal descent, is seeking her long-absent Irish father and leaving behind her troubled relationships with family and friends in a small country town. At first, Vaughn and Lena struggle to find any common ground. Lena dreams of a relationship with her missing father that will take her away from the unhappiness of her family life and provide the possibility of finding an alternative to the small town, which she believes holds no future for her. Vaughn, by contrast, has no such alternative; his journey is taking him to his sick mother and the probability of recapture by the police. Neither teenager has any money; their journey is a chancy

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one, dependent on walking and lifts in other people’s vehicles and whatever food and shelter they can scavenge. Vaughn, who believes Lena is white, sees her as a symbol of a racist society which refuses to accept him, while Lena sees Vaughn as representing the world of unemployment and hopelessness she is trying to escape. However, during the course of the journey Vaughn and Lena begin to realize they both lack a sense of belonging and share a desire for something more, even if that desire is both difficult to define and easy to deride (Lena mocks Vaughn’s desire for a car, just as he is bemused by her wish to become a writer—a profession he sees as definitionally white). Despite their initial suspicions, they come to care for each other, even as their journey ends in separation. David Edwards points out that “the story is essentially a dense allegory, which Sen creates by combining familiar themes of growing up and the adolescent quest for a sense of belonging, with the deeper issue of Aboriginal reconciliation and national identity.” Beneath Clouds delves into Sen’s personal life, which is reflected both in Lena’s denial of her Aboriginality and desire to escape from her community and in Vaughn’s character, which draws on the experience of one of Sen’s family members (Walsh). Sen’s film “intensifies the emotional journey of the characters so that the audience has no choice but to join them” (Walsh). Through his intimate depiction of these young people, Sen brings home the ways in which racially derived pain is internalized. In this way, Beneath Clouds is both a personal “history” and a “catharsis” for Sen—as well as, perhaps, for members of the film’s audience. While much has been made of Sen’s personal stake in Beneath Clouds, the film also examines the colonial history of Australia and its conflicting interpretation as it follows the journey of these teenagers who are both of Aboriginal descent. In doing so, it provides insight into both “black” and “white” accounts of history. Vaughn is bitter and blames white society for his situation. Sen utilizes Vaughn to express knowledge of Australia’s colonial past and the Indigenous dispossession of the land, such as when he tells a white farmer, “This ain’t your land, you fucking stole this land.” Although both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are acutely aware of the white land grab in colonial Australia, issues of the historical legitimacy of dispossession remain contested. The relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in Beneath Clouds emphatically represents the relations of power that form colonial conquest. The frequent presence of police officers in the film points to the presence of imperialistic attitudes in modern Australia. The police vehicles that often inhibit Vaughn and Lena’s journey emphasize the societal hierarchy that exists between white and black Australia. Sen accentuates this social

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imbalance: during their journey, the only time Vaughn and Lena are not stopped by police is when they are with a white man. For Indigenous artists and filmmakers like Ivan Sen, “identity is something that is constantly in the back of the minds of Indigenous people (Baillie) and self-representation is a dynamic, expressive, and ongoing process necessary both to empower Aboriginal people and to resist the ongoing effects of colonization. Indigenous perspectives and identity are central to the authenticity of self-representation in contemporary texts. Indigenous standpoints ensure that misrepresentations are avoided; this enables agency, which leads to self-determination and greater control of our future. For this to be achieved, Indigenous issues need to be brought to the wider community in a believable and genuine form. Beneath Clouds has succeeded in this. Collaboration, Identity, Decolonization Marcia Langton argues that “Aboriginality is a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, or representation and interpretation” (“Well I Heard It on the Radio” 33). For Langton, Aboriginality is created through the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Anthropologist Jeremy Beckett similarly argues that there has been “a medley of voices, black and white, official and unofficial, national and local, scientific and journalistic, religious and secular, interested and disinterested, all offering or contesting particular constructions of Aboriginality” (7). Aboriginal self-definition can get lost among these competing voices, which may even construct versions of Aboriginality that are unrecognizable to Aboriginal peoples; self-definitions can be ignored in favour of those that are more useful to various forms of political and cultural governance. For example, the currently accepted method of authenticating Aboriginality presupposes that the individual (a) is of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, (b) identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and (c) is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives.10 This is not uniformly acceptable to Indigenous Australians, although it is a requirement in accessing most government services as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island person. I would argue that Indigenous peoples can erode “white” or nonIndigenous discourses on Aboriginality by creating counter-discourses. Examples of the latter can be found in Beneath Clouds and in other films not directed by Indigenous people that have received some acceptance within Aboriginal communities, such as Babakiueria11 (1986, dir. Don Featherstone), Yolngu Boy (2001, dir. Stephen Johnson), and Australian Rules (2002, dir. Paul Goldman). While these films have helped promote

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more realistic and recognizable views of Aboriginal people, their history, and their contemporary situations, they are no substitute for self-representation. Yet, as Langton suggests, collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons have often been useful; useful, too, has been the inclusion of Western conventions so as to make the text more accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. Collaboration requires trust by Indigenous artists as they endeavour to find their balance in a white dominant culture. The process can only be effective with the right person, someone who has understanding and empathy for what the message is and for Indigenous ways and beliefs. If the collaborative process will benefit the Indigenous artist, it is worth undertaking. Renowned Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil’s inspiration for Ten Canoes began with photographs of the Yolngu people taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the mid-1930s. As Tudball and Lewis note, “the Thomson photographs were an invaluable reference, and having [sic] become part of the local culture. Here were images that could be discussed, incidents that could be derived from the images and each photo had, in some way, a story that illuminated the whole of the endeavour” (10).12 These photographs were taken by Thomson at a time when non-Indigenous Australians knew him as a champion of Indigenous Australian culture and society. Their appropriation by the people of Ramingining inspired Gulpilil, who had a strong desire to make a film telling the story of his people in their own language (9). The collaboration between the Yolngu people—particularly co-director Peter Djigirr—and white Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer13 was important in terms of producing a sense of authenticity and self-representation that de Heer by himself could never have achieved. The local community was involved in developing the script and in producing traditional artifacts for the film, such as the bark canoes, the spears, and the dwellings (2). All of the cast were indigenous to the Arafura Swamp, and none except David Gulpilil, who played the storyteller, was a professional actor. Many of the cast were direct descendants of the men in the photographs, and they were given option to play the character of their ancestor (11). The film itself became a powerful force in reclaiming their past and in showcasing Yolngu storytelling traditions. To make the film financially viable and widely accessible, however, the collaborators needed to construct a story that would please both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences (Tudball and Lewis 10). Ten Canoes uses plot devices familiar to mainstream society, such as heterosexual romance, mystery, intrigue, violence, and even toilet humour. At the very beginning of the film, a connection is created between the audience and the characters when the narrator uses a traditional Westernized

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beginning: “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away . . .” These familiar words break down barriers and engage Western audiences immediately: even if the direct reference to Star Wars goes unrecognized, the traditional fairy tale beginning is unmistakable. However, laughing, Gulpilil quickly reclaims the Aboriginal perspective: “No, not like that. I’m only joking. But, I am going to tell you a story. It’s not your story, it’s my story, a story like you’ve never seen before. But, you want a proper story eh? Then I must tell you some things of my people and my land. Then you can see this story and know it.” Gulpilil’s claiming of the story as his own amounts to a strong and positive example of reclaiming identity and pride. Irene Watson states that Indigenous people are normally portrayed as “the known” rather than the “knowers” (Moreton-Robinson 75). Through self-representation, Ten Canoes challenges this assumption. The non-Indigenous audience is, for once, put in the position of being the “other.” Ignorance about Indigenous culture is highlighted, yet with humour and therefore without offence. The narrator guides the audience through the story, explaining Indigenous ways and beliefs. That the film is spoken entirely in the Ganalbingu language with English subtitles further enhances its agency and authenticity, besides reiterating for non-Indigenous viewers Gulpilil’s point that this is not their story. By recording the Ganalbingu language and Aboriginal tribal life, the film also serves as a historical document or archive (Tudball and Lewis 11). Ten Canoes communicates the beauty and depth of Aboriginal culture. As David Gulpilil says: “That story is never finished. That Ten Canoes story, it goes on forever because it is a true story of our people, it is the heart of the land and people and nature.” The film expresses how Aboriginal people share an intricate connection to the land, seeing it as the foundation for their identity, their spirituality, and their existence; they often refer to the land as their “mother” (Scheppers 56). Highlighting the structure and values of Indigenous tribal culture in this film thus serves to convey what colonization has tried to destroy. According to Richard Broome, the lives of the Aboriginal people as articulated in the Ten Canoes narrative are guided by Dreamtime stories, which describe how the world came to be and elucidate acceptable codes of behaviour and social relations (19). The audience is presented with a story of an Aboriginal tribe that exists as a family in a fully functioning society. Family in Aboriginal culture often means your entire people and usually refers to an extended family group (Scheppers 57). The film is set in a time when the pre-colonial life of a hunter-gatherer society can be shown. Pre-colonial Aboriginal people lived in small, kin-based groups, which formed a hierarchical structure based on status, so that each

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person carried “a mental map of social relationships and thus behavior” (Broome 20). In making this film of a story within a story, the collaborators on Ten Canoes have engaged the culture of the peoples of the Arafura Swamp. The audience is asked to engage equally with both layers of the story, which are woven together. The more recent story of Minygululu and Dayindi is filmed in black-and-white, which suggests the deep connection to the past and the ancestors. This cultural understanding and practice is strong and highly valued in the present Arnhem Land community of Ramingining. However, the older story of ancient ancestors is filmed in vivid colour. This allows the audience to observe and for a brief time see another way, a way of living through an Aboriginal perspective that is thousands of years old. This reinforces the long connection between historical and contemporary Aboriginal cultures and the fact that Indigenous peoples, despite the influence of Western discourse, do have histories of their own. The scene that transports the audience into the second story begins with the camera panning along the Australian bush turning from black-andwhite to colour. Even before this, the audience watches shots of the swamp while listening to the narrator talk about “when all the ancestors were little fish in their waterhole,” thus showing the progression back in time to hundreds, even thousands of years ago. This scene is a reference to Aboriginal people always being of this land and the importance of a strong spiritual connection to the ancestors who are guiding our lives. The deep spirituality of Indigenous culture is also seen with the ritual of Ridjimiraril’s death. When he collapses during his death dance, the warriors finish his dance for him. A death song is sung so “all Ridjimiraril’s fathers know he is dying and come for him . . . Grandfather goes into Ridjimiraril’s heart to get soul out of there [and] keep singing to help him find his ancestors.” This shows the comfort that connection to cultural traditions can bring. Family forms a connection to self, and when generations die or are separated, the connection to a person’s culture be killed or erased. Culture is central to a person’s identity. It explains who we are, what our values are, and the way we think and communicate (Bamblett and Lewis 63). Frances Djulibing, who plays Nowalingu, the middle wife of Ridjimiraril, feels that her involvement in the film will reinforce culture within her family for generations to come and allow them to understand the importance of their heritage and their ancient ancestors: It is my destiny to do this, so all over the world they can see how my ancient ancestors had been like this before. Behind the black and white photos is the big story, and the kids of Ramingining have never heard that story. They just laugh at the funny photos, which is no respect . . .

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This film is for the kids’ future, so when they grow up they’re gonna see, because not enough of the older people is trying to teach the younger kids . . . This is not just only for me . . . I’m doing this for my grandkids and for the next one generation to generation. They can learn what’s in this film, this movie is gonna remind them about our ancient ancestors. (qtd. in Tudball and Lewis 16–17) Interestingly, during the film, Minygululu says to Dayindi, “all parts of the story have to be told for proper understanding.” This advice is an analogy for the role that Indigenous self-representation in contemporary texts plays in redefining Aboriginality. Indigenous self-representation can go far to undermine negative stereotypes and strengthen cultural identity, thereby enabling all parts of Indigenous history to be told and acknowledged. If the Australian nation is to achieve mutual understanding and reconciliation, it is imperative for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to be better informed than they now are of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous history and culture. This requires Indigenous self-representation in contemporary texts to be distributed to and viewed by mainstream audiences, for this will enable a change of attitude and stimulate pride in the heritage of this country. Ten Canoes provides insights into Australian Indigenous tribal life and culture. The inclusion of common family issues such as love, frustration, jealousy, and justice highlights that these emotions and family dynamics are universal. The use of the same actors in both stories emphasizes this point. The film shows that although tribal life is different, people who live it have many of the same hopes, dreams, and feelings as Westerners. The collaborative process used in Ten Canoes demonstrates that respect, common ground, and effective communication can bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures together. Self-representation brings self-understanding and with it an understanding of heritage and a sense of belonging, in contrast to the displacement and confusion that has been created by a history that conveniently rationalizes colonialism. Agency and self-representation can ensure that others do not define Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians can define their culture and life in their own way, and this act of self-representation can serve as an antidote to ill-informed assumptions about Aboriginal culture. Conclusion: Art Like a Bridge . . . The constant desire of the colonizers to define and pigeonhole Indigenous culture discounts the effects of modernity and cultural discourse. The colonizer’s view is either that Aboriginal culture is singular and changeless, unaffected by colonization and assimilation, or that it has been degraded

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to the point of disappearance. However, as the films I have examined here indicate, Indigenous identities and cultures are fluid and complex and are re-created in the context of Indigenous experience, cultural practices, and oppression amidst political struggles (Dodson 39). Dodson affirms that to make a definitive statement about Aboriginality “would be a violation of the right to determination and the right of peoples to establish their own identity” (39). Self-representation is thus fundamental to Indigenous self-determination, besides being liberatory for contemporary modes of Indigenous cultural expression. Langton articulates that self-representation means that Aboriginal people share knowledge with others and ourselves about our culture: “Aboriginality arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience” (31). Inawinytji Williams from the “Desart” Committee reflects on this notion: “Our art is like a bridge between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people, making them aware of our culture and stories” (Hendry 131).14 Thus Indigenous self-representation works as an anticolonialist deconstruction of existing discourses pertaining to Aboriginal identity in part because it so clearly wishes to speak to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences. The injection of Aboriginal themes and impressions in contemporary films like The Djarn Djarns, Confessions of a Headhunter, Beneath Clouds, and Ten Canoes has opened up a pathway through which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can gain access to and learn from an Aboriginal perspective. Denise Groves asserts that Australian cinema can be a vehicle for interrogating colonialist representations of Aboriginality (228). This is reflected in Langton’s description of Aboriginal film as a powerful medium because, as she notes, “it is from [this] that most Australians know about ‘Aboriginal’ people” (33). Aboriginal self-representation in film enables non-Indigenous viewers to see the often pernicious effects of their own representations of culture and history. This can produce a level of understanding of the political implications of representing “others.” It can also work to undermine what Langton describes as the most natural form of racism in representation, Indigenous invisibility. Langton quotes the US film theorist E. Ann Kaplan, who, visiting Australia, noted the initial invisibility of Aboriginal people to overseas visitors such as herself: “As a foreigner, it has been hard to locate Aborigines on any level, least of all in person. Yet once one becomes aware of their absence, suddenly in a way they are present” (24). More than twenty years after Kaplan made this observation, the films I have discussed here assert an Indigenous visibility, both within Australian film and within the Australian nation-state, by “speaking out blak.

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Notes 1 The Djarn Djarns premiered on 27 May 2005 at the opening night of the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival at the Sydney Opera House. This festival featured other films made for the SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) channel’s “Dramatically Black” TV series, including Plains Empty (2005, dir. Beck Cole), Sa Black Thing (2005, dir. Rima Tamou), Green Bush (2005, dir. Warwick Thornton), and showcased Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Cannesnominated Yellow Fella (2005). The Djarn Djarns won the Crystal Bear in the Kinderfilmfest program of the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. 2 The real Dreamtime Cultural Centre near Rockhampton, where Blair worked as a young man, advertises itself as “set in some 30 acres of natural bush land on Ancient Tribal sites.” Its facilities include a souvenir shop and conference rooms. 3 Following colonization, particularly through the early-twentieth-century assimilationist policies in play in Australia, Indigenous languages were forbidden and English was enforced as a language. In protest, many contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people choose to use what we see as the colonizer’s language “badly” by instating spelling that was easily identifiable, thus forming an Australian Indigenous Kriol. Indigenous writers and scholars often use the term “blak” in this context. Speaking blak is part of the process of finding one’s voice; in this chapter I will thus use the notion of “voice” to represent the wider sense of the fundamental right to self-define—as well as, more specifically, to speak of—the use of a private, personal, or group “language” to express a collective or individual identity. 4 Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) has been highly influential in the formation of post-colonial studies. Said argues that the “Oriental” is a kind of myth or stereotype that constructs the peoples of Asia and the Middle East as “others” against whom the identity, normalcy, and meaningfulness of the West can, by contrast, be constructed. Orientalist scholarship is marked by a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture” (Windschuttle, “Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ Revisited”). 5 The British colonization of Australia from 1788 was fraught with many elements of oppression of the country’s Indigenous population. Following Federation in 1901, even though Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were excluded from citizenship status, all of the states of the Commonwealth had statutes that sought to assimilate the Indigenous population. Michelle Grossman writes that “government policies throughout the assimilation period were enforced through an interlocking matrix of institutional, welfare and legislative schemes.” None were more destructive than the program of social engineering and segregation promoted by Western Australia’s Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville. Many of these statutes were punitive or separationist in intent, leading to the forced removal of children from their homes and families. These genocidal acts

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mirrored earlier programs that sought to “rehabilitate” Indigenous people. The end result was what is universally recognized today as the “Stolen Generations.” John Howard became Australian Prime Minister in 1996 and subsequently won the next three elections, in 1998, 2001, and 2004. John Howard . . . declared himself “the most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had’’ (Strangio, Paul, “Climate scorches Liberals’ unity,” Sydney Morning Herald: Federal Politics, September 2, 2009). The black armband view of history was a phrase first used by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Sir John Latham lecture, as published in the 1993, July–August issue of Quadrant—and was used to describe views of history which, he believed, posited that “much of [pre-multicultural] Australian history had been a disgrace” and which focused mainly on the treatment of minority groups (especially Aborigines). This he contrasted with the “Three Cheers” view, according to which: “nearly everything that came after the convict era was believed to be pretty good.” Keith Windschuttle is a historian who has gained either fame or infamy, depending on one’s perspective, with the publication of the following books: The Killing of History (1994), The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (2002), and The White Australia Policy (2004). All of these books, but most especially the last, insist that conventional histories of Australia have exaggerated the degree of racism to which Aboriginal people were subjected. Vicki Grieves notes that “perhaps most disturbing is that [Windschuttle’s] position demonstrates a great ignorance about Indigenous people, society and culture, past and present, and the basis on which contemporary Indigenous people are asserting their rights. His appeal is to a constituency that shares such ignorance: he positions himself within populist racist ideologies rather than within the ongoing intellectual debate.” Windschuttle’s third volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History aligns him with other neoconservatives trying to disavow the history of the Stolen Generations and of genocide as perpetrated on Australia’s Indigenous populations over two hundred years (http://www.sydneyline.com). Sally Riley’s film, Confessions of a Headhunter, won the AFI Award for Best Short Film in 2000. This three-part definition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity has been accepted by all Commonwealth government departments and is used in various pieces of legislation at both commonwealth and state levels. “However, the fact remains that a white authority defines who is an Australian Indigenous person” (Korff, Jens [ed.], Aboriginal Identity: Who Is Aboriginal? Creative Spirits, n.d., Web, July 15, 2012). Babakiueria enacts a strategic reversal in which Aboriginal people, arriving on the shores of Australia, find a group of white people enjoying a cookout at a “barbeque area.” The film satirizes racial stereotyping by making Aboriginal people the colonizers and whites the colonized.

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12 For a discussion of Thomson’s role in Yolngu conceptions of their own history, see Pearson’s “‘A Long Time Ago in a Land Far, Far Away’” in this book. 13 The making of Ten Canoes is an example of a successful collaboration between the Aboriginal men Peter Djigirr and David Gulpilil from Ramingining on the Arafura Swamp in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, and Rolf de Heer, who served as writer, co-producer with Julie Ryan, and co-director with Peter Djigirr. 14 Desart is the lobby organization for Central Desert Aboriginal-owned art centres. Based in Alice Springs, Desart has been providing support services for arts centres for the last 20 years. Desart provides a united voice for art centres and delivers programs that support the maintenance of strong governance and business practices, in addition to providing opportunities to market and promote Aboriginal art. Desart provides a conduit for broad engagement with remote art centres and has developed a national reputation for being a strong advocate to Governments and the broader art industry, highlighting the unique position aboriginal art centres hole in the National arts and cultural landscape, their successes, needs and challenges.

Three

Taking Pictures B(l)ack: The Work of Tracey Moffatt SUSAN KNABE

Australian filmmaker and photographer Tracey Moffatt is often hailed as the “Australian Cindy Sherman,”1 a comparison that draws not only on her avant-garde artistic vision but also on her propensity to appear as the central model in many of her own photographs. As well, it signals her deliberate exploration and exploitation of a range of generic conventions drawn from visual culture. While Sherman’s work explicitly interrogates constructions of gender and female sexuality within contemporary visual culture, Moffatt’s early works consistently foreground connections between history, race, and gender within the (post)-colonial space of Australia as a settler-nation. Certainly, the extant scholarship on Moffatt’s work (like Sherman, she has commanded a remarkable amount of academic attention, both within Australia and abroad) focuses primarily on those works—the films Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Night Cries (1989), beDevil (1993), and the photoseries Something More (1989)—that address issues of race, identity, and history. Along with Heaven (1997),2 these relatively early works have generated the bulk of critical studies of Moffatt, with even very recent articles, like Corinn Columpar’s “At the Limits of Representation: Tracey Moffatt’s Still and Moving Images,” continuing to revolve around films or photographic series that were produced during this early period. Moreover, as Columpar’s article suggests, much of the criticism explicitly and very productively interrogates Moffatt’s work on the intersections of gender, race, and representation, often through the lens of ostensibly white feminist film theory—something made evident by the title of Cynthia Baron’s article, “Films by Tracey Moffatt: Reclaiming First Australians’ Rights, Celebrating Women’s Rites.”3 Baron notes that “Moffatt’s films use cinema 81

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in ways that are a refreshing departure from the discursive practices in which gendered and racialized polarities of self and other have been used to sustain privilege . . . [and] represent occasions where those threadbare polarities are reframed so that audiences are given an Aboriginal woman’s view of Australia’s internecine history and fraught national identity” (167). My project in this chapter builds on the extant scholarship about Moffatt’s work, with its focus on gender, race, and representation, to consider how we might look queerly at these works and what we might see when we do. And like much of the previous scholarship, I will be focusing on some of Moffatt’s earlier works: Nice Coloured Girls, Something More, Scarred for Life (1994), and Scarred for Life II (2000). There are a number of reasons for the weight of critical emphasis on Moffatt’s early works. Some of these reasons are inherent to the work itself; some are attached to Moffatt’s own identity and history as well as to her position on the landscape of late-1980s and early-1990s Australian cultural production; and still others are a function of a particular historical and political moment in Australia. It is perhaps worth noting that the material I will be examining in this chapter also comes from this particular period and so reflects the intersection between the personal and the political aspects of Moffatt’s own identity, as well as the wider historical context in which she was living and working during this time. Moffatt was one of the ten founding members of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, although she left it shortly after it was founded in 1987 to pursue her cinematic and photographic work independently (J. Jones). Describing the twenty-year retrospective of Boomalli at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007, curator Jonathan Jones argues that the impetus for the co-operative grew out of the desire by urban Aboriginal artists—whom he terms “Sydney’s Black avant-garde”—to address the tensions around authenticity and assimilation that marked urban Aboriginal culture in the 1980s, particularly in Sydney, and reflected the pervasive “notion that urban Aboriginal culture is not authentic or traditional” (J. Jones). But the tensions animating both the collective and the artists who comprised it also grew out of a politicizing of Aboriginality and colonial history that defined that particular historical and cultural moment. Earlier in 1987, Moffatt had been arrested in Portsmouth, England, for protesting the Launch of the First Fleet, a re-enactment of the original First Fleet voyage (1787–88) that was part of the lead-up to the 1988 Australian Bicentenary celebrations. The re-enactment launch and accompanying cultural festival were only the most egregious examples of how the Australian Bicentenary served as a cultural space that reiterated and celebrated a particular colonial history, rather than as an opportunity to address the impact of two

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hundred years of colonization on Aboriginal people. Moffatt’s spontaneous protest was intended to draw attention to the questionable judgment and lack of historical and political awareness demonstrated by the organizers of the re-enactment when they flew the Aboriginal flag on the fleet’s ships, but her concerns were dismissed by the press and the event’s organizers (Crawford 1076). The protests by Moffatt and others in the United Kingdom in 1987 were harbingers of the intense debates ignited in Australia by the 1988 celebration of the “discovery” of Australia.4 The debates, and especially concerns raised around human rights abuses perpetrated against Aboriginal Australians, the lack of land rights, and the legacy of colonial violence, continued to develop over the following decade, coalescing around particular historical flashpoints or events. These flashpoints included the 1992 Mabo decision, which, by reversing the legal and moral validity of the doctrine of terra nullius,5 established a precedent for Aboriginal recognition and land claims; the publication in 1997 of Bringing Them Home, the report generated by the national inquiry into the Stolen Generations; 6 and the Howard government’s repeated refusal to formally apologize to the Stolen Generations.7 The two decades prior to the turn of the century thus were a crucible of politicization for many Aboriginal artists and filmmakers. Faye Ginsburg, in “Blak Screens and Cultural Citizenship,” locates the beginning of the efflorescence of Aboriginal film and media production in relation to these events (81), while Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’s 2004 Australian Cinema after Mabo suggests that these events had a profound impact on the way it is now possible to conceive of a national cinema in contemporary Australia (7, 172). While Moffatt’s own political and artistic development emerged in response to tensions specifically related to race, representation, and the colonial legacy, her personal and professional identities complicate any straightforward attempts to locate her work within a particular narrative of Australian and Aboriginal cinema and media production. Even as beDevil has the distinction of the first full-length aboriginal feature film, its art house origins alongside its narrative and visual complexity (some might say inaccessibility) work to elide its location within the trajectory of Aboriginal Australian filmmaking emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century. Moffatt’s position on the cultural landscape is as an artist whose media include film and photography,8 rather than as part of a cohort of Aboriginal filmmakers, including Rachel Perkins and Ivan Sen, whose emergence, Ginsburg suggests, was fostered by both cultural activist politics and policy initiatives (88–89). Without question, Moffatt’s development as an artist and filmmaker has drawn on the politicization of urban Aboriginal artists in the 1980s and on the funding that

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came available to support both art and filmmaking during this time (she produced some early work in relation to Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, for instance).9 At the same time, she remains curiously outside the more recently emerging mainstream of Aboriginal Australian filmmaking, despite the fact that the impact of her early works has meant that she is very often taken to represent contemporary Aboriginal filmmaking. It is perhaps unsurprising that Moffatt herself has resisted this burden of representation, even as others have attempted to locate her within that framework. Moffatt’s Aboriginal heritage and her childhood and adolescence in the white suburban environment of her adoptive family (and particularly the racially charged physical and temporal space of 1960s and 1970s Queensland) are certainly understood to inform much of her early work, most particularly the film Night Cries. This legacy remains in many ways quite central to the tensions within her work as a whole, and while at least some of the critical work on Moffatt has identified her as a member of the Stolen Generations (Fusco 129), her own descriptions of her adoption unsettle any simplistic reification of the relationship between her, her Aboriginal birth mother, and her white foster mother (O’Regan, Australian National Cinema 328). A similar refusal to take up and be fixed within a racial identity underwrites Moffatt’s adamant refusal to be categorized as an “Aboriginal” filmmaker or artist (O’Regan, Australian National Cinema 327; Grosenick 362; Collins and Davis 163), even though she does speak frankly and movingly about her Aboriginal heritage. As I noted earlier, Moffatt is often situated as a feminist filmmaker, and her work is included in shows and collections that take feminist cultural production as their focus. Further complicating questions of identity, Moffatt’s work is also often shown in exhibitions that invite viewers to situate that work as reflecting the sexual orientation of the artist. For instance, her work has been included in exhibitions associated with the Sydney Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras, including the Hand In Hand exhibition curated by Jenny Fraser and Shigeyuki Kihara in 2008 (Browning), and her profile is included in the exhaustive online site Feminine Moments: Fine Art Made by Lesbian and Queer Women Worldwide.10 Moffatt’s work invites us to consider how it might incorporate a queer (if not explicitly lesbian) perspective. Moreover, many of her images and films explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and coloniality in ways that resist simplistic conflations and representations of fixed identities that affectively and politically charged descriptors like “Stolen Generations” and “Aboriginal” (still less “Lesbian”) might otherwise invoke. And while, as Baron notes, Moffatt’s films “articulate Aboriginal Australians’ right to full and equal participation in contemporary postcolonial Australia” by reworking historical

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encounters between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, focusing on land rights and challenging conventional modes of representation (154), I would argue that her work complicates these political projects in important ways. Australian film and cultural critic Tom O’Regan observes that the very indeterminacy of Moffatt’s own identities, and in particular the movement in and through her films as photographer, director, actor/model—in his terms “her serial public identities”—all operate to “disrupt conventional categories and confining stereotypes as to Aboriginals and film making” (Australian National Cinema 327). Further, he suggests, while Moffatt goes out of her way to welcome our interpretations, she nevertheless “keep[s] open her options to later dispute the interpretations we produce” (327). In “Bad Grrrl Bravado,” Coco Fusco hypothesizes that Moffatt’s uncharacteristic coyness about her work in the interview with Fusco is a function of her resistance to being categorized or stereotyped: I realized that she was leaving gaps not so much to pass herself off as an aesthete but to encourage a metaphorical reading of her work by an audience that still treated artists of colour as unimaginative reporters of abject social realities. Tracey was operating in a mine field, captivating an audience that resisted politics and controversy with the seductiveness of her images, while returning over and over again to scenes that evoke colonial traumas in her homeland and abroad. Those colonial scenes of rupture and psychic mutilation are indeed rooted in historical events, but their meaning surpasses the circumstances of any one given moment. (129) Fusco argues that Moffatt’s own body, as a member of the stolen generation—in Fusco’s words, part of a project of cultural genocide—but also as actor/director/photographer, underwrites and sustains the mythical scenarios she builds. Both O’Regan and Fusco locate the unsettling potential of Moffatt’s work in relation to her ability to embody (literally) ambiguous or liminal spaces of identity; and both do so by articulating precisely those categories that Moffatt herself refuses to claim (or claims ambivalently) but that, in situating her own body both in front of and behind the camera, she begins to call into question. Like Sherman, then, her work operates by failing to reproduce constructed identities faithfully, and part of the “failure” is brought about by her own resistance to taking these identities up in conventional ways, both in front of and behind the camera. While the focus in most critical work on Moffatt has been on the reworking of colonial traumas in relation to gendered Aboriginal bodies—the mythical

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scenarios that Moffatt both offers up and undermines11—I want to consider how the indeterminacy of Moffatt’s scenarios, and her invitation to interpret texts outside of authorial intent, enable queer readings of these works. In taking up her implicit invitation, I will argue that these texts offer us a way to think about the relationships that are possible between two different forms of traumatic embodiment: Aboriginality and queerness. In order to do so, I want to focus on how the use of particular historical imagery, most notably that which derives from scientific disciplines that established and documented both racial and sexual differences, gets taken up by Moffatt in ways that make possible the complex and potentially contradictory articulation of queerness and Aboriginality. There is a long and fraught relationship between the traumatic embodiment of racialized and queer bodies and forms of visual representation. Illustrations, photographs, and films have been central to the production of raced, sexed, and gendered bodies, and these representations have continued to anchor the disparate yet related disciplines of ethnography and sexology, of cultural anthropology and medical science. Further, representations, through drawings, photography, and ethnographic films, of sexualized bodies, be they female or queer, have had a well-documented role in enabling a specific colonial narrative of non-white bodies. Moreover, while historical illustrations (both scientific and popular) lack the indexical relationship between subject and image that both film and photography appear to provide (hence their apparent objectivity), these illustrations allow us both to appreciate the centrality to the colonial gaze of the imbricated nature of sexuality and race (and its representation) and to recognize this visual legacy as it informs later, more ostensibly objective representations. Perhaps the most egregious, and certainly the bestknown, example of this conflation of science, imagery, and the colonial imaginary in producing a particular sexualized and raced body is the story of Sara Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus). Baartman’s body—displayed, dissected, and denigrated in both words and drawings—was the screen on which white, colonial, male fantasies of black women’s bodies and sexualities were projected (Fausto-Sterling, Schiebinger). Her story makes explicit the ways in which imagery and scientific inquiry reproduce and justify colonial relations of ruling that are animated by the sexual and social subordination of Indigenous populations.12 Similarly, as the work of both Jonathan Goldberg and Valerie Traub suggests, albeit in very different contexts, in historical texts the “rhetorics of gender and sexuality [operate] as explanatory tropes” (Traub 305) that secure differences between colonial and Indigenous bodies and offer rationalizations for conquest and control. Goldberg’s work on the use of accusations of sodomy and cross-

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dressing (and the conflation between them) as a justification for colonial conquest by the Spanish in the New World and Traub’s discussion of the way European scientists and explorers “located” women’s same-sex practices on exotic bodies and in foreign spaces indicate the ways in which the putative sexual practices of racialized bodies operate as potent sites of European colonial self-fashioning, including the emergence of colonialism itself. Traub argues that “locating the body (and bodies) within prevailing epistemic hierarchies by charting corporeal cartographies, anatomies and travel narratives not only function as colonialist discourses but urge colonialism into being” (305). Goldberg’s analysis of the accounts and illustration of Balboa’s extermination of the members of the Quarequa Indian leader’s household who were accused of sodomy and cross-dressing— which appeared in De Bry’s widely circulated 1594 text, America—suggests that this origin story “[knew] no national borders” (180) as it circulated widely in early modern Europe. This text, Goldberg argues, “does not tell us anything about the sexual practices of these Indians; it functions only as a spectacle for Europe and its ruses of power” (183). Instead, “what the scene offers is not the truth of a naked body—which is what the De Bry illustration seems to deliver—but a site . . . [where] the body of the sodomite takes on the status of an origin, serving as the cause and justification for what was done to the Indians” (184).13 The sexual anatomy and practices of non-European bodies, as Siobhan Somerville observes, thus became the means by which scientists (and others) were able to “delineate the boundaries of race” (41); in so doing, these early texts, with their focus on anatomical representations and descriptions, offered a template for later sexological and anthropological accounts of sexual and racial difference. “Sexologists,” Somerville points out, “reproduced not only the methodologies of the comparative anatomy of races but also its iconography” (41), thereby generating classifications based on case histories and physical examinations and buttressed by illustrations (and, later, photographs) of the body’s sexual abnormalities. The authenticity of these abnormal bodies, most clearly documented by the indexical relationship between body and photographic image, underwrote both medical and sexological sciences’ authority over, and fascination with, these bodies. Moreover, these illustrations and photographs, like the illustrations, photographs, and films documenting the physical and cultural differences of Indigenous others, circulated both through the relatively new scientific disciplines of sexology and anthropology (not to mention evolutionary biology) and through older political, social, and religious discourses. The apparently authentic representations of sexual or racial others offered these framing discourses as evidence for any number of truth claims about

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race and sexuality, each secured by an appeal to the body of the other—the other who is, in Donna Haraway’s terms, “not allowed not to have a body” (Simians 183). The relations of power (colonial, medical, religious, etc.), and the discursive and material circumstances they enabled, produced the conditions under which these bodies became both intelligible and authentic (in the eyes of the colonizer or scientist). Authenticity, defined in terms specified by relations of power and expressed through a particular visual fantasy, emerged as a site of both corporeal discipline and potential embodied resistance to this discipline. Anthropological documentary photographs and films of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries illustrate the degree to which the production of “racialized” bodies yielded a range of truth claims. In many cases, these photographs were understood or presented as documenting “the disappearance of a dying race” (itself a fantasy of colonial erasure) and as preserving, before it was too late, an authentic record of these disappearing peoples (Aird 25). However, as images taken by photographers like J.W. Lindt in the 1870s in northern New South Wales suggest, these “authentic documents” were often studio portraits that used painted and stylized “Australian” backdrops and props, many of which were at odds with the cultural heritage of the people being depicted in the photographs, even as they helped produce a kind of authenticity for the colonial viewer. Roslyn Poignant’s article “The Photographic Witness” suggests that, instead of being “truthful yet artistic” representations of Aboriginal peoples, which is what Lindt’s contemporaries believed these works represented, these photographs are images of displacement. The Aborigines’ removal from the bush to the constructed studio set, parallels their actual displacement as the land’s owners; and the stripping of the clothes they customarily wore also reflects the denial to them of a place within the settlement. An aura of lethargy and anomie pervades these images, which are visual metaphors for death. With their weapons laid aside and their wildness neutralised by the studio’s ambience the sitters have been transformed into specimens—like the authentic local plants arranged around them. Poignant notes that these images, which “horrifically exemplif[y] subjugation by camera” continued to be used up into the middle of the twentieth century to illustrate even relatively sympathetic accounts of Aborigines as “vanished tribes.” Michael Hayes, similarly, suggests that the images “form part of a narrative whereby European colonial authority portrayed itself as having the power to erase Indigenous space” (176). Queer bodies have

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often been produced and reproduced as sexually dissident and deviant through imaging techniques that, as Somerville suggests, bear more than a passing relationship to those which document the comparative anatomy of the races. The iconic black bar across the eyes of the naked specimen photographs of medical and sexological texts offers up these bodies to our gaze, even as they provide us with the physical trace of those prior, sexually dissident bodies. The Aboriginal people in Lindt’s photographs have their bodies literally staged in order to appear to produce an authentic cultural record and relationship to nature, and so make race appear on their bodies; similarly, the images of those whose bodies are deemed sexually aberrant— naked, anonymous, and located within the setting of the medical clinic— rely on a kind of staging to compel these bodies to manifest their perversion, even as the truth of that perversion might be elided by the very conditions under which the body is required to appear.14 T. Benjamin Singer argues that photography and medicine, starting in the mid- to late nineteenth century, colluded to “locate the sight/site of deviance on the bodies of a wide array of social outcasts” in ways that aestheticized photography’s apparently unique ability to access the “truth” of the individual and his or her deviance (601–2). Singer’s analysis underscores the ethical impact these images have even while making clear the extent to which this ostensibly “unmediated vision of medically detected pathology” is, in practice, “a carefully constructed and highly codified image” (604). Singer discusses the ethical dimensions of these pathologizing images and notes that “photographs of human bodies have a profoundly ethical dimension. Through their codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person, which is of course the central concern of ethics: a proper regard for the other’s legitimate claim for recognition” (602; original emphasis). It is precisely the way in which these images are staged that makes the bodies they depict intelligible as particular kinds of bodies; arguably, the cultural uncertainties put in place by the need to secure boundaries (between races, between genders, between classes, and between sexualities) also underwrite both the desire to see the racial characteristics attributed to Aboriginal people as absolute and atavistic, and the anxiety that seeks first to locate sexual abnormality within the body and then make it appear on the body. In both cases, then, the photographs operate as means through which racialized and sexually diverse bodies are produced as abject to the ostensibly white, heterosexual subject—a colonizing subject—who is formally addressed by these images. The displacement of these bodies (from the bush to the photographer’s studio; from wider society to the medical clinic) heightens their abject nature, rendering them matter out of place,

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and thus “signal[ling] a site of possible danger to social and individual systems, a site of vulnerability . . . [and] a potential threat to the system and to the order it both makes possible and problematizes” (Grosz 192). Thus images appear to secure the “other” as a colonized or medicalized object, and their power to fascinate is, in Kristeva’s terms, a function of their ability to render abject that which the subject seeks (needs?) to disavow in order to produce “safeguards” against annihilation (2). Kristeva provides us with a further clue as to how these seemingly disparate series of images might be understood to function in a cognate manner when she indicates that abjection is most explicitly an attempt to deny death, that which we must “thrust aside in order to live” (3). It is precisely the way in which these images reproduce the spectre of, on the one hand, a dying race (vanishing before our eyes), and on the other, evidence of a non-reproductive sexuality and sexual body, that animate their utility for and their power to transfix the colonial and medical gaze.15 In recent years, however, many of these ethnographic and medical images have been increasingly seen as evidence of a legacy of resistance. Moreover, this resistance is often understood as explicitly linked to the body, channelled through the unflinching gaze back of the colonized.16 Feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks draws on Foucault’s understanding of power and the possibility of resistance to assert that resistance might be effected corporeally, but in ways both fleeting and partial, and that this expression of agency manifests itself in “margins, gaps and locations on and through the body” (Black Looks 116). She asserts of the power of looking that those who are “subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositonal. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist” (hooks 116). In this way, hooks opens up the possibility of both the gaze of the “other” in the image as confronting, but also begins to articulate the way in which those whose bodies do not reflect the dominant viewers produced by historical relations of looking might look differently. We can thus begin to understand that it might be possible to see how some of these historical representations might not necessarily be seen today as wholly negative by the contemporary relatives of the people in these photographs. Photographer Michael Aird suggests that in spite of the egregious nature of these stylized portraits of Aboriginal people, they may nevertheless provide the only physical representation of ancestors or relatives, and so, in the wake of a cultural disruption as profound as the Stolen Generation has been, and continues to be, they may effect a kind of restoration of historical and

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familial continuity (25, 39). Just as historical studio images have been taken up as sites of resistance within some Aboriginal communities, Jennifer Terry’s book, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine and Homosexuality in Modern Society, traces the way that historical accounts of attempts by the medical establishment to determine the nature of lesbianism both provide evidence of women’s sexual practices with other women that comprise part of the all too ephemeral archive of queer desire and document the active participation by sexually dissident women in using medical investigations to further their own understanding of their sexuality. Terry’s work makes palpable Foucault’s concept of the reverse discourse—the way in which images, descriptions, and case histories that operate to name, define, and pathologize aberrant sexualities nevertheless also provide a site through which those individuals and groups that have been pathologized might reverse the dominant discourse, repurposing it to make their own lives intelligible to themselves and others (Foucault, History of Sexuality 101). The connection between ethnographic and sexological practices that I have mapped out here helps underscore the parallel histories of queer and racialized bodies and their presence in front of the camera that I think haunts Moffatt’s work. It also suggests an already extant (although often tenuous and imperfectly articulated) space of resistance that enables an oppositional gaze. Moffatt’s work both engages with and intervenes in the historical production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies, most obviously by making clear the representational and discursive conditions under which particular bodies and practices are produced as objects of study, documentation, and disciplinary control. In the process, she necessarily articulates the way in which personal, cultural, and historical trauma circulates, but while her work confronts us with these traumas, it also invites us to take them up in ways that are neither fixed nor certain. In refusing to provide an unambiguous narrative, Moffatt’s work also resonates with the increasingly diverse ways that it is possible to read the historical images of racialized and sexualized bodies. Rather than simply replacing extant historical images, Moffatt’s work reproduces the techniques and tropes that underwrite the colonizing and pathologizing gaze. In this way, her images enable us to apprehend the workings of colonial and normalizing power as it produces and reproduces historical trauma. They also situate those traumas resolutely within both the body and the everyday and locate the potential for amelioration not in the production of positive images but rather in the way in which trauma is produced and survived. Moffatt’s work reappropriates the ethnographic and colonial gaze, and furthermore, that reappropriation both enables and invites us to read this work queerly. In addition, Moffatt’s work resists a simple celebratory notion of

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either Aboriginality or queerness (hers are not, in any sense, “progressive” images); her work does, however, as O’Regan suggests, “speak of implication and mutual history” (329). In the short film Nice Coloured Girls and in the photoseries Something More, Scarred for Life (SFL), and Scarred for Life II (SFLII), it is cultural interrelatedness and mutuality that brings Aboriginality and queerness together and that makes them speak in and through each other. While Nice Coloured Girls is one of her best-known early cinematic works, Moffatt was, by her own admission, taking photographs and drafting her siblings and friends into photographic tableaux earlier in her adolescence (Sullivan 238). In fact, in 1998 she released a series of these early shots called Backyard Series, taken in the early to mid-1970s. These include three tableaux (“Nativity Scene,” “Planet of the Apes,” and “Rock Star”) and reveal in retrospect, as Eve Sullivan suggests, both the “precocious first steps of the future famous artist” and the potency of these images to unsettle simple childhood nostalgia (234)—something that the images in Scarred for Life develop more explicitly. Like Backyard Series, Moffatt’s 2003 image I Made a Camera uses found images to reconstruct her own “directorial debut” as a photographer, her body poised beneath the cloth of her cardboard tripod camera, her right arm providing instruction to the two stiffly posed but grinning Aboriginal children, who are clearly transfixed by the lens of Moffatt’s “camera,” while her foster mother and the woman’s older daughter, caught in the glare of the Queensland summer sun, gaze at the unfolding tableau. The sepia tone of the digitalized image (which, perhaps not incidentally, is reproduced on the cover of Art & Australia, in which Sullivan’s article appears) is at odds with the clothing of the children and the women in the image and with the date and location, which are carefully inscribed on the bottom left corner: Brisbane, Australia 1969; however, it does resonate with the period evoked by the replica camera and, ironically, with the ethnographic images of Aboriginal people from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The photoseries Something More (SM) (1989) references the interplay between sexuality and race through a complicated exploration of desire, dominance, and fetishization. This desire circulates between the central character, a young Aboriginal woman, played by Moffatt herself, who, as the first image suggests, longs for something more, and the other characters who populate the images in the series. These include an androgynous male character (he appears to wear lipstick and has his hair in a plait), who signifies a kind of pan-Asian non-whiteness (something that is underscored by his conical woven hat), and a sexy but somewhat sleazy blond woman dressed initially in a pink slip and leaning against the door of corrugated

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iron shack. The man’s feminine face rests tenderly on the central character’s thigh as she caresses his hair; his masculine arm and hand gently cups her shin (SM #3). By contrast, the blond woman’s forthright and dangerous sexuality is signalled through her sexual or fetishist attire (the slip and her high leather boots in a later frame) and her red varnished nails, which allow us to track her from frame to frame and which indicate the nature (real or imagined) of her relationship with the character Moffatt portrays. The danger inherent in the frame in which she files her nails, knife stuck into the table in the extreme foreground, informs how we might read the possibility of a relationship between the two women (as lovers, or rivals, or both). Thus the frame in which the blond woman’s hand, in blurry black and white close-up, caresses both the other woman’s body and the coils of a whip (SM #6) resolves eventually into the stylized fetishism of SM #8, in which, dressed in leather boots and standing in front of a motorcycle, she commands both whip and the figure of the other woman kneeling in the background of the image. The six coloured and three black-and-white images are assembled in a loose chronological narrative and imbued with implicit and explicit violence and sexual tension such that the hopeful Aboriginal woman in the first frame (she is dreaming of something more) literally becomes “roadkill” by the final frame; same-sex and interracial desire have a similarly dismal trajectory, moving through deviance to end in death—something that, as Vito Russo pointed out in The Celluloid Closet, seems to have been the default fate of queer characters in classical cinema. The reviewer of a retrospective of Moffatt’s work, writing in The Age newspaper, took Moffatt to task for this negative trajectory, particularly the link between women’s sexual dissidence and death (Nelson). I think that Moffatt’s use of colour and black-and-white here, and the ambiguity of the sequencing of the photos (usually mounted as three rows of three images), make this trajectory less absolute than the reviewer would have us believe. The interconnections between the two women and between both women and the two men in the pictures offer up a range of possibilities, none of which is fixed or certain. Moreover, the shift from black-and-white to colour and back suggests alternative levels of consciousness from the point of view of the central character: Is one a dream sequence? Or is the other? Moffatt’s imagery is visually arresting—her compositions draw out sexual tension, desire, fear, and a complex inner monologue—but remains unfixed within the series. Her work does not valorize or romanticize either of the women in the photos, still less any potential relationship the two may have; however, what is interesting is the degree to which Moffatt’s work here does place these racial and sexual archetypes (the blond slapper/scrubber17 and

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the mixed-race Aboriginal woman) within a space where all of these readings are possible, and in this sense her work both appropriates and resists conventional narratives. It is through this double gesture that the possibility of interconnectedness or a recognition of mutual history becomes enabled. The storyboard feel to the work—the way each image contributes to the narrative through scene setting—and what I would argue is an ironic repurposing of classic cinematic tropes within the Australian bush, together reiterate the filmic quality of Moffatt’s work, something that is further complicated by Moffatt’s use of painted sets and stereotypical props.18 In Something More, she sets the scene for a potential alternative history/future that echoes visually the studio sets and props that attempted to locate Aboriginal people within a mythic, fictive past. In doing so, she similarly produces Australia as a painted backdrop against which racial and sexual tensions are projected and explored. If Something More situates sexual and racial tensions against the iconic (and ironic, in Moffatt’s hands) Australian bush, it is Moffatt’s sensibility both for the everyday and for the possibility of constructing everyday experience that informs Scarred for Life and Scarred for Life II, a series of snapshot-like photos that evoke a kind of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s nostalgia (although the later series also includes several images set in the 1980s). This sense of nostalgia, produced by the photographic technique and by the props and further developed through the Life photo essay style of captioning, makes these among the most accessible of Moffatt’s photographic works. The topics of the photographs are precisely those things that are elided in the production of nostalgia for our childhoods—the way in which, as Moffatt suggests, our experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the crucible of family life and societal expectations might scar us for life. Thus the images and their accompanying captions evoke the spectre of physical and emotional violence, although, as Moffatt herself notes, those images often trace the fine line between humour and tragedy. Moreover, the recurrent reiteration of worthlessness, instilled by both societal and familial violence, reflects the complex way in which subjectivity is mediated through the psychic effects of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Like the short case histories that accompanied the photographs of sexual deviants, Moffatt’s captioned photographs re-create a case history for the subjects in the image, inviting us to imagine a psychological trajectory for these subjects, to examine their scars and discern their truths. This invitation is both established and undercut by the title of the series—Scarred for Life. This obviously injects a kind of wry humour and ironic distancing— these are, after all, stories shared with Moffatt by the adult survivors of these incidents (Moffatt, “Australian Artist Tracey Moffatt”)—but it also

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makes apparent the emotional and physical violence that accrues to children in our society, and particularly to racialized and queer children; and in the juxtaposition, it acknowledges both the resilience of those children and the price they pay for that resilience. In deploying nostalgia’s appeal in order to make clear the costs of fetishizing nostalgia (these are most certainly not the “Kodak moments” of anyone’s childhood), Moffatt’s title further underscores how nostalgia itself may scar us, as our pasts patently fail to live up to some idyll of childhood. The photos and captions, which Moffatt notes in an interview are all drawn from true stories told her by friends, indict the photographic subject’s family in either actively colluding with a racist, sexist, and homophobic society or failing to provide a refuge from this society for children, particularly those othered in relation to gender, race, or sexuality. That this collusion or failure to protect extends into adulthood but remains fixed to familial guilt and judgment is made explicit in the photograph “Suicide Threat, 1982,” in which the pregnant woman’s body in the foreground of a middle-class domestic interior is strangely overshadowed by the diminutive yet commanding figure of her mother in the background. The means by which this control and judgment is exerted is made clear in the caption: “She was forty-five, single and pregnant for the first time. When her mother found out, she said ‘If I wasn’t Catholic, I would commit suicide.’” Many of the images in this series reiterate the trauma of being judged and found wanting, of failing to live up to societal and familial norms and expectations in ways which reiterate this failure as something both individual and deserved, wholly unrelated to the way in which systemic disadvantage operates along lines of gender, race, and sexuality. In the image “Useless: 1974,” the caption accompanying the image of a teenaged girl washing the headlight of a car reads: “Her father’s nickname for her was ‘Useless’” The girl’s body, caught between childish roundness and adult curves, crouches before the car, her gaze wavering between an implicit challenge to the viewer to judge her and a palpable fear of being judged and found wanting. Similarly, in “Job Hunt, 1976” an Aboriginal youth, dressed in shirt and tie, leans against the brick wall of an institutional building; the caption reads: “After 3 weeks he still couldn’t find a job. His mother said to him, ‘Maybe you’re not good enough.’” While the images that focus on race and gender seem to provide, on the surface at least, a more straightforward indictment of parental and societal violence, the images in this series that map the way non-normative sexuality and gender circulate in childhood do so in ways that are often ambiguous about how queer childhood trauma operates. The censure of the proto-gay kid19 is apparent in “Wizard of Oz, 1956,” in which the young

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boy’s eagerness to dress up as Dorothy—the caption tells us he got “dressed too early”—angers his father, a quintessential 1950s patriarch, complete with phallic pipe. In this image, the queerness of the cross-dressing child in conjunction with The Wizard of Oz (and its well-known connection with queer history and culture) stands in stark contrast to both the explicit parental prohibition against queerness and the implicit message of the story—that queer kids must not “get dressed too early” lest they invoke the wrath of their parents. Queerness and childhood trauma circulate even more ambiguously through two images from SFL II: “Brother was Mother 1983” and “Piss Bags 1978.” In the first of these, the caption—“While their parents were out, his brother dressed as his mother. For a split second, he really thought his brother was mother”—suggests that everyday trauma affiliated with queerness may operate in ways that are not necessarily fixed, or attached to specifically queer bodies.20 In this case, the child who is “scarred for life” is the one who witnesses, rather than participates in, an act of gender transgression. The second image offers a more clear-cut assertion of the ways in which queerness and its articulations might operate as a site of trauma for those adjacent to it, both directly and indirectly. The foreground of the image is dominated by the rear half of a vintage 1970s camper van containing two children of different races and ages, their faces pressed to the closed windows, hands clutching chip bags, while in the background, behind the van and on the edge of the beach, two women, one white, the other clearly not, dressed in flowing, hippie-esque skirts, kiss passionately. The caption reads: “Locked in the van while their mothers continued their affair, the boys were forced to piss into their chip bags.” Moffatt’s composition presents a complicated narrative about queer desire and its potential traumatic effect, particularly within a homophobic and racist society. While the violence of the children’s exile in the van remains the focus of both the image and caption, Moffatt’s photograph, in figuring the women’s embrace, particularly when combined with the visible markers of time period and race, at least allows for the possibility of recognizing the risks inherent in their continued relationship. The lesbian lovers do not get a free ride from Moffatt in this image; however, it is not their relationship per se that is pathologized in the image, and they do remain a visible reminder of the presence of same-sex, cross-racial desire. While sexuality and race are juxtaposed as parallel but discrete constructions in most of the images, in the case of “Piss Bags 1978” and “Doll Birth 1972”—in which two young boys, one Aboriginal and one not, are caught playing at delivering a black doll from between the splayed legs of one of them—gender and sexuality operate together, albeit in ways that are, on the surface at least, apparently unrelated.

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The final text I want to consider here is Moffatt’s 1987 short film, Nice Coloured Girls. This film narrates the experience of three contemporary Aboriginal women—the nice coloured girls of the title—who go out to the Cross (King’s Cross, Sydney, an area that notoriously caters to the seedier side of Sydney’s night life) with the express purpose of picking up a white man to pay for their night out, without the women having to give him anything in return. While the film uses location sound, any actual dialogue is obscured by both the diegetic sound of cars, barroom, and restaurant noise and the sound track; while there is a suggestion of a language other than English, it is at best barely recognizable as language. Instead, the women’s story is related by a series of subtitles in idiomatic English, as they explain how they negotiate the transaction with the “Captain,” so named because, we are told, that’s what their mothers and grandmothers called them. The contemporary story, filmed on the streets of the Cross, is intercut with readings from letters by British and Irish sailors about their contact with Aboriginal women during the early settlement of the Sydney area. These readings are accompanied by stylized re-enactments and early images of the landscape and peoples of Sydney as seen through European eyes. Shortly after meeting with the Captain and having him share his cigarettes, one of the women leaves the pub with a young man. The remaining two women work on getting the already drunk Captain to take them out for a meal and dancing. Finally, they roll the by now dead-drunk man for his wallet to finance their cab ride home. The matter-of-fact nature of the subtitled narration of the women’s scheme—complete with asides about making sure the Captain is drunk and therefore less likely to be nasty and their justification for stealing from a man whom they believe “should be home with his family” rather than “enjoying being seen with two black women on his arm”—calls into question the phrase “nice coloured girls.” Moffatt’s deft use of the tropes of ethnographic documentary, not the least of which is the voice of the native informant, ironizes the simplistic understandings of Aboriginal women’s racialized and sexualized bodies that are embedded in both the historical documents (given as both text and male voice-over) and the contemporary assumptions about the women’s sexual availability that underwrite the twentieth-century Captain’s actions. While men appear to speak authoritatively within the film in ways that are familiar to us from other documentaries—interestingly, Moffatt only allows us to “hear” men’s voices, from incidental noise on the street to the posh tones of the voices reading the historical documents—Moffatt’s film makes clear, through the particular exchanges that are documented (both contemporary and historical), that although these men might speak about Aboriginal women, their speech reveals their profound lack of understanding and

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their hubris. Similarly, in showing the historical drawings and paintings of the Sydney Harbour foreshore being spray-painted over by an Aboriginal woman, the film undermines both the authoritative position usually accorded these types of historical documents (these images, products of a Western landscape painting tradition, are used in documentaries as direct evidence of how Australia looked at the time of white settlement) and illustrates both the need for and the difficulty of reclaiming images. Moffatt’s film thus engages in a critique of the implicit equation of Aboriginal women as landscape in the paintings, and both women and landscape as constructions of a white imagination. Further, it underscores the tenacious nature and continuing legacy of these images (French), suggesting that it is not enough to simply paint over the existing images; rather it is necessary to break not just the glass but also the edifice that supports the picture, as we see the woman first smashing the blackened painting with a rock, only to reveal the intact painting under the broken glass, and finally pushing down the (white) gallery walls. Moffatt’s film also offers another way of thinking about the intersection between sexuality and race, one that complicates further how a white imagination constructs Aboriginal women’s sexuality in relation to heterosexuality. From the time the third woman leaves them, it is possible to read the remaining two women as a lesbian couple. From their clothing (offering just the barest hint of a butch–femme relationship, with the taller of the two in pants and a shirt, the other in a dress) to the music— Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” while they peruse the menu together in the restaurant, seated side by side, looking very much a couple, and Prince’s “Nasty Girl” while they dance together under a disco ball, one leaning in to whisper intimately in the other’s ear—to their exuberant exit from the club to return home by taxi at dawn, Moffatt’s framing leaves room to read the relationship between the two women queerly. While the subtitles suggest one reason why the women are relieved when the Captain stumbles off the dance floor—“it is embarrassing to be seen dancing with the creeps”—the way in which the scene is framed, ending in a tight close-up of the women standing together, and their obvious pleasure in each other’s company, suggest another reason for their relief. The double nature of the narrative is similarly emphasized by the contrast between the initial disapproval of the Aboriginal woman on the foreshore—a historical foremother (the subtitles tell us that “our mothers don’t like it” when the women go out to find a Captain)—and the approving laughter and her smiling face as the women exit the club, wallet in hand, to continue their night of fun, sans Captain. The approval here is most ostensibly for the way in which the young women have worked the trick of extracting cash from the Captain;

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however, I would suggest that in reading this text queerly, the approving laughter also works to suggest that the past, just like the present, may have been much queerer than we have been led to believe, given the questionable accuracy of the extant historical record. It also underscores the way in which Moffatt’s film calls into question the veracity of the scientific and historical truth as it is presented in ethnographic films or photographs, inviting viewers to read resistance to these narratives of colonization and pathologization on a number of different levels. As I suggested earlier, Moffatt’s work cannot be read as fulfilling the mandate of a progressive text, putting forth unambiguously positive representations of racial or sexual minorities. This ambiguity is underscored both when the young women dance together as Prince sings “Nasty Girl” (and reiterated as the credits roll to Aretha Franklin’s “Evil Gal Blues”) and in the embrace of the neglectful lovers in “Piss Bags, 1978.” However both of these texts, along with the others I have discussed here, suggest how Moffatt’s works make apparent the difficulty of and risks inherent in reclaiming images of a queer and racialized past, even as it insists on the need to do so. The more overt and camp sensibilities of Scarred for Life and Something More reiterate the presence in Nice Coloured Girls of a queer potentiality, both past and present, but this queer potentiality, like the medical and ethnographic images, cannot be understood as offering a single truth. Moffatt’s reappropriations in these works range from taking b(l)ack colonial images and tropes to reworking the techniques of classification and control to suggest alternative histories. These alternative histories may, as Richard Grayson suggests, be found in art as often as they are in museums, and “offer . . . avenues of hope and imagination as well as mere repression . . . so that we may look quizzically and differently at the histories we know.” Moffatt’s works suggest that both the “histories we know” and the ones we might imagine are queerer than we think.

Notes 1 Cindy Sherman, an American visual artist, is perhaps most famous for her series of photographs titled Untitled Film Stills. In these images, she draws on the visual tropes of various cinematic genres and, using props and her own body, interrogates how gender is produced through visual culture. She does this by first identifying the centrality of specific forms of visual culture in reiterating gendered norms and the particular elements that contribute to these norms. However, in deliberately failing to reproduce these elements faithfully, her photographs underscore the constructed nature of gender within mainstream visual culture (A. Jones, “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman” 48).

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2 For instance, Catherine Summerhayes in “Moving Images: The Films of Tracey Moffatt . . . So Far . . .” situates Heaven in relation to Moffatt’s cinematic oeuvre. She considers Heaven exclusively in her article “Who in Heaven? Tracey Moffatt: Men in Wetsuits and the Female Gaze.” Interestingly, while Summerhayes suggests that sexuality and gender are central to the way Heaven operates (the film is “playfully compiled” film footage of male surfers changing their clothes on public beaches), she elides and conflates gender and sexuality in ways that appear to eliminate the possibility of a lesbian viewing position of the film when she states that the film enables the female camera’s focus on the male body to “coerc[e] the film’s viewer into a gendered viewing position, whether this position belongs to a woman or a homosexual or bisexual man” (75). Moffatt’s “cinematographers” in Heaven were six women, including Moffatt herself, and I am curious about the way in which the female gaze/camera is heterosexualized in relation to Summerhayes’s assumptions about the sexual politics of looking that the film enables. 3 In addition to Columpar and Baron, see French, Turcotte, and both articles by Summerhayes as examples of this approach. 4 The protests in 1988 calling for a Year of Mourning in response to the continued injustices experienced by Aboriginal Australians echoed the earlier protest over sesquicentennial celebrations in 1938, when Australia Day, 26 January, was designated a Day of Mourning in an attempt to extend citizenship rights to Aboriginal Australians. Buttons reading “White Australia has a Black History. Don’t Celebrate 1788” helped succinctly draw attention to the legacy of colonization and its devastating effects on the lives of Aboriginal Australians. 5 Terra nullius was at first a descriptor; it later became a legal term that in effect declared that the land was empty when the first European settlers arrived. As a founding doctrine with both legal and rhetorical weight, it effectively erased the Aboriginal presence in Australia (Collins and Davis, Australian Cinema after Mabo 3–4). 6 The Stolen Generations refers to those children of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent (particularly those of mixed race) who were forcibly removed from their families and communities through government programs or programs sanctioned by the government. These programs started during the late nineteenth century and continued, officially, until 1969. The historical context, the social, cultural, and political effects of the removals on children and communities, reparations and services for those affected by the policy, and possible parallels to current child removal policies are all examined in the report Bringing Them Home. 7 On 12 February 2008, following the defeat of the Howard government, the new prime minister, Labour leader Kevin Rudd, formally apologized to Aboriginal Australians in parliament, indicting the “laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments” in the “indignity and degradation”

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experienced by Aboriginal Australians and the harm inflicted by the removal of Aboriginal children from their families (Rudd, “Apology”). Eve Sullivan cites Moffatt’s own assessment of her work as driven by a desire to produce art, “to be a painter” rather than make “documentary pictures” (“The Juvenilia of Tracey Moffatt” 238). Moffatt also hints at this in her interview with Fusco (“Bad Grrl Bravado” 131). Australia’s SBS was started in the late 1970s with a mandate to provide programming to address Australia’s increasingly multicultural population, both through offering a more diverse range of topics and by providing programming in a variety of different languages. See http://www.femininemoments.dk/blog/lesbianartbooks/mn. This is particularly true of work on both Night Cries and beDevil. For a discussion of Night Cries, see Kaplan, “The Ethics of Witnessing.” Several articles address the haunting instilled by colonial trauma in bedevil; see Olubas, “Image, Affect and Memory”; Turcotte, “Spectrality in Indigenous Women’s Cinema”; and Mimura, “Black Memories.” Baron’s “Films by Tracey Moffatt” deals with both films. Ann Laura Stoler’s work on sexuality and sexual relationships in colonial situations is exemplary here: she tracks the different roles available to women, both as colonized and as colonizer. French also refers to how the colonial period situated women as “Damned Whores and God’s Police.” Both Goldberg’s work and Traub’s resonate with Said’s conception of “Orientalism”—that is, how what is orientalized operates primary to define “the West.” For instance, think of how the naked and clothed bodies of a biological female who lives as a man might operate in this circumstance to actually make the perversion disappear. In contemporary terms, this idea of the vanishing body—the corpse that confronts us with our own mortality and the spectre of both personal and racial annihilation—is most clearly articulated in the “face of AIDS” images (both of gay men from the 1980s and 1990s and of “Africans” in the 2000s), which offer another example of the complex and interrelated circuits of scientific sexism and racism that continue to circulate. The ways in which the notorious black bars are used in the historical sexological and medical images enable viewers to gaze upon the naked bodies of those deemed sexual anomalies without the risk of being confronted (caught) in their looking, offering a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in looking, heightened by the perverse and explicitly sexual nature of the bodies (and their nakedness). Drawing on Mulvey’s work on the gaze and its relationship to the camera, feminist analysis of the camera’s ability to subjugate women’s bodies often revolves around the inability of the object of the photographic gaze to look back at the viewer and the degree to which the camera operates as a means by which women’s bodies are dismembered. As Douglas Crimp notes in relation to Nicholas Nixon’s photographs of people living

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with AIDS (People with AIDS), the ability to resist is often circumscribed by the nature of the images (Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism 86). Nixon’s subjects are often explicitly unable to gaze back and so cannot confront or demand a response from the viewer. Dionne Brand complicates the ways in which the gaze at the camera might also be understood as having the power to command that we look at what is about to subjugate us, wherein resistance then may include the right to look away or refuse to look when commanded to (Bread out of Stone 171). bell hooks’ discussion of the oppositional gaze includes a similar mediation on the way this operates. Both terms, the latter specific to Australia, evoke a particular kind of sexual woman. See Waddell for a discussion of the scrubber in Australian film. Moffatt’s early films move from the stark use of obviously painted sets in Night Cries to the almost guerrilla documentary filmmaking aesthetic of Heaven. Eve Sedgwick uses the term “proto-gay kids” to refer to children whose nonnormative gender performance is assumed to signal their eventual homosexuality (Tendencies 163). Anne Cvetkovich describes the knock-on effect of trauma in An Archive of Feelings, noting that “those whose experiences circulate in the vicinity of trauma . . . are marked by it” (3).

Four

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/Colonial Cinema KERSTIN KNOPF

In Memory of Alootook Ipellie

Introduction With their award-winning Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the directing/writing team of Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn propelled Inuit culture and language onto the stage of international film art. The film won the Caméra d’Or for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, where Kunuk surprised the Western film elite by giving his acceptance speech entirely in Inuktitut. The second grand Arctic film by Kunuk and Cohn, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, premiered in September 2006 at the International Toronto Film Festival and screened at various film festivals around the world.1 This 6-million-dollar film (Kunuk, interview) was a co-production of Kunuk Cohn Productions, Igloolik Isuma Productions, and Copenhagen-based Barok Film. The Danish ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and other scientists travelled to the North American Arctic in the early 1920s to study traditional Inuit lifeways and oral cultural lore. Several times they met shaman Avva2 and his family, and they dedicated a considerable amount of their research efforts to this group. Based on Rasmussen’s journals, the film narrates a bleak part of Arctic history in the 1920s: the unrelenting forward march of Christianity and Westernization and the futile attempts of the shaman Avva to resist Christianization. The film documents how traditional Inuit life was thrown off balance—not by an evil shaman, as in Atanarjuat, but by colonial forces.

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Kunuk says he made the film for “a first audience that is Inuit: elders who are still alive and young people looking for a future beyond boredom, unemployment and suicide. It tries to answer two questions that haunted me my whole life: Who were we? And what happened to us?” (“The Journals”). To him it was imperative to show younger Inuit audiences what Inuit culture was like and general audiences how quickly Christianity and Western influences enveloped the Arctic, with devastating consequences for the Inuit (Kunuk, interview). Similarly, he meant to impart that conversion and radical changes in Inuit societies happened not long ago: “I want people to know it was only 83 years ago that we were living the law of nature” (qtd. in Gunderson, “Filmmaking Inuit-Style” 36). After a brief synopsis of the plot, this chapter discusses the film’s two sources: the ethnological colonial one (the journals of Rasmussen and his fellow scientists) and the post-colonial one (Inuit cultural lore and oral tradition). The filmmakers have merged these two sources into a transcultural cinematic product that presents colonial Arctic history from an Inuit perspective. This chapter also sketches out how the film translated the history of the Christianization of the Igloolik region into film. The analysis focuses on the contact and cultural exchange between Inuit and Westerners and on inter- and intra-community tensions that arose from the Western intrusion. Synopsis In 1922, the explorers Knud Rasmussen, Therkel Mathiassen, and Peter Freuchen arrive at the camp of Avva, the last great Inuit shaman in the Iglulik region. Avva’s family has retained traditional Inuit ways and has resisted the advance of Christianity. However, their customary life is already being overshadowed by Western influences: by the converted families in the area, by the violation of a taboo by Avva’s daughter Apak, and by the murder of a “white” trader committed by Apak’s former husband Nuqallaq. At Rasmussen’s request, Avva shares his life story and Inuit oral cultural knowledge, which becomes part of Rasmussen’s research results. Avva and his son Natar agree to accompany Freuchen and Mathiassen to the settlement of Iglulik while Rasmussen leaves for Baker Lake. During their journey to Iglulik, Freuchen and Mathiassen encounter blizzards and cannot find food; they know that the spiritual balance has been disturbed. In Iglulik, the people welcome them singing Christian hymns. Their life has drastically changed: the leader Umik now controls the food supply and has imposed daily prayer meetings and hymn singing on the community. Umik makes it clear that Avva and his family will not receive food without joining the prayers and, implicitly, converting to Christianity. The respected Nuqallaq,

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Umik’s son, is at the forefront of this evangelizing and brings the “words of the Lord” to the people. Umik stages a ritualistic consumption of food traditionally forbidden to shamans—the entrails of sea animals—and thus seals the conversion to Christianity. Apak openly confronts her father and joins the converted Iglulik people. Finally Avva, his spiritual and physical power weakened, gives up his resistance and drives his helping spirits away. Two Stories behind the Film There are two different stories behind the making of this film. One begins in the early twentieth century with the Danish explorer and ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, who dedicated his life to studying the Arctic and its people. Born in Greenland to a missionary and language researcher and a woman who was proud of her Inuit ancestors, Rasmussen grew up with Inuit people, spoke their language, and in his childhood learned how to hunt, travel, and live on the land. He says in the introduction to his Across Arctic America: “My playmates were native Greenlanders; from the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so that even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me . . . No wonder, therefore, that the expeditions of later years were like happy continuations of the experiences of my childhood and youth” (xxxii). Rasmussen became one of the greatest explorers of Greenland, established the Arctic trading and research station at Thule in northwest Greenland, and led four “Thule” expeditions into Greenland over ten years (xxxiii). During his legendary 5th Thule Expedition of 1921–24, financed by the Danish government and the Thule station, he and his fellow scientists explored a large part of the North American Arctic from Baffin Island to the east coast of Siberia, covering roughly 20,000 miles (xxix–xxxi). The members of this Danish expedition were, besides Rasmussen, zoologist and cartographer Peter Freuchen, archaeologist and cartographer Therkel Mathiassen, ethnographer and geographer Kaj Birket-Smith, scientific assistant Helge Bangsted, Greenlandic secretary and interpreter Jacob Olson, six Cape York Inuit (three of them women), whose main tasks were hunting and sewing, and cinematographer Leo Hansen, who joined the expedition later in 1923 (Rasmussen et al. 524). The expedition’s objectives were to study Inuit culture and environment beyond Greenland in terms of physical anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, folklore, linguistics, physical geography, and meteorology and to research the origins of the Inuit (524, 535, 549, 561). To this end, the expedition mapped various territories, explored their geography, geology, and flora and fauna, excavated ancient settlements, and studied the cultural groups they encountered—their customs and traditions, their hunting and sustenance, their songs and dances, and their belief system and mythology.

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The results are documented in a 1925 article in The Geographical Review, co-written by Rasmussen, Birket-Smith, and Mathiassen; in Rasmussen’s twelve-volume Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24 (1930), which includes Mathiassen’s Archaeology of the Central Eskimos I–II: Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, vol. IV (1927) and Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos: Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, vol. VI, no. 1 (1928); and Mathiassen’s Med Knud Rasmussen blandt Amerikas Eskimoer (1926).3 The principal source for Kunuk and Cohn’s film was apparently Rasmussen’s Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, vol. VII, no. 1, of the Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24. After introducing his various informants and their biographies as told to Rasmussen, that book takes on a more ethnographic character, with chapters on religion and philosophy; spirit powers that rule earth and Inuit life; views on the mystery of death; the functions and powers of shamans; amulets, magic songs, rules of life, and taboos; spirits that surround the people; songs, dances, games, and other pastimes; and folk tales and myths. Rasmussen’s principal informants for this volume were Aua, Ivaluardjuk, Takornâq, Inugpasugjuk, Naukatjik, Anarqâq, and Usugtâq. The text mixes Rasmussen’s descriptions with his understanding of these aspects of Inuit intellectual culture, quotations from the informants, and paraphrased accounts, tales, and songs, with markers identifying the informant. This text also includes maps; photographs of the informants and other Inuit; and drawings of Inuit dress, camps, games, and contests, song festivals, hunting scenes, and spirits, all made by Inuit other than the informants, except for one of facial and body tattoos done by Birket-Smith. Volume VII, no. 2, Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos, has a similar structure but includes more photographs and fewer drawings of Inuit, their dress, hunting, and so on. Volume VII, no. 3, Iglulik and Caribou Eskimo Texts, consists of most of the related Iglulik and Caribou Inuit tales from nos. 1 and 2, a list of Inuit vocabulary, a list of shaman vocabulary, a list of all Inuit encountered in these areas, and sketch maps and lists of place names provided by Inuit (Usugtâq and Ivaluardjuk for the Iglulik part), as well as Mathiassen’s diary entries from 9 September 1922 to 12 February 1923, when he and Olsen spent the winter on Southampton Island. The Iglulik and Caribou Inuit tales in this part are rendered verbatim in Inuktitut (printed with the Roman alphabet and additional transcription signs) and in English (translation from Danish). The line-by-line translation can be irritating but indicates the respect for the Inuit language that Rasmussen thought necessary to convey to Western readers. In doing this, he follows the cultural relativism method introduced by Franz Boas. In this way, he established Inuktitut as a language comparable to Western languages that

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could be understood and spoken by a non-Inuit. However, this also seems to have been a means for him to establish himself as a mediator and informant of Inuit cultures. His texts indicate that Rasmussen did not seem to share the cultural arrogance so often shown by other Western explorers, whalers, and missionaries. He seems to have viewed himself as a gatherer of information solicited from the Inuit. He knew that the “success” of his expedition would depend on the knowledge held by the Inuit, which they were often hesitant to provide, specifically with regard to “things as life itself and the purpose of life, and its guiding powers” (Intellectual Culture 19). Beside his own descriptions, he made space for Inuit voices, and he acknowledged their contributions. He tried to place himself on the same level as his hosts and informants and to act as an equal: it seems that he often succeeded, not least because he himself had Inuit ancestry. Speaking Greenland Inuktitut—a variant of North American Inuktitut—Rasmussen and his Inuit crew were able to communicate well with the Inuit groups they encountered; often these groups took Rasmussen for an Inuit from another part of the North American Arctic: Furthermore, all white men looked with supreme disdain on the system of taboo by which the balance of the Eskimo community was maintained. I understood then, that if I were to succeed in gaining the full confidence of these people, it was absolutely necessary to place myself in their position. I was not concerned to guide or correct them in any way, but had come to their country expressly for the purpose of learning what they could teach. (Intellectual Culture 20) Like Robert Flaherty, Rasmussen during his expeditions wanted to capture on film the life and traditions of the rapidly vanishing Inuit cultures— a practice that became known as “salvage ethnography” (Barnouw 45). Flaherty expressed sensitivity towards the cultures he studied: he spent considerable time living with the Inuit (sixteen months at Port Harrison, now Inukjuak) (Rotha 45), he included the Inuit in the production work for his semi-ethnographic film Nanook of the North (1922) “from acting, to the repair of cameras, to the printing and developing of the film, to the suggestion of film scenes” (Rony 118), and he showed the film rushes to the Inuit involved in order to note their reaction. In this way, he established the myth of “ethnographic participant observation,” which supposedly showed the filmed objects’ view of themselves in addition to the ethnographer’s (118).4 Rasmussen took a similar approach: he lived with the Inuit groups he

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visited; he asked them to talk about their lives, myths, taboos, and the like, which he paraphrased or quoted verbatim; and he included their drawings and maps in his work. But unlike Flaherty, who staged before the camera his nostalgic-romantic idea of pre-contact Inuit life without Western influences, Rasmussen documented Inuit contact with whalers and with Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) traders and other traders. On Baillie Island in Liverpool Bay in the Mackenzie Delta, where the HBC had established a trading post, he described the change from a hunting and barter economy to a hunting and cash-based exchange economy: The pursuit of gold and money values had revolutionized everything. The Hudson’s Bay Company was no longer the only source and centre of trade; independent traders came down the rivers buying up skins for cash, and the competition between them sent prices up to such a degree that the Eskimos in this rich fur country found themselves wealthy men all of a sudden . . . Consequently, we found ourselves now among a people highly paid and independent in proportion . . . The Eskimo hunters were no poor savages in kayaks; they owned schooners and called one another “Captain” . . . The women, whose deft fingers had been wont to compass unaided the making and decorating of clothes, now used sewing machines. Men and women alike had learned to write; and the men, to be in fashion, bought typewriters, though their correspondence was hardly enough to give them any great practice in the use of them. Safety razors were in general use, and cameras not uncommon. (Rasmussen, Across Arctic America 293–94) Flaherty created his superhero Nanook (played by Allakariallak), who was still untarnished by Western influences. Nanook could brave the natural forces, traverse ice floes, hunt and fish for food while others starved, and kill polar bears and walruses with a harpoon. Allakariallak, it needs to be said, died of hunger two years after Nanook was made—a fact that unmistakably reveals the gap between Flaherty’s idealistic Nanook and the real man, Allakariallak, who lost the battle for survival. Rasmussen does not fall into the trap of idealizing and romanticizing the Inuit braving natural forces. At several points in his books he tells of people who starved to death or who are on the brink of starvation—for example, when their party comes upon Hilitoq’s camp: “Half a score of human figures lay about in various attitudes, all in such a state of exhaustion that they could not walk. . . . It was an extraordinary instance of Eskimo limitations thus to find men at the point of death in a starvation camp within a few miles

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of plenty” (105). And he repeats Takornâq’s account of how she and her husband came upon the shelter of Ataguvtâluk, who had almost starved to death and had survived by eating human flesh: Yes, we came to that shelter, and looking in, we saw a human being squatting down inside, a poor woman, her face turned piteously towards us. Her eyes were all bloodshot, from weeping, so greatly had she suffered. “Kivkaq,” she said (literally, “you my gnawed bone,” which was her pet name for Padloq, whom she knew well), “Kivkaq, I have eaten my elder brother and my children.” “My elder brother” was her pet name for her husband. Padloq and I looked at each other, and could not understand that she was still alive and breathing. There was nothing of her but bones and dry skin, there seemed indeed hardly to be a drop of blood in all her body, and she had not even much clothing left, having eaten a great deal of that, both the sleeves and all the lower part of her outer furs. (Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture 30) The texts Across Arctic America and Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24 were compiled from thirty journals and 20,000 photographs and illustrations (Rasmussen, Across Arctic America xxxiv). Again and again, those texts display Rasmussen’s great respect for the Inuit and their traditions and beliefs. In the introduction to Across Arctic America, he writes: “The Eskimo is the hero of this book. His history, his present culture, his daily hardships, and his spiritual life constitute the theme and the narrative” (xxxiii). He admits their superiority in some of the practicalities of Arctic life. For example, regarding their adaptability to the changing Arctic conditions, he writes: Our own experience had taught us to appreciate the natives’ power of adapting themselves to their surroundings. Their extraordinary clothing, of soft caribou skin from head to foot, inside and out, enabled not only the men, but also women and children, to move abroad in all manner of weather; as long as they could manage to procure food enough, the cold of winter seemed hardly to affect them at all. (108) He also admires Avva’s skill with dog teams and travelling. The German edition/translation of Across Arctic America contains the following passage: How good is their ice shoeing! The sled is seven meters long. Under each runner is a layer of frozen peat with a thin crust of ice on top.

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While our steel runners glide heavily and screeching across the snow, which is rubbed to sand in this heavy cold, Aua’s big and heavy sled overcomes every frictional resistance without effort and darts across the ice almost on its own accord. (Rasmussen, Unter Jägern und Schamanen 73)5 Likewise, Rasmussen and Mathiassen praise Avva’s complex of five artfully connected igloos with passageways, storerooms, and numerous outbuildings, all together housing sixteen people, which Rasmussen calls “snow architecture” and Mathiassen a “snow palace” (Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture 46; Mathiassen, Mit Knud Rasmussen 33). With great surprise, Rasmussen witnesses how the old storyteller Ivaluardjuk, “the geographer of his tribe,” who was “remarkably well up in the country and its inhabitants throughout the entire range between Ponds Inlet and Chesterfield,” at the Repulse Bay HBC trading station draws a map of several hundred miles of the coastline of the Fox Basin between Repulse Bay and Ponds Inlet, complete with all the place names in Inuktitut (Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture 16–17). Rasmussen was delighted with this: he could now talk to the inhabitants about specific localities; until then, he had only the English place names assigned by William Edward Parry and Captain George Lyon during their expeditions one hundred years earlier.6 Rasmussen admits that not heeding Inuit advice drove them into lifethreatening situations: . . . and Miteq and I going by sledge—a plan which caused much head-shaking among the natives, who regarded sledging as dangerous or impossible at this season. Certainly, our journey turned out worse than we had expected. The ground was soft and wet, and very uneven, at the best, added to which we came every now and then to swollen streams, often so deep that we had to follow them some distance up to find a practicable crossing among the ice of the lakes. . . . On one occasion we came within a hair’s breadth of losing the canoe with its precious load. . . . Crossing in the canoes, we suddenly perceived the dogs making straight for the meat, and in hurrying to save it, we omitted to pull the canoe far enough up shore; when we turned, it was floating rapidly away down to the main channel. Guns, ammunition, cameras, diaries, and everything of value was on board; in addition to which, the canoe itself was our only practicable means of transport. The feverish chase that followed was beyond description. Igjugarjuk,—who, by the way, could not swim—joined me in a mad obstacle race in and out of water, each of us with one end of a line

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fastened round the body. . . . [A]nd when at last we reached the canoe itself and dragged it into safety, we were so exhausted that we sank down helplessly beside it. Another few yards and it would have been carried into the main river, to certain destruction—and ourselves with it. (Rasmussen, Across Arctic America 102–3) Notwithstanding Rasmussen’s deep admiration for the Inuit, one must bear in mind that his objective was to conserve traditional Inuit language, culture, and mythology, and he was ethnologist enough to seek out “pure” Inuit groups that had barely been exposed to Western contact. For example, after visiting with Inuit at Baker Lake, he notes: We saw no reason to spend any time among the people in the neighborhood of Baker Lake, as these, the Qaernermiut, had for a long time past had dealings with the whalers, and much of their original character had been lost. We therefore transferred our attention without delay to the unknown interior. (54) In some places in his account, Rasmussen laments the change in Inuit culture resulting from Western contact and Christianization. For example, he comments sarcastically on the fact that the Inuit at the Chesterfield station on northwestern Hudson Bay had only months earlier exchanged their caribou and sealskin clothes for Western dress: The handsome dresses of caribou skin, so admirably suited to the racial type of the wearers, and to their surroundings, had given place to the cheap and vulgar products of the trading station. The men went about in jerseys and readymade slacks, their flowing locks surmounted by a cheap cloth cap, while the women had exchanged their quaint swallow-tailed furs, long boots and baggy breeches, for shapeless European dresses of machine-made stuff, in which grace and character alike were utterly obliterated. (108) Similarly, he disapproves that they have exchanged their “wonderful snow huts” for big white canvas tents that make their settlement look like a “holiday camp.” He also deplores the “assailing noise” in the settlement issuing from gramophones and sewing machines (108). Rasmussen here betrays a romantic nostalgia for traditional Inuit life, the vanishing of which he is witnessing first-hand. It becomes clear that, like so many ethnologists before and after him, he is searching for the “pure,” “authentic” culture “untarnished” by Western influences in order to preserve it in writing, print, illustrations, photographs, and film. Rony refers to this ethnographic

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practice of “salvage ethnography” as “taxidermy” and “romantic preservationism.” She defines “taxidermy” as a form of representation that presupposes the acknowledgement of death (of a culture) and that entails a desire for the whole and for protection against its loss (102, 244). Rasmussen had profound respect for Inuit cultures, but his world view was shaped by Eurocentric cultural hierarchies and the colonial dichotomies of civilization and wilderness, cultural superiority and inferiority. On arriving at the Chesterfield settlement, the “‘Capital’ of Hudson Bay” (Rasmussen, Across Arctic America 36) and link to civilization, he exclaims: “But the one thing which most of all impressed us as civilized and city-like was a wooden church on the shore of a tiny lake [. . .] The sound of a church bell made a deep impression on our minds; it was as if we had passed a thousand years in heathen wilds, and now returned to Christendom and peace” (51). Rasmussen viewed himself as a student learning from his informants, but he was still in the position of the culturally superior subject studying culturally inferior objects. And he seemed oblivious to the fact that contact with the Inuit and the exchange of intellectual knowledge (Rasmussen also sang songs and told stories from his culture) and material items across the two cultures would contribute to the rapid process of cultural change. He clearly engaged in what I would term “ethnographic economics”: the exchange of cultural knowledge (intellectual as well as practical) about the Inuit for material items from Western culture, such as salt, paper and pencils, rifles, and tools. As the leader of this enterprise and publisher of the collected information, he remained in control over what was said, done, and printed. In his descriptive writings (interspersed with Inuit quotes), he reserved for himself the authorial voice on Inuit culture and philosophy. The other story behind the making of Kunuk and Cohn’s film is about self-controlled and independent Inuit media beginning in the 1980s. The Inukshuk project was founded in 1980 under the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC) in response to the introduction of mainstream Canadian television to the Arctic, which had a devastating impact on Inuit cultural traditions, language use, and identity formation. The project ran seventeen hours of Inuit-produced programming each week, broadcast to six communities in the Keewatin region for a six-month trial period (Greyson and Steele 60).7 In 1981, this project was replaced by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), which went on air across the Canadian Arctic in January 1982. In 1992, this was in turn replaced by TeleVision Northern Canada (TVNC) after lobbying by various Indigenous organizations. The TVNC was a government-funded consortium of the IBC, five local Indigenous broadcasters, the NWT and Yukon governments, the National Aboriginal Communications Society, and the CBC Northern Service.8 This pan-

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Arctic cross-cultural broadcasting system was tailored to the information and entertainment needs of Northern communities. It produced in seven Aboriginal languages as well as English and French.9 After the TVNC’s application for a country-wide broadcast licence was approved by the CRTC, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN)—the world’s first national Indigenous television channel—was born. It began broadcasting in September 1999. With the goal of countering southern programming and its destructive impact on Arctic people, the first independent Inuit-owned film production company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, was founded in 1990 by director and hunter Zacharias Kunuk, the late producer Paul Apak Angilirq, elder and actor Paulossie Qulitalik, and New York–born video artist Norman Cohn, the only non-Inuit member. Since its inception, this filmmaking team has created a number of autonomous Inuit programs, including the thirteen-part dramatic television series Nunavut: Our Land (1994–95) and the award-winning Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001).10 Their work reflects what Kunuk and Cohn call an “Inuit-style of community-based media production.” They shoot the films on Indigenous land, Nunavut; their usually all-Inuit casts consist mostly of Igloolik residents; as far as possible, they employ Inuit crews, mixing expert filmmakers with novices, who learn “by hands on the set.” Southern professionals are involved in pre- and post-production, which includes music composition, editing, Foley effects, and the training of Inuit film novices—for example, in makeup, sound recording, continuity, stunts, and special effects (Atanarjuat). Their production budgets are spent largely in local communities, specifically Igloolik. For example, the making of Atanarjuat employed sixty Igloolik residents as cast, crew, and support workers and injected $1.5 million into the local economy (“Filmmaking Inuit Style”). The making of The Journals employed 172 people and brought $2.4 million into the community (Gunderson, “Filmmaking Inuit-Style” 38). Isuma Productions takes a horizontal approach to filmmaking instead of a hierarchical one (Kunuk, interview); this translates into “equality on the set.” Elders participate throughout the filmmaking, contributing their versions of a story or tradition during the research phase and reviewing the scripts for cultural accuracy (Gunderson, “Zacharias Kunuk” 50). Kunuk makes a point of screening his films in Igloolik before their world premiere. Isuma Productions summarizes this community approach in its mandate: it strives to “preserve and enhance Inuit culture, create jobs in Igloolik and represent a distinctively Inuit point of view in the global communications marketplace” (Atanarjuat). Its films expose Inuit intellectual property to a global audience and, in a sense, commercialize it. But with its community approach to filmmaking, it also gives something back: the film, national and

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international attention, jobs, money, and cultural pride. Inuit history and stories are processed by Inuit artists (the filmmaking team) and thereby “modernized” and made accessible to Westerners, but they are still Inuit intellectual property for the use of the Inuit community. The Colonial Meets the Post-Colonial Rasmussen’s explorations and Inuit-controlled media production merged when Isuma Productions’ writing team wrote the script for their second major film. They committed themselves to extensive research in Inuit oral history, listening to “stories handed down from people who lived through that time, the parents and grandparents of people living in Igloolik today” (“JKR—Settings and Scriptwriting”). They combined this oral cultural lore with information retrieved from the journals and memoirs of Rasmussen, Freuchen, and Mathiassen as well as from written accounts of traders, missionaries, whalers, and government officials (“Behind the Scenes”). For Atanarjuat, the filmmakers had based the re-creation of traditional clothes, tools, hunting weapons, and sleds on the journals and drawings of Parry and Lyon, complementing this information with Inuit cultural knowledge (“Bringing Ancient Knowledges Home”). Even more so than in Atanarjuat, in The Journals the filmmakers combine Western colonial sources—the printed materials produced by explorers, missionaries, and traders—with post-colonial sources—Inuit oral accounts and cultural knowledge. This includes knowledge about traditional Inuit ways of life, about the times of upheaval arising from Western influences and the conversion from shamanism to Christianity, and, not least, about the Inuit view of the European visitors and intruders. The filmmakers re-create this part of Inuit history by detouring through colonial Western discourses. The collaboration between Inuit and Danish production companies, with each having relative autonomy over decisions falling into its responsibility (e.g., Inuit characters/cast/crew and Danish characters/cast/crew) (cf. Kunuk, interview), reflects this deliberate post-colonial approach. Since Canadians contributed 80 percent of the resources for the project (human, financial, technical), Kunuk and Cohn were able to retain artistic control (Kunuk, interview). Despite its title, the film focuses on the Inuit perspective, how they perceived Rasmussen and the others, how they perceived the foreign religion that overran their communities, and how they lived with these influences, which changed their lives almost overnight. Kunuk states: “I think that Knud Rasmussen recorded this; but we were more after what was happening to these people . . . what was going through their heads. So we were not too concerned about Knud Rasmussen, but about these people, what was happening to these people” (interview). Also, much of the film could not

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have presented Rasmussen’s view, for he went on to Baker Lake and only Freuchen and Mathiassen travelled to Iglulik with Avva’s family. Rasmussen as the originator of the journals becomes unimportant for the rest of the film, and Freuchen and Mathiassen are mere witnesses to the encounter between converted and traditional Inuit. At the same time, the film is a metafilmic comment on colonial films such as Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in that it repeats the idea of (visual) anthropological study and its colonial gaze upon the “other.” In the same way that Flaherty presented the persona Nanook through a colonial gaze, Kunuk and Cohn now present Rasmussen, Avva, and the other Inuit through an anti-colonial, autonomous gaze over which they have total control. They respond to and correct Nanook’s anachronisms and cultural inaccuracies as well as its stereotyped and romanticized presentation of Inuit. The colonial gaze is reversed as the Europeans and Inuit are presented through a post-colonial lens. Through their meticulous research, the filmmakers counter colonial “romantic preservationism” by accurately presenting traditional Inuit life and the ensuing cultural changes within a correct historical time frame. Flaherty expunged Western influences from his film—his Inuit of the 1920s use traditional weapons and hunting methods exclusively and have to pretend to see a gramophone and castor oil for the first time—whereas Kunuk and Cohn’s Inuit of the 1920s have pipes, tobacco, steel knives, rifles, thimbles, finger rings, pots, kettles, and enamel cups. They are familiar with wood frame houses, the gramophone, and the accordion, and they cook their meat instead of eating it raw. Since Avva’s family was still traditional and autonomous and did not live close to a trading or missionary station, their clothing is traditional, although they use everyday items acquired through trade. Isuma Productions states that “rigorous authenticity is their hallmark” (Gunderson, “Filmmaking Inuit-Style” 37). This accuracy is especially hard to achieve when a time of drastic cultural changes is being presented, and the film does a superb job of overcoming this challenge. Cinematic Realization of Inuit History The film starts with a group of Inuit posing for a photograph, with Apak and Nuqallaq, by then already working for “whites,” prominently in the foreground. The scene is complemented with ajajas (traditional Inuit songs), which are being recorded and will later be played on a wax cylinder phonograph. This cinematic marriage of traditional songs and up-to-date Western sound technology underscores the cultural exchange that has already taken place at this point in the story and foreshadows more contact with the West and ensuing cultural change for the Inuit. As the colours fade to black-and-white, the camera renders a still to imitate the photographic

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medium; it then zooms in on Apak while the voice of an elderly woman begins to narrate: “I am called Usarak, though I was named Apak when I was a young woman, during the time of the story I am telling you now. When I was still Apak, my father was the famous Iglulik shaman Avva, who with my mother Orulu, both passed away many years ago.” Apak tells the film’s story in retrospective, starting ten years earlier, when she was still Nuqallaq’s wife. While there is no more direct voice-over narration by an elderly Apak, the film repeatedly focuses on her, which sustains her as narrator. Apak as narrator puts the film’s focus on the Inuit’s perspective, not Rasmussen’s. Avva could also have functioned as narrator; perhaps he does not because he appears as narrating Inuit oral history for much of the film, and Kunuk and Cohn did not want to blur Avva’s position of cultural informant within the film with that of the film’s narrator. Apak, however, does not appear as narrating on-screen, and her diegetic role as character and non-diegetic role as narrator are clearly distinguishable. Nevertheless, this double function puts emphasis on her character, whose actions have momentous importance for the fate of her father’s family. She is approached by the spirit of her dead husband, with whom she has sex and whom she harnesses to gain spiritual power.”11 He was killed by a Netsilik man, and in accordance with Inuit custom and to avoid feuds, the Netsilik replaced her dead husband—with a man she does not love. She violates custom by hiding a miscarriage in order to avoid the taboo; this may be one reason for the food shortage, the bad weather during the journey, and the upheaval in spiritual balance in Avva’s camp. Her former husband Nuqallaq had killed a “white” trader; he is also instrumental in converting the Inuit to Christianity. Finally, Apak is the first of Avva’s family to cross over to the Christianized camp. The filmmakers take special care to relate the contact between the Inuit and the Danes. The first image, from 1922, is of Evaluarjuk at the trading station learning to spell his name in Inuktitut syllabics.12 A close-up of the syllabic alphabet in an Inuktitut bible and a later one of a similar Inuktitut bible together constitute a visual sign of Western influences (a writing system and Christianization). The spelling scene at the post, where Christianized Inuit women sing hymns, foreshadows the conversion of the rest of the traditional Inuit. In Avva’s camp, Evaluarjuk tells about the Danes who arrived at the trading station while he was there: “They act like Whites but they speak our language. Their parkas have a little tail in front. Their pants are bearskin and their boots are mostly dog fur. The big one has a beard and we call him Big Pita [Peter Freuchen]. He likes to drink. The quiet one [Knud Rasmussen] is called Kunnuti and seems to be his helper.” During this account, the camera shows the Danes arriving at Avva’s house, first in extreme long shot and then in long shot intercut

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with images of the people greeting one another. In this way, Evaluarjuk’s talk and the camera images describe and visualize the Europeans from the Inuit’s viewpoint. Rasmussen’s journals, of course, describe the first meeting between Avva and Rasmussen’s group at the end of February 1922 from his own perspective: We had had a long day’s journey in the cold, and were now, in the fine starry night, just ready to set about building a snow hut, when suddenly, out of the darkness ahead, there appeared a long sledge with one of the wildest teams I have ever seen. Fifteen white dogs were racing along at full gallop with one of the big Hudson Bay sledges, at least 7 metres long, and six men on it. They sighted us, and came sweeping down right on top of us, and a little man with a big beard, his face covered with ice, leapt down and came running towards me. He stopped, and after shaking hands in white men’s fashion, pointed up inland towards a hollow where, he explained, he and his party had their dwellings. His keen eye rested on me, full of life and spirits, and he greeted me with a ringing: qujäηnamik “Thanks, thanks to the guests who have come.” This was Aua the shaman. (Intellectual Culture 45) The film changes the first contact situation from Avva inviting the Danes into his home to Avva returning home from hunting with the Danes being already there. It shows Avva and other men with dog team and sled driving home, where the Danes await them. From Avva’s viewpoint, we see the Danes and the Greenland Inuit first in bluish twilight, as tiny specks on the Arctic landscape that become bigger and bigger. In a medium long shot the camera presents Avva and Rasmussen as they heartily greet each other. Their words are not heard, but the soundtrack of this scene features an ajaja that, as we know from the previous and following scenes, comes from inside the snow house complex. Also here, the filmmakers visualize Rasmussen’s words in reverse point of view from the Inuit perspective: they do not show Avva coming near from Rasmussen’s perspective, but Rasmussen and his party becoming more and more visible from Avva’s approaching perspective. The soundtrack does not give voice to either man; rather, it superimposes “Inuit sound” that beckons to the Danes and welcomes them. This serves to sustain the Inuit perspective in the encounter scene. When two different cultures meet, each perceives the other from its own perspective and tends to define the self as the norm from which the “other” deviates. All aspects of the other culture are perceived and judged within the framework of the philosophy, beliefs, customs, and the like

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Figure 4.1 Apak accepts the gift of the salt. © Igloolik Isuma Productions

of the “own” culture. It is hardly imaginable that the other culture can see us (the “self”) differently than we see ourselves. As is known from colonial writings and testimonials, the Europeans not only understood European body and facial features, values, morals, beliefs, religion, and ideas of civilization and human relations as the norm, but viewed deviations from these in other cultures as “proofs” of their inferiority. Differing religions, belief systems, morals, and ways of life and sustenance were defined as inferior, uncivilized, and savage. It was inconceivable to European ways of thinking that other cultures could see them as not the superior culture. By employing Rasmussen’s writing to visualize the colonial encounter and by switching perspective to the Inuit one, the filmmakers highlight that there are always two different perspectives during cultural contact, that the European perspective is not necessarily the normative one, and that Europeans, too, are assessed from within the framework of another culture’s thought. The explorers receive a friendly welcome. There are introductions and polite conversation, and the visitors are fed well and are helped when they ask. In his written account, Rasmussen commented on the atmosphere of good humour in Avva’s house: “the general tone of the house was set by the cordial, jesting manner in which he and his wife addressed each other and ordered the others about” (Intellectual Culture 46). The film makes it clear that the fact that Rasmussen speaks Greenland Inuktitut fluently and that Freuchen and Mathiassen speak it well helps with this cultural contact. Also, Natar and Nuqallaq speak a bit of English. When Avva’s son Natar

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Figure 4.2 Avva relates Inuit intellectual knowledge © Igloolik Isuma Productions

offers to take Freuchen and Mathiassen to Iglulik, Avva comments: “My family doesn’t work for Whites. But everyone sees my son wants to help people who speak our language.” While everyone is socializing in Avva’s snow house, Avva, wanting to learn more about the other culture, asks Rasmussen to sing something in his language. Rasmussen sings “M’Appari tutt’amor,” an aria from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha. Italian opera music is a prominent sound motif in the film, and in the next key scene the diegetic sound of the aria sung by Rasmussen fades into the non-diegetic sound of the same aria played from a gramophone and interpreted by Enrico Caruso, the renowned opera singer of the 1910s. Mathiassen is shown sitting on the ground eating meat with salt, surrounded by curious Inuit women and children who are standing. Mathiassen is featured from a straight angle, the Inuit from a low angle, with some shots simulating Mathiassen’s point of view. To break the notion of European cultural superiority and Inuit inferiority, the filmmakers here avail themselves of the conventional reading of camera angles in which the superior and powerful are shown from a lower angle and the powerless and inferior from a higher angle and reverse this convention.13 Apak tries the salted meat and gladly takes the salt that Mathiassen offers her. The soundtrack with European opera music underpins the inherent European influence contained in the gift of the salt, a gift that contributes towards the Westernization of the Inuit. It also harks back to the first scene and reinforces that the Inuit already knew phonographs/ gramophones.

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Another key scene focuses on the transmission of cultural information from the Inuk to the ethnologist. Rasmussen says: “I came to hear your stories and songs if you will share them, and to learn about your beliefs.” Avva replies after some consideration: “We believe happy people should not worry about hidden things. Our spirits are offended if we think too much.” Rasmussen: “Yes. I understand.” Avva’s reply is what Takornâq and her husband Padloq told Rasmussen, slightly changed and shortened: “So also the spirits that guided men’s fate might be offended if men concerned themselves over much with such things. Men knew so little of things apart from their food and sleep and rest; it might easily seem presumptuous if they endeavoured to form any opinion about hidden things. Happy folk should not worry themselves by thinking” (Intellectual Culture 19). With this verbal exchange, Kunuk and Cohn take care to present Rasmussen as a man who respects the Inuit, who sees them on an equal basis, who does not demand things but asks for them. He knows he cannot force or coerce the informant in any way if he wants reliable information. Rasmussen noted in his journals: “All study of folk-lore is solely and entirely dependent on the sources from which the material is derived; it is necessary to find narrators not only gifted with knowledge and imagination, but thoroughly interested in the work as well” (45). The filmmakers here also voice an initial hesitation on the part of the informants to share such precious information (17). According to Rasmussen’s notes, he and Avva for several evenings and during hunts discussed rules of life, taboos, mythology, and beliefs. What the filmmakers present as Avva’s account is a slightly altered and shortened version of the chapter “Aua is consecrated to the spirits” from Intellectual Culture (115–20).14 That chapter tells Avva’s story about his birth and childhood, about the strict taboos that were laid upon his parents and himself to ensure his life, about how he received his shamanic power, about his helping spirits and how he calls them. In the film, Avva is framed prominently in the right foreground in a medium close-up and later in a close-up, while the younger of his helping spirits, Avva (Avva had been named after the little spirit Avva [118]), sits silently in the left background. The camera imitates Rasmussen’s (and eventually the film viewers’) point of view as he watches Avva relate his story. This ten-minute scene is almost uncut, with one switch from medium close-up to close-up after five minutes, one insert of an outside scene in slow motion after seven minutes, and three cuts to Orulu and her blubber lamp towards the end. It seems as if Kunuk and Cohn meant to place undisturbed emphasis on the oral communication of Inuit knowledge that was of so much importance for the ethnologist.

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When Rasmussen asks about the reasons for all the different taboos, Avva poses counter-questions as to why there would be so many blizzards, not enough food, illnesses, and constant hardships for the people. By that he seems to be trying to show that some things simply cannot be explained and that taboos are put in place to appease spirits and restrict hardships. The film moves outside, where Avva demonstrates what he talks about by showing Rasmussen (and us) the windswept Arctic plain and his ill sister Natseq in her igloo. This four-minute scene is based on Rasmussen’s chapter “Religion and Views of Life: ‘We do not believe, we fear’” (Intellectual Culture 54–57). “‘You see,’ said Aua, ‘you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask you why life is as it is. And so it must be. All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask’” (55–56). Avva’s answer, marginally different in the film, expresses his unease with Rasmussen’s probing questions that dig for explanations for things incomprehensible to Western thought. One should also note at this point that the film has Avva tell Rasmussen these things before he converts, whereas historically he did after he had converted (Rasmussen, Across Arctic America 118, 130–31). Avva cannot tell Rasmussen about his shamanic power and experience during their first encounter lest he lose his power; that is possible only after conversion (Trott, personal conversation). Orulu’s account on camera is the slightly altered last part of Rasmussen’s rendering of her story (48–53). In that account, Rasmussen described her as “the most faithful storyteller” and as “one of those who knew most about the old traditions” (68). Rasmussen’s notes show that he discussed oral tradition with Orulu. He pointed out to her that there were different versions of the myth about the Mother of Sea Beasts, and they spoke about some features of the story that would have appeared illogical to a Western mind—for example, that the stormy petrel to whom she was married preferred seals over all other meat and that the seals and other sea animals were made from the woman’s cut-off fingers after she had fled from the petrel. Orulu answered with a lesson in Inuit belief and oral mythology: Too much thought only leads to trouble. All this that we are talking about now happened in a time so far back that there was no time at all. We Eskimos do not concern ourselves with solving all riddles. We repeat the old stories in the way they were told to us and with the words we ourselves remember. And if there should then seem to be

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a lack of reason in the story as a whole, there is yet enough remaining in the way of incomprehensible happenings, which our thought cannot grasp. If it were but everyday ordinary things, there would be nothing to believe in . . . You always want these supernatural things to make sense, but we do not bother about that. We are content not to understand. (“Intellectual Culture,” 69) Rasmussen’s text here betrays his Eurocentric attitude, which sees the Western religion as the only “true” one, in that he notices discrepancies and inconsistencies in Inuit oral mythology but not similar illogical features in the Judaeo-Christian mythology (e.g., Mary’s immaculate conception). The text also bears witness to Orulu’s understanding of the difference between pragmatic reality and mythology/belief and the existence of two different belief systems. It would have been interesting to see how the filmmakers would have translated this encounter that reveals Orulu’s sharp mind, but this conversation is not, unfortunately, part of the film. The scenes where Avva and Orulu transmit their cultural knowledge are post-colonial filmmakers’ versions of these colonial encounters, which took place some eighty years earlier. They are also electronic renderings of Inuit mythology for the film’s viewers that offer modified versions of traditional stories. When Avva and Orulu are presented, the camera simulates Rasmussen’s point of view on the diegetic level and the film viewers’ point of view on the non-diegetic level; we, like Rasmussen in the film, listen to and learn from Avva and Orulu’s accounts. These are the only scenes that obviously render Rasmussen’s perspective. If it is Isuma’s mandate to “preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language” (“Teachers’ Resources”), this electronic storytelling is one way of doing it. It is important to translate oral traditions into electronic form because television has brought drastic changes to Arctic communities and is a major form of entertainment: “‘When TV came to Igloolik in 1983, everybody stopped listening, visiting one another and telling stories,’ he says. ‘The only way was to put these stories in the box. It was time to tell these stories through TV’” (Kunuk, in Gunderson, “Zacharias Kunuk” 49). Kunuk agrees that in our postmodern times, video and film have become electronic storytelling and (Indigenous) filmmakers are today’s storytellers. He considers filmmaking to be a perfect tool for rendering oral history (Kunuk, interview). “Kunuk regards himself as a storyteller in the time-honoured Inuit oral tradition. In the 21st century, he feels that film is the best way to tell stories” (Gunderson, “Filmmaking Inuit-Style”

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37). In this sense the film is modified oral storytelling: it relates cultural knowledge and oral history (Avva and Orulu’s accounts) and tells a story with a historical basis (Western–Inuit contact and Christianization of the Igloolik region). Two of Avva’s helping spirits (an old and a young woman) that “live” with the people are photographed as human beings, and only from the context can the film viewers infer that these are in fact spirits. As mentioned earlier, when Avva relates his cultural knowledge to Rasmussen, his young namesake spirit sits right behind him and looks unconcernedly upon the scene. She later sits in Avva’s igloo that is being built in Iglulik. When Apak confesses her sins shortly before her conversion, Avva’s second helping spirit, played by a centenarian, is among the people. The only clue viewers have for telling spirits from people is that they wear elaborately sewn garments and do not participate in what is going on. The elderly male spirit that twice ridicules Apak for having sex with a dead man similarly looks like a human being (he “vanishes” through a cut or appears in a dreamlike sequence). I believe that the filmmakers present spirits as human beings because they are reluctant to work with Hollywood-style special effects, but also, and even more, because they mean to transmit the traditional Inuit belief that spirits are part of everyday life and belong to the living. This thought is corroborated by the film itself: on the way to Iglulik, Mathiassen sees spirits but insists he has seen human beings. Evaluarjuk tells him that the Shadow People live with them, that they look like human beings, and that some people can see them and some cannot. In this way, the film makes clear that for the traditional Inuit, the physical and spiritual worlds are not separate. Kunuk and Cohn take great care to present the difference between traditional and converted Inuit and the conversion of Apak and Avva. They juxtapose scenes in Avva’s igloo with scenes in the converted settlement of Iglulik. There is laughter and merrymaking in Avva’s camp when they have enough food. In one heart-warming scene, Avva’s family, the Danes, and the Greenlanders have much fun playing games; one hide-and-seek game or partner-changing game has obvious sexual connotations, as two masked dancers ostentatiously sport fake sexual organs.15 Also, conversations among the Inuit display a very open attitude towards connubial and sexual matters. If not shocking, this natural attitude towards sex must have appeared at least unusual to the Danes. This is stressed in three brief scenes in which Apak makes love to the spirit of her dead husband—all beautifully shot in black-and-white, somewhat blurry, and rendered in slow motion. But there is a subdued mood in the igloo during the journey

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to converted Iglulik, when the group starves and has to fight blizzards. These hardships and this mood foreshadow the Christianization of the Inuit and symbolically depict the pain of Avva’s family on the journey towards conversion. Most of the scenes in the converted Iglulik settlement are rendered in a sad and melancholic tone, not least due to the Christian hymns and psalms that are constantly sung by the converted people. In fact, the singing becomes a bit of a nuisance to the viewers and illustrates the overpowering force of a Christianity from which there is no escape. As the singing grows unnerving (altogether eleven and a half minutes), the film underscores Avva’s perspective—these songs have become unbearable to him. He can overhear them from the neighbouring igloos, and he comments dryly: “They never stop singing.” Avva has a sad visit with a former shaman from Iglulik, who talks about his first doubts about shamanism and their happy times before conversion. He says: “He [Umik] keeps the food so we all eat together. Life is a dream.” This last statement might mean that life does not feel real anymore, nor as happy and unencumbered, or that he feels uprooted from what he knew. In the last part, the film intercuts pivotal scenes in Avva’s igloo and in the converted settlement. In the latter, Umik and Nuqallaq conduct a siqqitiq16 (Trott, personal conversation), feeding people taboo meat (entrails) as manifestation of conversion and of abandoned taboos, talk about the spiritual elevation achieved through the new belief, preach new commandments, and decry shamanic songs and shamans as serving Satan. In Avva’s igloo, Apak confesses that she hid a miscarriage; thus, she believes she is the reason for the people’s suffering. By custom, such a breach of taboo can be atoned for through confession (cf. Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture 169) and the spiritual balance thereby re-established. But Apak’s breach of taboo is only part of the reason for the spiritual upheaval. Avva’s family is under great pressure because the Christianized Inuit in Iglulik will not share their food with them unless they join. Avva, who is losing his power, challenges his daughter to use her spiritual powers to see into the future, but she refuses, replying that she does not have his strength and that she wants the family to eat and live. Plainly, the only two people with shamanic power in the family feel weak at this point in history. The conflict between father and daughter reaches its climax when Apak leaves and crosses over to the converted Inuit. Four times when the film cuts between the converted settlement and Avva’s igloo, the soundtrack from the former (hymns or preaching) carries over to the latter, showing Apak’s or Avva’s face accompanied by the music of the Christian church before it switches to traditional ajajas. In this way, ajaja songs and hymns are juxtaposed and the contrast between tradition and Christianity is aurally highlighted. Through inter-

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cutting between the two “spheres” and this use of sound bridges, the film underlines the immense pressure placed on the shaman arising from the fact that he and his family are the last to cling to traditional beliefs. What is so bewildering about these last scenes is not the conversion itself, but with what unrelenting zeal some Inuit (here Umik and Nuqallaq) have become instruments for Western missionaries, demonizing their earlier traditional beliefs and manipulating their own people. In Rasmussen’s journals, Avva is still a traditional shaman in the winter of 1922. By the time Rasmussen returns the following winter, he has converted to the Christian faith. In the film, this conversion takes place during one winter, perhaps to emphasize the rapidity of this radical change for the Inuit. Cohn says: “What this one family experiences in three months represents what everybody went through. It’s one of those pivotal moments in history that are totally distilled; momentous change in a second” (Gunderson, “Filmmaking Inuit-Style” 36). In Across Arctic America, Rasmussen notes upon his arrival at Avva’s house: It was known that I was on the way, and above each hut waved a little white flag—a sign that the inmates had relinquished their old heathen faith and become Christians. As I drove up, men, women and children trooped out and formed up in line outside Aua’s hut, and as soon as I had reined in my team, the whole party began singing a hymn. The tune was so unlike what they were accustomed to in their own pagan chants that they bungled it a little, but there was no mistaking the earnestness and pious feeling which inspired it . . . And here I could not but recall my first meeting with these same people a year ago, at Cape Elizabeth. Then, they had come leaping and capering round me in an outburst of unrestrained natural feeling; now, all was ceremonial and solemn to an almost painful degree. (118–19) The German edition/translation says about Nuqallaq (here Noratlaq): “What no ordinary missionary could have achieved in the course of many years, he had accomplished in one winter” (Rasmussen, Unter Jägern 279). The film neglects to show Rasmussen’s meeting with the converted Avva. His notes are cinematically translated insofar as there is much happiness and laughter in Avva’s family before they reach Iglulik and none in the converted settlement, where people seem intimidated and unhappy and very seldom laugh. Likewise, the film presents Nuqallaq zealously preaching beside his father. The film leaves unclear why Apak and her father have finally converted. Perhaps it was the food shortage in Avva’s camp because of Apak’s breach

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Figure 4.3

Nuqallaq and Umik preach. © Igloolik Isuma Productions

of taboo. Since Inuit before conversion periodically experienced starvation and dealt with it through their shamans, this explanation seems unsatisfactory. In Apak’s case, perhaps she despised her Netsilik husband and wanted to reunite with Nuqallaq. Or perhaps she realized that conversion was inescapable. Similarly, perhaps Avva, one of the last great shamans, understood that Western civilization, philosophy, values, and religion could not be stopped or evaded.17 Perhaps he had known that increasing contact with Western cultures, trade goods, and a written language (the syllabic system) came in a “package” with Western religion, and that he must succumb to the pressure of foreign influences.18 In a moving last scene, Avva, crying, tells his three helping spirits to leave, and they wander off wailing into the emptiness, leaving him a lonely figure on the vast Arctic plain and abandoned to his new and uncertain fate. They become smaller and smaller until they vanish.19 The scene is shot at dusk, perhaps to underscore the end of shamanism. This tone of misery and desolation is repeated when after the closing titles the film shows Avva’s sled crossing over to the Iglulik settlement in a high-angle extreme long shot, the camera zooming out to show the group as a tiny little speck on the vast white Arctic plain. Like his helping spirits, the great shaman is rendered cinematographically unseen—a strong contrast to his visual dominance throughout the film. This last scene is accompanied by the same aural marker, the opera aria, from the first contact scenes—again in strong contrast to the ajajas from the scenes with the shaman earlier in the film. Thus, the shaman Avva is erased, both visually and aurally, at the end of the film.

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The converted sing hymns. © Igloolik Isuma Productions

The aria’s lyrics are a lament about lost love; surely, the lover sings, he will die of grief. The aria supports the film’s desolate tone and perhaps instills empathy or similar grief in viewers: traditional shamanism has lost, Western religion has won. The film makes clear that this is the sad outcome of contact between the Inuit and the colonizing South. This gloom at the end foreshadows the devastating consequences for the Inuit: the loss of traditional economies, economic and political dependence, vanished cultural traditions, the gradual loss of language, the break-up of families, the disruption of traditional community life, the introduction of southern world views, high unemployment rates, substance abuse, violence, high suicide and high school dropout rates, the injection of consumer-driven capitalist values, desires, and needs that did not exist before the introduction of television, and a general feeling of loss, uselessness, and hopelessness that many Inuit communities struggle with today. The film never claims to be non-fictional. However, its title and the three captions at the beginning—“A Series of Events Reported in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,” “Arctic Canada, January 1912,” and “Ten Years Later”—suggest that it narrates a particular segment of Arctic history. With the closing titles, the film presents archival photographs of Apak, Avva, Orulu, Evaluarjuk, Umik, Nuqallaq, and other Inuit as well as of Rasmussen and the members of the Danish expedition. With these photographs, the film connects to the beginning, where the camera imitates a black-andwhite archival photograph of Apak, Nuqallaq, and others. At one point in the film, the camera presents Mathiassen drawing a sketch of a tool that

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would appear in his publications, thus linking the historical event, the historical publication, the source for the film, and the film with one another. With the title, captions, photographs, and sketch, the filmmakers define the film as fictionalized empirical history. The tone of the film is desolate. It does not have Atanarjuat’s wonderfully clear skies, nor the range of Arctic light that brings out the diverse qualities of snow, ice, and Arctic colours. In this film, windswept landscapes, blizzards, overcast skies, and dark, low-key indoor scenes abound. The unwelcoming weather underscores the people’s turmoil, the hunger in Avva’s family, and the grimness of this era of drastic upheaval. The scenes in the converted Iglulik settlement, however, are shot in bright light and calm weather with clear beautiful skies. The bright light shines beautifully through the igloo walls and renders some snow blocks almost translucent. It is as if the film is cynically commenting on the “divine enlightenment” that awaits the people who convert. This film is similar to Atanarjuat in terms of filmmaking style. Because of Arctic conditions and the filmmakers’ preferences, it was shot on digital video and later transferred to 35mm film (cf. Kunuk, interview). It has a very slow pace, long takes, and no fast cutting; the film’s pace seems intended to reflect the pace of Inuit life in the 1920s. There are close-ups on the faces of Apak, Avva, Orulu, Umik, and Nuqallaq to underscore their reactions or reasoning. Avva and Orulu are shown in close-up and medium close-up when relating their accounts. With Avva’s account, this close-up dominates the screen for almost ten minutes; in this way, the camerawork places cinematographic emphasis on Inuit oral tradition. Also, there are quite a few close-ups on faces of converted Inuit during their hymn singing in order to underscore their solemnity. These close-ups are juxtaposed with those of Apak and Avva during the intercut scenes with Avva and the Iglulik group at the end of the film. During scenes of people travelling on the land, low-angle shots highlight sled dogs and people’s faces from below. Handheld camera shots abound, specifically in scenes of people socializing and travelling. Backlit shots, the almost exclusive use of natural light during day scenes outside and inside, and low-key indoor scenes at night, when blubber lamps seem to be the only diegetic light sources, contrast with Hollywood’s techniques designed to achieve seamless presentation. Together with the slow pace and handheld camera, the lighting ensures a more natural quality to the film. Conclusion Although the film suggests that its source is colonial (Rasmussen’s journals), its latent source is Arctic oral tradition. The film is narrated not so much from Rasmussen’s as from the Inuit perspective and toward the end

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neglects Rasmussen’s altogether. Filtering Rasmussen’s text through their scriptwriting and shooting process, the filmmakers have decolonized its colonial ethnologist source. By presenting the Inuit perspective on the Danes, the filmmakers emphasize that there are always two perspectives in moments of cultural contact. In this film, almost uniquely, Indigenous ways are treated as the “norm”/“self” and European culture and religion as the “other.” Christianity and other European influences are the intruders. In this way, the film succeeds in pinpointing and neutralizing Eurocentric hierarchies and colonial dichotomies such as self/other, civilized/barbarous, superior/inferior, and religious/heathen. This film brings together colonial and post-colonial sources, as well as Inuit and Western filmmakers and actors. It is a hybrid film that revises colonial history and emphasizes the Inuit perspective on that history. The filmmakers have introduced the post-colonial Inuit voice, spoken Inuktitut, and an Inuit film into the film world and in so doing have contributed to decolonizing the dominant Western film discourse.

Notes 1 For details, see the “Screening Log Book—The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,” at http://www.isuma.ca/calendar. 2 There is a difference in spellings: while Rasmussen spells the shaman’s name “Aua,” Kunuk and Cohn spell it “Avva.” Similarly, Rasmussen spells “Ivaluardjuk” and “Orulo” and the film “Evaluarjuk” and “Orulu.” “Igloolik” is spelled “Iglulik” in the film. Except in quotations and direct references to Rasmussen’s journals, this article uses the film’s spelling. 3 A far more concise version of the twelve-volume report is Rasmussen’s Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, originally published in 1927 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in New York. 4 Flaherty acknowledges the support of the Itivimiut in the opening titles, which might have supported the belief in the myth of “ethnographic participant observation.” 5 This is a personal translation of the text in the German edition. The German edition/translation of Across Arctic America largely corresponds with the English one but contains extra passages, of which this is one. 6 Apparently Rasmussen here is referring to Parry’s second expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1821–23 that brought him to Igloolik. 7 Jennifer David gives a contradictory date and holds that the Inukshuk project was created in 1978 (David, Aboriginal Language Broadcasting in Canada). Greyson and Steele say the project was proposed by the ITC in January 1978 to the Department of Communications and started in 1980 (“The Inukshuk Project,” 60). 8 “History of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation,” at http//www.inuitbroad casting.ca/english/history.html.

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9 Lorna Roth, “Television Northern Canada,” http://www.museum.tv/archives/ etv/T/htmlT/televisionno/televisionno.htm. 10 Besides documentary and the above-mentioned programs, Igloolik Isuma also produced the three dramatic films Qaggiq (1988), Nunaqpa (1990), and Saputi (1993). These productions won awards and special recognition in Canada as well as international acclaim. 11 I thank Chris Trott for clarification in this regard and for his further valuable comments. 12 In 1918, syllabic writing was introduced to the Igloolik region and the first bibles were translated into Inuktitut and disseminated. The Inuk Umik, a self-proclaimed evangelist, went to Igloolik in 1921–22 in order to convert this community. In 1931, the first Catholic mission was established by Father E. Bazin at Avvajja, three kilometres north of Igloolik. The same year, Ituksarjuat and his wife Ataguttaaluk, the last traditional leaders of Igloolik, were baptized. The first Igloolik children were sent to the Catholic Residential School at Chesterfield Inlet in 1955 (Angilirq et al., Atanarjuat, 7). 13 Of course, there are exceptions to the usage and interpretation of high and low camera angles; for example, Orson Welles in Citizen Kane presents the otherwise powerful Kane from a low angle after his defeat in an election campaign. 14 Besides this account, Rasmussen printed Avva’s explanations of Inuit views of life and death, the soul, and taboos, as well as a selection of Avva’s magic songs. Avva’s texts are considered to be reliable, culturally accurate, and representative. They have since been published in anthologies of Inuit literature and compilations of the world’s oral traditions—for example, in Penny Petrone, ed., Northern Voices, and “Eskimo Songs and Thoughts,” http:// humanistictexts.org/Eskimo.htm. 15 As pointed out by Chris Trott, this is a cinematic representation of the Tivaajut ceremony. 16 Siqqitiq is the “ritual of converting pagan Inuit to Christianity with ritualistic consumption of taboo foods. This was done to underscore that the numerous taboos no longer apply because Christians do not observe them. Umik, the prophet utilized such rituals when converting” (“Siqqitiq, the communion meal (siqqititut).” See also note 7 from Remie/Oosten, “The birth of a Catholic Inuit community. The transition to Christianity in Pelly Bay, Nunavut, 1935–1950,” and Laugrand 1997. 17 Nevertheless, not all shamans in the area converted to Christianity. 18 These thoughts came up in a conversation with Ian MacRae at the international conference “Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context,” Waterloo, Ontario, May 2007. 19 According to Chris Trott, Rasmussen records that Avva sent them to his sister in Pond Inlet.

Five

Australian Indigenous Short Film as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair’s The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk COLLEEN MCGLOIN

The central problem is the need to develop a body of knowledge on representation of Aboriginal people and their concerns in art, film, television and other media and a critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, drawing from Aboriginal world views, from Western traditions and from history. Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal Art and Film”

Introduction Recently I accompanied a group of (mainly non-Indigenous) undergraduate Indigenous Studies students, colleagues, and interested guests to a lecture and screening by Australian Aboriginal filmmaker Wayne Blair. Blair showcased his films and spoke about their production and reception and his development as a filmmaker. I had begun to use Indigenous short film as a pedagogical aid with a view to shifting discussions from representations of Aboriginal people, embedded into many subject components across the humanities, to a more critical engagement with discussions about Indigenous self-representation. The shift in focus encouraged students to reconsider, through the lens of representations of Aboriginality by Indigenous authors and text producers, what they had learned through other subjects dealing with representations of Australian Aboriginality, and to develop an understanding of the politics of self-representing. In this chapter, I examine two of Blair’s short films, The Djarn Djarns (2004) and Black Talk (2002). I will discuss the ways in which these films foreground Aboriginal culture, 131

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values, and practices. I argue that Indigenous short film as a genre in its own right; it is a medium that uses very specific temporal and spatial strategies to tell stories about colonial history. Although some of these stories are often narrativised through a contemporary lens, they often bear traces of the manifold expressions of Aboriginality, through traditional, urban and rural settings. In noting the constraints of genre as an organizing principle for the production and reception of texts, I also consider the pitfalls of generic categorization. In my analysis of Blair’s short films, I will consider his use of humour as powerful tool for interpellating viewers. I have noted in my teaching that humour can function to alienate viewers and to produce resistance, but if deployed effectively, it can promote the development of a critical anti-racist praxis for teaching and learning. I will exemplify this by drawing comparison between the use of mockery as applied in reversal narratives such as the 1986 short film Babakiueria (dir. Don Featherstone), and its more subtle and effective application in Blair’s films. To my mind, one of the most powerful devices in Wayne Blair’s films relates to how he uses the narrative structure to effectively, yet subtly, shift the focus of race back to the non-Indigenous viewer. This strategy follows the theoretical emphasis of work in contemporary whiteness studies where whiteness is racialized (see Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Frankenberg, Dyer) and also, as a methodological strategy, it invites non-Indigenous viewers to think more carefully about the politics of speaking for others, or, to borrow from Spivak, to consider their own implication in colonial privilege (62). Blair’s films explore issues of physicality in relation to Australian Aboriginal people, raising questions about cultural “authenticity” and skin colour. In doing so, they unsettle assumptions about colour and culture while bringing into focus the multiplicity of contemporary Aboriginal identities, and in particular, the ways in which identities are experienced by Aboriginal people who are not visibly identifiable. In my reading of the politics inscribed in Blair’s short films. I draw from student discussions where students “got” Blair’s points because of the textual and filmic techniques he deploys in their creation. These films are underscored by anti-colonial critiques of colonial rule, its continuity, and the associated policies that continue to have devastating consequences for Aboriginal people in Australia. At each viewing of these films with students, I am astounded by the range of strategies used to produce these narratives through the framework of humour, lighthearted mockery, tragedy, irony, sadness and anger, and by the way the films contest colonial representations of Aboriginality and reaffirm more relevant and intelligible modes of self-representation. The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk are contributions to a growing number of short film productions by Indig-

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enous filmmakers. Many of these films re-present Indigenous cultures by undermining the dominant discourses of race and identity that continue to regulate the lives of Aboriginal people. Contextualizing Aboriginal Short Films It is important to situate contemporary Aboriginal short film productions historically. Recent times in Australia have been marked by a vigorous return to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century protection policies. Remote Aboriginal communities are again being subjected to military “intervention” in the wake of the former Howard government’s response to the Little Children Are Sacred report of 2007. In July 2007, disregarding the report’s findings and its authors’ recommendations, the government responded to allegations of pedophilia by Aboriginal men with draconian and invasive measures. The further erosion of Aboriginal rights accompanying these measures under the guise of child protection, and the associated moral outrage generated by media commentary, reinstated both literally and symbolically the ideologies and practices of past colonial policies. As Leona Oliver argues, “funding never seemed to be available for intervention that could be carried out appropriately and culturally by the Elders who tried to pursue this avenue previously” (10). The return to past protection and assimilation policies is further evidenced by a string of events affecting Indigenous people in recent times, among them the government’s response to the events of 2004 at Redfern, Sydney,1 where a justifiably angry Aboriginal community rioted following the senseless death of a young Aboriginal boy fleeing from police pursuit; the dismantling of the Indigenous body, ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) 2 in 2005 by the federal government; and the federal government’s refusal to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007. These events were significant markers in what was a relentless backlash to any reforms or public discourse about Indigenous rights in 1990s Australia. The government’s reaction to the above-mentioned events was for many years indicative of efforts to re-centre white Australia and reproduce the mythology of “sameness” so often expounded by those politicians who take pains to assert that Aboriginal people should be treated the same as non-Aboriginal people. In reference to the “intervention” into remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, former Prime Minister John Howard reinforced this notion of “sameness” in a 2006 interview with Barrie Cassidy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) when he said: “I’m not asking for harsher treatment of Indigenous people—I’m asking for the same treatment and the same law, applied by the same courts to all Australians irrespective of their ethnic background” (“Troops”). A

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year later, federal troops were in the Northern Territory implementing the Howard government’s “intervention,” and further troops were on offer to help Western Australia deal with its crackdown on the sexual abuse of Indigenous children. In February 2008, Australia’s newly elected Labor government signalled, for many, a new era when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered an official public apology to the Stolen Generations. However, Australian Indigenous rights are still suffering the legacy of the many years of the Howard government, which famously opposed any form of revisionist history—in particular, Indigenous history. This is the political and social landscape that gave birth to Blair’s films, which serve as a profound testimony to the endurance of Indigenous cultures in the face of the official denial of Indigenous histories. The Politics and Problematics of Generic Categorization Houston Wood argues that “to greater and lesser degrees, every Indigenous film reflects the specific storytelling traditions of the native peoples being represented” (1). This is a cogent reminder of the specificity of Indigenous filmmaking. I have previously argued that Indigenous film constitutes a genre in its own right (McGloin), but I want to draw attention here to the difficulty that generic categorization presents. Differences in content, form, and narration render conformity to any particular generic dictates almost impossible; as Derrida tells us, genres are never pure (Derrida and Ronell 55–81). Furthermore, in the case of the colonial representations of “otherness,” generic categories that represent Aboriginal people are invariably to reflect dominant discourses of nation. Western thought is underpinned by efforts to make sense of texts and culture through classification and categorization: marks of similarity and difference organize the world into comprehensible forms, facilitating recognition and exclusion. And although genres always imply limits, they also contain possibilities for subversion, for altering or extending limits. In other words, literary and cultural categories that simplify the world contain the seeds of their own impurity; they are governed by a “principle of contamination” (55– 81). Genres reflect efforts to organize and hierarchize texts and cultural practices in order to produce particular responses, readings, and subject positions, or more precisely, “to become aware of genre as an important socio-historical category is to become aware of the way in which genre activates specific ranges of meaning in a culture and of the way in which it functions to organize knowledge and the position of the speaker and listener” (Pugliese, 85). Consequently, multi-generic texts that appear to elude categorization can disorganize the arrangement of meaning and the organization of knowledge. Nevertheless, genres can be useful; the rules

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and regulations of genre can detect textual silences, and the provision for intervention into their orderliness. Although commonalities within genres can position readers through narrative structure, this is not the only criterion for categorization. In many Aboriginal short films, for example, commonality can be found in how humour is used or manipulated to express narratives in ways that are accessible and often non-confronting. Despite the appearance of cultural fixity in Western systems of representation, genres remain unclear, unfixed categories that are always “up for grabs.” In film texts, genre is often determined by a dominant organizing principle, such as drama, comedy, or documentary; however, there are other ways of classifying film, through a focus on a particular theme—for example, sport, dance, creative art—or director. Narrative structure is a prominent organizing principle in Blair’s films. His narratives move tentatively through issues of sadness, grief, and loss, tempering these with moments of comedy, hope, and cultural pride, all of which are underscored by the history of colonization. Blair’s films deal with culture, history, politics, contemporary Indigenous issues, and gender relations. They are cultural stories that can be distinguished from other “national” stories. As pedagogical devices, they are useful in introducing students to counter histories. Humour as a Tool for Teaching Counter-Histories Blair’s films apply humour in strategic and subversive ways. Humour serves important political purposes—for example, it is used to undermine white authority, to reinforce agency, and to entertain. Blair uses humour to chide and subtly mock, or “take the piss” out of, non-Aboriginal viewers, and thereby contest their perceived “knowledge” of Aboriginal people and their preoccupation with cultural “authenticity.” Humour is also an effective mode of resistance, and while it might be considered an unusual device around which to construct a narrative about the ongoing effects of colonization, its application for this purpose is not new. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Babakiueria, which utilizes satire to produce a reverse colonization narrative. Babakiueria, despite its production in the 1980s, is still widely shown in many undergraduate courses, both in Australia and elsewhere. This film invites non-Indigenous viewers to identify with the violence of colonial invasion. In a comedic and what many students have described as “in your face” mockery, black people invades white lands, impose colonial legislation and black supremacy; white culture is outlawed, derided, and white folks are forced off “their land” into the bush. Babakiueria makes its point about white supremacy very simply, using visibly identifiable Aboriginal and white actors. There is no attempt

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to historically nuance the existence of light-skinned Indigenous people, nor are issues of class and gender addressed. Australian race relations, within this formula, are presented as a seemingly straightforward black-and-white affair. White audiences are invited to empathize through induced guilt explicitly encoded in a parodic reversal narrative. Blair’s films, by contrast, apply subtle mockery that does not remove anger and frustration from the narrative but rather invites political engagement without resorting to humiliation or derision. From my experience teaching his films, this is a deft strategy that is far more effective than the reversal narrative structure of Babakiueria, which can “lose” viewiers, particularly if they have not yet acquired a sound knowledge of colonial history or the tools with which to understand the persistence of colonial power relations. It is often difficult for students to process the feelings of guilt induced by reversal narrative strategies, or to distinguish guilt from the more useful emotional response of shame with its attendant expectation of responsibility. This argument is not an attempt to minimize the historic violence of colonialism, or to make racism more palatable for non-Indigenous students. On the contrary, I’m interested in finding more effective and productive ways of teaching antiracism that neither dilute colonial histories nor resort to the oversimplification of reversal techniques. Blair’s more restrained application of mockery is not confrontational. Rather, it invites viewers to laugh at themselves and to recognize themselves in oblique references that encourage reflexivity and thought about their own implication and complicity in the ongoing presence of colonialism. The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk Blair’s films can be situated within the burgeoning production of Indigenous short film over the past twenty years or so. The work of Tracey Moffatt, for example, includes the short films Night Cries (1989), Nice Coloured Girls, (1987), and beDevil (1993), all of which, in their own particular ways, challenge conventional short filmmaking, representations of Indigenous people, and the official histories that have produced those representations. Nice Coloured Girls, for example, challenges colonial representations of Aboriginal women, depicting them as powerful, humorous, and adept at manipulating power structures for their own purposes.3 Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, in addition to his success as a feature film director (Samson and Delilah, 2009, The Sapphires, 2012) has also produced a considerable number of films that contest dominant perceptions of Aboriginality through the use of humour: for example, Green Bush (2005) and Mimi (2002). Blair’s films can be historically, thematically, and cinematically located within the oeuvre of Australian Indigenous short films. The Djarn Djarns

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and Black Talk can be read through a series of narrating strategies that challenge colonial representations of Indigeneity through structure, content, form, and characterization. In both films, Blair applies a selective use of flashbacks. These are inserted at strategic points in the narratives to recapture past relationships and histories. Flashbacks are also used at the end of each film to unsettle the viewer’s expectations of a particular ending by introducing new knowledge. The Djarn djarns are a group of Aboriginal male youths, who, along with a Samoan didgeridoo player, perform traditional dance at the Dreamtime Centre. The narrative focuses on Frankie Dollar (Hunter Page-Lochard), an eleven-year-old Murri boy who is one of the Djarn djarns.4 The film depicts events on the first anniversary of his father’s death and weaves together Frankie Dollar’s loss, the disintegration of his family life, the sexual abuse perpetrated by his white stepfather, and his membership in the Djarn djarns dance troupe. Flashbacks recapture the bond between father and son prior to the father’s death as well as the teaching of culture embedded in that relationship. The practice of Aboriginal culture through traditional dance is represented as a reclamation of culture that provides an antidote to the violence and loss Frankie has endured; the Djarn Djarns troupe becomes a substitute for his own fractured family. Blair states: “The film talks about friendship, the love between a father and a son, a mother and a son—family” (Runcie). Throughout the film, the devastating effects of colonization are depicted through the figure of Frankie. Frankie’s Aboriginal father dies and is replaced by a white patriarchal presence who sexually violates him while his mother is out working nights. The djarn djarn dancers provide Frankie with some relief from a history of violence, loss, and abuse. Although the narrative replays shots of Frankie’s traumatic past, his rage is tempered by dance and his obligations to his troop. There is a sense in this film that the reclamation and reinforcement of cultural identity can counter colonial violence. The film foregrounds agency; unlike many contemporary Aboriginal youth, the representation of Frankie uses cultural pride to counter the violent effects of colonialism. Within this structure of white patriarchal violence informed by colonial relations of power, the narrative echoes the histories of thousands of Aboriginal women and children who were violated and exploited by white men. Despite the film’s references to the devastating impact of colonialism, though, its intended message proclaims the resilience of Aboriginal cultures and their continued resistance to colonial domination. This message is skilfully articulated through Blair’s use of humour. The Djarn djarns perform at the “Dreamtime Centre,” described as a “dream world for blackfellas.” This naming is a deliberate appropriation of Dreamworld, a famous theme park and corporate entity on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

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At the “Dreamtime Centre” Blair lampoons white preoccupations with cultural authenticity. The manager of the centre assures the buyer of a didgeridoo that all staff are “authentic” as he winks, grinning, while taking the customer’s credit card. The send-up of white obsessions about cultural authenticity is further augmented when the manager announces, “We’ve got a hundred percent Indigenous staff here from the accountant to the janitor. We’re all blackfellas here.” Blair’s use of comedy to deride perceptions of “real” Aboriginality offers an invaluable mechanism for teaching, particularly at this point in history where preoccupations with who is and who isn’t Aboriginal are commonplace in media discourse in Australia. Although interspersed with humour, the film raises serious issues that continue to affect Aboriginal people and communities. Among these are child sex abuse, the loss and reclamation of culture, and the early death rates for Indigenous males and the effects of this on Aboriginal women and children. The Djarn djarns invokes colonial policies whose legacy continues to produce appalling mortality rates for Aboriginal males, who on average die roughly twenty years earlier than non-Aboriginal males. For Aboriginal males in the 15–54 age group (like Frankie’s father), the death rate is between three and seven times higher than for non-Aboriginal males (“Aboriginal Health Information”). And although Blair has said he intended the reference to child sex abuse to be subtle (Runcie), it is, in fact, both powerful and timely, given contemporary debates and current official inquiries into child sex abuse in Australia and elsewhere. In the wake of the Howard government’s military-style occupation of remote Aboriginal communities in 2007, continued by subsequent governments into 2014, and the belated response to the concerns expressed by Aboriginal women from these communities for many years, Blair’s film is replete with political statements about the effects of colonialism on Aboriginal communities. The reference to child sexual abuse provides a basis for critically analyzing the media coverage now being given to this issue, and also provides a useful starting point to critically analyse claims made prior and during the Northern Territory intervention regarding the “inherent” nature of violence in Aboriginal communities. The film, therefore, speaks both to historical and contemporary issues. The Djarn Djarns, according to Wayne Blair, is somewhat similar to another of his films, Black Talk, which won the Dendy Award for Best Short Film at the 2003 Sydney International Film Festival. Black Talk tells the story of two Aboriginal males in their mid-twenties who shared a close childhood connection and who meet again after several years apart. The opening scene shows the two sit together on a bench outside a church. They recount childhood memories with exuberance, echoing their childhood

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high spirits as they recall with hilarity events from their boyhood. In the background, people in funeral attire arrive at the church. Laughter here is juxtaposed with death and sorrow. The viewer is drawn into the pair’s reminiscences, though. Between their boisterous laughter and shots of people arriving at the church, the now adult cousins speak of their years of separation: Tim (Russell Page) left to live in the city, while Scott (Laurence Clifford) stayed in his community. In a profound scene, Scott challenges Tim’s decision to leave his community, telling him, “Those city fellas don’t give a rat’s arse about you. They’re just gonna suck the soul out of you ’til you can’t breathe no more.” The metaphor of breathlessness—or lifelessness—works to draw attention to the film’s theme of the early death rates of Aboriginal men, but also, it metaphorizes soul destruction as a violent colonial practice. Death here is not merely physical; it is spiritual. Lifelessness is not just death but refers also to the cultural sickness experienced in many colonial contexts where the separation of Aboriginal people from their families and communities is a direct consequence of the imposition of dominant cultural values and is a cause of both physical and psychological illnesses. The film’s exploration of the fragmentation of many Aboriginal communities brings into view the realities of colonial policy, but more cogently, it draws attention to the ongoing effects of the destruction of cultural ties and kinship relations. Black Talk is an extraordinarily powerful film. Blair uses a range of narrative and filmic techniques to interpellate viewers at a number of levels eliciting a range of possible readings. For example, it could be understood that communities are protectors of youth and culture and that leaving is dangerous, or that leaving one’s Indigenous community leads to assimilation. The high-spiritedness of the male characters juxtaposed with the funeral setting temporarily unsettles audiences who do not know until the film’s end whether the funeral is for one of the characters in the flashback, or for someone yet to be introduced, or perhaps simply peripheral to the narrative. In the final scene, the character Scott enters the church, followed soon by Tim who approaches the coffin and looks down at Scott’s deceased body. The dramatization of the dialogue between a living and a deceased Aboriginal male, contextualised in an atmosphere of youthful male exuberance brings into focus the film’s most prominent message about the early death rates of Aboriginal males. The impact of Black Talk grows rather than diminishes on repeated viewing; I am constantly amazed by this film’s capacity to move students towards a critical engagement with the issues presented, not simply because it generates intense emotional responses—this is indeed the case, many students are moved to tears watching this film—but because these responses themselves seem

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to generate a desire to understand and interact with the issues raised. As a pedagogical device for teaching anti-colonialism, the film is extremely powerful and always generates discussion that is productive, reflective, and underscored by a range of critical approaches to understanding colonialism, and Indigenous self-representation. Like Djarn Djarns, Black Talk stages a critique of colonial discourses of authenticity by casting light-skinned Aboriginal people in principal roles. This disrupts colonial preoccupations with skin colour as an “authentic” marker of Aboriginality. Students engaging with this have noted Tim’s dual representation; he is cast as a dark-skinned child and a light-skinned adult. Tim’s “whitening” can be read an intention to disrupt, as stated, or conversely, the dual representation can be seen as a signifier for enforced assimilation— or the “whitening” of Aboriginal culture as part of the colonial process. Viewer responses to the film challenge preconceived ideas about Aboriginality. Some students consider that Tim’s lighter skin as an adult reflects an act of agency and an assertion that Aboriginal are urban dwellers who live and work in contemporary spaces. Others consider Blair’s casting of a lighter skin adult as a statement about the assimilationist effects of colonialism. Also, questions are often raised about the possible “benefits” of passing as white, how this act of agency might work to effect positive outcomes. A range of possibilities arise from this representation but most usefully, Black Talk generates discussions about current official definitions that authorize Aboriginality for those who (1) are of Aboriginal descent, (2) identify as Aboriginal, and (3) are accepted by the community as an Aboriginal person (Gardiner-Garden). The film raises questions about the impact of these demands of identification, not least for those who do not know about their heritage until later in life or who, through forced relocation for work and other reasons have difficulty establishing community connections. The film also encourages viewers to consider Aboriginality in its multiple contexts, its vast range of histories, narratives, geo-political dimensions, and ways of being. These considerations can prove difficult for many non-Indigenous students who often embark on tertiary study with a ‘fixed’ set of ideas about Aboriginal people: multiple ways of being refute singular identity constructions that make for a much more simplistic analysis. In addition, Black Talk provides a productive basis for critical engagement because it resists the neat, sequential, spatio-temporal order of linear histories which suggest that the past is over. Blair brings the colonial “past” into the present through the death of Frankie Dollar’s father in The Djarn Djarns and through the death of Scott in Black Talk. Despite each film’s use of humour, the serious issues regarding early mortality, familial and communal fragmentation, child abuse and other forms of violence are connected to colonialism in each film.

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Conclusion As I have suggested elsewhere (2006) and extend here, contemporary Aboriginal short films can be identified as a distinctive cultural genre. As such it is characterized by narratives that oppose the knowledge presented in official histories, foregrounding other histories, epistemes, and contemporary cultural experiences. There is a politics of resistance in many such films; they constitute elements of a large body of self-representational material that seeks to re-present Aboriginality to Aboriginal people as well as to nonIndigenous people. Although inroads have been made in evaluating and critiquing non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal people in some areas of cultural production, there is little academic work dealing with Indigenous self-representation in short film with a view to assessing its pedagogical merit. This may be due in part to the lack of serious exploration in short film generally (Crimmings and Graham). While many Aboriginal films speak for themselves in terms of re-presenting Aboriginalities and reinforcing cultural pride, the burgeoning field of Aboriginal short film production solicits attention. My interest in addressing the lack of critical writing in this area is not propelled by the broader considerations of how the films are created, their technical and logistical dimensions, or their place in the world of cinema generally. Rather, I am interested in exploring the politics inscribed in the narratives and how these texts contribute to a critical awareness and understanding of counter-histories in the process of teaching and learning. The genre of Aboriginal short film draws on the often complex exigencies of modern Aboriginal life and imbues Aboriginal self-representations with the realities of Aboriginal experiences. Aboriginal short films, often through mockery, decentre the privileged category of whiteness that is historically embedded into literary and film canons. These films impose, for non-Indigenous viewers, a reconceptualization of Aboriginal culture, and for Indigenous viewers, a set of representations that reflect the experiences of Aboriginal life in their multiple contexts by interpellating viewers through familiar and relevant frames of reference. Blair’s films are statements about Aboriginalities encoded with the possibilities of what this term means, or can mean, or might come to mean. These films raise questions about what constitutes Aboriginal identities and how the discursive and material effects of these identities are practised in the day-to-day lives of Aboriginal people. Semiotically, many Aboriginal short films unsettle preoccupations with skin colour as a visible signifier of race that “authenticates” Aboriginal people in Australia at many institutional and governmental levels. Through this deliberate ambiguity, Aboriginal short films like Blair’s make possible a redefining of subject positions that reflect the experiences and world views of Aboriginal subjects while engaging many non-Indigenous viewers with issues in a way that counters dominant representations of Aboriginal people.

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Speaking of the redefining of Aboriginal identities, former editor of Art and Australia magazine Hannah Fink states: “A requisite of self-definition must be liberation not only from the incarcerations of stereotype and the burden of having to perform or translate a self for a nominal white audience, but freedom from the onus of having to define oneself at all” (1). Fink reminds us that self-representation for Aboriginal people, is an act of agency through which Western philosophical concepts of identity can be challenged. She draws attention to the liberating possibilities of Indigenous self-representation whereby self-identity is not necessarily the focus of Indigenous storytelling; and whereby identification through country, community, and kinship relations can take precedence. Self-definition, as Fink points out, can be a liberating force for Aboriginal subjects dealing with the daily reality of racist stereotypes and the demands of “authentication” from white audiences. But as Blair claims, it is also about sharing Indigenous knowledges: “To have Australian Indigenous representation at a festival of this magnitude is just amazing . . .; opportunities like this help us to share our story with the world” (Runcie). There is a sense that, for Blair, self-definition is not merely a chore that sets the representational record straight, nor is it a capitulation to white audiences’ demands for “authenticity”; rather, it is an act of agency whereby Indigenous textual producers seize and rework the frames of reference that discursively define and regulate what Aboriginality(s) are or can be.

Notes 1 The phrase “Redfern Riots” refers to a nine-hour riot between Aboriginal community members and police in August 2004. The riot followed the death of seventeen-year-old Aboriginal youth, T.J. Hickey. Hickey came off his bicycle and was impaled on a fence while being pursued by police. Although the death of T.J. Hickey was subsequently described by the coroner as a “freak accident” and the police were exonerated of any wrong, the view of Hickey’s family and the Aboriginal community was that the police were chasing Hickey and therefore were responsible for his death. 2 ATSIC was replaced by the federal government’s instatement of “Indigenous Coordination Centres,” government-run (non-elected) bodies headed by a manager and coming under the jurisdiction of the Department of Families, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs. 3 For a discussion of Moffatt’s work and of Nice Coloured Girls, in particular, see Susan Knabe’s chapter in this book. 4 “Murri” is a term used by Aboriginal people to denote Aboriginal people from the Queensland area.

Six

“Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away”: Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes W E N D Y G AY P E A R S O N

Four thousand years of oral history silenced by fifty years of priests, schools, and cable TV? This death of history is happening in my lifetime. —Zacharias Kunuk, “I First Heard the Story from My Mother”

Decolonizing activities are sometimes misunderstood as a futile effort to return to the past. Decolonization is not that, but a process designed to shed and recover from the ill effects of colonization. Indigenous communities and nations decolonize their collective identities and their institutions, and individuals decolonize their minds and their ways of interacting and participating in institutions. Decolonizing projects include both the recovery of lapsed Indigenous practices and the utilization of non-Indigenous practices for Indigenous purposes. —Susan A. Miller, “Native America Writes Back”

Introduction: Three Images Here is an image: a young man hidden in snow-laden bushes watches intruders murder his parents and small sister and dump their bodies through a hole into the frozen lake. In his horror, he knocks one of the skis he is holding downhill, alerting the Tchudes1 to his presence. They pursue him, shooting him in the arm with a crossbow bolt. They are on foot and he has a single ski. Escaping, he inadvertently leads his pursuers to a nearby encampment of fellow Sámi. Realizing that our young protagonist, Aigin 143

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(Mikkel Gaup), has probably revealed their whereabouts to the Tchudes, the camp bursts into argument. In the end, a small group of men head into the snow-covered hills to try and ambush the Tchudes while the remainder harness the reindeer and pack for the trek to the coast and, they hope, safety. As the tale is well known, albeit in a variety of forms, throughout Scandinavia, neither the Sámi nor the “daro” (non-Sámi) audience is surprised when the Tchudes murder the shaman, Raste (Nils Utsi), and force Aigin to lead them across the mountains in pursuit of those who have escaped. Nor is the local audience entirely surprised, despite the film’s very effective building of suspense, when Aigin tricks the Tchudes to their deaths by convincing them to rope themselves together as they negotiate the treacherous mountain paths and eventually leading them off a cliff. Everything about these scenes from Ofelas (Pathfinder), Nils Gaup’s 1987 Sámi-language feature film, tells us that we are viewing a representation of the past. The Sámi are dressed in traditional costume, including cloth tunics and furs, and are depicted living in lavvo (tents), using reindeer sleds and skis as transportation, and hunting with bows and arrows and spears. Similarly, the brutal Tchudes are dressed in black cloth and leather in an antique pattern and armed with spears, knives, and crossbows. Although the Tchudes seem out of place in this environment, their dark clothing standing out against the snow in a way that the Sámi skins and furs do not, they are clearly identified as belonging to the past. No marks of contemporary life are present at any point in the diegesis. Here is another image: a strange shaman, Tuurngarjuak,2 enters an igloo where he provokes the local shaman into a competition; when he wins, he strips the leadership of the clan from his dead opponent, Kumaglaq, and bestows it on Sauri, who covets the role and the power to mistreat and humiliate his old rival, Tulimaq. Their rivalry in turn is continued by Sauri’s son, Oki, and Tulimaq’s sons, Aamarjuaq and Atanarjuat, who are only infants at the time of Kumaglaq’s death. This ill will is exacerbated when Atanarjuat wins a head-punching competition against Oki and is thus enabled to marry his beloved, Atuat, who had been promised to his rival. When Oki’s sister, Puja, enters the picture, first becoming Atanarjuat’s second wife and then breaking taboo by seducing his brother, the situation becomes even more complicated. Puja’s manipulations give Oki and his friends the excuse they have been seeking, and they attempt to murder the sleeping brothers, thrusting their spears through the tent walls. Aamarjuaq dies, but Atanarjuat runs naked across the ice to escape his pursuers, thus proving the truth of his name (Atanarjuat means “fast runner”), which also happens to be the title of Igloolik Isuma Production’s first feature film, released in 2001. As with Ofelas, the diegesis re-envisions

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the past, in this case a past that specifically predates the colonial encounter with the governance, economy, culture, and religion—in short, the disciplinary regimes—of European invader/settlers. Even a brief glance at the film’s website (www.isuma.tv/atanarjuat) is enough to assure the spectator that the Inuit filmmakers have put a great deal of effort into ensuring the historical accuracy of language, dress, housing, food, and other cultural practices, including shamanism.3 In this case, the only marks of contemporary life come with the credits, where the filmmakers show us scenes of the filming, including Inuit in contemporary dress with cameras, boom microphones, and so on. Here is one more image: as the camera swoops airborne over the Glyde River towards the Arafura Swamp in Australia’s Northern Territory, with the sounds of bird calls and a gathering storm in the distance, a voice-over tells us, in English, that the story we are about to hear is not our story: “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away. No, not like that. I’m only joking,” the narrator claims, laughing at his own Star Wars joke—since, after all, Star Wars is one of the pre-eminent cinematic myths of our time and the point is that, if the Balanda (white people) have their myths about the past, the Yolngu have their own as well.4 As the camera moves fluidly around the swamp, the narrator’s voice tells us how he was waiting in the swamp like a little fish before entering the vagina of one of his father’s wives; this makes clear to non-Yolngu viewers that we are now working with entirely different cosmologies and epistemologies. As the swamp scene fades slowly from colour to black-and-white, the narrator remarks, “We have to go back long time [to find the story], back to the time of my ancestors.” We now see a black-and-white scene of the forest, shot with a still camera; we hear the distant sound of men talking and joking and ten Aboriginal men appear from the right, walking in a line across the camera’s view before disappearing to the left. Soon we learn, both from the narration and from the dialogue, that the men are on their way to make bark canoes, which they will use to collect goose eggs. The audience soon realizes that one young man, Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, who also plays Yeeralparil), covets the youngest of his older brother’s wives. The brother, Minygululu (Peter Minygululu), starts to tell the other men a story as they strip the bark from the trees; the story is clearly as much a part of Dayindi’s instruction in the laws and ways of his people as are the directions about making a bark canoe. As the story progresses, the diegesis switches from the black-and-white of the historical past, set approximately one thousand years ago, but based on photographs taken in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thompson, to full colour for the location in “Myth Time” of the story that Minygululu is retelling. Neither scene makes any visual reference to the contemporary

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life of the Yolngu people. As with each of the previous films, the dialogue is in the Indigenous tongue (respectively Sámi, Inuktitut, and, primarily, Gunalbingu and Mandalpingu), and the characters are depicted in roughly historically accurate ways in terms of dress, housing, food, tools, weapons, and cultural practices.5 Unlike the other two films, however, the contemporary world of colonized Australia is represented diegetically in Ten Canoes (2006), but only aurally, through the voice of the narrator, famous Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil—specifically, through his direct address to a presumptively non-Indigenous audience and his Star Wars reference. In each case, the world represented in the diegesis is not just the past, but specifically the pre-colonial past, a time when Indigenous cultures existed in their own right, not in a hierarchical relationship with a colonizer’s culture, and produced world views sufficient in themselves, with their own epistemology and cosmology. In each case, moreover, there is an encounter with a stranger or strangers that produces evil consequences for the local people. Furthermore, each of these films is based on an oral storytelling tradition that has been taken up in Western ethnographic discourse as myth or, more accurately, legend, even though, as Zacharias Kunuk argues, these stories are often understood by Indigenous communities as oral histories.6 Indeed, as Therese Davis notes, most reviews of Ten Canoes have celebrated it as a “depiction of a mythical past” (Davis points out that far less “attention has been paid to the ways in which the narration brings the mythical past into the present,” a point that I will take up later in this chapter), although it does not seem to have been based on an extant myth or legend (“Remembering” 11).7 Similarly, the story that is retold in Ofelas has been treated primarily as a folktale by non-Indigenous scholars, in part because a much longer history of contact with other ethnic groups, such as the Vikings and other Scandinavian peoples, has caused the story to penetrate into what are today the national cultures that overlap and subdivide traditional Sámi territory. Thomas Dubois notes that folklorists have collected numerous versions of the story, many published during the heyday of folklore scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his article on Ofelas, Dubois reproduces two of these tales as a way of comparing them to Gaup’s version in the film. While there are conspicuous differences between the film and well-known versions of the tale (the better-known northern versions always seem to feature a Sámi hero, while other versions do not, necessarily), Gaup’s retelling can itself be understood as fitting within oral storytelling traditions: stories change according to the needs, skills, and culture of the teller and her audience. In some versions of the “Pathfinder” story, for instance, the invading villains are Swedes, in others Russian, and in yet others named only as “Tchudes”

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(both of the versions that Dubois summarizes, collected originally in the 1850s and in 1902 respectively, identify the villains as Russian Tchudes). Gaup himself chooses not to identify his Tchudes by ethnicity, going so far as to have them speak a synthetic language invented for the film. Although Dubois makes some excellent points about Ofelas’s role in the cultural revival of the Sámi in the 1980s and beyond (more about cultural revival later), treating the film predominantly from a folklorist perspective, for me, risks occluding both the extent to which oral storytelling has functioned historically and continues to function in Indigenous cultures and the extent to which this retelling, even if the audience does not believe the narrative to be factually true, involves a recognizable representation of the past within the diegesis. That is, a young man named Aigin does not need to have tricked a gang of Tchudes to their deaths for us to recognize the historical aspects of the film’s setting. This is perhaps even clearer in relation to Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes, where the filmmakers have taken care to document the process of historical reconstruction. Even though both of these cultures (Inuit and Yolngu) have much more recent histories of initial contact with Europeans and others8 than the Sámi, in all three cases there are people living who retain or remember many aspects of traditional life. The reconstruction of housing, tools, clothing, and weapons, as well as language, is conceived by the people involved in the films not purely as an exercise in the creation of film props (or as a fetishized exercise in world creation, as for example with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), but precisely as acts of historical preservation and potentially of cultural revitalization; in either case, though, the result is the creation of a material archive. Indeed, the Yolngu people who assisted in the making of Ten Canoes had an agreement with de Heer9 that, in contradistinction to normal film production practice, “recognize[d] the Ramingining community’s property rights for all artefacts and sets made for and used in this film” (Davis, “Remembering” 7). In the case of both Ten Canoes and Atanarjuat, much was made of the need to relearn old skills in the course of making the film. In both cases there were older people in the community who had either retained old skills, including the ability to speak the local language, or who remembered something about them. In both cases—in many ways ironically— the filmmakers also resorted to ethnographic documents, not only to ensure the authenticity of the tools, weapons, clothing, and so on, but also to recover the methods of their making. For example, the Ten Canoes DVD includes segments on “Making a Canoe,” “Building Huts,” and “Making Spears”; at one point in the unnarrated canoe-building segment, the audience sees the men (Peter Djigirr, Philip Gudthaykudthay, and others, along

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with de Heer) consulting one of anthropologist Donald Thomson’s photos from the 1930s to determine the construction of the prow. Yet at the same time, their use of contemporary tools—metal axes, knives, screwdrivers, a four-wheel drive to transport the bark to the water—recall Native American historian Susan Miller’s comment that “decolonizing projects include both the recovery of lapsed Indigenous practices and the utilization of non-Indigenous practices for Indigenous purposes” (“Native America” 15). Similarly, in “Building Huts,” we see the women discussing Thomson’s photographs of huts from the 1930s. In engaging in the supposedly non-Indigenous practice of building props and sets (indeed, of making the film itself), Indigenes are not only using non-Indigenous practices for their own purposes but also turning the exercise of producing cinematic visions of the pre-colonial past into an Indigenous practice. “Anyone Can See, We Got That Law” We come from this land. People, Balanda, always come, miners and that, and we always say no to them, no mining, because we don’t want to lose our culture. White man’s ways will just destroy us. We have our law from long time ago, important law for everything, but all them white men come more and more and we can’t stay in that law. That law just dropping away. If we go more further with losing our law then maybe white men can tell us, “Where’s your culture? . . . Nothing, you’re lost, all bad luck for you.” But you film mob came here to lift up this law for us, to show how they used to sit a long time ago, them laws. So white men can see, we can see, anyone can see, we got that law. (qtd. in Tudball and Lewis 16) For the people of Ramingining, Thomson’s photographs have become the primary source of authoritative images of the past. As a number of commentators, including Ernie Blackmore, Tom Crosbie, Therese Davis, Louise Hamby, Ian Henderson, and Houston Wood, have discussed, Thomson’s glass plate photographs,10 “taken at a time when anthropologists such as Thomson collected with the aim of ‘preserving’ for science what they considered to be a dying culture, [have] since been appropriated by the Yolngu people as a new form of cultural history” (Davis, “Remembering” 9). To be fair, Thomson seems to have been deeply sympathetic to the Aboriginal people, living with them for long periods and undertaking a risky mission in 1932–33, while still a young man, to Caledon Bay to prevent a burgeoning race war between white settlers and the Yolngu. Nevertheless, since pre-contact Indigenous lifestyles were inevitably regarded by

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non-Indigenes at the time as static (thus “timeless” and “unchanging”), it is probable that Thomson was no different in this regard—although he was less interested than the filmmakers themselves in ensuring a pre-contact “purity” to his images (some of which show his own equipment and tools). Thomson’s photographs—or rather the people of Ramingining’s relationship to them—are largely responsible for the film’s shape, narrative, and even existence. The story of de Heer’s visit to David Gulpilil’s homeland (Gulpilil starred in de Heer’s 2002 film The Tracker) is too well known to rehearse here (see Davis, “Remembering”; Hamby; and Wood). What is notable about the story of how Gulpilil showed Thomson’s “ten canoes” photograph of the goose hunt to de Heer and of de Heer’s response to it is primarily that it kick-started a process in which Thomson’s images functioned as a measure for envisioning the historical past. The Ramingining community’s insistence that, because the photographs were in black-andwhite, the film must also be black-and-white conflicted both with the contemporary mainstream cinematic commitment to colour and with de Heer’s contract, which called specifically for a colour film. It also denotes a different relationship between the cultural meaning of black-and-white photography and ways of thinking about historical representation. This is not to suggest that the people of Ramingining were unaware that the naked eye would have seen these scenes in colour, but rather that they understand the images as holistic representations in which black-and-white connotes pastness and thus a specific and direct link to the ancestors who appear in the photographs. Accuracy in representing the past, then, includes insisting that “Thomson Time” be black-and-white time. While from a Western perspective, the use of black-and-white does not make the film a more precise representation of the past, it does in fact accurately represent the history of photographic/filmic representation itself. Because “Myth Time,” unlike “Thomson Time,” is a space where “anything is allowed to happen” (Davis, “Remembering” 9), the decision to use a dual time frame solved the problem by allowing colour film for the “mythical” narrative as well as for the framing sequences of Gulpilil’s narration (thus giving us, in fact, a triple time frame—colour in the presumably contemporary period of the Storyteller’s voice, black-and-white for Thomson Time, and colour again for Myth Time). The depiction of the goose egg hunt is, as Davis points out, a true story, well documented by Thomson’s photographs. Similarly, the use of a static camera in the black-and-white segments mimics Thomson’s still photography and also provides an even stronger visual contrast with the mobile camera used in the colour segments. Finally, both colour schemes contrast with the

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washed-out colour used for the imagination of the past and for speculation about future consequences (what might have happened, which is not discrete from what may still happen) within the diegesis of the Myth Time segments. These segments that speculate about the diegetic past and future—and it is important to understand them as a function not of linear time but of a relationship shaped by culture and law—are of particular interest in considering the questions of how the film represents the past in relationship to the present and relates the supposed distinction between myth and history through oral storytelling. In his reading of the film from the specific position of the willing non-Indigenous spectator, Ian Henderson argues that Gulpilil’s Star Wars joke must be understood in the context of the relationship between oral storytelling and Indigenous law (the proper way of living): It underscores that, through telling an old story of the telling of a yet more ancient story, he is of our historical present and that he expects us to learn, like Dayindi, its contemporaneousness. But if Dayindi must understand this story of the story, our concern is the story of the story of the story. As the storyteller says: “It is Minygululu’s story for Dayindi back then. And it is my story for you now. It is a good story. Maybe this story will help you live the proper way, eh?” Our version of Dayindi’s task, then, involves bringing the different time frame structures operating in the film into a particular functional relation, as present in a radically “other” way. (60) This is more complex than simply saying that the past affects, or continues to operate in, the present. It suggests, rather, that the aesthetic choices of the filmmakers—particularly the movement between these different time frames in Ten Canoes, the slow pacing of that film, and the even slower pacing of Atanarjuat, in conjunction with the use of long takes and long shots that situate the spectator within the landscape—combine to nudge the spectator into an alternate sense of time, one that is radically different from that of the West. Time can contain “Mythic Time,” or the Dreamtime, not as a fictional if powerful story but as a historical fact that returns the past to the present within the framework of tribal law. As Henderson also says (and he is the only other critic I have come across who has noticed and/or speculated on the use of washed-out colour in the film), the washed-out colour sequences are in many ways “key to understanding Ten Canoes, showing us how to bring the different time frames into a meaningful (though, for Western cinemagoers, unfamiliar) relation” (61). Doing so,

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in turn, allows us, like Dayindi, to learn to “live the proper way”—itself a much more complex notion of creating a relationship between different epistemological and ethical systems than the appropriative New Age-y belief that “we” (the descendants of colonizers) should value Indigenous peoples for “what they can teach us,” that is, for their knowledge and, more commonly, customs (dreamcatchers, smudging, etc.) that can easily be appropriated into a vaguely countercultural ethos that treats Indigeneity as a sort of “lifestyle choice.” The first washed-out colour sequence occurs early in the film when the audience is introduced to the Myth Time people. I am not sure whether these sequences are an ironic commentary on ethnographic film in general or a specific nod to Robert Flaherty’s (in)famous ethnography of the “Eskimo,” Nanook of the North (1922). In any case, just as Flaherty’s silent film introduces each of its subjects (or, more accurately, characters, since the Inuit involved are playing people other than themselves) with a closeup and intertitle, Ten Canoes introduces each person with a close-up and voice-over explanation. However, while Flaherty’s subjects are captured by the camera and seem to have no recourse to asserting their own subjectivity, de Heer and Djigirr consciously subvert the relationship between the ethnographic gaze and its object by holding the shot to show the still subject starting to respond with movement, smiles, and laughter. Part of the storyteller’s introduction of Yeeralparil (Jamie Gulpilil) focuses on that young man’s unmarried state and his desire for Ridjamiraril’s youngest wife, Munandjarra (Cassandra Malangarri Baker)—an obvious parallel to Dayindi’s situation, which is reinforced by the use of the same actor for both roles. The introduction finishes with Yeeralparil leaving the young men’s camp, shot in washed-out colour to indicate that this is not actually happening but is his “imagined projection” of pursuing Munandjarra by pretending that he is looking for something to eat. As his ruse is discovered by the eldest wife, however, and he is turned away, the scene returns to fullcolour and cuts to Yeeralparil actually arriving at the main camp to get his hair cut. Significant here is what the audience and Dayindi are learning: that Yeeralparil’s desire for Munandjarra goes against tribal law and can only disrupt the camp’s ability to live the “proper way.” The crux of the Myth Time story is the disappearance of Ridjamiraril’s second wife, Nowalingu (Francis Djulibing) and Ridjamiraril’s growing obsession that she was taken by a strange magician, which eventually leads him to kill a different stranger, attempt to conceal his crime, and face payback, as the men of the stranger’s tribe get to throw spears at him. Ridjamiraril dies as a result of being hit by one of these spears, and Yeeralparil inherits Munandjarra—but also his brother’s two older wives. The Myth

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Time story told to Dayindi thus leads him to understand how failing to follow the law can unravel the community, with consequences far beyond what he has imagined: not only does Yeeralparil end up with the responsibility for three wives, but he loses his brother and the community loses someone important to its well-being. The other washed-out sequences in the film surround two of the major, if inadvertent, triggers in Ridjamiraril’s tragic trajectory: first, when the stranger appears, the men of the tribe imagine him performing various forms of evil magic upon them; and second, after Nowalingu disappears, these same men theorize reasons for her absence. Again, we see each of these theories acted out in washedout colour: “Maybe that cross-river mob took her”; “Maybe a crocodile ate her”; “I think she ran away”; and Ridjamiraril’s retort, “She wouldn’t do that. That stranger took her.” However, the other men conclude that she just took off, until they hear reports that she has been seen with the cross-river mob. Here again, we return to the washed-out colour as the men imagine, this time, their potential future actions and their consequences—“We should just walk in and take her”; “We should sneak in during the night”; “It’s safer to grab her when the women are alone”—which lead to thoughts of retaliation—“We should take one of their women as well,” followed by “We should take ALL their women!” Each of these statements, however, unlike the initial speculation about what happened to Nowalingu, which was filmed with the camera inside the circle of men, sitting on Yolngu land, is shot with only the individual actor’s head framed against a plain white background. These shots, which are also unlike the quasi-ethnographic introductory shots of the main characters, are the only ones in the film that completely forgo a realist aesthetic, which underpins even the washed-out colour scenes. What is perhaps most noticeable about these shots—which begin in either CU or MCU, zoom in to ECUs on the men’s painted faces, and are sometimes shot from a low angle—is that they so clearly displace the men from their locatedness in the land, which is the site of law and which gives meaning to Yolngu identity. As the men move further from the law, with more extreme suggestions not only for retrieving Nowalingu but also for retaliation, the spectator is jolted by the only frame-breaking moment in the entire film—the point at which an unnamed warrior reaches out and grasps the sides of the camera as he shouts, “We should take one of their women as well.” The background of this shot is pure white, suggesting perhaps that the warrior’s desire for retaliation, if carried through, would place him outside the law and thus also displace him from the land in which he is ordinarily grounded. This reflection on the emplacement of Yolngu cultural identity on the land—which, for all Indigenous peoples, is so much a part of their struggle

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Figure 6.1 An unnamed warrior (Johnny Buniyira) holds the camera and stares into the lens. Image courtesy of Rolf de Heer.

against deterritorialization by colonialist enterprises—is mirrored in the community’s response to the appearance of the first stranger. The Storyteller comments that no one knows why the stranger has entered the tribe’s territory. He reminds the spectators of their historical distance from the events and the difficulty of interpretation: “I don’t know any more. That story is too old. But that stranger had not signalled that he was coming. He had the smell of someone very dangerous.” Not asking for permission to enter another’s traditional territory is a very serious breach of the law, which may be part of the reason the stranger seems so threatening (and entering without permission is, obviously, the modus operandi of those most threatening of strangers, the colonialists who not only ignored local customs in entering Aboriginal territories but also ended up stealing most of the lands they entered). In addition, this commentary is positioned in relation to a series of comments by the Storyteller about the shape and nature of the story: “This story is now growing like a young tree that is flowering for the first time. Back in that long ago time, maybe someone done the wrong thing. Or maybe the spirits were angry for no reason. But any way it was, the lives of the Ancients were about to change.” While the Storyteller’s commentary is directly about the events happening in Myth Time, which are being retold so as to prevent a similar disregard for cultural law, with whatever consequences might ensue, the Storyteller’s vacillation about the cause of the Ancients’ lives changing is significant. Sometimes evil happens for a reason, but sometimes it just happens. For the Yolngu, as for all Aboriginal Australians, the words have

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a more metonymic meaning: they reflect on the process of colonization, the point at which the not-too-distant ancestors’ lives did change, with lasting and grievous consequences for their descendants. Noting that the Storyteller does not assign blame to Ridjamiraril, but rather asserts that he has become increasingly possessed by a bad spirit, Henderson argues that Ten Canoes distances itself from a simplistic Western-style morality tale: the law is not disrupted through a single “fault” but is restored through a broad network of actions (potentially including the abduction, the possession, the accidental spearing, and the payback), which may not be interpretable or have meaning in law until afterward, until after the patient and careful negotiations of a range of possible explanations, in one’s own head and in consultation with others (notably in the men’s tribal council . . .). Only then does the whole story have meaning as truth; only then does it become true. (63) From this perspective, Ridjamiraril’s acquiescence to the payback ritual, which he undergoes in order to prevent war between his tribe and that of the man he has killed, followed by the performance of his death dance, can be seen as restoring law to its rightful place (Henderson refers to this in terms of “becoming-law,” a process illustrated by Dayindi’s decision to turn away from Minygululu’s youngest wife after he returns from the goose egg hunt). Tom Crosbie, comparing the ways in which both Ten Canoes and Atanarjuat function as “critical historiography,” notes that both films share “a social critical technology . . . which posits the past not as a lost standard, but an ever-rich source of contemporary guidance; and posits major social upheaval as traumatic but reconcilable” (148). Henderson emphasizes the importance of patience and waiting to understand (particularly for those of us who are, like myself, Crosbie, and Henderson, in the position of the non-Indigenous viewer who, in a reversal of the usual paradigm of knowledge hierarchies in Western culture, is left “out in the cold” and doomed “to being the one ignorant of technology, survival, culture, and indeed genre” [Crosbie 148]). Looking at the film from “outside” culture and law, we may still tentatively conclude that Ten Canoes indeed posits the past as a living guide, like the Storyteller’s flowering tree, and produces a doubled historiography in which commentary on, and learning from, Myth Time is always also a commentary on, and way of learning from, the true Thomson Time—the time that, unlike the film’s dis-placement of it into the distant past, is also the time of colonialism. Without the colonial history of the last two centuries in Australia, there would be no need for David Gulpilil to tell a non-Indigenous audience that this, while a good story, is not their story,

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nor to laugh at a Star Wars joke that both declares that the Yolngu people can comprehend and consume Western culture without losing their own and rejects Western notions that mythic stories, which are certainly among the major semiotic locations of the Star Wars series, are not history, but fiction—that, in other words, the story of Ten Canoes is not true.11 In a similar sense, the depiction of legend/myth/history in both Atanarjuat and Ofelas also negotiates this same doubled or in some senses duplicitous historiography. One of the ironies of these films is the fluidity of spectator positions they offer precisely when they are so often seen as addressing only a kind of ethnographic audience.12 They address not only the local Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship but also Indigenes and non-Indigenes from other parts of the world. Positing a commonality of knowledge and perspectives among different Indigenous viewers (and a parallel commonality of ignorance and world views among different nonIndigenous viewers) both reflects multiple different forms of access to the films as meaning-making projects and relates to the ways in which Indigeneity itself can be defined: Susan Miller, for example, defines Indigenousness “as the lifeways of those peoples who have never adopted a nation-state type of organization. Most usefully, Indigenousness may be viewed as a way of relating to everything else in the cosmos[, one where] people are seen as families or communities rather than individuals” (“Native Historians” 27). The Matter of Visibility The use of Thomson’s photographs merits further consideration in terms of how representations of the past shape Indigenous identity for both the Yolngu people and the Balanda, while failure to acknowledge the Indigenous past or to recognize the history and continuity of culture allows not only for generalized non-Indigenous racism but also for material consequences such as the Stolen Generation and the residential school systems that plagued Indigenous peoples throughout Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It matters what people see and how they interpret what they see. Thus the archive created by Thomson’s photographs has far more than an ethnographic significance, and the ways in which the photographs are taken up in the film speak to differing notions of the relationship between history, myth, storytelling, culture, and identity. On the one hand, as Davis points out, and despite the Ramingining community’s own affiliation with and sense of ownership of them, “de Heer’s script stubbornly overrides the historical basis of the photographs” as he sets the film back approximately one thousand years, before Yolngu contact with either “whitefellas” or the Makassans of Indonesia, rather than in the 1930s: “In other words,” Davis concludes, “as scriptwriter and director, de Heer seems determined to hold

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on tight to the myth of Yolngu spatial and temporal isolation” (“Remembering” 9). In attempting to understand why de Heer seems committed to maintaining a standard but inaccurate view of Yolngu history, Davis suggests, following Mike Walsh’s contention that the “pre-historical past, the time of ancestors, becomes a utopian space of enhanced vitality and possibility” (qtd. in Davis, “Remembering” 10), that “by privileging the story of the mythical past the film comes dangerously close to putting the historical-frame story, or what some Aboriginal writers refer to as ‘trustori,’ at the service of a very European notion of myth. That is to say, it reduces Aboriginal pre-contact history to a moral fable” (“Remembering” 10). Having raised the spectre of this risk, however, and having noted its appeal to “critics who are always pleased to see a film that they interpret as placing Indigenous people outside history,” Davis retreats from this position, choosing instead to emphasize the rarity with which the film has been received in this way and to concentrate instead on the ways in which the film counters stereotypical forms of colonial representation. Nevertheless, for all three of these films, and especially for Ten Canoes and Atanarjuat, there certainly remains the risk that, by creating a vivid, believable, and often attractive vision of the pre-contact past, the films risk confirming naive or sometimes overtly racist outsider stereotypes regarding the ways in which Indigenous people are both placed within history (locked in the past) and displaced from it (never its subjects). What the films’ historical emphases do displace, most vividly, are the images— never too deeply buried within the mainstream repertoire of stereotypes of Indigenous peoples—of the feckless, uneducated, and often alcoholic Indigene living on “undeserved” welfare cheques. This is somewhat peculiarly confirmed by Bruno Starrs, when he ends his discussion of sound in Ten Canoes by saying that de Heer has empowered the people of Ramingining to tell their own story “to the extent that the social malaise of contemporary Indigenous Australians seems an aberration, not the norm” (20). Should we really be surprised that the social malaise caused by colonization is not also the historical norm? Davis points out that “as a direct demand for recognition Gulpilil’s narration is timely, pointing us toward the wider frame of current politics of Aboriginal recognition in Australia” (“Remembering” 11), particularly coming, as it did, on the heels of widely publicized and often misleading13 reports of the incidence of child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. Davis notes that the federal government, rather than offering assistance in dealing with the long-term and traumatic damage of colonialism (what, in a Native American context, Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart has named “historical trauma,” i.e., unresolved trauma that is passed

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on historically from generation to generation), and specifically with the history of the Stolen Generations, during which kinship relations and parenting skills were destroyed, instead seized upon the reports as an excuse for exercises in “neo-paternalism” (“Remembering” 11). Writing early in 2007, before the Labour successors to Howard’s Liberal government went ahead with implementing the “Northern Territory Emergency Response Act” (NTER)—known to Aboriginal people and its non-Indigenous opponents as “the Intervention”—Davis was hopeful that the representation of Yolngu people in Ten Canoes as having both history and culture would convince Australians to rethink racist interventionist policies that have historically proven ineffectual. None of this is to dismiss the very real systemic difficulties that both rural and urban Aboriginal people face following more than a century of federal and state policies that have created a climate of hopelessness and despair in many communities and that have, all too often, sought to blame Aboriginal communities for the conditions created by colonization. Rather, it is to note that, as the people of Ramingining hoped, images of something that is both recognizably historical (the depiction of the past) and recognizably cultural (historical practices continued into and re-created in the present) demand a certain recognition from the audience that the Yolngu are neither noble savages nor indolent “dole bludgers” (welfare habitués), but people living in cultural systems as complex as, if different from, those of the non-Indigenous audience. But the material and discursive effects that Davis hoped for in 2007 failed to materialize. Indigenous judgment of the NTER circulates around three main themes: rather than protecting children and providing fulltime schooling in remote areas, the act has allowed compulsory seizure of Indigenous lands; quarantining of people’s incomes has made simple survival difficult, so that many Aboriginal people have fled to Darwin and other centres, where they face unemployment and homelessness; and there has been no significant increase in convictions for child abuse, while substance abuse has increased and school attendance and sales of alcohol and junk food have remained static. Even more to the point, Aboriginal social workers who call for collaboration between Indigenous communities and the government and for culturally literate approaches to remote communities have been ignored, as has growing opposition to the act among many groups and individuals, including former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (Bessarab and Crawford; “Statement on Aboriginal Rights by Leading Australians”). Thus the question of representation, which enables audiences to see people differently, matters because it has material consequences. When the dominant image of Aboriginal people is stereotypical and demeaning and when much of that image depends on the erasure of

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both historical and contemporary cultures (and their relationship to each other), we end up with popular support for, rather than objections to, racist and discriminatory policies. In this climate of ongoing federal and state hostility to the idea of Aboriginal people who are neither deculturated nor dispossessed of their traditional lands, films like Ten Canoes occupy a significant position in providing hope for Aboriginal communities by expressing the value and viability of Indigenous culture and law. The hope expressed in the making of Ten Canoes is reminiscent of that attached to each of the earlier films, Ofelas and Atanarjuat. In each case, the film was conceived by its makers and received by at least some among its various audiences as making both a political and cultural intervention into the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the surrounding settler/colonial cultures. Survivance: Dynamic Representations of the Past in the Present In a similar way, Atanarjuat is positioned by its makers, Igloolik Isuma Productions, just as their earlier documentaries had been, as a statement about Inuit survivance, to use Gerald Vizenor’s term for thinking about Indigenous survival as a continuous and changing process rather than a static replication of the past in the present. Atanarjuat is set about five hundred years in the past (both Ofelas and Ten Canoes are set roughly one thousand years in the past). The film’s assertion of the Inuit as a people with a culture, a history, and a vividly detailed knowledge of their environment marks them, as Shari Huhndorf notes, as “self-consciously engag[ing] in the interrelated projects of political activism (especially campaigns for sovereignty), nation building, and the reconceptualization of cultural identities in response to dramatic social changes” (823). Huhndorf adds that in all of Igloolik Isuma’s twenty-plus documentary films as well as the television series Nunavut (Our Land), a primary concern . . . is to convey a sense of continuity between past and present Inuit life. In this context, the past serves not as a marker of irremediable loss incompatible with changes in Native societies . . . Rather, through the dialogue, narratives, and the layering of historical and contemporary images, the films convey the persistence of traditional values and practices and their continued usefulness: at the same time they help to create this continuity between past and present by imparting traditional knowledge. (823) Atanarjuat does not depict a single contemporary practice until the end credits; nevertheless, the film comments on the colonial context and its effects on

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Inuit lives and epistemologies. Significantly, it is a stranger who brings evil into the community, thereby disrupting the ability of community members to live properly and to avoid breaking taboos. The strange shaman brings to the tribe precisely the same forms of confusion and deculturation that have been the result of colonial contact; the encounter with the shaman thus functions as a mise en abyme for colonialism as a whole. Raheja notes that read metaphorically as a seductive, foreign presence, the visiting shaman can be seen to represent both an individualized destructive power and the destructive power of Euro-Canadian colonialism. The community struggles over the course of the next two and a half hours to purge itself of the damage caused by the introduction of malevolent forces and begins to heal again. This is instructive for the contemporary community at Igloolik and its environs who can take these lessons about negotiating the potentially dangerous terrain of the “other” to apply to the present colonial and environmental context in their homelands. (“Reading” 1177) In addition, since shamanism, or local religion—which plays a significant part in all three films—is largely unknown outside Indigenous communities, the role of the shaman itself serves to distinguish between different audiences.14 Tom Crosbie points out that the Inuit filmmakers choose not to explain Inuit concepts and practices, such as shamanism, to non-Indigenes, thus “leaving the non-Inuit viewer out in the cold.” Indeed, Crosbie argues that Kunuk “dooms the settler to being the one ignorant of technology, survival, culture, and indeed genre” (148). Both Sophie McCall and Michelle Raheja point to the way in which the film’s opening lines (Tuurngarjuaq’s singing, “I can only sing this song to someone who understands it”) function as “a cue to the non-Inuit spectator (including non-Inuit Native Americans) that the film’s narrative and details may remain incommensurable since a non-Inuktitut speaking person wouldn’t understand his song” (Raheja, Reservation 212). For Crosbie, as for McCall and Raheja, the non-Inuit in the audience are faced with the task of cultural interpretation, a task that is usually forced upon the Indigenous; both Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes thus counter what Homi Bhabha has defined as “the colonist or settler’s self-interested projections . . . [in which] the literary or cinematic form of the indigene is often simply a narcissistic, mirror image of the coloniser/settler” (Crosbie 136), an attitude that Ernie Blackmore elsewhere in this book describes as “Aboriginalism,” following Said’s Orientalism. Raheja notes how Atanarjuat simultaneously refutes and exploits the “Eskimo orientalism” that sees “the representation of the Eskimo [as] about origins—in this

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case the origin of society in the ‘pure primitive’: peaceful, happy, childlike, noble, independent, and free. The Eskimo of the movies is ‘essential man,’ stripped of social constraint and High Culture” (Fienup-Riordan, qtd. in Raheja, Reservation 210). This is, of course, Flaherty’s “Eskimo,” embodied in Allakarialak’s creation of Nanook for Flaherty’s camera. Yet rather than rejecting this “‘Eskimo orientalist’ representational history” outright, Kunuk and his fellows at Igloolik Isuma make use of what they can—such as ethnographic texts and drawings—to lay claim to their own historical narratives and imagery. Survivance requires decolonizing practices that combat “Eskimo orientalism” or, more generally, “Aboriginalism” in all its forms. Film as a decolonizing practice relies, at least in part, on the capacity of visual technologies to allow audiences to see in specific ways. While it is impossible to foreclose alternative readings of any text, the visuality of film allows its makers to foreground certain interpretive possibilities. When the makers of Atanarjuat both re-create and revise images from Nanook of the North, they are foregrounding their own reclamation of history and identity. This may be enhanced for an audience that has a visual memory of Nanook, but it does not depend on knowledge of Flaherty’s film. Thus filmic references to Flaherty in Atanarjuat operate as a form of what Linda Hutcheon (1992), referring to Canadian culture more generally, refers to as a practice of double-talking: they have more than one audience and more than one potential meaning. For the Inuit, the most important meanings are clearly bound up in the ability to represent cultural history from an Inuit perspective. Thus infamous scenes from Flaherty involving the building of igloos and the interiors of igloos (notoriously shot in partial igloos to allow sufficient light for Flaherty’s camera) are both re-created and corrected, as are scenes of hunting and family life. This, in turn, reverses the accusation—implicit in Flaherty’s film—of primitivism and incompatibility with technology. As Crosbie points out, examining the scene where Nanook inserts an ice “window” into his igloo and his wife appears to clean it, “Flaherty’s portrayal at once renders the Inuit as completely Other in their exotic behaviour, [yet] he nevertheless ultimately asserts both the inferiority of their cultural practices, by linking the primitive ice window with the modern glass window, and demystifies the whole process through the jolt of recognition, in effect consigning the Inuit to reflect a simplified settler or modern, western lifestyle” (142). By contrast, Kunuk’s vision of igloo building delights in accuracy of detail, location within custom, and pleasure in the igloo’s aesthetics (for the latter, see Crosbie 141–42). The igloo has no need of comparison to either historical or contemporary nonIndigenous forms of housing; it exists in its own right as a practice proper

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to a way of life. The proper techniques of igloo building, and the recognition of the igloo as a technology proper to its geographical location and to Inuit cultural practice, together work towards a politic of survivance, of recognition that the past can survive in the present. As Huhndorf, Raheja, Krupat, and Crosbie all note, the film’s use of Western cinematic technologies not only to archive but also to preserve and re-create a living past reaffirms the possibility of reconciling Inuit tradition with the things the Inuit find useful in contemporary technologies and lifestyles: Atanarjuat’s concluding images, which are interspersed with the credits, complement this narrative turn by showing scenes from the making of the film; not only do these images highlight its fictional nature and, thus, further distinguish it from ethnography, they also show Inuit mastery of Western technologies used to accomplish their own goal of self-representation, another aspect of self-determination. These events and images find a parallel in recent Canadian history in Inuit efforts to establish political autonomy and to revive the practices that have defined life in the region for centuries, at times using Western tools to accomplish these purposes. Atanarjuat rewrites the Inuit past as well as the history and consequences of colonialism in a way that imagines, and consequently helps to realize, a different kind of future. (Huhndorf, “Atanarjuat” 825) This “different kind of future” is one that reinscribes Inuit values and belief systems onto people, culture, and land. It is what Kunuk means when he says that the film centres on “lessons we kids were supposed to learn about [the consequences] if you break . . . taboos” (Kunuk, “I First Heard” 17)—a quotation that also brings to mind the discussion of the law in Ten Canoes and thus links the two films’ projects of decolonization and visual sovereignty.15 All Parts of the Whole As with the other two films, Indigenous cosmology permeates every aspect of Ofelas. Thomas Dubois, the only critic to have written significantly on that film,16 begins his discussion by noting that Ofelas is both “an artistic entity and . . . a product of Sámi cultural revitalization” (255). He adds that “Ofelas is more than an entertaining and exciting film: it is a proposition to Sámi and non-Sámi peoples alike regarding the identity and future of Sámi people” precisely at a time when, as he quotes Harald Gaski, “the assimilationists were starting to believe their work of deculturing the Sámi was about to succeed” (256). The film thus functions as a turning point in the revival of Sámi culture and in reinforcing demands for recognition,

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self-governance, education and linguistic preservation, and land rights (notably grazing rights), among other issues—all of them familiar both to the Yolngu and to the Inuit as well as to Indigenous cultures in general. Furthermore, Dubois makes the point that, like Ten Canoes and Atanarjuat, Ofelas negotiates between at least two audiences. On the one hand, it displays a filmic idiom familiar to anyone who has watched American adventure films, be they Westerns, thrillers, or love/adventure stories. Leitmotif images of suspense and warning (including the telltale appearance of a raven whenever the villainous Chudes are on the move), eery thriller music (seamlessly mixed, however, with traditional Sámi yoik), a suspense-driven narrative structure, and complete resolution of plot conflicts by the film’s end all contribute to the film’s comprehensibility to international media-literate nonSámi audiences. (259) Dubois discusses both the aspects of Sámi culture and cosmology that Gaup chooses to gloss for non-Sámi audiences and the inside jokes and sly cultural references within the film. He also notes the ways in which Gaup reinterprets the traditional oral narrative so as to provide an element of suspense for an audience all too familiar with the story, largely through the humanizing of Aigin, so that it is possible for an audience to believe him too naive and inexperienced to deal with the Tchudes. Dubois also makes the point that Gaup may have set his film deep in the past in order to avoid disturbing both Sámi and other Scandinavian audiences with a valorization of shamanism over Christianity. The film depicts the Sámi living within a cosmology that emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things, a concept emphasized visually in the film by the repeated reference to circles: the circle of the magic ring that allows others to face the Noaidi (pathfinder) Raste’s eyes after he has killed the bear and thus absorbed its power, which makes his gaze temporarily lethal; and the circle of the decorated drum that the Noaidi uses to learn about events in other places and to divine the future, and that functions as a symbol of his role, which he passes on to Aigin. In fact, the drum is so central to the film’s cosmology that the images that decorate it appear both during the titles, entering the frame one by one to form a circle, and then again superimposed over the actual drum, and during the credits, when they are superimposed over an overhead shot of the surviving Sámi around the hearth fire. The symbols on the drum represent the world of the Sámi, including important animals (the reindeer, the bear, the moose, and the wolf), humans, and gods. More recent drums also bear images of churches and

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houses. Shamanism was associated with the devil by Christianity, and many drums were burnt by Christians, including Christianized Sámi, beginning in the seventeenth century as contact with the non-Indigenous Scandinavians increased. Dubois notes that for the insider audience, the shamanic initiation subplot holds tremendously divisive potential, a threat to the feelings of unity and consensus which the revitalist work should evoke. Noaidevuohta (“shamanism”), the divinatory drum, and other aspects of Sámi pre-Christian religion carry little charm or allure for many members of Gaup’s insider community . . . The old religion continues to be viewed as illicit among many Nordic Sámi Christians . . . In addition to these issues, however, the old religion continues to function as part of the Lapp-djavul stereotype common among non-Sámi Scandinavians . . . This stereotype operates in the Scandinavian community through the telling of common legends about Sámi magic and misdeeds, combined with an overall attitude of mistrust toward Sámi in general . . . The image of a Sámi Noaidi thus brings with it immediately this powerful stigma, no matter how personable, handsome, and heroic the character in the narrative may be. (268–69) Dubois notes that, by setting the film before Christianity became an option, Gaup avoids the censure of Christian Sámi. It is more difficult for him to avoid reinforcing non-Sámi stereotypes, but the film effectively depicts Sámi religion (“magic”) as a positive force, particularly when contrasted with “the religion of wolf-toothed depravity and malice practiced by the non-Sámi Chudes” (270). Indeed, it is this Sámi understanding of the interconnectedness of the whole world that differentiates them from the Tchudes: when Aigin initially refuses Raste’s attempts to get him to understand that, despite the loss of his family, he is not really alone, he ends up holding his hand over Aigin’s mouth to demonstrate that not everything can be seen. You can’t see it in the air, but your very existence is tied to it. In this way, all things are bound together, intertwined. No man can ever tear himself apart from the whole. But it can happen that he loses sight of the whole. When he does, he is like the Tchudes. Men who have lost the path. They stumble blindly towards self-destruction. The Noaidi is the village’s guide to living within the whole, an epistemological principle closely related to the idea of living within the law

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in Ten Canoes. Moreover, in case anyone should miss the importance of shamanism and the cosmological perspective it embraces, it provides the only two doubled moments in the film: the first, discussed above, with the reappearance of the drawings that decorate the drum; the second and perhaps more important, the repetition, part way through the scene, of Raste’s opening speech. At the start of the film—and in quite similar ways to Atanarjuat, which also opens with an extreme long shot of snowfields with a low-hanging moon in a deep-blue sky—we hear Raste’s voice initially as a voice-over to a panoramic view of the landscape in which human figures are reduced to tiny dots. Raste says: “Listen now, and remember what I say. This morning I saw the reindeer bull for the third time in my life. The first time I saw it, I was your age. Then once again, in the prime of my years. Young man, I am old. The reindeer has come to me for the last time.” The Sámi audience will presumably recognize immediately that the speaker is a Noaidi; the non-Sámi non-Scandinavian audience has to wait (with the patience advocated by Henderson) to see whether the film will offer an explanation. Even without any idea of the precise significance of the reindeer bull, however, the audience realizes that something significant is happening here, that something is being passed on from an older man to a younger. When the film immediately cuts to a shot of Aigin skiing homeward down the mountain slopes, we are not at first any wiser. It is not until Aigin flees to Raste’s village that the non-Sámi audience has any sense of Raste’s significance—and very soon after we realize this, the film repeats the initial speech, this time in context: the villagers have fled, and Aigin, consumed with thoughts of revenge, is sleeping in one of the lavvo as he awaits the arrival of the Tchudes. He is awakened twice: the first time thinking he sees the ghost of his sister; the second time by Raste, whose advice to him finishes with the very words that opened the film. After hearing these words, Aigin says, “But what does it mean, Raste?” He looks down for a second, and when he looks up, Raste is gone, leaving us, like Aigin, unsure if he was there in the flesh or by magic. When the Tchudes arrive, they kill all of the village men except for Raste and Aigin. Aigin bargains for Raste’s life, agreeing to lead the Tchudes over the mountains in pursuit of the women and children. But the Tchudes kill Raste anyway, something Aigin does not discover until later. As with the oral versions of the story, it is not clear whether Aigin has a plan in mind from the start or whether he changes his mind when he discovers the Tchudes’ double-dealing. Either way, he alerts the camp by throwing his flaming torch into the night sky while also tricking the Tchudes into falling to their deaths from the snow-covered mountainside—almost losing his own life in the process. Both the fleeing villagers and the coastal Sámi

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they have joined are initially persuaded that Aigin has betrayed them, only to discover that he has sacrificed himself for them. But Aigin survives to be reunited with his potential love interest and to take up the mantle—or rather the drum—of Raste. Despite having the most conventional narrative structure and pacing of the three films, Ofelas has a similar political and cultural agenda: Ofelaš presents itself not simply as history or folklore but as a parable, an affirmation of the strength of Sámi people when they recognize their common identity as well as their common enemy. Gaup’s Chudes are not dangerous because they are foreign, but rather, because they are evil: they have lost track of that unity which binds all things together and saves mankind from disintegration and depravity. Aigin leads his adopted community—and symbolically, all Sámi—away from that abyss of disconnectedness, towards a renewed embrace of unity and a recognition of the responsibilities of the individual to the collective. In a Sámi political climate long fragmented by national, economic, linguistic, and religious differences, Gaup’s portrayal offers a powerfully inclusive alternative vision. (Dubois 271) Indeed, director Nils Gaup’s political aims become even clearer when we look at his second feature film (the third, after Ofelas and Nils Goran Petterson’s Bázo, to be made in the Sámi language), Guovdageainnu Stuimmit (The Kautokeino Rebellion, 2008). In The Kautokeino Rebellion, Gaup tells a barely fictionalized version of the 1852 rebellion against Norwegian authorities in the small village of Kautokeino who were engaged in exploiting the local populace by pushing alcohol on the men, overcharging for staples, giving extended credit, which was then taken out by seizing and killing portions of the reindeer herd, and attempting to prevent the local Sámi from practising Laestadianism, a Sámi-influenced form of Lutheran Christianity that, in contrast to the state-sponsored Church of Sweden, encouraged abstinence from alcohol and—perhaps due to the influence on the young Lars Levi Laestadius of a Sámi women named Milla Clementsdottir—appears to have allowed women unprecedented authority in the church. At any rate, Gaup depicts Elen Aslaksdatter Skum17 as leading the Sámi conversion to Laestadius in the film. As the authorities in the town cracked down, attempting to force the local Sámi to shop at the town store and return to the official church, and unjustly imprisoning many of the men and slaughtering reindeer herds, they created such difficulties for the local people that a riot resulted during which the liquor dealer and

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a municipal official were killed and the store was burnt to the ground. Norwegian authorities arrested and tried Elen, her husband Mathis, and others. Two men identified as leaders, Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby, were beheaded after the trial, and their heads were sent to museums in Oslo and Copenhagen. Mons Somby’s descendant, Nillas, is a Sámi journalist and photographer who was politicized in 1968 by plans to build a hydroelectric dam across the Alta River at Alta-Guovdageainnu. The project would drown the Sámi village of Máze and threaten the culture and livelihood of the local Sámi, who depended largely on reindeer herding. (This, of course, has resonance for Canadians; three years later, the Cree of northern Quebec would engage in a prolonged battle with the provincial government over the James Bay hydroelectric project, which would eventually flood an area larger than the state of Florida, causing massive environmental destruction and displacing many of the traditional inhabitants of the land.) Nillas Somby became a significant voice in the resistance to the dam, taking part in protests and a hunger strike and finally, after the Sámi lost their court challenge in 1982, in an attempt to blow up the construction site. Somby lost an arm and an eye when the amateur bomb exploded prematurely; he was arrested, and his amputated hand was seized as evidence. He was released from prison while awaiting trial and fled to Canada, where he was adopted by the Iroquois First Nation. He was eventually recaptured by the RCMP and returned to Norway, where he was sentenced to time served. Although at the time of the dam protests, Somby was not all that knowledgeable about the fate of his ancestor in the 1852 rebellion (in an interview, Gaup makes the point that the event was something Sámi did not talk about), there are eerie parallels between the two stories. Those parallels came to the forefront when Somby, who managed to have his preserved hand returned to him by the authorities, discovered that the head of his ancestor remained in the Anatomical Institute at the University of Oslo. This discovery triggered his second campaign against Norwegian institutions: to retrieve the heads of the two executed Sámi. This campaign is recounted in one of the first Sámi documentaries, and certainly one of the best-known: 1999’s Oaivveskaldjut (Give Us Our Skeletons) directed by Paul-Anders Simma. Nils Gaup is himself a descendant of the other executed man, Aslak Hætta, and The Kautokeino Rebellion recalls the political and cultural oppression of the Sámi at a time when disputes over fishing rights,18 grazing rights, and the decision to build dams across traditional Sámi lands all created contention between the Sámi and the national governments of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. While the politics of The Kautokeino Rebellion are more overt than those

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of Ofelas, both mark the distinctive cultural identity of contemporary Sámi and their resistance to assimilation. Gaup’s films serve as a remarkable symbolic reminder. The beheading of Mons Somby and Aslak Hætta and the loss of Nillas Somby’s hand function as mise en abyme for the ways in which Indigenous cultures have literally been dis-membered by colonization, while the retention of skeletal remains and of Nillas’s hand symbolize the colonizing power’s obsessive interest in anatomizing and exoticizing the other, a practice that reached its extreme in the exhibition of the Indigenous Khoisan woman, Saartje Baartman. Kidnapped from South Africa in 1810, the teenaged Baartman was exhibited live and then, after her death in 1816, as an anatomical showpiece. Her skeleton, preserved brain, and genitals, and a plaster mould of her body, were exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1947 and were only repatriated to her homeland in 2002. The designation of Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” sums up the colonial fascination with her body as symbolic of the racialized and sexualized other, while her posthumous dismemberment serves as a synecdoche for colonial practice in general. In showing the local variant on this colonial obsession with the disciplining of the Indigenous body, and with the deculturation of Indigenous people through dismemberment, anatomization, and exhibition, Gaup reminds his audiences of the political stakes of an encounter that most descendants of colonists would prefer to forget.19 In contrast to the symbolically or literally dismembered bodies (of people, of culture) resulting from colonial contact, these three films bring together a sense of the wholeness of Indigenous culture (itself symbolized by law or other ways of encoding the idea of a proper way of living) through the use of visual technology, remastered into what Raheja refers to as visual sovereignty. This is a reclamation of relationship to the land (a relationship understood by the colonizer solely in terms of ownership); it is also a reclamation of more immaterial things, such as representation and culture—crucially, the representation of one’s own image. For representation has material consequences. As I discussed earlier, the misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples strongly authorizes government policies and public (non-Indigenous) attitudes and ideologies that remain, to this day, immured in colonial stereotypes and the wilful refusal to see Indigenous peoples in their full complexity, as people with both a present and a history. It is this remembering that is effected by the narrative in Ofelas when Aigin restores the harmony of his people by defeating the Tchudes and taking his rightful place as Noiadi around the drum: as Raste insists, he learns to be part of the whole. While Ofelas is, as already noted, the most conventional of the films in terms of pacing, cinematography, continuity, character development, and

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ultimate closure, it still has much in common with the others, particularly in its re-creation and valorization of a traditional world view that conflicts with that imposed on the Indigenous people by the colonizers. Each film begins with the intrusion of a stranger, or strangers, who bring evil to the community. Each ends with the restitution of a way of life after significant sacrifice. Each insists, also, on the viability of an Indigenous view of history that is not the colonizer’s as well as on the utility of an Indigenous cosmogony that is not the colonizer’s way of understanding the world. Thus each film ends with the restoration of harmony in the community through the refutation of the consequences of the stranger’s appearance on the land. This is particularly noticeable in Atanarjuat, where the filmmakers have chosen to revise the traditional narrative ending, in which Atanarjuat kills his enemies, in favour of one in which Atanarjuat merely defeats Oki and his brothers and leaves their punishment to the elders, who banish them from the community. The casting out of alien evil, through trickery, self-sacrifice, or both, links the films, despite their different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. Thus each, in remarkably similar ways, participates in a decolonizing project by reclaiming an Indigenous way of thought and an Indigenous historical perspective on the events of the past. To quote Michelle Raheja, each film thus functions to assist its respective people in asserting their own visual sovereignty.

Notes 1 There are several spellings of this traditional name for the invaders, but I have opted for Tchudes, as it is used in the English-language information on the film itself. The name is sometimes spelled “Chudes” or “Tsjudes.” 2 To save cluttering up this brief synopsis, I provide the actor’s names in this footnote: Tuurngarjuak (Abraham Ulayuruluk); Kumaglaq (Apayata Kotierk); Sauri (Eugene Ipkarnak); Tulimaq (Stephen Qrunnut); Oki (PeterHenry Arnatsiaq); Aamarjuaq (Pakkak Innuksuk); Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq); Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu); Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk). 3 For a discussion of shamanistic practices in Inuit culture in relation to their depiction in the film, see the ethnographic commentary by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure that is included with the published dual-language script (Paul Apaq Angilirq et al., Atanarjuat The Fast Runner). 4 This point is reinforced when, narrating The Balanda and the Bark Canoes: The Making of Ten Canoes, Rolf de Heer notes that “to the men, we’re attempting to find a part of their history. But they want more than history from this film. They want respect. Respect from the Balanda [white] culture for their culture.” The film then becomes a way of placing Yolngu history and culture, through its representation in the widely viewed

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medium of dramatic film, on an equal footing with a Balanda culture that has either ignored or debased Indigenous viewpoints. In relation to Star Wars, although much science fiction is set in the future, Lucas’s films are located, as in the quote, in the distant galactic past; in addition, the films rely on an imagistic synthesis of myths, legends, and folktales from Western cultures. Finally, the complicated relationship between past, present, and future—the viewer watches, in the present, a film set in the far distant past that looks like the far distant future—echoes the point that the Yolngu understand time differently from the linearity dominant in Western cultures. 5 Louise Hamby makes the point in “Thomson Times and Ten Canoes” that the Museum Victoria collection of artifacts, many collected by Donald Thomson, includes pubic covers for the women that de Heer chose not to use, along with other artifacts, like bags and nose rings, that Hamby claims are more accurate—at least for the 1930s—than some of those used in the film. In “A Question of Time: Ten Canoes,” Hamby cites a Yolngu informant, Jimmy Burinyila, who dislikes much of the film and complains that it is not accurate in its details. However, most Yolngu who have been cited commenting on the film have been very positive about it, particularly in its relationship to a sense of cultural revitalization. Henderson, for example, quotes Bobby Bunungurr as saying, “When I’m acting out on the swamp in the canoes, I feel full of life. The spirits are around me, the old people they with me, and I feel it . . . The spirits of my older people they’re beside me and they’re giving me more knowledge” (65). 6 The distinctions among myth, legend, storytelling, and history are somewhat unclear, even in the West. In general, storytelling—particularly oral storytelling—is linked to legends and folktales, whereas the term “myth,” although sometimes used synonymously with legend, is often deployed as a term for designating “untrue” religions (i.e., ones other than the speaker’s). Myth may be “true” in some larger psychic or cultural sense; legend is often assumed to have some loose basis in the past; folktales may be culturally true but not factual; history is generally understood in populist terms and in some academic circles as a recitation of past fact. In relation to these films, both the distinctions and the confusions among the terms are crucial, and they can be deployed by critics in both negative and productive ways. 7 L.R. Hiatt, in “Who Wrote Ten Canoes,” makes the point that the question of the origin of the Myth time story “is never satisfactorily answered. According to the Ten Canoes website, the story and script were created expressly for the film, which rules out the possibility that the latter was knowingly based on an existing myth, folktale or legend in the traditional corpus” (72). Louise Hamby notes, however, that the film has been taken up among the Ylongu as having its own historical reality, citing de Heer’s comment that “it has become one of their traditional stories” (qtd. in “Thomson Times and Ten Canoes,” 145).

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8 While Yolngu contact with Europeans dates back only to the 1880s, they have a significantly longer history of contact with the Makassans of Sulawesi, who visited every year to trade for trepang (sea cucumber) with the local people. Peta Stephenson notes that “the enduring connections established between the Makassan and the Yolngu undermine ‘the idea of Australia’s supreme cultural isolation’ prior to British colonisation” (18). Trade with the Makassans formed a significant part of the Yolngu economy and was sufficiently important that a trade pidgin functioned as a lingua franca in Yolngu territory. In fact, the word “Balanda” is derived from the Makassar language, in which it means “Hollander.” 9 While some sources credit only de Heer as director, he himself (a) gives codirecting credit to Peter Djigirr, and (b) is on record as crediting the community as a whole: “They’re telling the story, largely, and I’m the mechanism by which they can” (qtd. in Hiatt, “Who Wrote Ten Canoes?” 72). 10 Anthropologist Donald Thomson (1901–1970) visited the Yolngu people in Arnhem Land from 1935 to 1937 and again in 1942 and 1943. During those two trips, Thomson took more than 2,500 ethnographic photographs, as well as 1,500 images of natural history, in addition to collecting some 5,500 objects. Thomson took more than 11,000 photographs during his career, along with 7,600 metres of colour film; these are today in the collection of Museum Victoria (http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections-research/ our-collections/indigenous-cultures/donald-thomson/). 11 In this regard, it is important to note Hamby’s discussion of the ways in which the film has been taken up as a true story within Yolngu culture. While her discussion seems, probably unintentionally, a bit condescending about this response to the film, it reinforces the point that other epistemologies do not depend on the oppositional and hierarchical nature of Cartesian dualisms between myth and history or fiction and fact. 12 See both Hiatt (“Who Wrote Ten Canoes?”) and Bessire (“Talking Back to Primitivism”) for an analysis of mainstream reviews. 13 The reports seem to have been misleading because they failed to consider the effects of government policy on creating a climate of despair and engaged in a discourse of “blaming the victim”; they homogenized all Indigenous communities as the same, when there are many communities that have few or no issues with alcoholism, gambling, child abuse, domestic violence, and so on; they failed to contextualize the figures in relation to the experience of non-Indigenous communities; they failed to recommend culturally specific or sensitive approaches, but engaged entirely in top-down practices that have proven historically ineffectual; and, finally, they produced the abhorrent results of allowing seizure of Indigenous lands, of quarantining people’s incomes in ways that make ordinary life difficult to sustain, and of suspending the Racial Discrimination Act in order to allow race-based discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal families under the guise of “child protection.” In addition, Boyd Hunter points out that the incidence of child abuse in non-Indigenous Northern Territory populations (13.7 per 1000)

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was identical to the rate for Indigenous communities yet was not manifested as a public crisis (38). As with both Atanarjuat and Ofelas, there are a number of different audiences for Ten Canoes, each of which has a different relationship to the idea of Indigenous history. This is reflected to some extent in the three versions: one entirely in Gunalbingu and other Indigenous languages; one—the theatrical release—with an English narration and English subtitles for the Gunalbingu dialogue; and one dubbed wholly into English. There is the “insider” audience made up of the Yolngu and other Aboriginal peoples in Australia; there is the audience made up of other Indigenous peoples around the world, many of whom share common experiences of colonization, misrepresentation, and general mistreatment; there is the “outsider” audience of the Balanda and of non-Indigenous Australians, including recent immigrants; and there is the “outsider” international non-Indigenous audience, who may know little not only about Aboriginal cultures but also about Australia’s history of colonization. Ofelas, of course, complicates the linguistic situation. The original VHS tapes were in the Sámi language (which itself includes a number of distinct dialects) with subtitles (Norwegian, Swedish, and English). Also available, however, were a Norwegian DVD version in Sámi with Norwegian subtitles, as well as a German-distributed DVD that can be played in Sámi with subtitles in German, English, Spanish, or Portuguese or with dubbing into Norwegian, German, English, or Spanish. “Visual sovereignty” is a term applied to North American Indigenous film practices by Michelle Raheja in her 2007 article, “Reading Nanook’s Smile.” Raheja defines visual sovereignty as a way of “thinking about the space between resistance and compliance wherein indigenous filmmakers and actors revisit, contribute to, borrow from, critique, and reconfigure ethnographic film conventions, at the same time operating within and stretching the boundaries created by those conventions” (1161). If there are any significant additional Scandinavian-language works on the film, I have not been able to locate them, other than the discussion in Morsett’s Norwegian PhD thesis (“Stemme Fra Nord, Samisk Revitalisering”), which is, as yet, neither published nor translated into English. This is her name in the film, although some historical sources seem to give it as Elen Jacobsdatter Hætta. Kasta Pâ Land (Forced Ashore, 2010, dir. Harry Johansen) documents the use of a government ban on fishing to remove traditional fishing rights from the Coast Sámi while allowing commercial fishing in the same fjords. In an extreme version of this wilful forgetting, current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on record as saying, “We are one of the most stable regimes in history. There are very few countries that can say for nearly 150 years they’ve had the same political system without any social breakdown, political upheaval or invasion. We are unique in that regard. We also have no history of colonialism” (qtd. in Wherry; emphasis mine).

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Part III Mediating Practices

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Seven Ka Whawhai Tonu Ma-tou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/New Zealand JO SMITH AND SUE ABEL

As our title suggests,1 the founding of an Indigenous television channel in Aotearoa/New Zealand came only after what Māori broadcaster Tainui Stephens describes as “three decades of agitation by Māori” (113). New Zealand’s first Indigenous television channel, Māori Television, finally went to air on Sunday, 8 March 2004. Ever since, Māori Television has posed a challenge to established television culture in this settler-nation. New Zealand’s screen culture has long privileged a mainstream and predominantly Pākehā (New Zealand European) audience; the arrival of Māori Television signals a new era in that culture. The channel’s programming asks New Zealand society to take seriously the perspectives of non-Pākehā. International documentaries and other global programming link Māori issues with global Indigenous political concerns; at the same time, lifestyle shows throw into relief the monocultural offerings of other programming providers. Indigenous broadcast culture has generated strong tensions between Indigenous aspirations and the broader history of settlement, tensions that are conditioning New Zealand’s contemporary socio-political milieu. In this chapter we examine the emergence of Māori Television, describe the debates over the channel (its purpose and functions), and assess its ability to present a counter-narrative of New Zealand national identity that challenges more orthodox representations of this contemporary settler-nation. The History of Māori Television’s Emergence Māori Television has emerged from a long struggle to get the Crown to recognize and accept the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. That Treaty forms the bicultural basis of Aotearoa/New Zealand and has fuelled intranational claims 17 5

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to Indigenous sovereignty, as well as appeals for authority and power-sharing capacities that have implications not only for New Zealand broadcast culture but also for ways of understanding New Zealand national identity. Long-time Māori broadcaster (and ex-CEO of Māori Television) Derek Tini Fox puts it like this: The Treaty, signed in 1840 between the British Crown and the chiefs of Aotearoa, guaranteed to the Māori people tino rangatiratanga, or absolute authority over all their resources; and a large number of Māori communities are currently reclaiming, under the Treaty, land which has been stolen from them over the last 150 years. Like the land, the public broadcasting system is a vital present-day resource, and as such Māori are legally entitled to an equal share of it. (260) Yet the treaty remains an incomplete project in terms of meeting its promise of power sharing between Treaty partners. The state infrastructure continues to be based on forms of governmentality inherited from British imperialism (in the form of a Governor General, a House of Parliament, and a High Court), and while many aspects of Māori culture have been incorporated into the existing infrastructure, little systemic change has occurred (Fleras and Spoonley 239). A prominent characteristic of this contemporary settler-nation is that it regulates intranational tensions such as Treaty obligations by resorting to a rhetoric of pragmatism that asks New Zealanders to “get the past behind them” so that the nation can compete with a united front in an increasingly globalized economy.2 Māori culture has a significant symbolic value on the global market, a value that the New Zealand government utilizes for its own ends. The promotion, activities, and achievements of Māori Television must be understood in this larger context. However, Māori access to the means of media representation has been much less than the bicultural balance promised by the Treaty. According to Fox, in 1993 the amount of television programming with content relevant to Māori was less than 1 percent of total broadcast time (261). And prior to 2004, shows that were relevant to Māori were most often scheduled at non-commercial times. Writing before the emergence of the Māori Television channel, Tainui Stephens noted that one of the usual reasons given by broadcasters for their lack of support for Māori television [on mainstream channels] is that it is not commercially viable. It is no accident that most Māori programming is seen on Sunday mornings. This is currently the only non-commercial time on the weekly schedule. This continued relegation to Sunday morning transmission is viewed by many as an insult. (110)

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One must understand the emergence of Māori Television in 2004 in light of this longer history of Treaty neglect. Treaty rights were mobilized in relation to broadcasting concerns in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s the fourth Labour government launched neoliberal reforms and set about deregulating media industries. When Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand were established as state-owned enterprises in 1986, the New Zealand Māori Council and Nga Kaiwhakapumau i te Reo (Guardians of the Language) took a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal, arguing that under the Treaty the Māori language was a taonga (treasure) and that the Crown had a responsibility to protect the language by, among other things, ensuring its presence on the airwaves of the nation. Because of Crown intransigence, Māori took this claim (at considerable cost in time and money) to the Privy Council in London. The Crown’s eventual recognition of the significance of te reo led to the establishment of the funding agency Te Mā ngai Pā ho in 1993, which is tasked with allocating funds for promoting Māori language and Māori culture. This did not, however, immediately clear the way for Māori Television. Ranginui Walker has documented both the bureaucratic impediments and the ill will among a considerable section of the non-Māori public throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. This ill will was fuelled by ongoing critical scrutiny of Māori media initiatives by mainstream media, drawing on and furthering a long-established discourse of Māori inability to manage institutions and their finances, resulting in “a waste of taxpayers’ money.” A key development here was what long-time Māori broadcaster Debra Reweti describes as (with considerable understatement) the “interesting experiment” of the establishment of the Aotearoa Television Network (ATN) in 1996 (184). ATN was described by the Crown as a pilot scheme for a Māori television channel and was set up to run for thirteen weeks. Because of the time frame and the budget it was allowed, many commentators have suggested that it was set up to fail. 3 Its heavily publicized money troubles followed by its closure in 1997 ultimately tainted the reputation of Māori program makers. Indeed, due to mainstream press coverage of ATN, this initiative is best remembered for CEO Tukuroirangi Morgan’s clothing expenditure rather than for the high-quality Māori-language programs it produced. The emergence of Māori Television in 2004 would also draw intense scrutiny from news media, which focused on the channel’s potential failure rather than its aspirations. Many roadblocks prevented the channel from going to air in mid-2002. In 2001, Minister of Māori Affairs Parekura Horomia introduced the Māori Television Service Bill to establish a new channel dedicated to te ao Māori (the Māori world). This bill was not passed until May 2003, which meant that in the meantime there was no legislation to support and enable

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the newly appointed Board of Directors to function effectively. During this time of legislative inertia, the board was asked to appoint a CEO (the now notorious Canadian John Davy, who turned out to have no legitimate qualifications for the position). While the Māori Television board struggled to function in the legislative vacuum of 2001 to 2003, media coverage of the efforts of Māori Television avoided deeper analysis of the board’s situation, focusing instead—with relish—on the past failures of ATN, the John Davy fiasco and, later, the departure of Derek Fox as CEO at the end of 2003. The stereotype of Maori initiatives as a waste of taxpayers’ money surrounded the emergence of the Indigenous channel. In 2003, prior to Māori Television’s launch, Marc Alexander, broadcasting spokesman for the conservative political party United Future, conflated the accountancy problems of a Māori production house with the viability of a Māori channel. Citing the financial woes of Aroha Films as “just another nail in the coffin of Māori TV,” Alexander went on to criticize a channel dedicated to te ao Māori by stating that “you simply cannot expect people to make competent business decisions for an enterprise that relies on ideologically driven agendas rather than on market needs” (Alexander). The question needs to be asked: How could one production company’s financial woes have such a strong impact on the broader initiatives of a Māori channel? What symbolic value could this failure generate for the wider non-Māori community of Aotearoa/New Zealand? Public discourses like these feed into a long history of Pākehā/Māori encounters where Pākehā label advocates of Treaty rights as somehow against the notion of the nation (or as “haters and wreckers,” according to former Prime Minister Helen Clark),4 or as part of a “Treaty-grievance industry.”5 These kinds of public outcries betray an established attitude that Māori are marginal and are somehow a threat to nationhood. Despite such ideologically charged press and political reception, the kaupapa (commitment to a particular philosophy) that drives Māori Television has resulted in a fiscally responsible organization that has produced a hitherto unseen vision of life in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The unexpectedly high core viewership per month (of which at least 77 percent is estimated to be non-Māori ) suggests that Māori Television has proven there is an eager market for public service television and that tikanga (customs) and te reo Māori (Māori language) have a pivotal function to play not only in te ao Māori but also in the nation as a whole. Yet it is not quite clear at this stage what effects this pivotal function will generate. As suggested by the Crown’s recognition of the important role played by broadcast culture in the revitalization of te reo Māori (and as long argued by Māori), the focus on media industries highlights the increasingly central role that

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audiovisual culture plays in the negotiation of community relationships, social power, and cultural survival. Indeed, as part of a global Indigenous media movement, Māori Television has a role to play in disrupting the hegemony of New Zealand settler society and in affirming an Indigenous form of social agency. Epifanio San Juan argues (in the context of US racial politics, but also applicable to the cultural politics of New Zealand), “racial politics today is no longer chiefly mediated by biological and naturalistic ascriptions of value, but rather by symbolic cultural interpellations . . . pivoting around the affirmation of a ‘common culture’” (131). The mainstream press coverage of ATN and of Māori Television’s emergence suggests that technologies of representation have long been in the hands of settler-centric media producers who have defined what is “common” about New Zealand culture. Pākehā resentment over the funding of Māori broadcasting initiatives has relied on arguments concerning taxpayer rights and “special privileges” based on racial difference. Yet for the first twenty years of New Zealand broadcasting, when Māori were paying taxes, programming content of relevance to Māori was almost non-existent. In light of these embedded discourses of nationhood and Māori/Pākehā relations, how might Māori Television dislodge such narratives? The Role and Function of Māori Television As noted earlier, the emergence of Māori Television has been driven by the rights to representation as guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi. The Act that established Māori Television states: The principal function of Māori Television is to promote te reo Māori me ngā tikanga Māori [Māori language and customs] through the provision of a high quality, cost-effective Māori television service, in both Māori and English, that informs, educates and entertains a broad viewing audience, and, in doing so, enriches New Zealand’s society, culture and heritage. (Section 8) The channel’s mandate is to promote the cultural revitalization of te ao Māori and at the same time to inform, educate, and entertain a “broad viewing audience.” To maintain cultural integrity, the channel has a Kaunihera Kaumātua, or Māori Elders Council, which meets quarterly and provides cultural advisory support to the channel in terms of both te reo and tikanga. The channel’s employees’ manual states: “Through this Kaunihera Kaumātua we are able to receive independent guidance on how we are operating the channel from the perspective of those who contributed to its development.” Māori Television’s tactic of naturalizing te reo and tikanga

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Māori extends itself to every level of the channel’s organization, including its station promotion. The channel’s tag line (mā rātou [for them]; mā mātou [for us, but not them]; mā koutou [for you]; mā tātou [for everyone]) addresses an array of possible viewers, who include Māori and non-Māori, native speakers and non-native speakers. Accordingly, while Jim Mather (CEO of Māori Television from 2005–13) sees the core audience as fluent Māori speakers, Māori Television must also attract a broader audience that might be attracted to the language and/or the culture. In an interview in July 2007, Mather described the channel’s strategy as one of offering highquality local programming content, including public service programming and grassroots level sports. Viewers who tune in to a popular program are more likely to view other programming content placed alongside it. The intent is to “zig” where other channels “zag.” A prime example of this strategy is Māori Television’s all-day schedule of programming for Anzac Day in 2006, a day that commemorates war veterans and that has a significant place in New Zealand’s national imaginary. Another example of Māori Television’s ability to “zig” where others “zag” is the 2007 introduction of the current affairs show Native Affairs at a time when news media in this country were under severe threat. Other strategies for nurturing te reo Māori and attracting a broader audience can be seen in the popular sporting program Code, which features Māori athletes and role models. The show is set in a sitting-room environment so that its “laid-back Māori manner” eases the audience into its content. Although an English-language show, one segment of the program, titled “Wai’s Word,” involves Wairangi Koopu introducing Māori League vocabulary (e.g., poumuri is the Māori word for “backs”). Thus, while capturing an already established audience of sports fans, the show models, incorporates, and plants a language “seed” that might attract nonMāori speakers to the language and to te ao Māori. According to Māori Television’s former GM Programming Larry Parr, Māori Television has succeeded in the ratings so far because it “has attracted disenfranchized [Pākehā] viewers from the mainstream channels, who like Māori Television because of its public service broadcasting and minimal advertising.” This, he says, “has come at the expense of our own rangatahi (young people).” To honour its commitment to its core constituency of Māori-speaking viewers, Māori Television launched a second, complementary, channel in 2008 which screens 100 percent te reo programming. With this second channel Māori Television exceeds the amount of te reo they are required by statute to broadcast. Māori Television contends that it is contributing not just to Māori culture but to New Zealand’s national culture. Indeed, the popularity of the

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channel’s Anzac Day coverage suggests that the station is quickly becoming the channel for material traditionally associated with public service television.6 Nevertheless, there are questions that need to be asked, revolving around the role that Māori Television plays in contributing to New Zealand nationhood in a socio-political milieu informed by colonization. Māori Television functions within a wider mediascape in which Māori differences have often distinguished New Zealand in the global market—think here of the internationally successful film Whale Rider, the All Blacks’ haka, and the koru sign that adorns the national airline. This domestication of Indigenous cultural difference is an established mechanism of colonial and contemporary settler governance. The early successes of Māori Television may well have served the interests of the previous Labour government, which practised a particular brand of benevolent biculturalism that incorporated things Māori into an otherwise beige nation-state without making actual structural changes to existing forms of governance. There are issues, then, for Māori Television. Might Māori Television be contributing to a sense of national identity in which reo and tikanga are “normalized” and more non-Māori have some understanding of te ao Māori but in which structural inequities resulting from colonization are concealed? To what extent might Māori Television be pressured to present a domesticated form of Maori cultural difference—one that affirms a harmonious sense of nationhood—in order to sustain its own viability as a capital-intensive broadcaster? These questions have arisen in shifts in the promotional discourses surrounding Māori Television. Counter-Narratives of Nationhood? One advertisement for the channel begins with an archival image of a Māori group (including women and children) participating in a peaceful protest by blocking a railway line development at Mangapehi in 1910. The next image is a close-up shot of Mahatma Gandhi in the year that India gained its independence from British colonial rule. The third image takes us to 1964 with a still image of Martin Luther King Jr. and the passing of the American Civil Rights Bill. King’s image is quickly followed by that of Nelson Mandela, who is depicted placing a ballot in the box for the 1994 all-race elections in South Africa. To complete this prestigious lineup, the final black-andwhite photo includes Helen Clark, the now former Prime Minister of New Zealand, with two prominent Māori figures (including Huirangi Waikerepuru, a key player in the Te Reo claims to the Waitangi Tribunal). The caption notes the 2004 launch of Māori Television. This ad’s syntagmatic structure links earlier non-violent protests by Māori with the successes of world-famous leaders, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mandela, all

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of whom achieved political success for their people against colonial and/ or settler oppressors using non-violent means. By the time the final image of the launch of Māori Television appears, the audience has been invited to link contemporary Pākehā/Māori relations to successful international strategies of reconciliation and social justice. Yet where Mandela, King, and Gandhi are pictured as individuals responsible for watershed moments in history, Māori Television’s image features an image of Pākehā/Maori unity, a vision of bicultural bliss if you will. Where the first image of land protest in 1910 acknowledges the historic oppression of Māori, the final image of this ad positions Māori Television as the result of Māori agents and their successful partnership with the state. Likewise, the state is presented as an equal partner in the founding of Māori Television. While there can be no doubt that Māori Television is the result of state-sanctioned bicultural initiatives, this ad generates many ambiguous and ambivalent effects. The image of a successful launch stands in close proximity to historical examples of social progress and reconciliation as already achieved states. Yet in the same year that Māori Television was launched, the hikoi (protest march) against the Foreshore and Seabed Act took place and the independent Māori Party was founded in response to the government’s refusal to honour the recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal.7 While evidence of Māori protest does feature in the ad, it is placed safely in the past. The ad, therefore, not only masks the state’s long-term resistance to the establishment of Māori Broadcasting but also elides broader issues of Māori sovereignty and ongoing forms of settler governance. In this ad, the New Zealand nation is presented in bicultural harmony as an achieved state, with the former prime minister playing a significant part as the face of this benevolent bicultural nation. Yet, as we outlined above, while the voices that spoke out against the channel before it started broadcasting may have subsided, we mustn’t forget that it took dogged political activism on the part of Māori to get any Māori broadcasting at all. One long-time Māori journalist has suggested: Basically the Government had no choice but to set up Māori Television, and now if you listen to Parekura Horomia he is basically taking credit for this wonderful thing called the Māori channel. The Government is quick to fudge the whole background and history of Māori Television. It took a Court Case and then the Government defending it to the tune of what I’ve heard rumoured as around $50 million to try and cut [Māori Television] off at the knees. (Harawira, 2007)

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In light of this, we must be suspicious of any uncritical celebration of the channel’s achievements. The second example of Māori Television’s nation-building agenda can be seen in the subtle shift in its tag line from “Mā rātou, mā mātou, mā koutou, mā tātou” to an emphasis on “Mā tātou.” This latter version is found on the channel’s website, where viewers are welcomed with the following: Mā Tātou—for everyone Māori Television is New Zealand’s channel—we have something for everyone. You’ll see New Zealand life, New Zealand stories and New Zealand people.” The earlier and longer tag line suggested a diverse and variegated audience. For example, the distinction between mātou and tātou is an important one. Mātou refers to an “us” that means “you and me, but not those over there,” which implicitly suggests an Other. Tātou, on the other hand, means “all of us, together.” Any notion of diversity, of differences between groups, disappears when the longer tag line is abbreviated to simply “Mā tātou.” The diminution of difference continues in the body of text. Significantly, the term “Māori”—a group seen by Māori Television as its core audience—is absent here. Instead, the audience is interpellated as “New Zealanders,” and the repeated use of “our” solidifies this construction of national identity. Cultural differences thus become just another demographic difference such as that between “old and young.” How might we read this strategy of inclusiveness? As Māori Television inserting Māori into a previously settler defined and determined sense of nationhood? Could Māori Television be taking the lead in constructing a sense of nationhood for the nation, but on Māori terms? Or is this simply a marketing strategy that seeks to elide difference in order to better appeal— as per the statutory requirements set by the government—to a “broad audience”? One way to start to understand these shifts in promotional discourse is to think of Māori Television as a tool of decolonization. Māori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell, an early supporter of Māori Television as a tool for decolonization (Flavell, “Opening Address”), now sees the channel as having the potential for decolonization. He argues that programming in te reo does not in itself “free up the Māori mind” or educate Māori about the position of Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand today (Flavell, “Interview”). Is there some way, then, in which Maori Television offers us a tool

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for decolonizing the mind and thereby shifting the default setting of New Zealand mediascapes from one that privileges a settler-centric perspective? Wayne Walden, chairman of Māori Television (from 2003 to 2007), suggests that the management team “have purposely positioned Māori Television as ‘the face of Aotearoa New Zealand’” (“Chairman’s Review”). If this is so, then the nation-building agenda of Māori Television may not entail the same-old homogeneous notion of national identity that is the current orthodoxy. If we pick up on Flavell’s point that what Māori need is a decolonization of the mind, then we could ask: Do non-Māori also need a decolonization of the mind? What might a decolonization of the mind look like? Does a decolonized mind think from the viewpoint of difference as an ethico-political stance? If so, whose differences might one think from, and how are these differences to be accessed, understood, negotiated, and translated? More generally, we could ask how a critical and thus political notion of difference is articulated, maintained, and proliferated in this contemporary settler-nation and what role Māori Television has in contributing to this critical consciousness. John Hartley argues that television can act as a teacher of cultural citizenship and that television has a pedagogical function that can introduce an audience to other ways of being and becoming (140). The question then is, what kind of cultural citizenship does Māori Television model, perform, and demonstrate, and how might these strategies get taken up in the wider social context of Aotearoa/New Zealand? By focusing on Walden’s notion that Māori Television acts as “the face of Aotearoa New Zealand,” we can examine how the channel constitutes another kind of “worlding” that departs from established national orthodoxies. First off, one must approach the term Aotearoa/New Zealand as a conjunction of signs that demarcate the endlessly contested nature of this settler-nation. “Aotearoa” refers to an iwi-based nation, and “New Zealand” is that which demarcates the settler-nation and those who came after tangata whenua. The slash or gap between these two terms is the site that holds in doubt, suspension, and fine balance the potential unity of the two. Accordingly, a critically conscious approach to this conjunction might see Aotearoa/New Zealand as designating a site of endless contestation over what and who gets to count as the nation. By focusing on the gap or slash between the two terms, we can identify the differences between a Māori and a non-Māori audience that Māori Television might seek to appeal to. But we cannot forget that Aotearoa/ New Zealand is also a name that appeals to the dual identity of Māori within this settler-nation. Many Māori scholars and commentators have pointed out that Māori possess a dual identity that is unavailable to other

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New Zealanders: they are both members of an iwi and citizens of the state.8 While Walden’s claim that Māori Television seeks to provide “the face of Aotearoa/NZ” does suggest a nation-building agenda similar to that of settler society (where the nation is premised on a bicultural relationship between Māori and Pākehā), one can also read his statement as an address to the dual identity of Māori, who are both citizens of New Zealand and iwi members of Aotearoa. This latter mode of address privileges the differences within the category “Māori.” Such recognition suggests a critical form of difference that is not domesticated by a national orthodoxy that privileges the settler perspective. This is perhaps the critical and pedagogical function of Māori Television: to bring to light hitherto unseen visions of Aotearoa/NZ; to see with “iwi eyes” the shape and contours of the nationscape. These internal or immanent forms of difference get played out not only in the station’s original logo (“Mā rātou, mā mātou, mā koutou, mā tātou”), but also within the range of scheduling that Māori Television provides and in the content of the programs screened on the channel. To give some sense of what Māori Television offers, we could examine the popular “agony aunt” show Ask Your Auntie, hosted by Ella Henry, who is joined by a rotating panel of twelve women from various iwi. These women model a style of public debate that recognizes the differences in opinion among the panel members even while the panel expresses a shared sense of whanaungatanga (a close relationship) and community. They also offer solutions that come directly from their experiences as members both of a culture with its own and different tikanga and of a marginalized Indigenous group.9 Again, the tensions generated by Māori Television’s positioning within a settler-dominated mediascape persist. Ask Your Auntie could be perceived as a show where one can voyeuristically consume the pains, problems, and everyday ordeals of te ao Māori and so contribute to the commodification of Māori differences. But it is also a show that models public debate, mana wahine Māori (the strength/status of Māori women), diversity, and a critically conscious form of difference. These tensions between commodification and critique cannot be resolved, and indeed, we should not try to find a resolution. In this settler-dominated mediascape, Ask Your Auntie—like Māori Television as a whole—tries to dramatize, demonstrate, and model the endlessly contested nature of everyday articulations of national being and becoming. More generally, Māori Television asks us to reconsider the meanings surrounding Aotearoa and New Zealand and to privilege the many ways there are of understanding cultural and national belonging. Māori Television constitutes a worlding of Aotearoa/New Zealand that speaks in a multiplicity of different voices. This multidirectional mode of

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address might at one point invoke “mā tātou” in a nation-building gesture reminiscent of settler strategies, but we must remember that this gesture is rendered in te reo Māori, which requires that the non-Māori audience begin to understand this address in ways that differ from established orthodoxies. If earlier we have asked what kind of cultural citizenship Māori Television models and what its pedagogical function is, we could say that the channel asks its audience to think from the viewpoint of difference in ways that might change the orthodox frameworks we use for talking about national identity and social belonging. As a pedagogical project, this is no easy task; nor should it be. This is the work that media scholars face today. In an era of expanding Indigenous media content, we must find ways to think beyond binaries, develop site-specific ways of talking about the work of culture, and confront the ambivalences and ambiguities of Indigenous media within a contemporary settler-nation. Some Cautionary Observations We have called this chapter Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou (struggle without end). As we write this, Māori Television continues to face a range of challenges. But before it went to air, such challenges came predominantly from Pākehā; today, the rumblings come from Māori communities . The strategies that Māori Television has followed to attract a “broad audience” are not always appreciated by Māori viewers. Anecdotal evidence tells of older Māori who say, “We did not go on a hikoi for Ask Your Auntie.” Professor Taiarahia Black, Massey University’s head of Māori Language, has publicly challenged Māori Television: Māori TV must be reminded and held accountable so Māori can access quality Maori language options to build Māori language proficiency and knowledge about ourselves to increase the status and use of te reo Māori. Isn’t this what Māori TV was established to do in 2004, based on the premise te reo Māori is a taonga (treasure) to be protected and promoted as a living language? (Dykes 3) And as we noted above, Māori Television’s former GM Programming, Larry Parr, has himself expressed misgivings about what he sees as the growth of a Pākehā audience at the expense of Māori. There are tensions, then, in trying to meet both of the objectives set out in Māori Television’s enabling legislation. Sonya Haggie, Māori Television’s Director of Communications, responded to Black’s challenge by stating that “under the Māori Television Service Act we are required to broadcast in both languages”

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(Dykes 3). This is correct, but it only highlights the problematic nature of the role that Māori Television is required to play in this settler-state. The channel’s address to a broad array of viewers (“Mā rātou; mā matou; mā koutou; mā tātou”) also runs the risk of the channel being co-opted by interests that do not advance the rights of Māori. One such interest could be a government invested in supporting a world-class Indigenous channel that can contribute to an affirmative yet exclusively cosmetic bicultural brand both nationally and internationally. We need to remember how the channel emerged, and we must also remember that in the same year the channel was launched, the government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which ensures state ownership of land positioned below the high tide mark. By declaring this land Crown-owned, the government prevented Māori from exercising their rights as guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi. These larger issues of sovereignty and governance cannot be separated from the phenomenon that is Māori Television.

Notes 1 Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End is the title of Ranginui Walker’s 2004 seminal history of Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand. 2 In his 1990 speech as Race Relations Minister, Labour MP Trevor Mallard framed Indigeneity as predicated on the “now” of present-day occupation when he stated that “New Zealand [. . .] has to get its British imperial past behind it” and that “Maori and Pākehā are both indigenous people to New Zealand now.” Mallard’s speech can be seen as a response to the opposition’s (the National party) position on Treaty issues and race relations, encapsulated in Don Brash’s speech, “Nationhood,” given on 27 January 2004 at the Orewa Rotary Club, where Brash refers to the Treaty as contributing to divisive race-based legislation that gives special privileges to Māori. See Mallard, “We Are All New Zealanders Now,” Speech to the Stout Research Centre for NZ Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, 28 May 2004, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0407/S00504.htm. 3 See, for example, Burns, Public Money Private Lives; Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou; and Fox, “Honouring the Treaty.” 4 As The Press notes: “One of Clark’s more polarising responses around [2004] was the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which vested the area around the sea shore in Crown ownership, and resulted in a 15,000-strong hikoi on the steps of Parliament. Clark refused to meet the marchers, branding them ‘haters and wreckers.’ She met with a woolly sheep named Shrek instead, claiming the sheep was better company.” See http://www.stuff.co.nz/ national/politics/vote-08/candidates/about-the-leaders-28607/633471/The -prime-of-Helen-Clark-steady-as-she-goes.

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5 For an example of this popular sentiment, see NZ First leader Winston Peters’s 2003 speech, “Political Correctness and Treaty Grievances,” in which he stated: “The Treaty grievance industry has all the impact of a plague-like disease as it spreads through all echelons of the public service and government at both local and national level.” See http://www.scoop.co.nz/ stories/PA0303/S00153/political-correctness-and-treaty-grievances.htm. 6 Starting in 2005, Māori Television has devoted an entire day to commemorating Anzac Day. The program has been presented jointly by Māori broadcaster Wena Harawira and Pākehā Judy Bailey, a former long-time news presenter for Television New Zealand, often affectionately referred to as “the Mother of the Nation.” Bailey’s initial participation in 2005 attracted much media publicity before Anzac Day, and viewer e-mails to the channel indicated that it also attracted a substantial number of new viewers. While Māori Television’s audience ratings have climbed steadily since it started broadcasting in 2004, the Anzac Day coverage in April creates a ratings spike every year. 7 In 2004, the Labour government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act, thus ensuring state ownership of land positioned below the high tide mark. This act was a response to the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the Māori Land Court could investigate claims of Māori customary rights in this area. By declaring this land Crown-owned, the government has prevented Māori from exercising their rights as guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi. For more information on this act, visit http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ law-of-the-foreshore-and-seabed. 8 See Maaka, “The New Tribe”; O’Regan, “The Evolution of the Tribe”; Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou; and, most recently, Bargh, “Māori Development and Neoliberalism.” 9 As one example, a young boy wrote in saying that his parents were manufacturing the drug “P” in the family home, and he didn’t know what to do. Auntie Mabel replied that she did not “usually recommend our people go to the police,” but on this occasion it was necessary.

Eight

Superhighway across the Sky . . . Aboriginal New Media Arts in Australia: A Remix and Email Conversation between Adam Szymanski and Jenny Fraser JENNY FR ASER AND ADAM SZ YMANSKI

adam szymanski: How would you define Aboriginal new media arts? jenny fraser: For a non-Aboriginal audience, perhaps terms such as Indigenous, new, media, and arts need unpacking. However, in the context of Aboriginal new media arts, naming and defining may be counterproductive, and indeed impossible. Instead we should focus on the process of mapping—a snapshot in time, an overview, a sketching in—of fields of active negotiation between blak culture and new technologies, Indigenous voices and competing mainstream national or global narratives.1 as: How do you find that Aboriginal new media arts are received by people who are unfamiliar with the artistic practice? jf: The digital arena is commonly viewed as a new area of expression for Aboriginal involvement in art, culture, and politics. Unfortunately, new media arts are sometimes dismissed because work with new media is mistakenly perceived as a poor fit for an ancient culture. For Aboriginal artists there are certain rules imposed from the outside. Experimental video and web art challenge people’s expectations surrounding Aboriginal art in a more direct manner than bark paintings and weaving. Some people must think: “Why can’t artists just stick with traditions? How can new, challenging art be contextualized in terms of Aboriginality? If it doesn’t look like Aboriginal art then surely it isn’t a real cultural practice?” Old people from my mob have asked me, how can people identify where Aboriginal new media artists might originate from? Like in the 189

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way that other artists can be placed by the particular art practices they work in—for example, dot painting from the desert, bark paintings from Arnhem Land, shell necklaces from Tasmania, or even the more recent practice of printmaking from Torres Strait Islander artists. So as an answer I like to explain that Aboriginal new media artists always make reference to their country in their works. Some, if not all, of our artworks show our connection to place. In my own work, the layering of stories is often told through the use of family photographs and text, including Aboriginal languages along with historical documents from the archive, and also place-based contemporary exploration of country through video, audio, and digital photography. Through this process landmarks are identified, the connection reminding us of inherent obligation and reciprocity with the land, along with assistance in processes like navigation and oral history. Could you describe how Aboriginal new media arts diverge from mainstream, non-Aboriginal Australian art? Mainstream “Australian” Art has mimicked and perpetuated the European fine art tradition since colonization. Apparently it is vitally important that artists follow a certain line of artistic enquiry—going to the right art school, fine-tuning the right art form while studying under the right “expert,” and recycling the right academic theory. If we were going to describe these notions in terms of music, we might liken it to “classical.” Works by Aboriginal artists are rarely, if ever, included in mainstream new media arts exhibitions or events, and likewise, there are very few Aboriginal curators who include Aboriginal new media arts in their exhibitions, so by default there’s a huge divergence. This is a curious position because the exclusion or separatism wouldn’t be tolerated in shows that represent a popular art form like painting, and there would be a huge outcry because Aboriginal art is usually so prominent. So, what constitutes “new media arts” in an Aboriginal context? Something different happened with the uptake of new media arts. It was “new” so things were fluid: there were less rules and less reasons to care about them. As with all things experimental, there was, and still is, confusion around the area of new media arts; even in the mainstream, the edges are blurry and definition bleeds across forms. Maybe a musical form to associate would be “jazz fusion” or “re-mix” and Aboriginal artists could fit into this relaxed modus operandi a little more readily. What are some of the stylistic inspirations for contemporary Aboriginal new media artists? Aboriginal new media arts might borrow or mimic the styles of popular culture, advertising, documentary, and more. We don’t often see our-

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selves represented in these areas of the dominant visual culture. Unlike Indigenous peoples in some other countries, we rarely see Aboriginal people on TV, in advertising, or films. Like other Aboriginal artists before us in the 1980s, we aim to redress this lack of representation in Australia and attempt to place ourselves back into the picture, but by using the same technology that has been used to silence and keep us out. With such a wide array of stylistic influences and medium-specific approaches to creating art, what binds Aboriginal new media artists together? Those working in new media arts come from all kinds of different backgrounds with regard to disciplines and diverse cultures, and bring a variety of skills and specialities with them, including visual arts, dance, spirituality, sound, electronics, information technology, the sciences, printmaking, communications, cosmology, theatre, film and TV, to name a few. With all this input, maybe it’s not just about the medium, but more importantly . . . the message. Aboriginal messages need to be disseminated more than ever because of the silencing of our culture and voices through the oppressive thirteen-year term of the right-wing Howard government and the disbanding of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). In this climate anything Indigenous is political. So now, if the new media arts were music for our eyes, they might be considered protest songs—even if this is not the intention. And who exactly is singing these protest songs via new media arts? A number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and groups across the country have allowed their practice to evolve under the umbrella of new media arts. Whether for a one-off work or an urge to maintain consistency in their chosen art forms, people such as Destiny Deacon, Michael Riley, Warlpiri Media, the Marrugeku Company, Karen Casey, Lucy Dann and Mayu Kanamori, Donovan Jampinjimpa Rice, Uniikuup Productions, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Aroha Groves, Genevieve Grieves, and others are all forging tracks in the area. You briefly mentioned the silencing of Aboriginal culture during the reign of the Howard-led government. How has the Aboriginal new media arts landscape changed since the end of the Howard regime? It wasn’t only Aboriginal culture that was silenced by John Howard’s government . . . When the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board was disbanded for political reasons, it left a huge gap for mainstream new media arts. Since then the board has been renamed “Inter-Arts” (after the Canada Council namesake) and only engages guest peer assessors, instead of having board members over a term of one to three

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Figure 8.1 Aroha Groves, detail from Connections2. Virtual reality installation, dimensions variable. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

years. So essentially the brain trust of the board has been lost and so has the relationship to some of the Aboriginal artists who felt confident and persistent enough to apply. Unfortunately, no other board has taken up the slack and bothered really to engage peers with new media expertise, or implement initiatives with a new media focus (although they have gladly accepted the funding that was disseminated for new media projects). Kevin Rudd was the prime minister that followed on from John Howard, and is remembered for his apology to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations, but he didn’t even last a whole three-year term before he was forced out of the Labor Party. That really isn’t long enough for attitude adjustments to trickle down to the arts, or to expect to be able to undo thirteen years of damage to the arts (even if the inclination was there, which is questionable). Although it is extremely slow progress here, some headway has been made. This year saw the introduction of a new media category into the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. This is something for Aboriginal new media artists to get enthused about, but it is problematic because the prize is $1,000 less than all of the other art form categories and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory has not engaged any new media expertise, nor has it at the moment engaged an Indigenous curator. Consequently, strange decisions have been made, such as allowing the inclusion of

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digital photographic prints on paper (yet they already have a “Works on Paper” category alongside the New Media Award), and some have questioned other entries as ‘new media’ as well. So as always, it’s one step forward, two steps back. Sadly, it’s the Australian way. Since the term “new media arts” embraces a variety of different mediums, could you elaborate on the interdisciplinary basis of the practice? Interdisciplinary artwork specifically describes a process that engages more than one single art form, either between different art forms or collaborations involving cultural and artistic differences. “Burning Daylight” is a recent example of a large-scale interdisciplinary new media production. It is devised and performed by the Marrugeku Company, who are physical theatre practitioners from the cross-cultural branch of the Stalker Theatre Company, and also featuring local talent in Broome, a remote coastal town in the far north. Incorporating contemporary dance, film, live music, and karaoke, the project combines the unique performance style of Western Australian Indigenous dancers and musicians with Malaysian martial arts, unique Japanese and Chinese influences, and the company’s visual and acrobatic performance language. A series of happening dance scenes unfold highlighting the friction, local humour, and cultural collision in the streets at night in the part of Broome known as “The Bronx.” The karaoke videos envelop the onstage performers with historic Broome characters, such as the pearl diver, geisha, and the Aboriginal cowboy. Although on tour now, this kind of production is rarely seen in Australia, due to lack of funding and support for such large-scale events, but is featured in many international festivals for large, arts-friendly audiences. Who are some of the leading artists of the new media arts movement? A few of the artists who have invested a great deal of energy into crafting a practice and also in developing the “movement” of Aboriginal new media arts in Australia are r e a, Jason Davidson, and myself; sometimes we go under the name of the Blackout Collective. Because we also work in a variety of disciplines and come from diverse backgrounds, we have achieved some groundbreaking works. Each of our works comments on our own Aboriginal experience while establishing a niche and maintaining our own unique styles. Our works are also often more appreciated internationally than in Australia. Could you comment further on r e a and her work? r e a is a Gamilaraay/Wailwan artist, originally from Coonabarabran, a remote town in New South Wales, but now a long-time Sydney resident. She has a background in electronics in her mainstream employment and went on to study photography at the College of Fine Arts

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Figure 8.2 Burning Daylight, Marrugeku Company, 2009. Production still by Christian Arltorfer. Reproduced by permission of Marrugeku Company.

in Sydney and other courses at post-graduate level, including digital imaging and design at New York University. She has a “long” history in the new media arts scene and her current practice mainly involves video and digital imaging processes. Her recent work maang (messagestick) is a three-channel video and sound installation featuring historical 16mm black-and-white film excerpts from a film originally made by William Grayden, the member for South Perth in the Western Australian Parliament who, with Pastor Doug Nichols, undertook an expedition to the Central Aboriginal Reserve in 1956. This footage “remains today a powerful exposé of the conditions suffered by some of the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people who had been displaced by the 1956 Maralinga atomic bomb tests” (“1967 . . . Citizens at Last?”). The tests were ordered by the British and carried out by Australians; they lasted for ten years. The Pitjantjatjara people “were forced from their native land, they’d then been hit by serious drought. Seeking water, food and medical attention, they had struggled across hundreds of kilometres of outback terrain to reach the Warburton Mission. There the camera documented the terrible results of sun exposure, thirst and starvation, trachoma and blindness” (“1967 . . . Citizens at Last?”). Maang (messagestick) was shown at Planet IndigenUs in Toronto, 2009, and also toured Asia in Vernacular Terrain 2 by International Digital

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Figure 8.3 r e a, detail from maang (messagestick), 2006. Three-channel DVD and sound installation, dimensions variable. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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Art Projects, which featured Australian Aboriginal artists for the first time in 2008. And Jason Davidson is also at the forefront of the new media arts? Jason Davidson, a Gurindji/Mara/Nalakarn artist, currently based in Canberra, has a background in music and design. He studied Visual Arts at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. His practice involves producing works which include elements of animation, video, music, and his unique “X-Ray” art style—hand-drawn designs of animals and body organs. Jason’s work, Street Machine, explores ideas about masculinity and health—the car as a body—and incorporates his signature X-ray art/sci-fi-style digital designs. A project that is already seven years in the making, he produced the work coinciding with his research in Cross-Cultural Communication Breakdown as a part of his Masters of Health degree at the Tropical Health Institute. Very recently he has brought these issues to light again with the launch of a new website, Aboriginal Imagination. Featuring issues involving the arts, health, and copyright, the website is also intended as a safe haven for family members and other artists to promote their artwork in an Aboriginal-controlled environment free of other cultural gatekeepers. How would you describe your own artistic practice? With a background in education, my art practice to date has involved developing a screen-based practice, curating exhibitions, and maintaining a long-term online gallery presence. I am a Murri and studied through the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. I am currently based in Darwin, which is in the Northern Territory. Recent work Indian Cowboys / Cowboy Indians is a communication to my old people. When pondering their images, I noticed that the photographs

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Figure 8.4 Jason Davidson, Falcon Wings for Hope. Detail from Street Machine, 2010. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

had been doctored to lighten them. This pains me. It seems that they were too black. They worked on cattle properties, far away from their homelands. I wish to try to let them know what their old stomping ground is like now . . . Dressing-up in the photo booth is something that people do for fun on our homelands. It’s not real, but it is the photography of the day in a theme-park-inspired playground. Pictured here is my art family, lenticular-style, a movement, a resistance . . . I am left to wonder how real the portrait sittings were for my old people. Did they find it fun? What would they dress as now? The Indian or the Cowboy or the Cowboy Indian? The work was recently shown at ICAN, the Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, in Jogjakarta. My personal commitment to giving back to the community includes founding cyberTribe—an online art gallery that features the works of Indigenous artists internationally. With a regular program of exhibitions both online and in other gallery spaces, it fills a much-needed space in order to appreciate the work of those labelled as “Urban Artists” doing conceptual / new media / contemporary artwork alongside those innovating in ‘traditional’ or customary practices and to com-

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Figure 8.5 2009.

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Jenny Fraser, detail from Indian Cowboys / Cowboy Indians. Video installation,

ment on individual and collective Aboriginal experiences. as: Why are the new media arts important to the political struggles of Aboriginal peoples? jf: The production areas defined as “new media arts” have created a space for recognition for self-determined Aboriginal artists. In doing so, both culturally specific and diverse sources of creativity are exchanged in a process of community building among Aboriginal peoples. This process of community building will be crucial to the ongoing vitality of Australian new media arts in order to expand and improve upon our artistic practices. It would be music to my ears if Aboriginal new media arts were better recognized by the mainstream Australian arts world, but it’s not entirely necessary.

Note 1 In contemporary Aboriginal usage, “blak” is deliberately chosen as a way of refusing the dominant culture’s attempt to define Aboriginal people and to impose cultural and linguistic practices upon them.

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Nine

On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South E R I N M O R T O N A N D TA R Y N S I R O V E

This chapter comes out of a group curatorial project that was structured on the idea of collectivity, in the form of being, acting, and working together. We two members of this curatorial group, Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove, applied to participate in the Global Indigenous Media conference to talk about our collective project. We were drawn to this conference in particular because we saw it as a forum in which we could discuss our own participations in collectivity, as members of a curatorial collective that organized its project around two independent video collectives: Igloolik Isuma Productions and Arnait Video Productions.1 These video collectives are based in Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada, and are well known in both mainstream media and film studies circles. Two groups of Inuit and non-Inuit artists incorporated Isuma, a men’s collective, in 1990, and Arnait, a women’s collective, in 1991. Each organization draws on its members’ various backgrounds in cultural production and cultural politics to make its video and film work, using tactics such as oral history and historical reconstruction. Our curatorial project on these video collectives was not grand in its public form; it was simply a short program of Isuma and Arnait’s video work, which we entitled “cache: three contemporary videos from Igloolik.” We screened the program to an audience at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, in 2005, and followed it with a short question-andanswer session with Arnait founding member Marie-Hélène Cousineau. What is most significant about this project for us (Morton and Sirove) is not necessarily the screening itself; it is the lessons in collaborative working that the project taught us and the questions about collectivity it has led us to ask now, ten years later. 199

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In this chapter, we revisit our screening by moving forward from our original curatorial concept, which we’ve explored in detail elsewhere (Cache Collective, “cache” 76), using the “cache” project as a lens through which to examine collectivity.2 We do so in order to ask a number of questions about what it means to work together in everyday life, as artists and critics, curators and audience members, and in partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Scholars before us have theorized such partnerships around the idea of the contact zone (Pratt 7–8; Somerville and Perkins 259–61). This is not our objective here. What we plan to explore are the conventional roles that get assigned to us in cultural practice and politics, depending on where we identify ourselves within these interrelated and overlapping positions, and what kinds of conversations, partnerships, and politics might emerge through the theorization of collectivity itself as it relates to Indigenous cultural practices. Our approach here follows visual cultural theorist Irit Rogoff’s suggestion that if we move away from our conventional roles in culture, which may include acting as artists, curators, critics, viewers, listeners, and/or audience members, we open up “other emergent possibilities for the exchange of shared perspectives or insights or subjectivities—we allow for some form of emergent collectivity” (“WE” 127). Collectivity, as Rogoff defines it, “is something that takes place as we arbitrarily gather to take part in different forms of cultural activity such as looking at art . . . To speak of collectivities is to de-nativise community, to argue it away from the numerous essential roots of place and race and kinship structures that have for so long been the glue that has held it together” (127). Rogoff’s discussion of collectivity refers specifically to the dynamics that take place in collective viewing contexts, where, as she puts it, audiences “inhabit the spaces of art in various forms of collectivity and in the process we produce new forms of mutuality, of relations between viewers and spaces rather than relations between viewers and objects” (127). We must be very clear about our intentions here. We (Morton and Sirove) are two non-Indigenous scholars; we have no grounds whatsoever to challenge the importance of “place and race and kinship structures” in relation to the collective nature of Isuma’s and Arnait’s work. We have no understanding of that local production context, having never travelled to Igloolik. We acknowledge, above all else, that our discussion of collectivity in terms of the southern reception of Isuma’s and Arnait’s videos is a very different kind of analysis than one examining the actual collaborative process of the videos’ production, or collaborations between Isuma and Arnait artists and Southern researchers, of which there are many. Our goal in this chapter is to discuss how a group of white graduate students from southern

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Canada engaged with Isuma’s and Arnait’s video practices, because we contend that audiences outside Igloolik (Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike) also participate in meaning making in their reading, reception, and interpretation of the work. Our point is a fairly obvious one: video is an accessible form of cultural production that gets circulated in many contexts, often outside of the ones in which it was first intended to be seen, and these contexts inform and are informed by the reception of Isuma’s and Arnait’s work. We argue that the southern reception of Isuma’s and Arnait’s works is important to consider, particularly since the members of each collective maintain that they are interested in producing their work from an Inuit point of view for audiences in and beyond their local context. At Isuma, their mission “is to produce independent community-based media— films, TV and now Internet—to preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language; to create jobs and economic development in Igloolik and Nunavut; and to tell authentic Inuit stories to Inuit and non-Inuit audiences worldwide” (Igloolik Isuma Productions). Arnait’s stated goal, in turn, “is to value the voices of Inuit women in debates of interest to all Canadians . . . While the video works situate themselves in the specificity of their production, they are universal in their motivation for expression. It is this combination that has secured a large public located across the Arctic, in South America, Europe, the United States, and Canada” (Arnait Video Productions). As Labradorimiut art historian Heather Igloliorte summarizes, Isuma and Arnait’s expansion beyond their local address is important because of the ability to use “the internet to democratize mass media, giving marginalized voices the opportunity to reach like-minded Indigenous filmmakers and global audiences, free of charge, on a grassroots level” (33). In this chapter, we will explore the meaning making that happens when channels such as video distribution centres, websites, and cable television make Isuma’s and Arnait’s work available to anyone with a credit card, an Internet connection, or a television set. Igloolik Video in Historical Context Film scholars have long pointed to the fact that video did not arrive unexpectedly as a form of cultural production in Igloolik, but rather as part of a much longer history of radio and television development in the Canadian North (Banning 26–28; Berger 6; Fleming, “Igloolik Video” 28–29; Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 13–14). While radio broadcasts made their way to the Arctic as early as the 1920s, the first Inuktituk-language radio broadcast did not take place until 1960, through the CBC’s Northern Service (Alia xxi, 89). In 1967, the CBC aimed to supply communities with populations

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of five hundred or more with radio and television transmitters so that its broadcasts could be heard and seen in more parts of the North. Yet Northern radio at this time was produced mainly by and for non-Indigenous people, as CBC North’s programming was almost exclusively in English. The CBC transferred this production model to its early northern television as well, through prepackaged television and radio sets that were broadcast to seventeen Northern communities beginning in 1967 (Alia xxii). As media historian Valerie Alia points out, this effort’s “main claim to northernness was its availability in one northern region” (100). In 1973, the CBC used the Anik A satellite to broadcast the first live television news program in the Arctic (Berger 6; Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 13; Fleming 28). This satellite technology also further expanded live radio transmissions throughout the North and developed telephone service for many northern communities (Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 13). Careful research has since been conducted along several academic and non-academic avenues into the effects of these English-language radio and television broadcasts on Northern, primarily Inuit communities. As Sally Berger notes in her research on Isuma’s and Arnait’s use of video, for example, this early English-language media “brought in outside values, undermined the use of the Inuktitut language, created unrealistic desires and frustrations, and increased the generation gap between young and old” (6). Igloolik plays a significant role in this history of media expansion in the Arctic, since, alongside Inuit communities in northern Quebec, the community was unique in its refusal to accept television broadcast until 1981, when the formation of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) secured the distribution of primarily Inuit content in the Inuktituk language (Berger 6). That same year, Zacharias Kunuk, one of Isuma’s founding artists and its current president, sold several of his soapstone carvings in order to purchase his first video camera. As Isuma scholar Michael Robert Evans remarks, Kunuk’s foray into videomaking is an oft-told tale: He made several carvings, flew down to Montreal, and sold them for cash. He then took the cash up the street to a camera store and bought a video outfit of his own, including a camera, a VCR and a television set. The clerk behind the counter showed him how to work the equipment, and Kunuk flew back to Igloolik and set it up in his living room. He made videos that showed his family doing various things around the house and on the land, and he played the tapes at night on his new setup. He knew he was onto something powerful when he saw neighbourhood children pressing their faces against his windows, watching the videos while standing outside in the cold. (“Sometimes in Anger” 14–15)

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Kunuk would later receive much of his training in camerawork and video production through Igloolik’s local IBC centre, where he worked as a senior producer on the broadcaster’s documentary Walrus Hunter (1986) and on many other Inuktitut-language programs from 1984 to 1990. In 1985, he applied for a Canada Council grant to produce his first independent video, entitled From Inuk Point of View. Kunuk describes this video as follows: I’m talking about coming from the Inuit side. How we lived, how we live now. The missionaries came and said “this is my religion.” The Hudson Bay Company: “You give me that and I’ll give you this.” The Mounted Police came and said “This is the law.” The Government came, brought houses and schools and living standards. This videotape is trying to say: “Even though we had a rough night can anybody now listen to what we (Inuit) have to say”? (“Untitled” 14) For Kunuk, video is a logical medium through which to tell stories from an Inuit perspective, since it provides an accessible way to record stories and oral history, document and re-enact hunting, building, and communication techniques, and experiment with narrative (Fleming 1996; Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 14–15). The IBC still broadcasts in Igloolik, carefully negotiating a dialogue between its Northern audience and its Southern headquarters in Ottawa. Ironically, the community-centred model that initially made working with IBC so promising for Kunuk has since been plagued with funding cutbacks, changing technologies, and network infrastructures; in the late 1980s, the broadcaster centralized most of its production in Nunavut’s capital of Iqaluit and its funding structure remained controlled in the South (Fleming 29; Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 14–15). Eventually, it became clear to Kunuk that the IBC could not effectively encompass his artistic and ideological aspirations (Berger 6–7; Evans, “Sometimes in Anger” 15; Evans, “Isuma: Inuit Video Art” 66). With collaborators Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik, and Norman Cohn, Kunuk founded his own production house in 1990, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Inc. In 1991, support from the Canada Council helped Isuma’s members establish Tarriaksuk Video Centre, the first independent, not-for-profit, video training and access centre in the Arctic. Tarriaksuk hosted a women’s video workshop under the guidance of Montreal-based video artist Marie-Hélène Cousineau, which eventually led Cousineau, Susan Avingaq, Julie Ivalu, Mary Kunuk, Madeline Ivalu, Martha Maktar, and Celina Uttuigak, among others, to establish what is today known as Arnait Video Productions. Isuma and Arnait are now internationally recognized names in film production because of the widespread success both collectives have had

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with their feature-length films: Isuma’s Atanarjuat (2000) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), and Arnait’s Before Tomorrow (2008). But the trajectory of Northern media, not to mention the collectives’ early video work, is important to reading the Southern reception of these films in historical context. When the collectives were getting off the ground, the legacy of what Cousineau calls a “paternalist and—might as well say it—colonialist attitude” among Canadian government funding agencies in the cultural sector offered Isuma and Arnait little alternative to producing low-cost videos (2). In documenting correspondence between Isuma, Telefilm Canada, and the CBC in the initial negotiations to obtain funding for Atanarjuart in 1998, Cousineau fumed that “at worst, [Isuma’s Inuit producers are] silenced, and at best, they once again reproduce the production models which are tolerated (low-budget production models, especially documentaries)” (2). For Kunuk, the message from Canada’s cultural bureaucracy was clear: “Think and speak white if you ever want to get ahead in your life” (Kunuk, quoted in Cousineau 4). Despite—and, indeed, because of—such restrictions Isuma remained a tour de force as an independent production house. By the time Nunavut became a territory in 1999, Isuma had already brought more than $2 million into the community of Igloolik by creating over one hundred jobs in the cultural sector (Cousineau 1). Cousineau notes that “in a community where unemployment reaches 50%, this is not a negligible contribution— and goes beyond what innumerable government programmes have tried to do” (1). Clearly expert in negotiating the boundaries of government funding agencies, which are still reluctant to finance a private (read “non-state”) company, all the while maintaining its headquarters in a small Arctic community, and because of the very nature of its international distribution, Isuma fosters a necessary collaboration between Northern and Southern and Inuit and non-Inuit audiences that allows it to function successfully. Also, notwithstanding the widespread accomplishments of both Isuma and Arnait as individual collectives in the art world, collaboration between the two production houses continues by way of museum exhibitions and media screenings, as well as through high-profile film festivals such as Cannes, at which Atanarjuat won the esteemed Caméra d’Or for Best Feature Film in 2001. Northern Production and Southern Reception Between 1998 and 2000, a controversy arose in the pages of the Torontobased art and politics magazine Fuse regarding the Southern reception of Isuma’s work, one that may have gone unnoticed to some readers. In 1998, film scholar Laura U. Marks published a short piece in Fuse entitled “Inuit

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Auteurs and Arctic Airwaves: Questions of Southern Reception.” Marks’s article suggests that, in most Southern treatments of Isuma’s film and video, there exists an “auteur problem,” in which critics attribute Isuma’s work exclusively to founding member Kunuk. She writes that critics repeatedly compare Kunuk to Robert Flaherty, and Igloolik Isuma Productions to Nanook of the North, in a convenient shorthand for colonialism vs. self-determination. Kunuk was the only videomaker represented in the important exhibition of aboriginal artists, “Land, Spirit, Power,” at the National Gallery of Canada, and there [the Isuma video] “Nunaqpa” was attributed to him alone. (15) Marks’s point is that the Isuma collective was founded on the notion of collaborative process, in which the work of its four founding members (Kunuk, the late Paul Apak Angilirq, Norman Cohn, and Pauloosie Qulitalik) was equally shared and valued alongside the work of Igloolik community members who provided stories, sewed costumes, and acted onscreen or as part of the crew. In the south, Marks contends, attributing authorship of Isuma films and tapes solely to Kunuk misses the collaborative nature of Isuma’s practice. Norman Cohn summarizes Isuma’s collaborative configuration as follows: For four millennia Inuit have refined co-operation as a medium of production and survival, valuing consensus and continuity over individuality and conflict. As a collective, Igloolik Isuma Productions arrives at the millennium practicing respectful co-operation as a formal element in our media art. We implant these values—our collective process—in our filmmaking practice; community support and participation are qualities of production we make visible on the screen (27; qtd. in White, “Frozen” 60). Responding to Marks’s article in 2000, Michael Robert Evans provided Fuse with an alternative reading of Isuma’s practice, one that offered readers a concise history of Isuma’s formation and its relationship to the IBC. Detailing the history of Isuma’s complex hegemonic relationship with the IBC, Evans critiqued the conventional Southern narration of this history: Zacharias Kunuk has been positioned at the head of the attack, and the struggle has been portrayed as a battle between him and the people who run the IBC. These misperceptions are not the fault of the people at Isuma—they are the fault of journalists who fall prey

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to their own habits. I spent nine months—from July 1998 to April 1999—in Igloolik, researching a Ph.D. dissertation on Inuit video, and the situation I found there exposes the fallacies of the media’s standard interpretation. The issue is more complex, more subtly shaded and more important than a mere showdown on the dusty streets of Igloolik. (“Sometimes in Anger” 16)3 In a subsequent publication, Evans explained his reasoning for producing the Fuse article; at the same time, he critiques Marks’s approach to studying Isuma: She offers no direct research whatsoever in the article: no original quotes from Kunuk, Cohn, or the other producers, or from people in Igloolik, or even from critics and film scholars. All the research in the piece stemmed from secondary sources. This article was published while I was in Igloolik working with Isuma, and the reaction there was a mixture of disappointment and frustration. Had Marks talked to Kunuk, she could have more forcefully made the point that any auteur status conferred on him was the result of southern assumptions and runs counter to Kunuk’s own desire to emphasize the importance of collaboration in Inuit culture and in Isuma’s operations. In response to urgings from Kunuk and Cohn, I wrote an article for the same publication that endeavored to offer a more grounded view. (The Fast Runner 53) Evans’s point is clear: for Marks to make claims about Isuma’s reception, she would first have to understand the context of Isuma’s production by making contact with the collective in Igloolik or, at the very least, sourcing the artists through secondary interviews. The Fuse case provides an important example with which to begin our discussion of Isuma’s and Arnait’s reception in the South, since Marks and Evans offer two very different methodological and ideological perspectives for studying the collectives’ videos and film. On the one hand, Marks points to the fascination with and popularity of Isuma’s and Arnait’s work in the South, which is not necessarily to suggest that this audience is comprised entirely, or even mostly, of non-Inuit or non-Indigenous viewers. Clearly, as Igloliorte points out, acknowledging Isuma’s and Arnait’s connections with Indigenous audiences around the world is a critical position from which to read their video and film production. In our reading of Marks’s argument, she is making a parallel point to the central issue of audience, suggesting that there exists a body of reception literature on

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Isuma and Arnait produced by art galleries, film scholars, and popular film critics who have had little or no contact with Isuma and Arnait artists, due perhaps primarily to geographical and language barriers. Just as a gallery in Toronto may not necessarily send its curator to visit a video artist’s production studio in New York City in order to research a piece for a screening, neither would it necessarily send a curator to Igloolik. And while there is clearly an uneven hegemonic relationship between a Toronto gallery’s relationship to New York as opposed to Igloolik as a production site, the fact remains that videotapes circulate relatively easily among these locations. Moreover, Isuma and Arnait artists make their tapes—and now their high quality Blu-ray films—available to galleries and film festivals worldwide, in the same way that most professional video artists and filmmakers do. The point is that the tapes and films create their own dialogue with non-Igloolik audiences in many different contexts, which, as Marks’s article suggests, can lead to interpretations that take on their own meanings (such as the erroneous tendency to read Kunuk as being Isuma’s principal auteur). On the other hand, Evans represents the number of film scholars who have travelled to Igloolik, observed Isuma’s and Arnait’s production practices first-hand, conducted primary interviews with the artists, and published works based on this research material (Evans himself has published two books on Isuma based on such research trips). Evans therefore makes the case that Isuma’s and Arnait’s work cannot be understood without first understanding its production context first-hand, since the local context of Igloolik is central to any productive reading of the videos and films. Perhaps more important, Evans’s argument suggests that scholarship on Isuma and Arnait needs to address the hegemonic history of media and telecommunications in the North in relation to the collectives’ work, since, as we have already discussed in this chapter, video in Igloolik did not emerge in isolation, but in tandem with these technological developments. These media inform Isuma’s and Arnait’s work, which the collectives use on their own terms and in order to tell their own stories, as much as the local community in which the work is produced. As Evans points out in relation to Isuma, the collective is a loose consortium of videographers and others—costumers, scriptwriters and so on—who make the creation of videos possible. Some at Isuma came because they believe in the struggle against persistent colonialism. Some came because they like the atmosphere. And some came because they prefer the project-based approach to videomaking—an approach more in keeping with attitudes common in

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the North—over the short-segment and deadline-driven approach taken by the IBC. But these interests are sufficiently common to bind the group to push for its own approach the alchemy of converting ideas into videos. (“Sometimes in Anger” 16) The resulting cultural production is layered with influence, which cannot be fully comprehended without looking at the cultural, political, and economic history of Igloolik and the history of broadcast media in the Arctic, not to mention the various funding traps that Isuma and Arnait must still fight against in order to make their work. There exists a tension between these two interrelated points of view, but in our minds it is a productive one. This tension is part of the historiography of scholarship on Isuma and Arnait, one that is bound to the scholarly convention of classifying, interpreting, and analyzing one’s object of study. In the case of Isuma and Arnait, the tendency in the South has been to classify their work according to known filmography in terms of style and genre, interpret it in relation to its local production context, and analyze it in terms of its value to Inuit audiences. For example, in one of the earliest scholarly articles written on Isuma, film theorist Kass Banning writes about the collective’s refusal to utilize a cause-and-effect dramatic narrative scenario, a decision that Banning notes is necessitated in part by the unpredictability of such factors as the Northern climate. Banning writes: “Initially, it is difficult to detect anything uniquely non-western about the use of the video medium,” since the very nature of video as a production method encourages a time-based narrative wrought with dramatic possibility (28). The slow pace is a product of storylines subject to weather and hunting conditions, and according to Isuma, “‘action’ is actually more about doing and making things to stay alive, than arguing about them. Cooperation is the story, rather than conflict” (Igloolik Isuma International 70–71). Banning describes this combination of production values and stylistic choices as foregrounding “a mixed economy” (28), one that reinvents the video medium for a decidedly Inuit style of narrative storytelling. Kunuk’s own description of his experience as an Inuk videomaker confirms this approach to “mixed” production: “Today we are living two lives—one in Inuktitut, the Inuit way, and one in the white culture” (qtd. in Hendick and Fleming 14). Banning’s discussion of Inuit hybridity is today understood as a familiar trope in post-colonial readings of intercultural cinema, one that is certainly not without its problems. Yet it is a persistent interpretive framework when it comes to reading Isuma and Arnait. Since the beginning of our own research on the collectives, we have come to appreciate Banning’s

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early work on Isuma because of the way she problematizes her own position as a Southern viewer. She critically explains her “journalistic compulsion” to speak to Kunuk upon seeing Isuma’s first video, Qaggiq, and she identifies this “desire to know” as having its lineage both in both colonial histories of orientalizing and in late capitalist consumption of all things “new” (26). As she puts it, historical distance from my pillaging predecessors could not totally ameliorate the difficulty of locating a site to speak from, to “speak about” work produced by a culture that is not my own . . . Intending neither to mimic the one-sided relations of the anthropologist’s gaze nor adopt the travel writer’s monologic will towards self-discovery, I attempt here to give a limited account of this relatively new artistic practice to southern Canadian readers. (26) While Banning stops short of privileging her own narrative as a Southern viewer above the production context of the North, her affective reading of Qaggiq informs her critical analysis of the tape and suggests the importance of considering such reception stories as sites of critical inquiry in their own right. “Caching” Igloolik Video in the South As part of the Cache Collective, researching and planning for our own screening of Arnait and Isuma videos, we were initially content to operate in our positions as somewhat informed Southern viewers, designing our program with the motivation to conduct a “critique” in the Foucauldian sense of the term, by “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest” (Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 154). Our audience was greeted with a brief introduction about the graduate seminar that led to the “cache” project and was given a short exhibition catalogue with a collectively authored essay, but little extraneous information about the production context of these videos before they were screened. We designed the program with the intention to draw out audience assumptions about contemporary life in the North, by programming two tapes that use the method of historical reconstruction before a third tape that locates its content directly in the present. The “cache” program framed the first two tapes, Arnait’s Qulliq (Oil Lamp) (1993) and Isuma’s Qarmaq (Stone House) (1995), as challenging “temporal and spatial categories as they represent lived experience in the past and present” (Cache Collective, “cache” 78–79). Qulliq is a taped historical reconstruction of the process of lighting a seal-oil lamp, which Inuit women used as a source of warmth and light

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inside snow houses. Qarmaq, part of Isuma’s video series Nunavut (Our Land), takes place in pre-settlement Igloolik in and around the 1940s and re-creates the construction of the kind of stone house that would serve as an early winter shelter before snow houses could be built. We understood Isuma’s and Arnait’s recording of such activities as both caching historical knowledge and producing new value through their engagement with contemporary audiences. In our all-too-comfortable position as curators, we the Cache Collective were satisfied with what we perceived as our own critical distance from the videos and with the fact that the general audience who attended the screening (a Southern, primarily white audience) might not instantly understand that these two videos were reconstructions. We purposely followed Qulliq and Qarmaq with Arnait’s Anana (Mother), a tape of higher production value than the previous two and one that employs documentary techniques to tell the story of a contemporary Igloolik family, the Kunuks. This second video uses face-to-face interview format, intercut with various images of the Kunuks’ daily activities on the land, which in turn provide the backdrop to tell stories about various important moments in the family’s history. Anana’s narrative follows Vivi Kunuk as she tells stories about her life, including her relationships with her father, mother, husband, and in-laws. In conjunction with Vivi’s own stories, Anana also narrates from the perspective of her daughter, Mary, as well as Vivi’s nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. The recording of intergenerational community knowledge directly confronts issues of the federal government’s resettlement of Inuit families and the subsequent affront to language and way of life that was a direct result of such colonialist assimilationist policies. The video simultaneously tells a story of Inuit cultural resilience and resistance to this colonial violence, at one point interviewing Vivi’s granddaughter, who tells the camera how she is currently trying to teach her mother, Vivi’s daughter, Inuktituk. Vivi’s granddaughter has chosen not to go to school in Iqualuit like many of her peers, because her past experiences being off the land, living in a city, and being away from her family led her to become depressed. Vivi’s daughter was part of a middle generation, in between Vivi and her granddaughter, that (like Zacharias Kunuk) was forced to attend government schools in Northern settled communities. These schools were modelled on the residential school system and shared many of its abuses. Many Inuit people from this generation, including Vivi’s daughter, have had their language stolen from them as a result of such state policies. The Cache Collective planned to introduce Anana at the end of the screening because of the way it addresses contemporary life in Igloolik in relation to the adaptation of traditions, the resilience of Inuit families, and

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the methods of survival that people such as Vivi’s granddaughter employ in their everyday life. By screening Arnait’s and Isuma’s earlier, short, historical reconstruction tapes first and concluding the program with the hour-long Anana, staged then in present-day Igloolik, we intended to displace conventional Southern assumptions about Northern ways of life. We anticipated that our audience might be surprised to see the appearance of snowmobiles and Toronto Maple Leafs baseball caps in Anana after watching the historical representations of Inuit life in Qulliq and Qarmaq. We can admit now that we had the naive intention to use our curatorial strategy to educate white viewers, as if we were in any position to teach our audience about Igloolik or Inuit cultural traditions. Yet our curatorial reading of specific formal elements of the videos led us to this purpose: the historical (Qulliq and Qarmaq) versus the contemporary (Anana) context of the narratives; the simpler (Qulliq and Qarmaq) versus more intensive (Anana) use of videography and editing techniques of the three videos; and the visual context of winter landscapes in Qulliq and Qarmaq, which many Southerners commonly associate with “the North,” versus Anana’s portrayal of Vivi’s grandchildren swimming outside in the Igloolik summer. Indeed, at the time, we saw our curatorial method as successful, since during the public discussion that followed the screening several viewers revealed their initial assumptions that Qulliq and Qarmaq represented present-day scenes, and their subsequent surprise when they noticed Anana lacked igloos and sealskin clothing. Looking back at the screening now, we could perhaps still contend that it served a pedagogical purpose to some limited extent, despite the obvious baggage attached to using works of art and culture to “educate” audiences—baggage that must be understood in line with the complex history of the museum’s emergence as an authoritative institution and its colonial relationship to Indigenous peoples’ cultural and material heritage.4 With regard to using Indigenous cultural heritage towards some pedagogical function, the late curator and scholar Deborah Doxtator once noted that “it’s always being pointed out to native and aboriginal people that they have to correct this or that.” She then astutely asked: “Why is it my responsibility to ensure that they are enlightened? It’s their responsibility to take care of their own education” (60). Zacharias Kunuk has also commented extensively on Isuma’s desire to stage interventions into the body of conventional images of the North: I’ve seen a lot of films done about our culture from [a Southern] point of view. All the time they’re up here, their heads are down there. The books you read, the films you see, are films done up in the

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north from a southern point of view. I’m not against southern filmmakers or bookmakers, every time I read them or see them there is always a mistake. I just wanted to tell my side of the story. (qtd. in Banning 30) Whether or not these works carry the self-conscious goal to correct Southern assumptions—and it is unquestionably not the responsibility of the work to do so—we the Cache Collective certainly had this misplaced ambition at the time of our screening. And through the process of the screening, we came to understand that although Isuma’s and Arnait’s works often have this effect, whatever the producers’ intended goal for their non-Igloolik audiences, ethnographic lessons have little to do with the expressive exchanges that take place in gallery settings such as this, in which curators, artists, artworks, and audiences interact. The Limits of Collaboration In our planning of the “cache” screening, we the Cache Collective completely underestimated the performative and collaborative potential of the audience. We invited Marie-Hélène Cousineau, who was at that time based in Montreal, to facilitate a question-and-answer session after the screening. Cousineau, as we have noted, is a founding member of Arnait and the only non-Inuk member of the women’s collective. We expected that she would address audience questions about the nature of the videos’ reconstructions versus Anana’s contemporary documentary format. The audience’s participation with Cousineau, however, soon raised Rogoff ’s assertion that “criticism does not have to be enacted at a distance but can take place and shape in the realm of the participatory” (“WE” 129). One audience member interrogated Cousineau about her position as a white, Southern artist travelling north and about her intentions in training Inuit artists in video production. Did it bother Cousineau, this audience member wanted to know, that she operated from this position? Were the Inuit artists she engaged with offended or angry? Did they feel culturally colonized? While the Cache Collective reacted silently, we were surprised by the nature of this questioning. Cousineau calmly described the ways in which the Arnait collective operated, through collaboration between members who negotiated their shared production goals together. Cousineau clearly stated that she was simply one voice within a larger group of equal collaborators. Cousineau has previously spoken about her role in training her fellow Arnait members on video production. On her arrival in Igloolik, she explains,

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the idea of a center for community video activity [already existed] . . . What was needed was somebody with video skills . . . [and] fundraising skills . . . Generally, it needed planning, organization and administrative skills. There was nobody in town with that training. The only people who had those kinds of skills were the people who worked at IBC.” (qtd. in Fleming, “Marie-Hélène Cousineau” 12) Here Cousineau discusses the pragmatic need for skills that were simply not widely available to learn in Igloolik. The existence of trained individuals at the IBC reminds us, however, not to take an anti-modern position in which we might interpret Cousineau and her video camera as contaminating some supposedly untouched, authentic cultural locale. Moreover, it is clear that in Igloolik, as in other parts of the North, Inuit were already using radio as a communications tool. Video seemed like a logical extension of this practice, although Cousineau could not be sure this was the case until she felt out community interest. She used the radio to announce that she was going to be “teaching women how to do video. Anybody who’s interested should come and see me at my house” (qtd. in Fleming 14). A couple of people came to this initial meeting, including Martha Maktar, who had some video experience already, and Celina Uttuigak, who subsequently made a list of women to approach to see if they were interested in having a workshop. Cousineau found that the women had a clear vision of what they would do with video, and they started interviewing women and taping them. The tapes were used for fundraising, and all the producers were paid. Cousineau explains that they “certainly have their own agendas. Both [Madeline Ivalu and Susan Avingaq, who had joined the group as well] are responsible for a women’s sewing group . . . And they knew what they wanted to do. They were never short of ideas. They’re both interested in teaching younger people about the culture” (qtd. in Fleming 14). Cousineau brought her skills and agenda to an existing set of agendas. Not only did they negotiate ideas, but they also negotiated communications throughout the process: “Since Susan, Madeline and Matilda didn’t really speak or understand English, I had to figure out how to teach them without talking, by showing. Sometimes we had no translator, and we just learned by watching” (qtd. in Fleming 14). Moreoever, Cousineau was certainly aware of self-critical ethnographic problems, and she thought about them: I found the classes in feminist ethnography interesting just because the fields of anthropology and ethnography have really been questioning their roles. Some people in those areas of film—especially women from Third World countries or African-American women—

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have been asking questions about practices in anthropology. They are trying to see and question the place of the expert in the work. They are asking the anthropologist, the scientist, the teacher or the linguist: “What’s your place in this work?” “How does that reflect in the final work?” “Do you talk about your place or do you not talk about your place?” These are issues of collaboration, ethnographies of two or three voices. How do you work with people? What are the limits of collaboration? (qtd. in Fleming 17) At the “cache” screening, the line of questioning from the audience revealed assumptions about who is automatically presumed to be in charge; about an outsider’s motivation as automatically if accidentally exploitative; and perhaps about the introduction of new media into Inuit culture as signalling cultural colonization, reflecting a difficult supposition that collaboration is impossible. Of course, Cousineau was not a neutral bearer of technology. Her aims and goals were executed in collaboration with those of the participating women in Igloolik. Prompted by this question about collaboration’s limits, the “cache” screening became an opportunity for Cousineau to explain that Arnait operated not in the context of Inuit/ non-Inuit dichotomies, but as a collective—one that recognized, as Rogoff suggests, that “meaning is never produced in isolation or through isolating processes but rather through intricate webs of connectedness” (“WE” 128). We argue that this type of understanding is crucial in the context of intercultural and particularly Indigenous media production, since these days it is commonly recognized that it is not always possible, nor always desirable, to locate one’s identity along such lines as Inuit/non-Inuit. As political philosopher Jean Luc Nancy suggests, it is not always possible to say with any assurance whether . . . identities are international, infranational, or transnational; whether they are “cultural,” “religious,” “ethnic,” or “historical”: whether they are legitimate or not—not to mention the question about which law would provide such legitimation: whether they are real, mythical, or imaginary; whether they are independent or “instrumentalised” by other groups who wield political, economic, and ideological power. (qtd. in Rogoff, “The Where of Now” 89) Drawing on Rogoff’s line of thinking, the central question then becomes: How do we introduce the notion of a collectivity that experiences art in a way that moves beyond artists and audiences producing meaning based on subjectivities alone and towards an understanding that promotes the kind

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of collaboration that is so crucial to both Isuma’s and Arnait’s work? We might find there is no meaning that is not shared meaning, not because such meaning is the result of a signification that all beings (or participants in its formation) have in common, but because, to borrow Nancy’s phrase, “meaning is itself the sharing of being” (qtd. in Rogoff, “We” 130). The “cache” screening is a good example of what can happen on the commons, in such collaborative spaces as the aftermath of a video screening. What we as curators had failed to expect, stimulate, and support was that our audience—and not only our curatorial collective—had the potential to prompt such meanings. Rogoff’s webs of connectedness take in not only the collective conditions for production and dissemination but also audience engagement in such gatherings as our screening. The performative and collaborative nature of this particular audience, Cousineau as artist, and the Cache Collective as curators, all served to inform meanings produced in and around the screening itself. By introducing the concept of collaboration as central to the experience of art, we are insisting here that such exhibitions, as Rogoff points out, “do not have immanent meanings but function as fields of possibilities for different audiences in different cultural circumstances and wildly divergent moods to produce significances” (“WE” 128). What emerged at the “cache” program were conversations and partnerships limited neither to Inuit versus non-Inuit, nor to Northern versus Southern experience, but generated by collective engagement with the event of the screening itself. This collaboration continued when we enlisted Cousineau to participate in a 2005 interview for Fuse. In the interview, Cousineau hints at the complex and sometimes testing nature of profitable collaborations, specifically regarding Before Tomorrow (2008), Arnait’s first feature film. Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu directed the film; Susan Avingaq wrote the script. Before Tomorrow is also co-produced by Isuma in conjunction with Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn’s own company, Kunuk Cohn Productions. At the time of the interview, Before Tomorrow was a work in progress, and Cousineau noted that “with all the individuals involved, it’s more of a challenge for all of us” (qtd. in Cache Collective, “Persevering Realpolitik” 19). Fostering collectivity is not always easy, yet working towards it can lead to new and exciting questions about how we as curators, artists, community activists, cultural critics, and scholars think of “audience,” particularly in terms of how we articulate meaning and embed ourselves in the distribution of that meaning. It allows for a conversation to begin apart from the binaries of colonial violence that separate the hegemonic and the marginalized, “the blamed and the blaming” (Rogoff, “WE” 131), thus paving the way for a model for collective action. In other words, the

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benefits generated by collective practice become more recognizable when we move beyond the limiting framework of teacher/student, object/viewer, or artist/audience dichotomies, in order to begin to examine the ways in which meaning circulates among the collective. In terms of how the Marks and Evans debate played out in Fuse, we see the “cache” project and all of its related incarnations as part of such dialogue about both the contexts and the audiences of cultural production. As such, we have tried to conduct our engagement with the historiography of scholarship on Isuma and Arnait in a way that acknowledges the importance of each position. We hope we have done so in a way that informs about the productive tension between the two and, perhaps, that contributes a third position defined by practices of collectivity, practices that open up a space for unexpected conversations to take place.

Notes Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove would like to thank Marie-Hélène Cousineau of Arnait Video Productions for allowing the Cache Collective to interview her about her work and for her willingness to facilitate the question-and-answer session at the original “cache” screening in 2005. We are equally grateful to Dr. Lynda Jessup of Queen’s University, who taught the 2004 graduate class in which we originally produced this research and who helped us conceptualize these ideas about Igloolik video, and to Jan Allen for her support in producing the screening and the accompanying exhibition catalogue. We would also like to thank our fellow members of the Cache Collective, Lindsay Leitch, Emily Rothwell, Andrea Terry, and Michelle Veitch, for working with us on the “cache” project. In particular, we must single out Emily, for the diligence and intelligence she brought to her leading role in producing the 2005 Fuse interview with Marie-Hélène. 1 After seeing significant financial difficulties in 2011, the formal company Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. went out of business. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn founded a multimedia production company, Kingulliit Productions Inc., to replace Isuma, and the Web portal for Indigenous media Isuma.tv remains unaffected, as does Isuma Distribution International Inc. Although we use the term “Isuma” in this chapter to refer mainly to Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc., which existed from 1990 to 2011, we extend the term as well to the ongoing multi-dimensional set of initiatives now beyond the production company proper. 2 At the suggestion of Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s chief curator, we decided to call our curatorial group “the Cache Collective.” At the time, we thought the name was a pithy play on the collective authorship that so clearly influenced the production of the Arnait and Isuma videos we

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included in our screening. For more on the development of our collective and on the screening project, see the Cache Collective, “cache: Provisions and Productions,” 74–88. 3 Note that in Kass Banning’s 1991 article on Isuma, she makes an important connection between the role of Inuit lobby groups such as the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, the effect of this lobbying on the founding of the IBC in 1981, and the influence this process had on Kunuk’s development as a director and producer. See Banning, “Local Channels,” 26–28. 4 It is well established that the modern public museum developed by constituting a new space of representation, which, as cultural theorist Tony Bennett argues in The Birth of the Museum, involved “constructing and defending that space of representation as a rational and scientific one” (1). Studies such as Bennett’s argue that the public museum is not just a place of instruction but also a liberal institution in which liberal values have been both forged and inculcated. Art historian Carol Duncan makes a similar argument in Civilizing Rituals (1995), where she suggests that the modern public museum, despite its genealogy from pre-modern princely collections in Europe, established a new space of institutionalized representation. The modern public museum thus distinguishes itself from its pre-modern counterpart (the semi-private princely collection) and the competing modern exhibitionary complexes of the masses (world’s fairs and sideshows) by structuring itself as an ordered institution of the state with the means not only to educate all who walk through its doors but also to help create wellmannered, liberal citizens through its institutionary practices (Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 1).

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Part IV Documentary Approaches

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Ten

The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project: Matching Product with Process in New Forms of Documentary STEPHEN FOSTER AND MIKE E VANS

Introduction Documentary filmmaking/videomaking is approaching a crossroads; we are on the cusp of a radical shift in form and practice. New technologies, including Web-based and interactive approaches, allow for a more flexible delivery of content. Digital video content has been adapted for blogs, directed to wireless mobile devices, and embedded with interactive content, transforming the traditional territory for documentary. Innovations in aesthetic form and broadcast capacity allow documentary to reach new audiences in new ways, diversifying the level of audience engagement and participation, blurring lines between subjectivity, authorship, and audience, and potentiating the development of participatory and community-based documentary methodologies. As new approaches gain momentum, issues of representation and of access to means of production become paramount. These new conceptual directions in documentary practice coincide with an increase in mainstream audience appreciation of non-fiction programming and with a consumer appetite for reality TV and Web phenomena such as YouTube. It is safe to say that documentary, as a method of representation, communication, self-expression, and entertainment, has never been so diverse or so popular. Aboriginal people and communities in Canada have taken advantage of these recent trends and have not only incorporated new visual media technologies into their cultural practices but also led the way in developing new strategies and applications. Digital video has transformed moving pictures from the sole preserve of highly skilled and well-capitalized filmmakers 221

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into an artistic and documentary medium accessible to a much wider crosssection of society. New technologies, new distribution portals (like those available on the Web), and new networks like the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), in addition to well-recognized commercial and artistic successes such as Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001, dir. Kunuk), have people thinking about the potential film offers for Indigenous selfexpression. Individuals and communities are no longer merely consumers, and no longer merely objects of representation; they are now active subjects and producers of media art and are actively seeking ways to use tools like video to mediate understandings of their lives in a populist manner. This chapter describes some of the dynamics of just such an attempt to turn documentary processes to participatory ends in northern British Columbia. The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project was the result of a direct request from the Prince George Métis Elders Society to create a video that would document the lives and knowledge of Elders in the Métis community in Prince George, BC.1 The Elders had seen how other communities had been presented on APTN, and they wished to have their own community reflected in the media. This was a participatory project, undertaken collaboratively, based on the Elders’ desire to make a video that would represent their community to others, serve as a record, and establish their presence on the national Métis cultural landscape. It was also a creative endeavour based on a collaboration between artist (Foster) and social scientist (Evans) that had two goals: to create a new form of documentary narrative, and to document the role(s) that video projects can play in creating community and documenting culture. Towards these ends, we undertook extensive collaborative work with the Elders and developed interactive technologies (Web and interactive DVD) for the creation of a visual database. The work embraces traditional documentary video; but at the same time, it complicates the documentary tradition in that it uses participatory techniques so as to share with community collaborators the power to produce narratives. Such power sharing operates at the level of process and as well as that of product. New media technologies open narrative construction to ongoing community participation via a hyperlinked database of audio, visual, and textual materials through which people may take (and perhaps make) their own stories. The objective is to match product with process, creating a methodology that is more in sync with the ethics and objectives of participatory research and extending those values to the audience. The result is a hybrid participatory action video documentary that utilizes DVD interactivity and fragmented narrative to produce a product that is consistent with collaborative participatory processes and that creates opportunities to extend participation.

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The division of labour was based on expertise. This understanding— that participants would bring their own expertise to the project—was foundational to the research relationship. There was no confusion about the participants—the Elders were Elders; Evans, a social scientist; and Foster, a videographer. There was an early effort to engage the Elders in the actual videomaking, but all of the Elders resisted this. (We like to joke that the Elders have demonstrated a similar disinclination to take an active role in interactive digital video and Web-based design.) While we have learned much from one another over the past four years, the research has been based on dialogue, power sharing, and a fusion of complementary skills and objectives rather than on principles of sameness and equality. This, in itself, is an important nuance for participatory work. Theoretical Context An essential element of all research relationships is just that—relationships. This is doubly the case for participatory relationships. Certainly from the very early days of participatory research (e.g., Freire; Fals Borda; Hall, “Research, Commitment, Action”), a central principle of the methodology has been that researchers must be willing, and be seen to be willing, to share control and power. This need not, however, be a sharing of power and control over all things at all times. Indeed, in an effective participatory relationship there is a division of labour, a division of power, and, we would argue, an overt recognition that the interests of community and researcher participants may at times diverge without conflicting (Evans, McDonald, and Nyce; Evans, Foster, et al.). Key here is the understanding that in a participatory relationship neither the researchers nor their interests disappear as distinct entities; researchers do not simply enact the collective desires of the communities in which they work, but rather negotiate and accommodate a number of concurrent interests both within the community and between the community and the researchers involved. Participatory research relationships are constructed between at least two parties and do not—at least, not usually—fuse the parties into a seamless whole. This said, the willingness of researchers within a participatory relationship to take direction from community participants is what distinguishes participatory research from other types of research relationships. In the case of the relationships leading up to this project, Evans, who had worked for a number of years and on a number of projects (Evans et al. 1999, 2004) with several of the Elders involved, had established both his capacity as a researcher in the community and his willingness to be instructed. Ethnographic film and video, like ethnography itself, has come under critical scrutiny for its assumptions regarding authority. Working within

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an interdisciplinary and participatory frame, in which no one agenda has priority over another, necessarily means that research objectives and artistic goals are multiple. This is not a problem as long as the various goals do not conflict. In practice, this means there are ongoing negotiations regarding what and how research gets done and what sorts of research products result. Note that such negotiations are specific to the actors involved and that the development of respectful relationships requires reciprocity—an appreciation of the mutual benefits that are possible. In this project, for example, the Elders acknowledged the needs of the academic researchers to produce academic products (such as this chapter), the academics accepted the Elders’ directions regarding what sorts of activities the videotaping would focus on, and both Elders and academics agreed on the need to provide space for many voices in the materials presented to a public audience. The Elders wanted a documentary video that portrayed their lives; in particular, they wanted to capture the elements of traditional culture that are central to Métis identity as well as those that are challenging to maintain in an urban context. Through the documentary process, we have sought to represent visually the traditions that culturally define the Métis of the Prince George area and the expressions of culture they share with other Métis communities. Over the years, the Elders have identified key traditions, such as the annual pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne in Northern Alberta, and have worked with us to document them in visual form; this has created a record in digital video for future generations and serves as an artistic expression of Métis culture. For the most part, the events and topics that have been captured by this work have been controlled by the Elders themselves, and the selections have been made by the Elders rather than negotiated. In tandem with this collaborative approach to the creative process, we have sought new representational forms, which include multipanel effects and simultaneous imagery. The video uses images that reveal their sources and show elements of their production. While it is important for a documentary to account for its own history, it is also important for it to “feel sincere” rather than contrived or selfconscious. Following works such as Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces, we have tried to strike a balance between art and useful documentation of the cultural traditions of the Prince George Métis. Minh-ha in Naked Spaces utilizes formal camera techniques that are designed to disrupt the viewer’s engagement with the subject; the result is a far more complex representation of the community she is documenting. Her filmic approach emphasizes the medium so that viewers are fully aware they are watching a film. This is contrary to the traditional approach of expository documentary, where the goal is to render the medium transparent. However, it is pos-

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sible to alienate both your audience and the community by prioritizing aesthetic expression over the communication of content. In our project, we tried to ensure that our cinematic approach was consistent with the subject we wanted to document and that the Métis community was represented in a manner they felt appropriate. At the same time, though, we did not want to be tied to traditional documentary convention; we wanted to be able to explore other aesthetic approaches that might better convey the complexities of the Métis community and its history. So we explored interactivity and non-linear narrative. Throughout, we have worked to maintain a level of flexibility that allows us to balance science and art with community. We see this as an innovative process that respects the subject as much as the videomakers in aesthetic and content decisions. Although not the product of Aboriginal interlocutors, the independent documentary film Deadly Currents (1991) by Simcha Jacobovici is instructional for us; we observe how the presence of the documentary makers can influence the events and human drama unfolding in front of their cameras. Reminiscent of cinéma-vérité, which was adopted in Quebec in the 1950s by many of the directors of the NFB’s Studio B, this approach to documentary was controversial at the time and provoked considerable criticism. The very issue that the video purported to document became confused, and its consequences became unclear. Jacobovici used juxtaposed interviews and conflicting points of view to engage the issues in a complex manner that, in the end, presented a more holistic picture of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The inclusion of the cameraman and crew in the scene revealed their presence as an influencing factor. This stylistic approach contradicts filmmaking convention where cameras are hidden and documentary production is rendered invisible. The conventional approach is intended to hide the hand of the filmmaker in order to make the video more persuasive and appear more objective. Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) in her documentary work surrounding the Oka crisis (Kanehsatake [1993], My Name Is Kahentiiosta [1995], Spudwrench— Kahnawake Man [1997], Rocks at Whiskey Trench [2000]) also deliberately draws attention to the camera’s presence. While our documentary project utilizes stylistic conventions consistent with cinéma-vérité, it also conforms to a decidedly interdisciplinary and participatory process, one that works in the interstices between community, science, and art. Our general approach is one of simultaneity, with multiple points of view and stylistic juxtapositions. After Donna Haraway (Simians), we accept that our knowledge, like that of the Elders and all others, is situated in our own experience and perspectives. Since objectivity is neither possible nor desired, we exhibit our

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own subjectivity instead of trying to occupy a position of objectivity. If we are to have transparent dialogue, we must first ensure that the positions of the interlocutors, both the researchers and the Elders in this case, are clear. Unsituated documentary is as much of a “god trick” as when an author, ethnographer, or analyst obscures his or her presence through claims to all-seeing yet unpositioned objectivity. Indeed, in video, the camera is such an effective tool for distancing the producer from the video product that special attention is required. As Jay Ruby writes of documentary video: There is a basic conf lict between the conventions of successful television documentary realism and an interpretive, reflexive, postcolonial, and critical anthropology that has more to do with epistemological and economic differences than anything else. The former deals with packaging information in coherent units, whereas the latter sees knowledge as fragmentary, always incomplete, and at times, contradictory. (36) Nevertheless, we recognize that all of us—not just filmmakers and social scientists—use narratives to make sense of our lives. Conflicting viewpoints need not produce incoherence, and multi-vocality need not equal cacophony. A primary assumption behind this project is the cultural specificity of television and film (Michaels; see also Turner, “Visual Media,” “Social Dynamics”). That is, the style of filming, the narrative structure, the sorts of images shown (and not shown), the subject matter, and so on, are all culturally constituted and situated in history. While this point may seem obvious, it cannot be overemphasized. Indigenous/Community Self-Representation From the perspective of minority communities, television, videos, and films are “theirs”/non-local rather than “ours”/local (MacDougall, Transcultural; “Visual”). The opportunities for marginalized people to speak to others (let alone themselves!) through video are extremely limited. The development of Indigenous media is an important turn in recent years. There is currently a welcome proliferation of organizations, networks, and individuals working to make minority voices and the voices of their communities heard (Ginsberg, “Indigenous Media: Self Determination”; “Indigenous Media: Faustian Bargain”). In Sol Worth and Joe Adair’s pioneering film project Navajo Film Themselves (1965), the Navajo participants chose what would be filmed. This represented ethnographic film’s earliest steps in the direction of research that respected the “Native” as expert. Individual members of a Navajo com-

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munity were instructed in the use of portable film equipment and then given the opportunity to make films reflecting their own interests and inclinations. The researchers assumed that this would provide insight into the Navajo mind and world view. However, as an early example of Indigenous self-representation through film, it had uneven results, especially in terms of product, and the researchers’ bedrock assumptions were those of objectivist ethnographic thinking. From the perspective of participatory action research (PAR) in the twenty-first century, the project failed to consider the impact of the researchers and the contemporary world-system and colonial structures, and it showed little concern for whether the research was relevant to the community. The project did, however, point to the inevitable recognition that representations are culturally specific. Furthermore, although there was no overt reflexivity on the researchers’ part regarding their own ethnographic practice, the research was a precursor. More widely known innovations in documentary in the mid-twentieth century occurred in the context of film practice rather than ethnographic research. The Challenge for Change (CFC) project was an NFB initiative launched in the early 1960s that ran until the late 1970s. This project focused on empowering communities by providing training and facilitation for film production (and, later, video production). While originally not concerned with production training, later efforts addressed the issue of how media representation and media production could be democratized. What came to be known as “the Fogo process,” reflecting the importance of Colin Low’s pioneering CFC series about Fogo Island, Newfoundland, was overtly committed to community participation. Although the CFC promoted decisively activist outcomes, its goals had much in common with those of participatory action research. The CFC had a tremendous impact on this methodological approach to documentary. The Fogo Process has acquired almost mythic stature as an influence on participatory documentary (see Waugh, Baker, and Winton). The CFC had demonstrable short-term successes—for example, it showcased the work of the NFB’s Indian Film Crew, particularly Mike Mitchell’s work on You Are on Indian Land (1969). However, the sustainability of these outcomes is open to question. As the program developed, it sought to extricate the artist/director from the process and position him/her in a coordinator/facilitator role. Inevitably, this made the project useful only to those involved in it and undermined its ability to engage outside audiences with the issues facing marginalized communities. While some technical expertise was disseminated through CFC projects, lack of access to a wider audience became a crucial issue as avenues for mainstream broadcast distribution never fully materialized. More recent assumptions about new

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media initiatives democratizing media access and creating a more level playing field display a similar utopian idealism. Our experience does not support the notion that people will take up cameras and video editing. The “digital divide” is as much about human capital and experience as it is about access to equipment (Byron and Gagliardi). But it is possible that the effective inclusion of younger participants may change this. Our project attempted to take a collaborative, blended approach where the Elders decided on content and direction in concert with the artist/ researcher. The assumption found in PAR and embedded in the CFC program is that media training can foster community agency. During our own project, however, it became apparent that this belief was not shared by people in the community. The Elders wanted to see themselves reflected in media but did not want to become filmmakers/videomakers themselves. They desired control of their representation within the project but did not necessarily desire to learn new skills associated with media production. Furthermore, many Elders were involved and not all of them agreed all the time. Choices had to be made. Thus, we learned that even a communitydriven master narrative necessarily excludes some material. With this in mind, we looked for an approach that was more inclusive than a traditional documentary structure would allow. Linear narratives compel the exclusion of some voices. So we developed an interactive structure and process that allowed us to include information from a variety of people. A traditional approach to documentary narrative would have required leaving valuable and insightful interviews on the cutting room floor. Instead, our process has allowed this material to be included in alternative non-linear threads. Some elements remain fragmented and lack narrative cohesion; even so, they provide keen insights into the community and the issues it faces. They also honour the personal input of individuals who might normally not find expression in a project of this nature. DVD/Web-Base Structure—Narrative Conventions, Community Representations, and Inclusivity The conventional figure for structuring interactivity is that of a visual “tree”: options or choices are provided to the user/viewer to follow narrative paths that diverge from the initial starting point—for example, as in “choose your own story” games. Instead of this, we took a more open approach by anchoring elements or issues facing the community in thematic linear narratives that could then be woven together. See Figure 10.1. This allowed for an extreme amount of flexibility in constructing the various components of the DVD. Some elements are heavily edited while others remain unedited and are allowed to unfold in real-time. Some ele-

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Schematic diagram of interactive structure of DVD.

ments are audio-only; some are photo-based slide shows. Individual interviews often form their own short, modular documentaries similar to the “vertical film” structure utilized by Colin Low. The navigation interface is designed to be intuitive and transparent, allowing a viewer with limited technical knowledge and ability to navigate easily or even choose not to engage in the interactive elements. This is achieved by placing interactive links in the subtitle tracks as menus that periodically appear at specific junction points. Because these menus have been placed in the subtitle tracks, they can be turned on or off as desired, allowing for a more traditional linear viewing of the material. This fragmented approach offers some interesting aesthetic opportunities, but it is also practical in that it allows for greater inclusivity and functions metaphorically to echo the community’s dispersed but still cohesive nature. Figure 10.2 illustrates the structure of the Prince George Métis Elders Video. Menus facilitate viewer choice of the sequences of audiovisual material. These in turn are interconnected (arrows) with other sequences. With the interactive DVD, context-based menus appear as the documentary unfolds within the video stream itself, allowing the viewer to follow tangents as they appear. For example, in Figures 10.3 and 10.4 (screen shots from the

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Figure 10.2 Screen shot from DVD Studio Pro during production illustrating the complexity of interactivity between the various tracks of video, audio, and photo content.

DVD), text-based buttons appear at the bottom of the screen as a clip plays. The viewer exercises control over the flow of the DVD by clicking on these buttons. These structures allow material generated and selected for presentation, via a participatory process, to be viewed in a participatory way. The interactive structure also allows the audience to make ongoing choices about how to shape their viewing experience. Since completing the project, we have presented it in a variety of contexts, including individual screenings and theatre-style screenings. We have also exhibited it in art galleries as a multi-monitor video installation. While the project can be played on a individual player and controlled by a single individual, it has far greater impact when presented as a multi-monitor video installation with multiple audience members controlling different screens. The simultaneity of different screens playing different elements creates unique and intriguing juxtapositions and vignettes of content and image. This fragmentation reflects the complexity of the contemporary Métis diaspora while creating a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the local community, its history, and its dynamics. The multiple screens extend the metaphor created by the interactivity and increase the level of complexity. The interactivity embedded in the video elements engages the viewer/audi-

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Figure 10.3 Screen shot from the Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Lac St. Anne interview.

Figure 10.4 Screen shot from the Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Elder’s introduction.

ence in a dialogue with the video imagery and content that is beyond passive reaction. As the viewer/audience navigates through the material, via cursor on screen or remote control, they build their own connections and construct their own narratives. Interviews can play off and inform one another as they combine with imagery of surrounding locations and historical information, giving a broader context to the individuals and community.

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There is much more we could say about the material we have produced with the Elders and our other research collaborators over the last few years. For the most part, we are not saying it here. It is entirely possible that all the things that could be said will never get said in one time or one place. That is okay. In place of narrative closure, we all (researchers, videographers, Elders, and others within the Métis community) experience narrative fragmentation. This is, perhaps, a better representation of our community. On the other hand, our structure does allow for narrative completion; it is just that this happens one strand at a time. We believe this is preferable to a single authoritative strand. With a new approach rooted in new technologies and new methodologies, our project extends the challenge imagined by the NFB when it created the CFC.

Note 1 The project was initiated by the Elders, who decided collectively that they wanted to do a video project. With this decision made, they approached Evans and suggested to him—told him, actually—that a video project was a good idea. Having had some experience with video projects done amateurishly, Evans had some serious concerns, but he agreed to seek expert help. From this point, Evans, Foster, and eventually several others (Marni Amirault, Craig Campbell, and Michelle Daveluy of the University of Alberta and Earl Henderson of the University of Northern British Columbia) formed an interdisciplinary team to undertake the research.

Eleven

“Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone”: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew UTE LISCHKE

Introduction Since his first book, Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock / Education Is Our Right: Two One-Act Plays (1992), Drew Hayden Taylor has been known as one of Canada’s leading First Nations writers. A member of the Curve Lake First Nation in central Ontario and an award-winning playwright, humorist, columnist, filmmaker, and lecturer, Taylor uses humour to bring about a greater understanding between Indigenous and European cultures. In much of his work he draws on his own complicated identity (his mother is First Nations, his father is white) to confront the racism in contemporary society and its complex relationship to identity. To counter the effects of racism, from Europeans but also from fellow Aboriginal people, both on and off the reserve, Taylor uses the healing powers of humour. In his documentary Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers (2000), he further explores the ways that humour and laughter are linked to survival and healing for First Nations peoples. Released by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), this documentary is one of several, including Hands of History (dir. Loretta Todd, 1994), that highlight the contributions of First Nations artists and promote Indigenous cultures in Canada and beyond.1 As Canada’s national film producer and distributor, the NFB has a mandate to develop critically engaging films and has shown leadership in supporting Indigenous filmmaking and bridging understanding between cultures. Taylor’s documentary on Indigenous humour fits into this mandate in its engagement with humour as a tool for survival and decolonization; it is also a film that grows out of Taylor’s own approach to the complex 233

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legacy of colonialism and identity. By examining the film and Taylor’s own writings on humour and Indigenous identity, this chapter identifies the aspects that shape and inform Indigenous humour and make it such an important site of healing. These aspects include a focus on storytelling, the debunking of stereotypes and political correctness, and the importance of the figure of the trickster in both humour and healing. Storyteller with a Mission Often referred to as a cross between Indigenous author Sherman J. Alexie, Jr. (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian) and stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, Drew Hayden Taylor is at home in a variety of genres but has made his greatest impact as a Canadian playwright and humorist. Influenced by the works of Tomson Highway and Thomas King—he recently commented that he “wants to be like Thomas King when he grows up” (Lischke)— Taylor has established his own tradition within the genre of Indigenous humour by combining a sense of drama with acerbic wit to carve out a space in which Indigenous peoples share the world with Euro-Americans, but on their own terms. He refers to himself as a “playwright-humorist” who does not want to re-create the gloom and doom of traditional theatre—the legacy of the “dead white man.” Instead he prefers to explore the human psyche through humour, an acute sense of observation, and a desire to bring First Nations philosophy, literature, and history to the attention of non-Natives. Taylor’s travels around the globe as lecturer and writer-in-residence, or while collaborating on the production of a play, have provided him with various perspectives on the human condition and issues of mixed identities; they have also enabled him to share his experiences from an Indigenous perspective. In doing so, he has helped dispel the stereotype of the stoic and humourless “Indian” so often reproduced in popular culture. In all aspects of his work, Taylor is a storyteller with a mission. The only child of an Ojibway mother and a European father, he grew up on the Curve Lake reserve surrounded by an extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of whom told stories late into the night. For Taylor, storytelling was not simply an idle pastime, taking the place of modern media; it was also a source of constructive entertainment that created both comfort and consolation for a boy who knew he was “different,” marked out by the colour of his eyes—green/blue instead of brown. As a child listening to stories and, later, as a storyteller himself, Taylor honed his skills as a writer and humorist coming to terms with his identity. Comparing his own experiences to those of Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street, Taylor acknowledges that Kermit’s rendition of “It’s Not Easy

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Being Green” led him to conclude that this song could just as easily have been renamed “It’s Not Easy Having Blue Eyes in a Brown-Eyed Village”: Yes I’m afraid it’s true. The author happens to be a card-carrying Indian. Once you get past the aforementioned eyes, the fair skin, light brown hair and noticeable lack of cheek bones, there lies the heart and spirit of an Ojibway storyteller. “Honest Injun” or as the more politically correct term may be “Honest Aboriginal.” (Me Funny 3) Storytelling enables Taylor to work through the issue of mixed identities in ways that confront both expectations and assumptions about what being Indigenous looks and feels like. Referring to himself as “pink,” he confronts his mixed identity within Native and European cultures: My pinkness is constantly being pointed out to me over and over and over again. “You don’t look Indian!” “You’re not Indian, are you?” “Reallly?!?!” I got questions like that from both White and Native people. For a while I debated having my Status card tattooed on my forehead. (Me Funny 4) Taylor’s words underscore the impact of these expectations on his developing sense of self. He recalls how he dyed his hair pitch-black at one point, during a particularly insecure period, in an attempt to secure his Indigenous identity. This insecurity was exacerbated by the fact that, as an actor, he was often called to play the role of a Native person, only to be told after the audition that he was not Native looking at all. His reaction now is to seek out the humour in the situation, concluding that he would “make a great undercover agent for Native political organizations” (Me Funny 5). Racism is not endemic only to white settler societies. Taylor emphasizes that his “blue” eyes have received similar reactions from Native people. For example, after revealing to one audience that he was writing a proposed television series with two other comedians, a well-known Aboriginal poet asked him how he could work so well with “half-breeds.” Taylor responded in his usual deadpan fashion: “The company would be called . . . A Buck And a Half Productions” (Furious Observations 104). This is a good response to the nagging and recurring question of Taylor’s mixed identity; it also confirms that identity, politics, and racism are closely intertwined and that humour is how Taylor tackles these challenges. As these stories indicate, for Taylor, humour has always been synonymous with both storytelling and healing. He draws on Indigenous understandings of humour as an essential part of the spirit of any story and its healing power.

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“Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone. Political Correctness vs. Native Humour, Round One” In his essay on Native humour in Me Funny,2 Taylor cites author Paula Gunn Allen’s description of how Native peoples incorporate humour into their lives:3 “Humour is widely used by Indians to deal with life. Indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, and at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one’s own land necessitates” (Whacking 67). In an interview, Indigenous writer, activist, and academic Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) acknowledged that “a comic spirit [is] at the centre of Indigenous cultural identity” (Bruchac 4), which is also about survival and “getting along” (295). Equally, J. Allan Ryan observes in The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art that “a distinct comic and communal attitude does exist that can legitimately be labelled ‘Native humour.’ Transcending geographical boundaries and tribal distinction, it is most often characterized by frequent teasing, outrageous punning, constant wordplay, surprising association, extreme subtlety, layered and serious reference, and considerable compassion” (xii). Joy Porter points out the significance of Indigenous humour for healing rifts across cultures: “Humour has a central, healing role within many aspects of Indian cultural life . . . It is notoriously culturally specific” yet “has always provided a valuable bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of seeing the world” (60). Perhaps unsurprisingly, although humour has been present in Indigenous writing for a long time, it has until recently received scant attention from literary critics. Bernd Peyer argues that this neglect is due to the fact that levity did “not fit in with the still widely accepted stereotype of the stoic Indian” (116). Taylor’s film and his book of essays Me Funny can be situated in relation to works by Vine Deloria, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Tomson Highway, and Thomas King. Humour is a vital component of these authors’ creative works, and all of them have brought “Indian humour” to the forefront of critical discussion. Furthermore, these authors’ works, as well as the 1995 exhibition Indian Humor, which was organized by American Indian Contemporary Arts and which travelled throughout the United States (McCollum 407), have continued to raise the awareness of non-Indigenous audiences about the importance of Indigenous humour while challenging existing stereotypes about Indigenous people. Taylor’s film overtly counters stereotypes of the “Indian” as they circulate in popular culture, both in North America and beyond. The extent and nature of stereotypes of Indigenous people on film and in culture has been the focus of several critical studies, including Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian (1979) and Angela Aleiss’s investigation of stereotypes

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and cinema in Making the White Man’s Indian (2005).4 Often these stereotypes operate both by commission, both positive (the “wise elder,” the “Indian Princess,” the “loyal sidekick,” the “noble savage”)5 and negative (the “drunk”, the “savage,” the “doomed race”); and by omission, where Indigenous people are seen strictly in a historical context, the implication being that they did not survive the transition to contemporary times. Both in his film and in his writing, Taylor exposes the problematic nature of these stereotypes by exploring and representing contemporary Indigenous lives in as complete a manner as possible. In doing so, he opens himself up to criticism from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences and critics, something he addresses directly in his work: “Some people have no sense of humour. I am tempted to say some ‘white people’ but that would be racist. Though I’m told that it is politically impossible for a member of an oppressed minority to be racist against a dominant culture because of some socio-political reason” (“Seeing Red” 21). Taylor deliberately steps outside the boundaries of “political correctness” and plays with the fact that, because he straddles “white” and “Native,” he can play an undercover agent manoeuvring through the minefield of Native identities and representations. This is a fraught position, as Taylor indicates when he refers to the time his play alterNATIVES was being produced in Vancouver in 2002. A humorous portrayal about cultural conflicts and perceived stereotypes, the play generated one review that called it “witless white bashing,” accusing Taylor of “having it in for white people” (“Seeing Red” 21). Yet on the same day, the theatre received a bomb threat that accused it of producing a racist play. Taylor’s reaction was this wry comment: “Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed and write a play” (21). His lighthearted response to the overreaction his play generated does not mean that he takes this criticism lightly. He argues that Indigenous humour, especially when presented in a theatre, has often had a perception problem, something that is compounded by a lack of understanding of contemporary Indigenous issues among the audience. This undermines the dominant culture’s willingness to enjoy, appreciate, and accept the unique Indigenous sense of humour; as a result, humour itself becomes politically charged. In the case of alterNATIVES, given the volatile atmosphere in British Columbia at the time—the fallout over the Nisga’a Treaty, and the turmoil involving the Musqueam reserve’s white landowners6 —it is no wonder that some Vancouverites were less than enthused by a Native comedy/drama that some perceived as “white” bashing (22). Although by now used to this kind of reaction to his work, Taylor continues to be surprised when it happens, something that animates his documentary.

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Thomas King also recognizes that Indigenous humour is difficult to define: I suspect that we will never find a good definition for Native humour, that the definition may lie in and change with performance, which is a fancy way of saying that, if there is such a thing as Native humour, it’s like the wind. We can’t see it. We don’t know where it comes from. And the only time we feel it is when it’s blowing in our faces. (King, “Performing Native Humour” 171) Both Taylor and King argue that humour is universal: we may all laugh at misfortunes, at catastrophes, at racist and sexist jokes, but this does not define a particular sense of humour as much as it defines fears and hatreds. However, humour is also transformative and is closely tied to both acceptance and survival; the volatile mixture of teasing and survival humour that is self-directed and quite common in First Nations’ humour is found in other culturally diverse communities.7 Thus teasing, a form of permitted disrespect, becomes the means by which one measures one’s acceptance into a particular Indigenous community, and humour reflects the essence of the community while also serving as a “cautionary tale” for it, as Thomas King observes in Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew. Because humour is so often self-directed and self-reflexive, it helps us laugh at the self and the chaos of history; “we are at our best when we laugh at ourselves” (“Performing Native Humour” 181). Trickster Tales Taylor’s stories foreground self-directed and self-reflexive humour, establishing him as a trickster figure. Functioning on the edge between cultures, where it reveals uncomfortable truths through humour, Taylor’s work resonates with the powerful and evocative figure of the trickster, as does that of many other Indigenous storytellers. Much has been written about the trickster in First Nations literatures. Lenore Keeshig-Tobias acknowledges that the trickster is a figure found in oral cultures the world over, but he is special and central in the cultures of North America. Among his names here, in Canada, are Glooskap, Nanabojoh, Weesakejak, Napi, Raven, Hare, and Coyote. Half hero, half fool, this figure is at once like each one of us and like none of us. Trickster tales are at once admonitions, instructions, as well as entertainment. (3) The self-reflexive nature of the trickster, often manifest in the figure of Coyote, derives from the fact that

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a Trickster character . . . has lots to learn and teach while travelling the world . . . [and] sometimes is like a magician, an enchanter, an absurd prankster, or a Shaman, [and] sometimes is a shape shifter, and who often takes on human characteristics. Trickster is a transformer figure, one whose transformations often use humour, satire, self-mocking, and absurdity to carry good lessons. (Archibald 5). In Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, as in his other works, Taylor plays the role of the trickster, observing his surroundings, imparting cultural rules and knowledge, and sharing lessons learned. As a trickster, however, he entertains as he educates and learns even as he teaches, drawing on his history as a storyteller to map out the healing potential of Indigenous humour. Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew: Humour in Indigenous Film and Media Taylor’s interest in storytelling, humour, and identity culminated in a documentary about Native humour, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew: Native Humour and Its Healing Powers. No stranger to diverse media technologies, he had been working with both APTN and the CBC, writing scripts for children’s and other programs. With Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, he has extended Indigenous storytelling into the realm of Indigenous media production. Much as his theatre work does, his documentary allows his audience to hear Native people—in this case, Native comedians—respond to contemporary social and cultural issues. Taylor recognizes that it is the white audience that needs to be educated in Indigenous humour. Writing about humour and white audiences in relation to his plays, he notes that most of the audience were afraid to laugh, or were uncomfortable with the prospect of laughing at native people, regardless of the context . . . Perhaps in some way they wanted to feel guilty by what they saw, to be kicked in the ribs by social tragedy their ancestors had caused rather than give in to the healing powers of humour. They did not expect Native people to be funny, let alone laugh at themselves. (“Seeing Red” 24) Taylor recognized that audiences needed permission to laugh. They were used to mainstream media portrayals of the tragic, downtrodden, miserable “Indian” on the one hand, or the “noble savage” on the other, so they needed to learn that contemporary Indigenous people are much like the rest of society. Humour was one way to make that common humanity apparent. He conceived the documentary as a means to break down stereotypes of

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Indigenous people, and Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew does just that, overturning conventional images through a powerful but unexpected (by non-Indigenous audiences at least) element: humour. The title plays with the connotations that words like “Redskins” (in particular) bring to mind. Indigenous people have long been bombarded with demeaning images that draw on and perpetuate stereotypes. These images include sports team mascots (the Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians) as well as the labels on commercial products (Red Man tobacco, Big Chief sugar). As Philip Bellfy points out, labels like these suggest the stereotyped Indigenous body, complete with headdress and war whoop, as well as (equally disturbingly) “some settler ‘bounty hunter’ holding up a bloody scalp — a ‘red skin’” (30). While “Redskins” is the most obviously contested term, each of the terms in Taylor’s title foregrounds significant issues relating to “identity” and to how and where Indigenous people fit into the Canadian mosaic. As noted earlier, Taylor takes up the “trickster” role, which is uniquely suited to tackling stereotypes through performance. As a theatrical device (including in stand-up comedy), the trickster can shape-shift, tell a story, and teach a lesson. Similarly, the third term, “Puppy Stew”—taken directly from The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour—underscores the self-reflexive nature of Indigenous humour; here, the trickster figure of Coyote sets up and knocks down expectations in a playful yet powerful way. The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, a radio show on Canada’s CBC Radio One created by Thomas King, ran from 1997 to 2000. The setting is taken from Thomas King’s award-winning novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993), from which the radio broadcast borrowed heavily; however, this program developed new characters, all of whom were Aboriginal, including Thomas King, who played himself, Jasper Friendly Bear (Floyd Favel Starr), and Gracie Heavy Hand (Edna Rain). Much like the novel, the radio program consisted of socially relevant satire and political repartee with a great deal of self-mockery and cheeky humour. Much of the humour revolved around Indigenous characters exposing the gullibility of non-Indigenous tourists, who were willing to suspend both their disbelief and morals to chow down on “puppy stew” which was served up, tongue-in-cheek, by Gracie and company at the Dead Dog Café. In referencing “puppy stew” in his title, Taylor is nodding to the way that King’s radio drama (on the country’s national broadcaster, no less) used humour to poke fun at the nonIndigenous audience and to explore how stereotypes operate and circulate. “Puppy stew” was presented as Gracie’s favourite dish, and the café customers were told (and apparently believed) that Labrador retrievers provided the meat for it because they had more meat per pound than other breeds.

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The program also, importantly, asked us to consider how these representations might become sites of both appropriation and misunderstanding. The disparate elements foregrounded by the documentary’s title and underscored by the joke told at the beginning of the film—“What is a Native vegetarian?” “A very bad hunter”—set the stage for Taylor to ask what defines and constitutes Indigenous humour as he sets off on his road trip across Canada. Instead of answering the question himself, he draws on interviews with and performances by six other Aboriginal entertainers and authors to explore how Indigenous humour flourishes everywhere, both on and off the Rez,8 from the foothills of the Rockies to the city of Toronto, home to one of Canada’s largest urban Indigenous communities. The documentary moves back and forth between interviews and performances, situating the audience as spectators watching a performance and as witnesses responding to these individuals’ life stories. This doubling has a humanizing effect, erasing the lines between Native and non-Native; we are able to relate to the performers’ humanity through our shared laughter. All of the participants in the documentary, through their performances and their stories, elaborate on the significance of humour in Indigenous cultures and identify its significant healing powers, past and present; humour, for them, is a means of coming to terms with identity politics and racism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as urban Indigenous populations grow, and at a time when many families are just now coming to terms with the impact of residential schools on their families and communities, issues of identity and healing continue to have real significance for First Nations peoples. Stand-up comics Don Burnstick (Cree) and Don Kelly (Anishinaabe) provide different views on humour, healing, and identity. As a child, Burnstick found humour to be a short-term way to prevent his father from being physically abusive. After years of living on the streets and abusing alcohol and drugs, he discovered that humour could serve as a bridge between cultures. In his stand-up routine, Burnstick plays the “Redskin guy,” using a “Washington Redskins” sports bag to carry his various props, which allow him to play on stereotypes about Indigenous people: “Redskin stuff to show you are a redskin, such as cowboy boots and a garbage bag used as an ‘Indian suitcase.’” His jokes are full of self-mockery: he uses both his baseball cap and his hair to play with stereotypical images of the “Indian”—the “stoic Indian,” the “Cree,” “Ojibwe,” “Métis,” or even a “Cree from Saddle Lake First Nation.” In the documentary, the stand-up skits are interspersed with serious moments when Taylor interviews Burnstick and we discover Burnstick’s difficult personal journey as one of fifteen children whose life was filled with alcohol and drugs. Burnstick speaks about how he learned

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that by being funny, he could break the tension in his home or even stop his dad from beating his mother. Fellow comic and stand-up comedian Don Kelly did not share Burnstick’s painful childhood experiences. His humour focuses on the way he encountered racism. Like Taylor, Kelly does not “look Native.” The offspring of a Native father and a Swedish-Irish mother, Kelly has red hair and very fair skin; this disjunction between appearance and identity mediates his experience of racism and provides him with a unique way of understanding how racism works.9 For example, he recalls that people often say “classic” things to him, such as, “You’re not Indian, you don’t drink and collect welfare. No, not you, I mean those other guys I’m talking about.” To put his audience at ease and to highlight Indigenous versus non-Indigenous relationships, Kelly always starts off by “introducing” his Aboriginal name: “Runs Like a Girl.” He says this gets a good laugh, particularly when he tells his audience that he prefers to be known by Kelly so that his audience will take him seriously. In his act he finds his role model in the Canadian singer Shania Twain, a Métis adopted into an Anishinaabe family. He notes that majority culture audiences are initially uncertain about whether his humour will be aggressive towards them, but that they eventually recognize that his humour skewers stereotypes of the “Indian.” By challenging stereotypes rather than apportioning blame, Kelly invites his audience to be in on the joke rather than the butt of it; in this way, the audience members have room to be self-reflexive about their role in perpetuating racist stereotypes. In a lighthearted moment at the end of their interview, Taylor and Kelly use foil-covered reflectors to suntan themselves on a snow-covered patio overlooking the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The humour that underpins Thomas King’s radio drama, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, is similar to Kelly’s in that it invites the audience to participate. Taylor’s interview with King, however, gestures towards some of the limitations of this approach. In the initial segment on King, we watch a rehearsal in which the actors tape the show and discuss changes to the script. As was noted earlier, the Dead Dog Café, an “Indian” tourist trap with its “puppy stew” and farm-raised meat Labradors, works as a site through which both the audience and the Indigenous characters are able to chuckle at the naive tourists. It is possible that King is making a further point about how Indigenous cultural practices are vulnerable to nonIndigenous commercialization. The White-Dog Feast, a midwinter festival among some North American First Nations, during which a white dog is sacrificed to the creator as a thanksgiving, might well, in King’s deft hands, give us the Dead Dog Café, in which canny Indigenous people exploit the dominant culture’s fears of, and fascination about, them. Taylor’s interview

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with King sounds a warning about the limits of humour in crossing cultural divides; King recounts how the “Cuddles for stew joke with Gracie” got a lot of mail and a strong reaction from people. King explains that some of the audience simply did not understand that Gracie’s threat to turn Cuddles into stew was a joke. A different type of relationship to humour is explored in the segment with Sharon Shorty and Jackie Bear, two humorists from Yukon. Bear (a singer/performer) and Shorty are passionate about the Elders in their lives and are fascinated by the elderly women in their communities. The response of Elders to a skit one of them had performed about a traditional Elder led to their first gig in a community hall. Watching the Elders both laughing and crying as they were performing made the two women realize they were on to something. They created the alter egos of Sarah and Susie, two elderly Indigenous women who “speak” to First Nations audiences about their daily activities—and their love of bingo and Kentucky Fried Chicken. As performers, they have come to recognize that the characters of Sarah and Susie keep the spirits of the Elders alive, and keep their spirits up as well. As with the other segments, we hear Bear and Shorty speaking about their personal stories, which underscore the deep connection between past and present that saturates both their performances and their lives. For instance, they talk about how they became roommates at the same time as their grandmothers became roommates in a Yukon seniors’ home, how they use clothing in their performances that was given them by Elders who had watched them perform, and how they wear their grandmothers’ stockings when they perform. In doing so, they enhance both the significance of the telling of stories and the power of healing. Even while making people across the country laugh with their portrayal of two Elders, they are playing a role as community healers, linking past to present. Furthermore, their stories/histories touch a universal chord. As one Chinese lady told them after a performance, “You remind me so much of my auntie! You have made me laugh.” Taylor gleans further understanding about Indigenous humour from Herbie Barnes, an actor, director, and comedy improv instructor and cofounder of a sketch comedy troupe, who describes Native humour as an “exploration of the dark side.” In perhaps the clearest link between humour and healing, Barnes has founded “ArtsAlterNative,” a space where Native youth engage in group therapy through performance. For Barnes, comedy is significant because it leaves the audience with something to think about. Along with stories and the figure of the trickster, humour functions as an important signifier of Indigenous culture; and like storytelling and the trickster, it can be transformative and take people to another place. Barnes

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notes that most people have a fear of going to the next place. He encourages the youth he is working with to “go and slay the dragon”—that is, to be transformed. Barnes’s use of humour for healing makes explicit the connection that all of the participants in the film gesture towards: that First Nations communities, after all the tragedies they have faced, are now “moving into a space where we can have humour,” and that that movement is an intrinsic part of healing. King remarks in the documentary: Those things that hurt in life, those things that continue to hurt about being native in North America, I can handle those things through humour. I can’t handle those through anger because, if I get angry about something, it just gets away from me. It just consumes me. I’ve got to keep coming back to humour as my sort of safe position. And I think I can make more of an impact. Taylor’s film, like the men and women it showcases, partakes of this healing. When so often the majority culture’s image of First Nations peoples is derived from newspaper headlines or sound bites that trumpet negative happenings, such as financial mismanagement on reserves, or brief television clips that focus on “violent” acts, such as road blockades or protest marches, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew offers an alternate view, one overlaid with the voices of all races joined in shared laughter and the possibility of communal healing. At the root of humour, there are truths in the context of individual experiences. Indigenous humour has been, and continues to be, a source of survival for Indigenous peoples. As Taylor observes, Native humour comes from five hundred years of colonization, of oppression, of being kept prisoners in our own country. With legalized attacks on our culture, our languages, our identities and even our religion, often the only way left for Native people to respond to the cruel realities of Fourth World existence was in humour. Humour kept us sane. It gave us power. It gave us privacy. (Whacking 69) Indigenous humour is a reaction against a world that does not believe that Indigenous lives matter. It stems from a deep desire for survival. It has healed the pain of many by creating and maintaining balance. In Indigenous cultures, humour and storytelling are often understood as synonymous and are highly respected. By interweaving the personal stories of his subjects with their performances, Taylor has created a documentary

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that discusses humour from the perspective of Indigenous people and that explores how humour originated in the past to influence the present and point to the future. Above all, he shows that humour has been an essential tool in the healing process of Indigenous peoples, who are beginning to liberate themselves from the legacy of colonization. When Susie and Sarah say their farewell to the audience, they mention that they are going hunting for moose meat to put in their freezer. Their departing words are “Goodbye, Colonel Sanders!” But then, turning back to the audience, they tell us to “keep on clapping.” Or, as the ending of the Dead Dog Café would have it in its famous closing line: “Stay calm, be brave, wait for the signs.” Notes 1 See Gail Vanstone’s discussion of Hands of History in Chapter 13. 2 Taylor uses the term “political correctness” as a way to engage in a discussion of the hysteria surrounding the reception of his play by a mostly white, Euro-American audience. 3 Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna, Sioux, and Lebanese (1939–2008), was a poet, novelist, and critic. A professor at the University of California—Los Angeles, she paved the way for mainstream Native American authors. The 1983 publication of Allen’s Studies on American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs was a major advance for Native American literature. 4 For example, Chris Eyre, the prominent Native American filmmaker and the director and producer of such films as Smoke Signals, Skins, Edge of America, and Imprint, debunks society’s fixation on the dying Indian. His films avoid depicting First Nations peoples as “victims,” a role often explored in Hollywood films. His films are attempts to realistically portray Native people as human beings. See also Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race; See also Keeshig-Tobias, “Goodbye, Wild Indian,” and Lischke and McNab, “’Show Me the Money,’” both in Lischke and McNab, Walking a Tightrope. 5 The stereotype of the “noble savage” is especially prevalent in West and East German Indianer films. For a more complete discussion of these films, see Lischke and McNab, “’Show Me the Money.’” 6 The Nisga’a Treaty, the first modern-day treaty to be negotiated in British Columbia, was settled in 2000. The parties to the negotiations were the Nisga’a First Nations in northwestern BC, the Canadian federal government, and the BC provincial government. The resulting treaty set the standard for subsequent negotiations in BC (Fact Sheet: The Nisga’a Treaty, http://www .ainc-inac.gc.ca/ai/mr/is/nit-eng.asp). As well, in 2000 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on the case of The Musqueam Indian Band v. Glass, the culmination of five years of court battles between the Musqueam First Nation (whose traditional territory includes Vancouver) and the leaseholders who

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live on the Musqueam land regarding the renegotiation of rent for these properties. http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1816/index.do. 7 For example, after the release of the comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan in November 2006, there was much discussion about the appropriateness of ethnic and racial humour. In the film, the writer/actor Sacha Baron Cohen poses as a reporter from Kazakhstan on a road trip across Amerika and interviews unsuspecting people. In one scene, he is coached by Pat Haggerty, an American “Humor Coach,” on the various nuances of American humour and is cautioned about the use of ethnic/racial jokes. Baron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew, counters that his character’s racism demonstrates how racism feeds into mindless conformity, exposing people’s prejudices. In a way, Cohen’s transformative character is very much like the essence of the trickster Nanapush. 8 The Rez is short for “The Reserve,” a term applied by Indigenous (and, increasingly, non-Indigenous) Canadians for tracts of land set aside by the Indian Act for the use of First Nations peoples. Tomson Highway’s first play, The Rez Sisters, is an example of how the spatial term gets taken up to mean more than a physical place. 9 Kelly is the star of the APTN program Fish Out of Water, which capitalizes on both his “urban Aboriginal” persona and his non-Aboriginal appearance.

Twelve

Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro MAEGHAN PIRIE

As subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history. —bell hooks, Talking Back

Introduction I open with this quotation from bell hooks’s Talking Back because her enunciation of subjecthood as both reclamation and naming is significant. In relation to First Nations filmmakers Shelley Niro and Alanis Obomsawin, filmmaking is a politicized site of resistance through which previously obfuscated oral narratives, lived experiences, and alternative aesthetics take shape through re-presentation. Furthermore, contemporary ethnographies that emerge from Niro and Obomsawin are indeed a talking back against the systemic marginalization of First Nations in Canada, a marginalization rooted firmly at the intersection between racism and sexism. These filmmakers critically engage with traditional filmmaking norms in their approaches, subject matter, and production methods. Indeed, the overarching similarities between Obomsawin and Niro are the critical, political perspectives within their works and their ongoing negotiation with Indigenous and gender identities. Beyond their noteworthy repertoires and comparable overarching themes, I chose these filmmakers because of their memberships in geographically and culturally diverse groups. While both artists are part of the Mohawk Confederacy, Obomsawin is Abenaki, an Algonquin-speaking nation located southwest of Montreal, and Niro is a Mohawk from the 247

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Six Nations. I interviewed Niro in June 2009 and Obomsawin in February 2010. Obomsawin did not plan to become a filmmaker, describing it during our discussion as not her idea. Rather, a series of events and an interest in educational reform led her to this medium. Beginning in 1960, Obomsawin began touring Canada and the United States as a singer and storyteller, focusing largely on educational institutions for audiences of all ages, “including university and kindergarten children” (Obomsawin interview). From there, she was asked by NFB producers to act as a consultant on a film; since then, she has directed and/or produced more than thirty films for the NFB, ranging from educational multimedia kits and animated shorts to feature-length documentaries. Shelley Niro is a member of the Turtle clan and comes from Six Nations, Ontario, part of the Bay of Quinte Mohawks. She resides and works in Brantford, Ontario, and directed, wrote, and produced her first film, It Starts with a Whisper (1992), with Anna Gronau.1 During our conversation, she made it clear that a desire to re-present the lived experiences of First Nations, especially First Nations women, has been part of her personal paradigm since she began her career as an artist. Niro’s melding of this theory into her practice (be it photography, painting, or film) is part of a personal manifesto behind her artwork. She described this genesis as follows: When I first started doing art, or when I first started doing serious art, you look at all the Native art up ’til 1985 it was mostly male and you know, the image of women that was depicted, it was mostly soft, and, and representation of being like spiritual and almost voiceless, you know. I think Daphne Odjig was the only female artist around that was known at the time, and uh, I just thought hmmmm. So, I just thought I’m going to make art and I’m really going to put an emphasis on women’s imagery, ’cause there really isn’t that much out there.2 (Niro interview) The selection of Niro and Obomsawin effectively illuminates localized specificities and shared experiences of gendered and racialized oppression, as well as resistance. Alongside this talking back against pervasive stereotypes within the Canadian mainstream, there is, furthermore, a talking back against prior ethnographic films.3 To illustrate this, I have selected one example from each of these filmmakers’ oeuvres: Shelley Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper (1992) and Alanis Obomsawin’s Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (2006). Waban-Aki is part homage to Obomsawin’s childhood home, part historic revisionism on an impressively large scale, and part celebration of Abenaki cultural continuity, resistance, and

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art. The film uses numerous testimonials from members of the Abenaki nation to tell the story of this group. In addition to these narrative streams, Waban-Aki arguably functions as an addendum to Mother of Many Children (1977), with the reappearance in Waban-Aki of Jeannette Corbière, one of the first women to challenge the status of First Nations women under the Indian Act. It is in these sections that women’s stories most explicitly drive the narrative of Waban-Aki. An embodied, largely female Aboriginal identity is also a pervasive theme in It Starts with a Whisper, although Niro presents these issues via a dramatic film rather than a documentary. Shanna Sabbath is a young Native woman, living in a city (perhaps Toronto?), who leaves for a New Year’s trip to Niagara Falls with her three aunts, who still live on the reserve. Shanna’s anxiety, confusion, and, at times, despair as a First Nations woman living in an urban environment, trying to come to grips with historical genocide and contemporary racism, is depicted as a corporeal experience. Niro and co-director Anna Gronau employ dream-like dialogues and journey segments to enable the protagonist to confront these issues. It Starts with a Whisper begins with a dialogue-free segment along the banks of the Grand River. During a prolonged shot in which all we see are the protagonist’s feet, Shanna appears to discard her day-to-day apparel, literally stepping out of her jeans and stepping into a traditional outfit while walking through the woods. We are privy to her thoughts during this intimate stroll, which feature several female voices offering support and guidance with statements like, “Little one, Shanna, don’t be afraid. The voices of the past are calling you. The voices of the present urge you on. The voices of the dead tell you their sorrow.” After five minutes, we see the subject’s face. She is visibly anxious, overwhelmed, preoccupied. The scene is thus set for a personal journey in which Shanna begins the process of reconciling herself with her identity as a First Nations woman in twentieth-century Canada. Situating Knowledges: Haraway, Habitus, and Interviews My contention that Niro’s and Obomsawin’s aesthetics and approaches to filmmaking are a break from historical practices demands some context in terms of my own analysis and influences. By exploring relations and symbols and negotiating with how meaning is constructed—in other words, by considering habitus—I will be making a concerted effort to negotiate with and address gaps in contemporary research.4 This allows for an exploration that extends beyond the utterances of the filmmakers and the participants within the selected films, to examine the shapes these articulations adopt: Is a point asserted through a story or a traditional narrative arc? Is an

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argument voiced while another daily activity is being engaged in? How does the participant engage with the camera? How do production processes and filming styles change from one artist to the next? These are but a few questions I pose in my subsequent considerations regarding the manner in which these filmmakers’ narratives take shape. From this perspective, stories extend beyond a speech act. They are embodied. Shelley Niro’s own description of the production process she has come to follow as an artist highlights the embodied nature of this intersection between storytelling and filmmaking. During our conversation she described this process as one that can be likened to tangible pieces, unique unto themselves, coming together to create a layered story. Niro describes this process as “construction. You have to construct everything. You have to construct the script, from the script you have to construct wardrobe, you have to construct sound, the sets [. . .] the actors. So everything is [. . .] physically brought in together” (interview). Physically pieced together by the author, similar to a quilt, filmic texts like It Starts with a Whisper and Waban-Aki are quite literally corporeal, of the artist’s body proper and also part of these filmmakers’ re-embodiment of contemporary ethnographies based on their own and their participants’ habitus. The scholarly gaps I identify speak not solely to the literal absence of study surrounding First Nations filmmakers (especially women), but also to the problems inherent in how research in this arena is typically carried out. For instance, along with my initial interpretations, I rely on excerpts from unstructured interviews with Niro and Obomsawin. My desire to avoid imposing my research agenda as I speak with the artists is also a call for collaborative approaches between researcher and subject that are sensitive to historically rooted marginalization found within some more mainstream academic methods. This focus on ongoing dialogue and an integrated approach to visual articulations presents a break from the pervasive privileging of writing and words, in that it concentrates instead on “ideas developing through the formation of relationships” (Frontier Farewell 8). Unstructured interviews, therefore, actively confront and confound standard academic approaches to these films, which involve ample interpretation but little or no dialogue with the filmmaker. So, what am I really critiquing here? Initially I had difficulty answering this question in a satisfactory way. The work of thinking though this dilemma took a more productive turn only when I reread Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges.” This text was instrumental in making clear that many previous encounters with analyses of Indigenous ethnographies were tainted by an invented neutrality based on assumed norms of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Haraway’s emphasis on the persistence

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of vision articulates a feminist objectivity that takes root in situated knowledges that emerge from specific embodiments, rather than transcendence through either relativism or totalizing conflations. In short, “the moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision” (582). As a mode of vision, feminist objectivity does not split subject and object, nor does it claim omniscience. Rather, feminist objectivity enables a locatable, responsible expression of knowledge in which academics become “answerable for what we learn how to see” (583). I would add here that Haraway’s acknowledgement of knowledges as emanating from embodiments is particularly useful to my own interactions with these films as corporeal negotiations with history, gender, habitus,4 and systemic marginalization. How does one remain situated, acknowledging the partialness of one’s perspective and remaining accountable for what and how knowledge is produced? Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis offers insight regarding the emancipatory potential contained in inclusive oral narratives. She states that it is our responsibility as critical, sensitive individuals to “question not only the validity of positing one ‘centre’ or self as a model for all life experiences, but also the expectation that a single male voice has the power and authority to represent others, regardless of race and gender” (43). From this perspective, speech acts function as affirmative gestures, helping to shape reflexive identities that reflect a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints (43). Clearly, this emphasis on the inclusion and connectivity of oral narratives parallels the numerous female voices that drive Obomsawin’s and Niro’s works, which in turn break from traditional ethnography founded on Western dualism and the documentation of difference. Some Background: Situating Six Nations, Situating Odonak The persistent presence of the past was a common sentiment expressed by Shelley Niro and Alanis Obomsawin during their separate interviews. Certainly, both artists use film in part to re-present histories that have been relegated to the margins of mainstream Canadian education and media or systematically effaced altogether. I start with Niro’s elaboration on erasures of Six Nations history within the mainstream Canadian narrative: And so, like everybody from Six Nations knows the history, like how we got this land and why, and if wasn’t for Six Nations there would be no Canada . . . We’d all be speaking US [laughter] and you know, and then the people who are sort of taking this land now and building these developments um, they really don’t have to worry about that because the next generation will come along and they’ll keep doing it and doing it and doing it whereas the people from Six Nations, you

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know we’re kind of still in that mindset where it’s like, it hasn’t really changed for us . . . So it’s kind of frustrating that way. (interview) Niro’s insights regarding land tenure in the Grand River Valley point to the ongoing significance, for the Iroquois populace, of historical encounters. In spite of the relevance of historical figures like Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe and Joseph Brant for members of Six Nations, Niro’s commentary surrounding ongoing encroachments speaks to a complex series of interactions, which are distilled and distorted through racist allegations that are normalized in the Brantford newspaper—an assertion Niro voiced prior to the quoted segment of conversation above.5 While history plays a prominent role, perpetually interacting with the present, Niro’s (and my own) negotiations are not fixated on trauma. Rather, Niro’s summation of Six Nations history and its relevance to her filmmaking speaks to my earlier contentions concerning filmic re-membering as a politicized force of memory that is at once recuperative, corporeal, and in flux.6 A poignant scene that illustrates this coexistence between historical recognition and contemporary celebration is found in It Starts with a Whisper. During Shanna’s dream sequence,7 she speaks about her anxiety and sadness with Elijah Harper,8 an Ojibway-Cree Member of Parliament who played a significant role in blocking amendments to the Canadian Constitution because there had been insufficient consultation with First Nations communities. His humorous yet salient advice is, “Whatever you do Shanna, don’t blow up.” Harper’s response to Sabbath is representative, I argue, of Niro’s ongoing efforts to re-present First Nations identities. Niro describes the scene as follows: So, she has this dream where he’s there and she says y’know people are bugging me and I have all this burden I’m carrying and I keep thinking about things; historically significant stuff [me: yeah]. And really he’s like, “Well yeah, it’s good to think about this stuff but you really have to live your own life and just get on with it.” That’s essentially what he’s saying. And so after he gives her this kind of permission to live, umm, then she more or less accepts her aunts and then they continue on the celebration. (interview) Later on she elaborates on this moment between Harper and Sabbath by stating that the weight of a history largely erased in mainstream representations “is a heavy burden and I think it’s um, it’s like a legacy and just learning how to deal with the legacy, and um, yeah, confront and keep going” (interview).

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Like Niro, Obomsawin uses film as a recuperative pedagogical force, in which film functions as a didactic intervention that confronts mainstream Canadian education’s failure to account for its ongoing marginalization of First Nations. This confrontation and re-visioning through film is a common theme throughout this filmmaker’s repertoire. Alongside this documentation, or bearing witness, is an obligation on the part of Obomsawin to accurately portray participants as nuanced individuals who comprise diverse communities. Nevertheless, initial experiences with the NFB proved frustrating in this regard: “I did it once [acted as a consultant] and I knew I wasn’t gonna do that again because they were just using me to open doors to communities and then I became worried because the film comes out and if the people are unhappy they’re gonna be mad at me” (interview). I highlight Obomsawin’s dissatisfaction because it speaks to an obligation to the filmed communities that Obomsawin expressed several times. This obligation is linked to a desire to situate previously erased histories but also to an underlying motivation to remedy past ethnographic practices in which the filmed subjects were denied opportunities to articulate their lived experiences. This resistance through film (and storytelling and singing) emerged from Obomsawin’s own experiences in the Canadian educational system in which the exclusion of First Nations history was a damaging childhood trauma (interview). She went on to say that, as an adult, she “wanted to find a way to make changes so that our children in the future would not have to go through those kinds of things” (interview). Like Six Nations, communities like Kahnesatake and Kahnawake (featured in several of Obomsawin’s films, including her celebrated Oka series) have been part of long-standing land conflicts, initially with the Catholic Church and now with governmental bodies (Surtees 67–70).9 The Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 was the forerunner of the Indian Act of 1869. This earliest iteration of the Indian Act promoted not only full “enfranchisement” into the Canadian populace through the acquisition of European education and private property but also the erosion of First Nations’ women’s autonomy. Two sections stood out. First, Section 11(1)(c) asserted that an Indian [sic] was a male person with a patrilineal male ancestor falling under the 1874 definition, or was the legitimate child, wife, or widow of a person falling into this racialized category. Second, Section 72 allotted the Superintendant General the power to cease payment of annuities and interest to an Aboriginal woman with no children who had elected to leave her current husband and live out of wedlock (read: immorally) with another man. Both sections demonstrated the phallogocentric and patriarchal paradigms that have shaped—that continue to shape— this piece of legislation.

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The act was amended several times following its inception and was eventually re-enacted in 1880 with the formation of the Department of Indian Affairs. Most significant in the context of Obomsawin’s films is Section 12(1)(b). Throughout Waban-Aki she adeptly illustrates the sexism and racism carried out in the name of this document, which includes regulations stating that a First Nations woman ceases to be First Nations in the eyes of Canadian law if she marries a man considered non-Indigenous. A woman who falls into this bureaucratic category suffers numerous punitive consequences: she is unable to return and live on her reserve, even under extenuating circumstances such as illness, widowhood, divorce, or separation; she and her offspring (also deemed non-Native) are deprived of any social and cultural amenities from the mother’s community; and, finally, upon marriage, this woman must dispose of current holdings and may not inherit property from her parents (Waban-Aki). Visual Sovereignty as a Starting Point for Discussion It is clear, then, that Indigenous sovereignty has been eroded through ongoing incursions, be they discourses founded in racism and sexism, bureaucratic violence in the form of treaties and acts, or forced displacements. While eroded, however, these sovereignties have never been extinguished, a contention that takes shape in the films of Niro and Obomsawin. Articulations of visual sovereignty10 are found throughout Waban-Aki and It Starts with a Whisper. This conception is defined as “a reading practice for thinking about the space between resistance and compliance wherein indigenous filmmakers and actors revisit, contribute to, borrow from, critique, and reconfigure ethnographic film conventions, at the same time operating within and stretching the boundaries created by these conventions” (Raheja, “Reading” 1161). Ethnographic filmmaking, once a colonial tool to categorize and quantify, is being appropriated and re-embodied in a manner that challenges traditional notions of sovereignty and the nation-state. Sovereignty, from within this practice, is embodied, interwoven with everyday talk, culturally specific practices, and cosmology. It is, therefore, a creative act of self(re)presentation (1162). Finally, visual sovereignty acts as a germinal site for discussion of First Nations epistemology, lived realities, and economies as outside of yet alongside Western institutional frameworks. The non-linear, expansive narrative within Waban-Aki speaks to these claims. This inclusion of individual voices within the broader political spectrum is a vital tool that Obomsawin employs time and again in her representations of these historical moments, which continue to resonate today. The patriarchal, racist assumptions that belie the Indian Act have

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obvious legislative ramifications. Obomsawin contextualizes the development of and changes to Section 12(1)(b); the interviews with First Nations women affected by this document humanize an ostensibly bureaucratic issue, situating it within a marginalized habitus, now brought to the fore. Section 12(1)(b) illustrates ongoing attempts by the Canadian government to police the bodies of First Nations females as part of a nation-building project centred on a notion of Canadian identity that ultimately rests on the exclusion of bodies (like those of Jeannette Corbière) that would challenge claims to a homogeneous nation-state. What emerged during my viewing of this film was a common contention surrounding a construction of an uninterrupted Indigenous identity, a contention that exists outside of Western discourses. Identity is not based on codified blood quantum, but rather is interwoven with one’s experiences and intimately linked to one’s community. Diane Nollet, a participant in Waban-Aki, underlines this observation: “As Indians, we’re Indians, not numbers.” The profundity of these moments, in which participants disclose their life stories, is plain. bell hooks’ discussion of confession and memory as sites of re-membering and re-presentation illustrates the recuperative power of oral narratives like Nollet’s, which literally merge the personal with the political. She writes that “this allows us to discuss personal experience in a different way, in a way that politicizes not just the telling, but the tale” (Talking Back 109), and she goes on to contend that storytelling, as a process, is capable of historicizing experience and radical politicization (109–11). The diverse women in Waban-Aki illustrate this. They are not merely retelling banal stories; rather, they are contributing personal biographies that are part of a larger feminist oral history. The personal here becomes undoubtedly political. Thus throughout Waban-Aki, an Abenaki identity that is both precursor to and forged through political mobilization is expressed time and again. Furthermore, activists like Jeannette Corbière speak to the potential for resistance through a shared marginalization that is a manifestation of the intersection between race and gender. During her on-camera description of experiences with a racist Canadian judicial system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Corbière is assertive and deeply concerned. A poignant moment in Mother of Many Children remains at issue in Waban-Aki, in which Corbière underscores the overall divisiveness of the Indian Act as a tool of bureaucratic erasure when she asks, “How can we allow a piece of legislation to divide us?” This question is eerily prophetic, as Obomsawin demonstrates the ongoing negotiation with this issue of who gets counted as Native and who does not. This question remains unresolved, as we observe in Waban-Aki when Claire Obomsawin states: “What was

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I? I wasn’t welcome anywhere . . . How can people lose their nationality? If you’re born Indian, you die Indian.” This use of testimonials in tandem with archival footage, family photographs, and animated segments demonstrates that for Obomsawin, film is a multi-faceted tool, one she describes as “an incredible place where you can do a lot of teaching and you can really make changes” (interview). Corporeal Filmmaking and It Starts with a Whisper Like Obomsawin, Shelley Niro takes seriously the politicized role of the artist. When I asked her about her self-perception of her films, she stated that the artist’s job is “to create work that will incite uhhhh . . . some sort of reaction. And sometimes it’s political and sometimes it’s something else. But I think it’s like, you have to generate something to say ‘Look we have to start thinking about this’ and ‘Don’t forget about that.’ You know, just like, always keeping things up on the surface and trying to keep things alive” (interview). Niro’s assertion that art becomes a means through which one “keeps things alive” begs further exploration. From this perspective, film is generated from a body, but additionally, it is a corporeal entity that entertains, provokes, and commemorates. This statement highlights the personal and political as inextricably interwoven. That both elements inform this artist’s filmmaking is further emphasized with her statement, “You’re an artist twenty-four hours of the day, so how do you pull apart the political from the personal?” (interview). The dream sequences that Shanna experiences beg further exploration. When Shanna is walking along the banks of the Grand River, dressed in garments one would traditionally associate with First Nations, we observe what psychoanalytic film theorist Kaja Silverman identifies as the agency of extraordinary economies at work. This occurs when aspects of the dream-thought are transferred to the content of the dream. This phenomenon is described as follows: “The part stands for the whole, a single figure represents a diverse group, and geographically remote locations converge in a composite image. Condensation joins together in an abbreviated and highly compressed form selected elements from the dream thoughts, and more remote memories with which they have some feature in common. It treats affinity as the basis for an absolute identification” (K. Silverman 91). This description is significant. Niro skillfully utilizes Shanna’s personal sentiments of sadness and paralysis to communicate a potentially widespread experience in which young First Nations people in urban spaces find themselves grappling with individual ruptures when away from home, represented through the banks of the Grand River. Furthermore,

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she expresses an unresolved grief concerning historic genocides, epidemics, and systemic racism, still experienced today. Thus, Shanna Sabbath becomes a useful vessel through which to articulate these issues: through the verbal repetition of disappeared yet divergent First Nations groups, viewers are provided with a point of reference, albeit in an “abbreviated and highly compressed form” (91), to begin to understand the contemporary significance of these “remote memories.” While this deployment of an individual to stand in for many could be destructive in other hands, Niro constructs a character in a sensitive manner so as to articulate a painful experience that remains relatively hidden from, as well as potentially difficult to communicate to, a mainstream North American populace. These moments of honest reflection and raw affect, within which the reflexive viewer is quite literally interpellated and invited to reflect upon her societal position proper, are interspersed with moments of tongue-incheek humour. The scene that profoundly struck me is the final one, an astute performance of the song “I’m So Pretty,” written exclusively for this film and performed by Shanna and her three matriarchal aunties. This concluding scene is dramatically different from the imagery that began It Starts with a Whisper. The setting (a kitschy Niagara Falls hotel room complete with heart-shaped bed), the dress (Shanna and her aunties are wearing bright-coloured garments), and the song (“I’m So Pretty”) successfully present an image of First Nations identity that complicates the more traditional iteration Shanna initially embodies. The young protagonist literally emerges from her journey, clad in a bright-orange dress similar to those of her aunts, no longer paralyzed by mourning and anxiety. Indeed, the lyrics she sings with her matriarchal companions suggest an awareness of the past that allows for thoughtful recognition but does not impede personal growth. The lyrics—“You said I was crazy / And too damn lazy / And took me away from my kind / You make me speak gibberish / But can’t control my mind”—speak to this resistance through art, as well as to healing and growth through support from kin. This is certainly a funny moment, but the humour deployed here does not obscure the significance of Shanna’s journey, which has been undertaken on the fivehundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s fateful “discovery.” Indeed, It Starts with a Whisper emerges as a hopeful assertion of sovereignty through the visual, through the words of Shanna’s aunts and Elijah Harper, and through its historic revisionism. Finally, the modern conception of Indigenous identity succeeds in “laughing at the camera” (“Reading Nanook’s Smile” 1179), adding a nuanced version of what it is to be First Nations in the late twentieth century while also poking fun at traditional notions of the Native who is a perpetually silent relic.

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Films like It Starts with a Whisper are therefore inextricably connected to the subjects (a category that includes both artist and audience) and to the cultural systems from which varying significations acquire meaning. What emerges is “a network of elements that signify only in relation to each other. Indeed the sign itself is a relational entity, a composite of two parts that signify not only through those features that make each of them slightly different from any other two parts, but through their association with each other” (K. Silverman 6). A filmic example that helps unpack the above statement occurs at the beginning of It Starts with a Whisper, at the end of the walking sequence. The shot that follows the disembodied, moccasin-clad feet walking along the banks of the Grand River is that of an adult bullfrog, partly submerged in the shallow river water. The next shot is of a group of tadpoles, now fully submerged in their aquatic womb, darting back and forth. This reverse life cycle suggests several possibilities. Does it illustrate the connectivity between humans and nature? Perhaps. Are these images, free of dialogue or music, but busy with the sounds of chirping birds and croaking amphibians, meant to underline the significance surrounding First Nations’ right to unfettered access to land bases not devastated by environmental degradation and exploitation in the name of profit? Potentially. My reading of this sequence, however, cannot be separated from my cultural experience proper—that is, my habitus. Initially jarring, the shots of the frog-then-tadpoles disrupt a takenfor-granted notion of life’s unfolding. What does this seeming reversal connote regarding Western conceptions of time and space? Time is no longer a linear process, and space is not portrayed as a fixed entity (TuhiwaiSmith 30). When I critiqued my initial reading of surprise, what emerged was a more nuanced interpretation: Could the frog parallel Shanna’s own rebirth? That in the protagonist’s journey to acknowledge the past, she opens herself to new possibilities, experiences, and ideas? Or could it symbolize the connectivity between generations, necessary for continuity, like the kinship ties that bridge Shanna and her three aunts? Again, I offer no conclusions, but wish to underline my own habitus, my own biases when consuming and negotiating with these narratives. Teresa Pijoan’s summation of life’s continual transformation nicely sums up my own interpretation of this scene and its possible link to Shanna’s own journey: “Many are transformed, though few of us sense the spiritual means of the changes [. . .] The power of the story is in the feeling it portrays—and the passage of that feeling brings transformation” (17). Pijoan’s mention of transformation demands that biology be introduced as a stream through which an additional reading emerges. The

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bullfrog we see first is capable of living in two environments: land and water. Its loss of its tail is part of a larger process during which it gains lungs and legs. While it is impossible that the frog can return to its primary state, Niro is, I think, making a comment about survival. Return is impossible, but the frog is capable of occupying multiple habitus—not unlike Shanna, illustrated in this film’s opening segment when her running shoes become moccasins. She figuratively and literally occupies two spaces in a corporeal manner: the city space is, at times, an overwhelming, jarring physical presence, while the Grand River and surrounding area is an internalized, locatable knowledge (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 583). On Performativity Linked to corporeality is the issue of performativity, which pervades both It Starts with a Whisper and Waban-Aki. During the final musical sequence of It Starts with a Whisper, the three aunts lie on the bed in a self-conscious display of sexuality that is funny, cheeky, and self-conscious. Drawing attention to gender performativity that confounds traditional conceptions of female Indigeneity is a central theme of Niro’s works, a part of her own personal feminist manifesto as well as a means of redressing the tendency to portray First Nations women in past art as largely silent. In the interview, Niro says that, along with this silence, death was the predictable ending for a young, beautiful Native woman appearing in film. What this reflexive performativity confronts, and what Niro’s words echo, is the Squaw/Princess dichotomy. Within the realm of visual culture, Native women have been imagined only as either the tragically beautiful, solemn Pocahontas figure or the physically capable, older Squaw. Whether these images were part of World’s Fair displays, nineteenth-century postcards, or the art of Victorian painters, their legacy has permeated the world of film (Valaskakis, “Sacajewea” 122–24). The above examples shed light on the issue of performativity in both these films. I have borrowed extensively from Butler here, especially her assertions concerning the performative nature of gender. Butler contends that gender functions as a performative entity—it has no ontological status. The ostensible gendered essence of an illusory biological core we cling to is entrenched, again and again, through discourse and the subsequent performance of this discourse, taken to an extreme and entering the arena of the performative. The performative character of gender regulates expressions of sexuality and desire and embeds the strictures of acceptable, heteronormative reproduction. Butler goes on to assert that “if the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted

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and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can neither be true or false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (186; emphasis mine). While I agree that gender is indeed performative and that this performativity is a corporeal experience, the experiences articulated in WabanAki and It Starts with a Whisper succeed in complicating the relationship between “original” and “imitation” in a manner that diverges from what Butler so succinctly documents. The confrontations with the intensely gendered connotations of Section 12(1)(b), and the subsequent Bill C-31, illustrate a reframing of gendered experiences according to lived experiences within a specific habitus—that is, the habitus of Mohawk women in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century. Is the political mobilization of these women merely reflective of a “falsely naturalized unity,” a fictive coherence? Or can we tease out these numerous testimonials to reveal a subversive performativity? This question is not an attempt to paint this resistance movement as a monolith or to deny the individuality of these actors, imbued with agency; without hesitation I concede that within this collection of voices there are myriad views and political leanings. What Obomsawin succeeds in portraying, however, is a complex iteration of gender and its intersection with racialized discourse. In the case of It Starts with a Whisper, the aunts represent strong female figures, each with a distinct voice. Certainly, their presence as matriarchs helps guide Shanna to a more peaceful state at the conclusion of this film. Furthermore, their come-hither musical rendition that ends the film confronts not only traditional constructions of female Aboriginal sexuality but also women’s sexuality as a whole. None of the women are easily labelled as a constructed “type” of woman. They defy classification and express a femininity that is interwoven with their shared Indigenous identity and that challenges mainstream gender roles. Their performance of “I’m So Pretty” successfully calls into question who is allowed to express their sexuality and what shape that expression must adopt. I turn to Moira Gatens’s discussion of the body politic to elaborate on the aunts’ performance. Gatens describes the contemporary political corpus as a masculine entity that must incorporate and control women’s bodies. What remains unacknowledged, however, is the modern body politic’s reliance on these female bodies, bodies that have “serviced the internal organs and needs of this artificial body, preserving its viability, its unity and integrity, without ever being seen as doing so” (82). This unity through incorporation constructs a collective political vocabulary “that can only speak of one body, one reason, and one ethic” (83). Those who speak in a voice that does not confirm the purported coherence of the body politic are

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silenced, fragmented, or pathologized as hysterical. With this context in mind, the lyrics of “I’m So Pretty” are all the more salient. When the aunts sing “You said I was crazy / And too damn lazy,” it is a direct challenge to an entrenched political language incapable of acknowledging difference. Furthermore, this performance challenges the definitional limits on acceptance as an active citizen within the Canadian body politic and interrogates the shape participants must adopt in order to become recognizable (82–85). Niro uses film to broaden the boundaries of this political corpus, recognizing Other/Othered bodies as part of this dialogue. Thus, the performativity that infuses these female-centred oral histories, like gender itself, is mutable. It takes the shape of testimonials, re-enactments, interpretive dance, and performance art and provides an alternative means of sharing knowledge and evoking affect in a manner that demands attentive, intuitive viewership. The issue of performativity speaks to the politicized terrain of the body. At this juncture I echo Butler’s assertion that the body is permeable, mutable, and, in spite or because of this fluidity, subject to political regulation (186). The body is, then, a politicized site of racialized reproduction, cultural continuity, indoctrination, and corporeal resistance. Concluding Thoughts By challenging historical marginalization and ongoing ruptures, the talking back we witness in the films of Shelley Niro and Alanis Obomsawin confounds a collective political vocabulary “that can only speak of one body, one reason, and one ethic” (Gatens 83). The incorporation of female bodies within this masculine, homogeneously racialized collective is an ongoing, inherently violent process that effectively erases Other/Othered bodies. Films like Waban-Aki and It Starts with a Whisper present their audiences with liberatory, radical visions that expose entrenched mores as utterly incoherent. The perpetuation of these visions demands work. This is significant. Film is a mechanism not only for resistance but also for recuperation and catharsis, capable of carving out hopeful spaces in which peripheral bodies bear witness to ongoing colonial violence as well as continuity and renewal. The mutability of the body extends to these films’ audiences as well. Actively confronting one’s expectations during the viewing process is valuable, part of the tension and potential permeating It Starts with a Whisper and Waban-Aki. Openness to what can be likened to a suspended state, in which we inhabit our body and internalize and work through our lived experiences, enables, albeit momentarily, transcendence of the confines of our habitus. When the boundaries of our consciousness are broadened, we are presented with the opportunity to forge boundaries with bodies

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not one’s own (MacDougall, The Corporeal Image 16). A link can be drawn here. Like the filmmakers, the individuals who comprise an audience are political actors, making political choices (hooks, Talking Back 95), capable of articulating myriad readings of these texts but also encountering alternative lived experiences effaced from mainstream representations of First Nations. These contemporary ethnographies are spaces in which bodies are allowed to collide without consuming one another. The talking back we observe in these films—be it performative, corporeal, or historically based—is at once creative self-expression and a “political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render [these filmmakers] nameless and voiceless” (hooks, Talking Back 8). This break in narrative structure and aesthetics is not, however, synonymous with a complete disavowal; rather, it “[adds] a new dialectic to it, in which the embodied filmmaker acts explicitly as the filter through which the world enters discourse” (Chanan 240). This emerging dialectic within ethnography is one in which films such as Waban-Aki and It Starts with a Whisper re-present and re-member cultural accounts within a framework of feminist oral history that gives weight to marginalized narratives and quotidian experiences (Minister, “A Feminist Frame” 37). Returning to bell hooks’ contention that begins this chapter, filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro “define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history” (Talking Back 42).

Notes 1 During our interview, Niro describes how at this stage in her artistic career, she had never considered film as a medium she would explore. She asked Gronau, whom she had met and knew was an experienced filmmaker, to co-produce and co-direct this film. 2 I elected not to “clean up” interview excerpts so as not to occlude the thinking-through that is any dialogue. I have often found that interview transcripts, free of pauses and rendered grammatically flawless through editing, seem sterile. I feel that editing spoken words during the writing process would be counterintuitive to a more collaborative approach to research in which knowledge presented is locatable (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges, 582–83). I relied extensively on Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). 3 Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is a prime example of early ethnography, informed by ethnocentric biases prevalent at the start of the twentieth century. Nanook emerged when, along with his wife Frances, Flaherty set out to record a personable Inuit family in their “natural” setting. It would be unfair to assert that the filmed subjects did not actively

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collaborate regarding what and how filming occurred. Michelle Raheja is right to underline the significance surrounding “the ways in which the Inuit instructed him in working collaboratively according to their views of social and cultural interaction” (“Reading Nanook’s Smile,” 1162). I do not wish to diminish Nanook’s perpetuation of misconceptions or binaries; rather, I want to underline the complexity surrounding visual representations and their existence along a spectrum of collaboration. Considering the epistemological foundations of early films like Nanook, the shift in filmmaking approaches among artists like Niro and Obomsawin is a pronounced one. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, habitus, in brief, is “the manner in which problems are posed, explanations constructed, and instruments employed” (Brubaker, “Social Theory as Habitus,” 213). As individuals, we are never completely the subject of or in control over our actions. We are shaped by our structural constraints, lived experiences, and surroundings (Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 164). This a useful concept for analyses of visual media like film in that one can consider the role of lived experience among authors and participants in moulding the final filmic product. In spite of the affectively moving and aesthetically challenging films that comprise these artists’ repertoires, there exists no extensive scholarly analysis that critically engages with the works of Shelley Niro, although Knopf ’s Decolonizing the Lens of Power, a Foucauldian examination of Indigenous films in North America, devotes a chapter to her feature film Honey Moccasin and discusses her early short Overweight with Crooked Teeth. Alanis Obomsawin has been the subject of several recent articles, including White’s “Alanis Obomsawin” (1999) and Pick’s “‘This Land Is Ours’” (2003) Harrison 2000, and Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance” (1999), as well as one book, Lewis’s Alanis Obomsawin. This text, while extremely useful from a biographical perspective and the first-ever publication devoted to a First Nations filmmaker, arguably lacks a critical engagement with Obomawin’s body of work, acting instead as a (well-deserved) celebration. This brief discussion is, therefore, twofold in nature: I will address shared themes contained in the films and the filmmakers’ production processes while simultaneously beginning to redress the general paucity of scholarship concerning contemporary Indigenous filmmakers. For reasons of brevity, I am unable to offer a detailed historical analysis of Six Nations land disputes. There is a great deal of literature concerning historical documents such as the Haldimand Tract and the role of individuals like Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe and Mississauga leader Joseph Brant in late-eighteenth-century Upper Canada. For analyses of land claims conflicts, I recommend Nokhrin’s “The Caledonia Land Dispute” (2009) and Dalton’s “Constitutional Reconciliation and Land Negotiations” (2009). I return to this sequence in a later section.

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8 Harper’s appearance in It Starts with a Whisper is noteworthy. Born in Red Sucker Lake, Manitoba, Harper (Ojibwa-Cree) was the first Treaty First Nation to be elected to a provincial government, as a member of the NDP. Harper was instrumental in scuttling the 1992 Meech Lake Accord, which had been negotiated without substantial participation from First Nations groups. Contextually, then, Harper’s appearance in Niro’s film is a timely cameo that speaks to his prominent role in Canadian politics (Harper, “A Time to Say No,” 219–26). 9 The Mohawk who comprise these Quebec communities constituted a primary migratory wave throughout the seventeenth century from the Mohawk Valley in what is now the US Northeast. For a detailed history of Mohawk in this area, including eighteenth-century land agreements, see Surtees, The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy (1985). 10 For a detailed discussion of visual sovereignty’s historical precedents, see McGregor, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development,” 86–87. McGregor’s account of past uses of the Two Row Wampum belt does an excellent job of contextualizing the discourses surrounding this visual articulation of sovereignty, especially in a Canadian context. Her article nicely outlines the symbolism behind the beadwork and colour scheme. Raheja, in “Reading Nanook’s Smile,” briefly discusses historical instances surrounding visual representations of sovereignty as well as precedents established via the Two Row Wampum (1164).

Thirteen

“I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are”: Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd’s Hands of History G AIL VANSTONE

The Sioux have a tradition about an old woman who is eternally quillworking while her dog lies beside her. When the woman sleeps, the dog tears apart her work and she begins again. They believed that if she completed her quilling, it would signal the end of the world. —Loretta Todd “Native Women’s Art”

Loretta Todd’s film Hands of History (1994) begins with the sound of drumming and a woman’s voice chanting. The intricacies of First Nations bead, cedar, and quillwork are revealed in vivid detail in a camera close-up. Giksan artist Doreen Jensen is heard in voice-over: “In my language there is no word for art. This is not because we are devoid of art. It is because art is so powerfully integrated within all aspects of life that we are replete with it.” This message threads throughout the film. In the final credits, Todd dedicates her film to the artists it features and to all Aboriginal women artists, in recognition of their inner strength, their discipline, and their gifts. Released through Studio D of the National Film Board (NFB), Hands of History is an homage to, and a celebratory portrait of, four First Nations artists: Rena Point Bolton (Stol:o), a traditional weaver of baskets and robes; Doreen Jensen (Gitksan), a carver, button blanket maker, and printmaker; Joane Cardinal-Schubert (Blood), an installation and mixed media artist; and Jane Ash Poitras (Mikisew Cree), a mixed media and collage artist. The fifth artist is, of course, Loretta Todd (Cree-Métis) herself, discerned through the film’s rich aesthetic fabric.1

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When I viewed the film at the time of its release, its sheer beauty and power of image moved me. It brought to mind a sentence from an essay by Trinh T. Minh-ha: “Two [five in the film] powerful women storytellers meet [and] work at strengthening the ties among women while commemorating and transmitting the powers of our foremothers. At once a grandmother, a poetess, a storyteller, and a woman warrior” (Woman, Native, Other 135). Organized around a framework of storytelling, Hands of History employs art to investigate artistic form, to tell stories about cultural identity, and to draw attention to the centrality of the land in sustaining life and spirit, underscoring the value of heeding ancestral knowledge and carrying it into the future. Most of all, it emphasizes the vital role women artists play as keepers and transmitters of culture: women as artists, women as storytellers, voices living through their art. As artist/educator Daystar/Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippawa) points out in the film, “our people live in a world we did not create. If we are to disseminate our culture, we must reimagine it anew. Our art becomes the conduit through which we teach and inspire.” In highlighting the personal stories and the artistic work of these First Nations artists, Hands of History weaves a tale of cultural richness, of identity, memory, and cultural wealth bound together through an ever-present sense of spirituality and a veneration of the land—invaluable modelling for spectators regardless of their cultural backgrounds. An example of women’s cinema, which film theorist Hoi F. Cheu argues contains a wide range of works not fully appreciated and studied, Hands of History invites us to uncover “radical possibility” through its encoded images. If, as Cheu suggests, women’s filmmaking provides an active voice of imagination leading us to an awareness of “rhythms that are not synchronized with the drumbeats of cultural and political domination” (Cheu 18), then this film builds a fresh understanding of art. Its significance transcends the boundaries of mainstream culture. Moreover, it extends a means of bridging the ideological gulf between First Nations and European cultural values. I draw on a cluster of theoretical ideas drawn from various sources, First Nations and European, to scrutinize how political storytelling creates a cultural vision with transformational promise. As we tap into the film’s activist practice, the relevancy and urgency of these stories will be released. Cultural Elder, teacher, and historian of the Fireweed clan Doreen Jensen occupies the centre of the screen in the opening moments of the film, addressing an audience assembled for an opening at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull. By telling a story, this celebrated artist, curator, and writer articulates the subject underlying Hands of History: “When the Europeans arrived they found Aboriginal artists creating beauty, culture,

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and historical memory.” Her storytelling becomes a means to express the film’s core concept: “We need to reclaim our own identity through our artists’ work, our heritage and our future.” Art in Jensen’s (and the film’s) lexicon is defined in pervasive and integral terms as infusing life itself. Rooted in traditional Western culture, art is all too often categorized, periodized, and sequestered from everyday life, stored in museums or art galleries to be viewed only by those able to pay the price of admission. Aboriginal art, by contrast, is embedded in every aspect of life, its all-encompassing cultural reality joining past to present. Jensen, the anchoring “storyteller” in the film, is herself a carver, button blanket maker, and printmaker who works tirelessly to revitalize and preserve Gitksan culture. As an artistic Elder, she is faithful to her cultural teaching that artists hold a central position of responsibility in an infinite “series of interdependent circles that define community/nation” (Kalafatic 116), a position that authorizes her role as the backbone storyteller in Hands of History. As a contemporary filmmaker, Todd fulfills Haida artist Bill Reid’s dictum that contemporary Native art should incorporate elements from European culture, effectively giving birth to a new art form to which all Canadians can relate (Tippett 78). Through her film, Todd celebrates the Native aesthetic, redrawing cultural ground, showing how the work of Aboriginal women utilizing ancient techniques is profoundly contemporary and stands as “a mediation between human beings and the rest of nature, between material and spiritual concerns” (Jensen). According to fellow artist, cultural activist, and writer Carol Kalafatic, “Aboriginal art—whether textile, song, film or basket—is ‘cultural record’ for our living communities, rather than for museums, and provides the instruction we need for life” (116; original emphasis). The role of artists as contemporary carriers of oral traditions, rooted in such a covenant, is to examine and acknowledge human relationships with one another and to transmit the culture, as Kalafatic says, making possible “our continued survival.” Here, the artist becomes intermediary between people and the universe they inhabit, between the physical and the spiritual: “Our role as contemporary carriers of oral traditions that are rooted in the covenant is to examine and acknowledge our relationships with others, between people and the universe, between the physical and the spiritual; we are story keepers who help acknowledge our peoples’ collective responsibilities to fight, laugh, and tell stories in order to live. And we become warriors by living” (116; original emphasis). Hands of History, in celebrating women artists and their art, fulfills and extends beyond this definition. In Kalafatic’s view, First Nations filmmakers hold a place among the generations of warriors who have held the front lines of battle for their

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ancestral territories and for the right to live with dignity. As storytellers, they “wield semiotically loaded, cinematic ‘madeleines’ with the power to bring layers of cultural memory to life” (116). Todd has said that the filmmaker works with image and sound to help others bring that cultural memory alive in themselves. Hands of History celebrates Aboriginal art’s ability to speak about identity, history, and memory, central to its reclamation project. Todd embraces this responsibility to her people as honour and duty: I see myself in the same way as the storyteller, except my way of telling the story is different . . . The storyteller, the artist, has a role to play in the health of the community. Even though there’s no word for “art” and “artist” in most communities, there is a word for people who tell stories. There’s a word for people who make things and help people with their dreams . . . The legacy in these films is inherited by other people, so with everything I do I have to be very careful about why I do it, who I do it for, who’s going to be hurt by this, who is going to gain from this. I have to think about the seven generations. (Abbott 347) Here, Todd invokes a feature of First Nations teaching that encourages reflection on how things were seven generations before and how they might be seven generations into the future. The seven generations concept is rooted in the belief that Indigenous peoples have a social and cultural responsibility to make decisions that will ensure the sustainability of Mother Earth, and not adversely affect Indigenous peoples yet to come (Anderson 1). The Power in Storytelling Writer Lee Maracle, a Salish/Cree from the Stol:o nation, explains that the story is a vehicle of instruction central to the oral traditions of Aboriginal learning because the story makes a place for the listener to enter in, to become part of the story. Indeed, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” is the core idea behind Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (2). While stories as the oldest form of cultural shaping lie at the root of who we are regardless of origin, Maracle points to an intrinsic difference between what she calls Aboriginal “oratory” and the European story. Stylistically, the European narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Plot is instigated by an event, a situation or problem where the characters are caught in a dilemma; a series of events lead to the inevitable climax and resolution, the whole sutured together by a central metaphor woven through the story’s fabric and discerned by reading between the lines.

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While some of the same elements exist in the Native narrative, Maracle contends that the nature of Native storytelling is distinct: The difference [with our stories] is that the reader is as much a part of the story as the teller. Most of our stories don’t have orthodox “conclusions”; that is left to the listeners who we trust will draw useful lessons from the story—not necessarily the lessons we wish them to draw, but all conclusions are considered valid. The listeners are drawn into the dilemma and are expected at some point in their lives to actively work themselves out of it. (11; emphasis added) Unlike the European model, the Native story does not contain set-ups or explanations. Instead, it concentrates on the “poetic terseness” of the presented dilemma (12). In truth, its dramatic power would be diminished if the story were framed in traditional European style. As Cheu reminds us, stories are agents of change: “We organize ourselves through storytelling; sometimes, while inventing new stories, we make new connections and renew relationships that transform our lives and our communities” (99). Thus, the story becomes the potential vehicle for transformations in perceptions of the self and of the world. Hands of History is an example of cinematic storytelling structured around a web of women’s interrelated stories, which it celebrates. However, if we take the stories themselves, they encourage a contemplation of cinematic form and combine to paint a distinctive portrait of First Nations culture with important lessons to consider. A richly textured ideological fabric makes Hands of History an example of transformational cinema, proffering a “radical possibility” (borrowing bell hooks’ phrasing) for counteracting the cultural stranglehold of mainstream white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture (Reel to Real 106) and for contemplating a “better way.” Todd’s Aesthetic and the Question of Protocol A commanding visual storyteller, Loretta Todd is from northern Alberta and is now based in Vancouver. A Rockefeller Fellow, she is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, writer, producer, and educator-activist. Her films, many of them multiple award winners, have been screened worldwide at film festivals and art galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art. An awareness of the craft involved in filmmaking and of its ability to command an emotional response has been with Todd since she was a child. As she recollects, “Somehow, I began to understand that filmmakers used the tools of storytellers, which appealed to my Cree love of craft” (J. Silverman 376). Silverman has observed that Todd’s early awareness of the complex relations

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among images, emotion, and craft would become central to her filmmaking style. According Kalafatic, a sense of purpose for Indigenous peoples is guided by their historical relationships with their own territories and lands and carried by artists in their languages of colour, light, rhythm, and word— a description, incidentally, that characterizes Todd’s approach to cinema. During her early twenties, Todd worked for the federal government and First Nations organizations supervising intervention and pre-employment programs aimed at helping First Nations’ women find jobs; she also worked with young people with addiction issues and facilitated business projects on a number of reserves. She sometimes used video as a tool in developing her work projects. Finally, in the late 1980s, still employed full-time, she entered film school at Simon Fraser University. There, she quickly developed her distinctive style using the camera “to challenge the conventions of ethnographic filmmaking and to reveal some of the social inequities she had experienced” (J. Silverman 379). While claiming the title “artist,” Todd retains a strong sense of duty to her community. Todd remembers the documentary films made by outsiders that she saw as a child as stories that basically silenced Native people. “When we moved to the city, they would show us these Indian films and the white kids would laugh” (Abbott 338). Fed up with such fare, Todd, in the early phase of her career, produced a series of experimental videos and installations that employed a “somewhat revolutionary” (J. Silverman 378) mix of impressionistic footage, dramatic recreations, and interviews. Turning away from the heavy codification that characterizes much of Canadian documentary production, she devised her own distinctive aesthetic to bring to light various accomplishments and struggles faced by First Nations communities. The Learning Path (1991), Hands of History (1994), Voice-Life (1995), No More Secrets (1996), and her best-known film, Forgotten Warriors (1997),2 earned Todd a series of awards and the reputation as a filmmaker who knows “the role of storytelling in the decolonization process” (Kalafatic 109). According to sociologist Bonita Lawrence, responsibility for the silencing of First Nations people lies with European-based regulatory systems that have forcibly supplanted traditional Indigenous ways of identifying the self in relation to land and community, discursively naturalizing colonial world views. As a political and social process, decolonization must involve both deconstructing and reshaping a sense of Indigenous identity (Lawrence 3). An uncompromising and aesthetically inventive filmmaker, Todd builds such a framework into her filmwork, maintaining a central emphasis on “the affirmative resolve of First Nations Peoples to revitalize their cultures, reclaim their right to self-determination, and envision a new and better future” (Pick, “Storytelling” 76).

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Yet as important as Todd’s work is in terms of reframing and revitalizing for her own people, it provides, equally, a compelling model through which a non-Native audience is invited into the story told from an Aboriginal viewpoint. In Hands of History, we are invited to look to the artists to find visions that have been missing from our own cultural discourse (Cheu 16). For example, Todd’s reframing in Hands of History renders it an example of “feminine-ism,” where “femininity is a creative force in both women and men, which once extracted, can be engaged to resist the power of social conformity and the informatics of domination” (11). If the act of reframing changes perception, Todd’s work offers reflective non-Native spectators an opportunity to examine and transform their own belief systems. Saulteaux-Ojibwa artist Robert Houle advocates “a violent decoding and recoding” (Nemiroff, Houle, and Townsend-Gault 45) if the First Nations’ perspective is to be understood, while Todd’s reframing, nonetheless radical, grows from a feminine aesthetic that sets in place “a process of revising laws and frameworks that construct reality” (Cheu 47), achieved through storytelling celebrating the Aboriginal artist and her work. A Question of Ideologies Of course, the West’s preoccupation with cultural domination has been the subject of criticism from many quarters. Cree performance artist, actor, and musician Cheryl L’Hirondelle Waynohtêw’s understanding and ongoing investigations of the nêhiyawiskwêwak (an active noun “naming” Cree women) as a performance practice of Cree culture becomes a tool in her hands to interrogate other cultures. At the same time, her practice functions as an instrument of resistance and interrogation in what Ahisiw MaskegonIshwew has identified as the one-way process of cultural and etymological translations between colonized and colonizer where the colonized is required to be bicultural and bilingual against and within a complacently monolingual and cultural monolith (307). Western feminists have long criticized their own culture for this stance. Filmmaker Sally Potter mocks British hubris in Orlando (1992), her cinematic version of Virginia Woolf’s novel, by depicting the following conversation between visiting Russian noblewoman Sasha and Orlando. S: Vous parlez français? O: Un peu—(silence) mais la pluspart des anglais ne peut pas—ne veut pas parler d’autres langues. S: Et comment ils font pour communiquer avec les étrangés? O: Ils parlent l’anglais plus fort.3

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When the newcomer asks Orlando how those who are English manage to communicate with those who do not speak their language, he replies that while most English people cannot, nor do they wish to, speak other languages, when required to communicate with those who cannot speak English, they respond by simply speaking English louder—an exchange that certainly resonates with many First Nations peoples. Todd, who has said that the West needs to wake up to see that it is part of many cultures rather than the centre of culture (60), renders Hands of History expressly as a statement of cultural autonomy. In 1989, responding to an NFB call for submissions to a film series on women Canadian artists, she tabled a proposal that would become Hands of History. Her proposal was adamant that Native peoples must define the term “art” by their own values, wherein image making is understood as an expression of their cultures and experiences: “The film will stand as a testimony to Native women artists’ political action in their own communities and in response to the overwhelming pressures of assimilation, acculturation and cultural genocide from dominant culture” (Todd, Native Women’s Art 3). The Indian Act and Cultural Theft As a woman of European background, I take her point and am angered at the imbalance that defines the terms of engagement between First Nations people and Canada’s governing institutions. It came as no surprise to learn that Todd, during production, found herself at odds with the NFB over the film’s style and content, although she held her ground (J. Silverman 384). If Todd’s storytelling is a form of cinematic writing, she is the kind of woman that French feminist Hélène Cixous says pointedly must “write woman”: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text—as into world and into history— by her own movement” (Cixous 245). In doing so, Todd takes on the ideological differences between First Nations people and European-style forms of government in Canada as authorized and regulated through a single piece of legislation, namely the Indian Act, which in large measure is responsible for the pressures she identifies in her proposal. Enacted in 1876 and amended no less than sixteen times, most recently in 2000, the act remains the single most controversial piece of legislation in Canada. Its “paternalistic and offensive features” impose a European cultural framework, effectively legislating First Nations people into “a form of sub-citizen” (G. Wilson 183). For Richard Hill, independent curator and writer of Cree history, the act

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stands as “a piece of definitional violence and authority” (12). Familiarity with the legislation is vital to understanding the treatment of First Nations people—historic and present—in a country where they are the originating peoples; yet most non-Native Canadians, I suspect, are largely unfamiliar with the nature and extent of its terms. Overall, it can be argued that the Indian Act has been a tool of cultural ruination that offers First Nations peoples two choices: assimilation or segregation. Through its clauses, the act regulates every aspect of First Nations cultural and material experience. Among other things, it required First Nations children to attend residential schools, where punishment for speaking their own languages was encouraged; it prohibited religious ceremonies such as potlatches as well as the wearing of First Nations dress. And, of course, it resulted in the (often) egregious and systematic “management” of First Nations land. Severed from their cultural connection to the land and the people through history, memory, identity, materiality, and spirituality—relationships that Hands on History restores and celebrates—First Nations people were dealt a cruel hand. Their art was reduced to the status of “craft objects,” which were seen as commodities or as museum artifacts and managed by the federal Department of Indian Affairs. Sandra Alfoldy’s Crafting Identity gives a fascinating account of the political endeavours of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild to preserve Canada’s many craft traditions, including those of its Indigenous peoples (laudable, even though the guild defined Aboriginal art as craft according to Western standards that regard “utilitarian” handiwork as craft), and of its fight in 1933 to defeat a revision of the Indian Act designed to prevent First Nations people from wearing their traditional dress (109). Todd’s film offers a cogent corrective to all of this. While making it clear that her priority is to explore and celebrate her own culture from a position of autonomy, she also says of non-Natives, “if these peoples are living on the land with us and they are the ones who are going to create economics and commerce from the land . . . we really have to be talking to them” (qtd. in Abbott 341). In Todd’s lexicon, autonomy signifies a right to cultural specificity, a right to one’s origins and histories as told from within. Although its history lesson is sobering, Hands of History is a generous film that meticulously details the richness of First Nations culture and portrays its complexity through art. Rather than “speaking English louder, those who subscribe to European traditions in Canada would do well to heed the fabric of stories in Hands of History as we revise and regenerate our own narratives personally, socially, and politically” (Cheu 115).

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“Too Native” and “Too Arty”: Protocol and Todd’s Aesthetic In Hands of History, Todd pushes the documentary beyond its conventional form to emphasize a First Nations point of view. Using the camera as a tool of illustration and instruction, she tells stories about the values of First Nations peoples, illuminating these through a blend of filmed interviews, dramatizations, archival footage, and footage of the artists’ lives and work. There is an absence of voice-over narration. Todd’s approach to cinematic storytelling implicates spectators, drawing them into the structure. Through overlapping cinematic images and sound, Todd circulates and affirms Indigenous values, making them accessible to the non-Native spectator. She feels no responsibility for making white people “listen,” yet her film contains valuable information for that group. Her work is created from a position rooted in the certainty of Aboriginal philosophy; she expressly uses tools of beauty and emotion to work with people’s beliefs: I start my filmmaking from my love of my people, my love of the land, for all my relations. The next place I start my films is to try to make other people feel that same love . . . What I’d rather do instead of creating action-adventure films where people are killed and everybody’s excited and their adrenaline rushes is to use that same strength of film to get to people at a deep level. If I can open their minds and make them recognize who they are, then hopefully that can start off or contribute toward dialogue or discussion. (qtd. in Abbott 342) Impatient with the Western approach championed by “media missionaries” who would come to Native communities of her childhood bringing “the gospel of the documentary” (J. Silverman 378), Todd exploits documentary form, making it her own creative medium. Drawing strength from a criticism she once received for being “too Native” and “too arty” (Bjornsons 211), she uses the camera to challenge the conventions of ethnographic filmmaking and to offer an antidote for colonization. This innovative and fluid mix of the dramatic and the factual points towards “a less-rigid filmmaking aesthetic” (J. Silverman 377), but this is only part of Todd’s decolonizing project for the documentary. The honour song, heard at the beginning of Hands of History, is Todd’s way of bringing Aboriginal form to the film, for it reflects a common practice in her culture for beginning any meeting, ceremony, or cultural gathering—as the NFB logo fades to the first image, we hear a woman’s voice announcing, “this is a woman’s honour song.” Opening the film in this way creates a respectful space from the outset so that audiences listen and open their minds

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to the stories they are about to hear. It also allows Todd to employ a First Nations practice of honouring the people who shared their stories during the making of the film (Abbott 339) and to create a cultural position of prominence. Indeed, she made this clear in her film proposal to the NFB, describing in this way the Native artists she proposed to film: She [the artist] adapts European mediums to her work but she refuses to be considered acculturated. She participates and is schooled in the academy but develops her own language of art that expresses her spirituality. She appropriates the linearity of western historical thought and inverts it, transforming it to meet the view of history that intertwines the past, present and future. In doing so she removes patriarchy’s dominance of time, renews our histories and reclaims the future. (339) Of course, this description applies equally to Todd. One of the many film segments to capture this approach is contained in the footage of Joane Cardinal-Schubert’s critically acclaimed installation and performance piece, The Lesson. Cardinal-Schubert, a celebrated, formally trained artist whose work expresses her irrepressible spirit and (sometimes) controversial opinions, created the piece driven by her strong sense of cultural identity. Shifting the parameters within which Aboriginal art is presented and received (Vida 1), The Lesson takes place, as one might expect, in a school classroom, thus invoking the spectre of the Indian Act–sanctioned residential schools. Chairs are arranged in tight rows facing a blackboard containing the day’s lesson. The piece begins with rapid whistle bursts, then the ringing of a school bell as the “teacher” (Cardinal-Schubert, dressed symbolically in white) summons the students to class. They enter, mark their attendance on a posted list, and sit obediently when she claps her hands for order. Following the pointer wielded by their teacher, the students read the words inscribed on the blackboard: “This is my history. In the beginning there were Native people across the land. When new people came, they shared with them their knowledge and goods and the new people took what they wanted. There were new rules.” Although the segment lasts only a minute or so, the spectator cannot fail to notice that despite the submissive demeanour of the students, the message they recite is deeply subversive. Todd’s camera lingers briefly on an apple with bent screw shaft stem sitting atop a book on each student’s chair, visible as the students assemble. All aspects of the image—the colourcoded red apple, the book’s white cover, and its title Helen Betty [the apple obscures part of the surname] rne: 10 Years to Justice conjure up the brutal

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murder of a young Cree woman, Helen Betty Osborne, at the hands of four white men in 1971, a chilling reminder of past injustices, which both Cardinal-Schubert and Todd link to specific colonial practices. On-camera, Cardinal-Schubert in central focus announces the rationale for the piece, declaring that Native people needed to be deprogrammed, sprung from the “lessons” they learned as children who had been separated from their own history. Guided by an incisive, agile sense of humour, Cardinal-Schubert “plays” on European art history, introducing aspects of her own culture so that her work, “multi-dimensional in technology, philosophy and visual imagery,” becomes a meeting ground for all. An important structuring tool for Todd is a carefully designed protocol. Dismissing the notion that adhering to a code would stultify her creative expression, Todd embraces it consciously as a referent to history and a sign of respect for form. Todd’s protocol is organized around three principles: to honour art by honouring the artists and their work; to demonstrate the continuum between traditional and contemporary art (in contrast to the periodization of European art); and to adhere to the protocol of the circle, structuring the film as if women were “sitting around in a circle and telling a story.” Remaining within this configuration allows Todd to assert Aboriginal principles, meanings, and philosophy, which are woven into an artistic whole by blending the personal testimonies of the four artists seamlessly throughout the film. Stressing that Indigenous expression strives to integrate form, content, and process, she demonstrates through cinema that First Nations art is the spiritual translated into human experience, thereby rendering that process and that experience visible: This film will also be a work of art itself. The information will not be subordinate to the style, but the style will help propel the film. The style will seek to extend the boundaries of documentary, maintaining the sensibility of documentary’s time-honoured form, yet contributing the development of a new native aesthetic that combines elements of storytelling with the progression of documentary through recent experimentation. (Todd, “Native Women’s Art” 2, 5) Adhering to the protocol of the circle creates the cinematic space for each artist to tell her story; this illustrates the continuum between traditional and contemporary art and also punctuates the process each artist follows in continuing her culture. Common themes surface in the interviews Todd records, uttered by each of the artists: their love of the land; their resistance to the Western impulse to catalogue, dissect, and classify everything in sight (Ames 13); their acknowledgement of the importance of

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the teachings of their Elders (often their mothers or grandmothers); and their sense of responsibility to their people. The range between the traditional and the contemporary artist is emphasized by the presence of Rena Point Bolton, the only artist in the film not to have studied in a formal, “Western” institution. Born in the late 1920s, at a time when the potlatch ban was rigidly enforced, Bolton was taught by her grandmother from infancy. It was she who revived the lost art of Tsimshian wool and cedar bark weaving, having spent thirteen years in the North in the 1970s learning and then teaching its techniques, yet she says simply, “My teachings were not to be an artist, but to pass on the teaching of the past. My materials come from the earth so I always thank Mother Earth for these things.” In this way, she invokes the continuum and distinguishes the spirituality that is integral to her process. To further emphasize the continuum, Todd uses black-and-white footage of early basket weavers, shot by a non-Native nurse in the 1940s, that she unearthed in the BC Provincial Archives. Each artist in turn relates the story of her art and details from her life, underscoring the centrality of oral traditions in First Nations culture. This fulfills Todd’s design for narrative fluidity: “One will talk for a while and then finish, another one will take up . . . the words will spark something in her mind that will take her into her own thoughts about her art, who she is and where her art come from, and that will continue throughout the film” (J. Silverman 384). Love and respect for the land, suffused with a penetrating spirituality, surfaces again and again in the film: Doreen Jensen walks down by the river where she grew up, by the totem poles, and as she talks, the spectator is invited to study the poles, which are visible in a close-up shot. Footage of Dead River Scrolls, Cardinal-Schubert’s installation at the A-Space Gallery, inspired by the dam being built on the Oldman River in southern Alberta “to call attention to how old the planet is and how we should be responsible to it,” echoes the hand-held camera footage of Jane Ash Poitras travelling through the Arizona desert—“one of the most sacred places to my heart”—to a gallery where she will show her work. This connection with the land and spirituality is palpable when we watch Poitras emerging from a sweat lodge and immersing herself in a river as she speaks of north–south Aboriginal religious ritual practices and the artist as a giver and a healer: “I believe the Creator inspires us; my courage comes from the Great Creator.” Todd’s use of the camera is masterful. In one sequence, Jensen is seated in her studio speaking of the moment she dedicated herself to a cultural awakening of her people, realizing that “our voices were never in art galleries.” Todd shifts her camera from Jensen’s face to focus tightly on the rounded and open mouth of one of Jensen’s carved masks, several seconds

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before Jensen actually utters the phrase. The resulting collage—sound (Jensen’s voice) layered on image (the mask’s open mouth)—demonstrates, as Todd says of her cinematic tools, that “the technical and the imaginative are the processes by which we filmmakers put our stories down” (qtd. in Abbott 347). Todd’s aesthetic and her prowess with film also facilitate her entry into the Aboriginal clowning tradition. Here, in the midst of honouring Aboriginal art, Todd becomes a trickster, using laughter and satire to promote social and spiritual healing among her people and to deliver her lesson to those who are not of First Nations origin. The trickster, of course, is an important figure for it allows the Indigenous artist to create “a particular kind of world in which the Judeo-Christian concern for good and evil and order and disorder is replaced with the more Native concern for balance and harmony” (King, All My Relations xiii). As Allan J. Ryan points out, many contemporary Native artists possess the trickster’s ability to interact with non-order through humour and irony, subverting formal concepts and traditions and throwing them open to question, something he identifies as the “trickster shift.” This “trickster shift,” in effect, subverts, revises, and reorders systems of representation and symbols of power and control, wherein artists serve as “role models for their ability to combat ignorance and imagine other ways of being human” (12). As the cinematic “orator,” Todd draws on her cinematic vocabulary— choice of angle, lens, colour, music, and sequencing—in order to take up this role. Maracle observes that the Aboriginal orator moves in metaphorical ways when speaking, with each facial expression and change in cadence, diction, and tone of voice resonating with the audience. She recalls watching well-known orators pull the legs of government officials by “posturing raven” as they delivered a compliment: “For us, this is hilarious, because not only does the posture go over the head of the official . . . [but also] the joke does not get by the Native audience watching the interplay” (13). The clowning tradition in Aboriginal communities, Todd says, is a way of dealing with people doing things they shouldn’t (qtd. in Abbott 346). Hands of History offers many such moments. The most obvious is a dramatized portion that skewers the imposition of Western fine arts traditions on Aboriginal art. Walking onto a dimly lit set, a serious-faced, neatly groomed white man of scholarly demeanour enters from stage right, mimicking the journey of Europe to North America, centuries ago. The large, thick lenses of his glasses gleam eerily in the half-light. Clad in a white lab coat, clutching a clipboard under his arm, he approaches the Native “artifacts” piled in a disorderly heap around his chair. Parodying the arduous work of critical categorization, he sits and picks up a Native mask; holding

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it at arm’s length, brow furrowed, he begins to examine its hair. As the dramatization unfolds, Jensen’s voice is heard in voice-over: “Art can be a universal language that helps us build the gaps between our different cultures but attitudes toward art reveal racism. The first Europeans called our art ‘primitive’ and ‘vulgar.’ Today, Europeans call our art ‘craft’ and ‘artifact.’ The single worst thing that has happened was that academics tended to freeze our art into certain periods of time.” On the word “academics,” the camera zooms slowly in as the scholar peers into the mask’s hair and then shifts to reveal Jensen seated at a desk flanked by books and her carvings. She resumes: “We have to be able to communicate what we are doing using our own words and our own voices. Up until now our work has been defined by outsiders and it’s difficult for an outsider to define the art I’m making or that other people are making unless they’re part of that.” The film shifts to the next frame, archival footage of First Nations people and Rena Point Bolton defining her work: “Everything that I learned to make was of use to the people.” While spectators may laugh with pleasure, the satirical quality of the scenario is unmistakable. Through her practice of serious clowning, Todd skewers Western museum practices, laying them bare for scrutiny. Her trickster’s point is made. Other comic moments are brief but equally pointed. In the sequence capturing the preparation for an exhibition, Jane Ash Poitras speaks quietly with the gallery curator, describing how her works, which together tell a story, need to be hung sequentially beginning with the shaman: “He is the ancient figure who takes you through the show—he explains the story and guides you through the journey.” Twice the curator interrupts Poitras, finally proposing that the shaman could “go on that wall over there to give him a position of prominence,” thereby privileging hierarchy over story integrity. Later in the film, after showing examples of cultural revitalization (Jensen’s work in Ksan Village) and resistance (Bolton’s personal rebellion against the potlatch ban), Todd returns to Poitras, who is still in the gallery. This time, Poitras speaks uninterrupted, interpreting the elements of her story, pointing out the significance of elements in her collage, “instructing” the attentive curator (shown in quick close-up, lips together, eyes on the artwork), who follows the story’s trajectory in silence. Todd, as trickster, also surfaces momentarily at the conclusion of the film. On screen, Jensen concludes her remarks at the Museum of Civilization. As her speech ends, the crowd applauds vigorously. Todd’s camera zooms past the white officials on the podium, eliminating them from the frame, to focus tightly on Jensen and her magnificent ceremonial button robe (her own creation) as she turns to the platform members to receive their praise.

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Conclusion: the Wisdom of Ancestors The summation of Todd’s lesson is offered in the closing words of Jensen’s speech: We need to learn from the wisdom of our ancestors. We need to recognize the hard work of our predecessors, which has brought us to where we are today. Canada is an image that hasn’t emerged yet. Because it has not recognized the art of its first nation [sic], its whole foundation is shaking. If Canada is to emerge as a nation and a culture with identity and purpose, we have to accept First Nations art and what it has to tell us about the spirit and the land. If you really pay attention, you can get the message and make it your own without diminishing it or appropriating it. Given Canada’s unaccountable refusal until 12 November 2010 to sign the 2007 UN Declaration of Aboriginal Rights, Hands of History remains acutely relevant, posing a disturbing puzzle. Ending with a dilemma, however, is entirely fitting for the structure of Todd’s cinematic story, since the unresolved dilemma arising from the action is a characteristic feature of the Aboriginal story. As Maracle maintains, “our stories merely pose the dilemma . . . As listener/reader[spectator], you become the trickster, the architect of great social transformation at whatever level you choose” (13). The solution rests with the listener. If we as spectators are able to relate to this story, seeing ourselves reflected through Todd’s own self-reflexivity, the film “succeeds in helping us cross the ultimate boundary of our own self-knowledge” (Cheu 156). In celebrating the richness of Aboriginal art, Hands of History creates an “ideological disturbance” that may well stimulate fruitful story revisions in the minds of its spectators. If we become aware of the insufficiency of our versions of reality, we may seek new expressions, new ways of revising the story, revisions translated into action and social transformation. Hope, as Cheu reminds us, lies in the process of revision (169). Todd, acutely aware of the transformative powers of storytelling, offers words of wisdom, an invitation: Storytelling is about transformation, and so our stories are about becoming . . . I just think about how, every day, if you got up in the morning and thanked the water and the trees for existing, for your own existence, how different your consciousness, your most mundane decisions, would be. Non-Aboriginal culture has basically drained the land of those qualities. But it’s still there—if you know how to look. (Eisner 403; original emphasis)

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Notes 1 I am indebted to Allan Ryan for this insight, which he shared with me at the Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context conference held at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2007. 2 Copies of some of Loretta Todd’s films are available from the National Film Board of Canada, http://www.nfb.ca, and in local public library holdings. 3 S: Do you speak French? O: A little—(pause) but most Englishmen aren’t able to—and don’t wish to speak in other languages. S: But how do they communicate with those who don’t speak English? O: They speak English louder (trans. my own).

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Part V Other Perspectives

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Fourteen

Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette’s Heater TA N I S M A C D O N A L D

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language . . . Walking is a space of enunciation. —Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”

The double exposure of the past and the present is presented as a riddle in which knowledge of the past doesn’t historicize present truth, but crystallizes it. —Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore”

Indigeneity in the ’Peg: Uncovering the Social ‘Suspect’ The opening frame of Terrance Odette’s 1999 film Heater is a crane shot; it pans over a central business district preparing for the winter holiday season, showing workers mounted on cherry pickers installing light bulbs in elaborate displays over a snowy urban downtown. The morning rush hour has begun, and cars negotiate the icy eight-lane avenue. The location is just two blocks west of Portage and Main in Winnipeg, once the commercial hub of western Canada and infamous as the windiest corner in the country: a significant fact on a sub-zero day in December. From a view of city workers installing Christmas lights, the camera angles down to sweep past store and bank signs and finally to street level, where we see a homeless man (played by Stephen Ouimette, listed in the film’s credits simply as the Man) stirring from sleep in an ATM lobby. He is speaking; although 285

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his voice is audible, the words remain indecipherable. The cars that pass through the opening shot will spend the rest of the film forever blurring the foreground or background, like moving wallpaper. The “white noise” of traffic, like the homeless Man’s constant stream of muttering, provides the film with a particular soundscape, interspersed with various recordings of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as ubiquitous holiday Muzak drifting from sound systems in nearly all the film’s interior scenes. These elements—the passing cars, the snowy streets, the music—frame the film’s quasi-comic quest narrative while defining the space through which the film’s protagonists will pass, space that is visually expansive but ideologically and politically narrow, making “social suspects” of both the Indigene and the indigent. Heater won Best Canadian Screenplay at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1999; Odette also won the Rogers Award for Best New Western Canadian Director that year. The narrative follows two men on a journey through urban Winnipeg: one man is Indigenous, one is white; one is sane, one is schizophrenic; both are homeless. The title object, an electric space heater still in its box, has immediate ironic significance for these two homeless characters in a sub-zero climate. Because they have no place to plug in the heater, it cannot provide warmth, and its resignification as a commodity rather than a functional object shapes the film’s action. The Man’s initial plan to sell the heater on the street proves impossible, as he suffers from the social phobias and delusions characteristic of schizophrenia. The manifestations of his illness prevent anyone from taking his offer seriously, for the typically pressured speech of schizophrenia causes him to blurt out “twenty bucks!” as though he is swearing at or threatening passersby. However, the sane and savvy Ben (played by Gary Farmer) has a grander plan. Only provisionally homeless after his wallet and identification have been stolen, Ben offers to do what Ouimette’s character cannot—negotiate the social and economic exchange of the heater at its point of purchase for a full refund of $74.95, then split the money with the Man. The project takes on the dimensions of a quest when the men discover that they must walk to a department store in a suburban shopping mall—in this case, the now-defunct Eaton’s in Winnipeg’s St. Vital Centre—a distance of seven kilometres from the downtown core where they meet. The ways that Odette offers the urban landscape of the film as a “space of enunciation,” in Michel de Certeau’s terms, elucidates a local history of racism while offering a subversive reading of the generic “buddy movie.” Heater strives to situate itself as a watchable genre film while resisting easy comic tropes and stock characters. The marketing tag for the film proclaims it to be “a road movie without a car,” but the humour of that slogan dissipates upon viewer recognition that “carlessness” also indicates

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homelessness in this case. What can it mean to walk in a city when the walker’s purpose is neither sightseeing nor business and when shelter and comfort are perilously uncertain? The phrase “a road movie without a car” takes a sly poke at the “buddy comedy” genre and functions as an invitation to read the odd-couple relationship between the two protagonists as both anti-buddy and anti-comedy. The presence of Indigenous Renaissance man Farmer (Cayuga)—actor, director, editor of the print journal Aboriginal Voices, and founder of Aboriginal Voices Radio—is a watershed piece of casting in Heater, not only for the prodigious artistic presence that Farmer brings to the project but also for his political sensibilities.1 The tag line has the bonus of serving as a reference to Farmer’s breakout role in Powwow Highway (1989), in which Farmer’s character, Philbert, names his 1964 Buick “Protector” and refers to the car throughout the film as his “war pony” who faithfully carries him through that film’s rediscovery of Indigeneity at the heart of American history. Philbert’s wise-fool reconfiguration of traditional knowledge won Farmer accolades as an Indigenous actor who understood the importance of tradition in the contemporary world. In Heater, the act of walking in a Winnipeg winter enunciates an economic silence surrounding poverty and racism that is historically embedded in the city’s treatment of its Indigenous population. Odette’s urban cartography of homelessness reveals a substratum of racism as the two men embark on their eccentric journey through the city centre, and his locales and images function as a subtext that shines a light on Winnipeg’s racist history and present. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur, the male figure of modernity who walks in the covered space of the Arcades in Paris and observes the changes in urban life that surround him, has become a popular critical trope, applied to subjects as seemingly far-flung in time and space from Benjamin’s contemplation of European modernity as Gail Scott’s examination of the Canadian lesbian flâneuse in My Paris (1999) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s contemplation of cyber-flânerie (2002). Odette has stated that his work in the art house mode allows him to make films that are “slow-paced on purpose” in order to “give [the viewer] time to respond” to the characters and situations (Foley); and in Heater, he deliberately marks the urban space as labyrinthine, and the homeless flâneurs as placeless, as Ben and the Man unite to negotiate the urban space from which they have been elided as citizens. Certainly the project of reading Indigeneity in Heater must consider the film’s complicity with a colonial gaze within a political economy of cultural production that governs even a low-budget film. Odette himself does not identify as an Indigenous filmmaker, which does not exclude him from making a socially conscious film about Indigenous people; but knowing

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that the camera can easily turn into an instrument of recolonization, we must inquire into the potential for Ben to become a spectacle laid out to meet the social expectations of both its white director and white liberal viewers. To ask the question using Christopher Gittings’s term, does this film “white-out” the Indigenous characters in order to privilege white representations of Indigenous peoples and reinforce negative stereotypes (198), or does the film deconstruct such representations? A great deal of Heater’s value as a film and as a social comment lies in Odette’s hands-off approach to interpreting Indigenous culture. Instead, Odette offers an unflinching portrait of racism as a counterpoint to the quest narrative. Odette uses the mise en scène to offer ironic comment on the history of white–Indigenous relations on the Canadian prairies and to underscore contemporary issues of systemic and personal racism. Peter Dickinson points out in Screening Gender, Framing Genre that Canadian film’s propensity for placing the screen Indigene in a “natural environment” and a historical setting has the effect not of drawing attention to Indigenous people’s traditions and rights, but, rather, of “detemporalizing” them. That is, by insisting on a visual historical context for the onscreen Indigene, white directors tend to ahistoricize Indigenous peoples and separate them (and viewers) from the relevant contemporary social, political, and cultural issues (Dickinson 80). By “figuratively abstracting the Indigene, through the repetition of synecdochic images of habitation, social organization, ceremonial ritual, and so on, as recognizably and romantically Other,” such films, even ones that intend to sympathize with First Nations people, tend to rely on these historical bases as “a way of not focusing on the Indigene in a socially material and politically proximate cultural context” (80). Far from being an abstracted Indigene, Ben is very much present in Heater, and it is his material reality—the fact that he has not vanished because of his homelessness, but rather, ironically, in spite of it—that becomes a problem for most of the white people he encounters in the film. Ben’s refusal to be an object and insistence on being a subject with agency is what drives the film. The humour in Heater is always on the verge of collapsing into desperation, echoing a precarious aspect of walking the streets that Walter Benjamin describes as the “dialectic of flânerie,” in which the flâneur believes that everyone on the street views him as “a true suspect” while simultaneously believing himself to be “utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (420). However, the Benjaminian dialectical image turns on the ability of the undesirable past to emerge suddenly in the present as a current discourse or vital image; this is particularly applicable to flânerie’s concern for observation of urban modality and mobility, and even more

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interestingly applicable to an analysis of the Indigenous person as flâneur. When we read a textured historical continuum between the past and the present in Heater, the Indigenous character is neither hidden as a social “undesirable” nor “detemporalized” through ethnographic romance; rather, he is situated as a “social suspect” who mirrors social indictment back onto white characters, and white viewers. As Susan Buck-Morss warns in her analysis of class and gender in Benjamin’s flânerie, “it is one thing to create out of others allegorical figures for one’s fantasy-projections. It is quite another to see ourselves suddenly from the outside, as actors on a Brechtian stage, where the allegory we portray is the system of capital itself” (129). The sight of a person who is of First Nations heritage walking in a prairie city is not an unmarked image. Odette is aware that Winnipeg is a city with a long history of engagement with and abuse of Indigenous peoples. Thus, his choice of locations and images elucidates a history of racism in the Canadian prairie city; at the same time, such locations map out the spatial practices that constitute social life, in de Certeau’s terms. The image of an Indigenous flâneur that is consistently and even hyperbolically evident throughout Heater also operates as a way to read the displacement of space through race. Or, as de Certeau eloquently puts it: “To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper” (103). If the flâneur is “suspect,” in Benjamin’s terms, because of his urban restlessness, the Indigenous flâneur is a social suspect because of his urban homelessness. Indigeneity and Flânerie: Urban Dialectics We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment. (Benjamin 419) Volume Five of Walter Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, first published posthumously in 1982 as Das Passagen-Werk, and then in English translation in 1988 as The Arcades Project, charts the social and political history of the figure of the flâneur, beginning with Baudelaire’s flâneur as an observing aesthete in 1863, proceeding to Benjamin’s philosopher of modernity strolling the Paris Arcades in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and extending further still to Benjamin’s own observation that the homeless clochards who sleep beneath the Parisian bridges are practitioners of a bohemian type of flânerie. In her examination of class in the figure of the flâneur, Buck-Morss examines the vital difference “between feeling totally at home on the streets, and being exposed and vulnerable there because one is totally homeless”

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(118). Identifying privacy as requisite for social dignity, she parses the difference between flânerie and homelessness while pointing out that the two conditions can be conflated, although rarely without social humiliation: “To inhabit the streets as one’s living room is quite a different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, where the most intimate aspects of one’s life are not protected from the view of strangers and ultimately, the police” (118). This need for protection and privacy surfaces several times in Odette’s film, notably in an early scene as Farmer’s character shaves in a tiny shared bathroom, squeezing into the small space with meagre supplies and an inadequate time period to complete the task. Add to this a claustrophobic camera angle—the camera operator could only have been standing in the shower stall to shoot the scene—and the voyeuristic gaze is ironically intensified. Viewers are invited to empathize with Ben even as we intrude upon his privacy. However sympathetic the gaze of Odette’s camera may be, we cannot escape the fact that Ben is being exposed to the eyes of strangers, especially those of the viewer. To overlay Benjamin’s flâneur-clochard with an Indigenous image may not entail so much a clash of worlds as a dialectical image in the Benjaminian sense, in which an image may be simultaneously “negated and preserved in history at once” (104). The Arcades Project yields a significant number of quotations from French men of letters that link Indigeneity and flânerie with surprising results. The ethnographically romanticized notion that the Indigenous characters in James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction “read the forest” as the flâneur reads the urban milieu, using similar techniques of close observation and interpretation, is especially prevalent. In Benjamin’s astonishing collection of quotations that draw parallels between Cooper’s style and the burgeoning genre of detective fiction, both Balzac and Baudelaire praise the detailed observations of the forest made by Indigenous people (or white people who take on Indigenous personae, in the case of “Hawkeye,” né Nathaniel Bumppo) in order to track both animals and humans. Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1913) includes the observation that “the poetry of terror” with which Cooper described the forests of the New World “was attached to the smallest details of Parisian life,” mirroring in everyday objects the “ominous interest” that Cooper’s tracker characters found in “a tree trunk, a beaver’s dam, a rock, a buffalo skin, a motionless canoe, a branch drooping over the water” (qtd. in Benjamin 442). Commenting in 1929 on Balzac’s Les Mystères de Paris, Régis Messac noted Balzac’s introduction of “two vagabonds, Echalor and Similor”—who were, in Balzac’s words, “Hurons of our lakes of mud, Iroquois of the gutter”—and rhapsodized over Balzac’s metaphor: “Cooper’s savages in the middle of Paris! Is not the big city as mysterious as the forests of the New World?” (441). Mes-

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sac’s conflations of “vagabond” and “savage” offer us a reading of the “urban Indian” as a Canadian dialectical image par excellence. While Cooper’s savages may have metaphorically occupied the streets of Paris in the minds of French writers, Frenchmen (and many Englishmen) physically occupied the Aboriginal space in the Americas, and the historical result has been, among other things, the uprooting and razing of Indigenous communities and the destruction of language and culture, not to mention the systemic racism that supports the concomitant poverty that reproduces contemporary “Iroquois of the gutter” in a kind of literary wish fulfillment that sees Balzac’s metaphor embodied. While the gritty realism of Odette’s film may seem to be worlds away from Benjamin’s middle-class flâneurs, and still further from the nineteenth-century admiration for “des sauvages” as interpreted by urban/urbane Frenchmen, Heater delivers a historical jolt in proposing a city that not only is not foreign to the Indigene, but indeed, is understood by the film’s Indigenous characters to be traditional land compromised by the long-term effects of colonial genocide.2 For the earliest reference to Indigeneity as an urban condition, Benjamin cites a passage in “My Heart Laid Bare,” written circa 1865, from Charles Baudelaire’s posthumous Oeuvres (1932), in which Baudelaire suggests that urban Paris is in its own way as savage as the New World: “What are the perils of jungle and prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether a man embraces his dupe on the boulevard, or spears his prey in unknown forests, is he not eternal man—that is to say, the most highly perfected beast of prey?” (445). This passage romanticizes the image of the Indigene; it also enacts the ethnographic romance of Indigenous peoples about which Dickinson warns. If we apply Benjamin’s “dialectic of flânerie” to these romanticized descriptions of “flâneurs of the forest,” we can see the conservative social investment in the down-and-out urban Indian played out within a Benjaminian dialectic. As he is subjected to the gaze of white citizens and white viewers in Heater, Ben exists in the film’s narrative as an object of the Benjaminian dialectic; he is both a “true suspect” of a gaze informed by racism and an “undiscoverable” object of the gaze—historicized, dismissed, “always already known” in Fatimah Rony’s terms—exotic but autochthonous, visually unmistakable yet conveniently voiceless (6). Allusive Histories: Indigenous Subtexts The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place. (de Certeau 103)

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There is a profound irony to be read in the image of a person of Indigenous background having no place in a city that had its beginnings at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, a traditional Cree and Ojibway meeting and trading space. Métis poet Gregory Scofield emphasizes this historical irony in “Women Who Forgot the Taste of Limes” from his 2005 collection Singing Home the Bones. Winnipeg is, in this poem, a “city . . . made of blood”3 and “a grave of history” (10). Scofield’s persona inquires into how Indigenous history may be called up from the urbanized space: if I go down to the lazy Red, lay singing in the grass will the faces of our ancestors take shape in clouds and will the clouds name themselves, each river-lot stolen? (10) Later in the same poem, the speaking persona wonders about the power of historical declaration. If he were to take the jawbone of a female ancestor and “place it scolding on Portage and Main,” would “all the dead Indians / rise up from the cracks, spit bullets / that made silent our talk?” (11). Marvin Francis’s 2002 City Treaty is a book-length poem that covers similar political and geographical territory, suggesting with its excoriating humour that the city built under the terms of a commoditized “McTreaty” (to which Francis adds, “would you like some lies with that?”) must acknowledge its racist history (431). As Thomas King does in Green Grass, Running Water, Francis appropriates the Western tropes of cowboy and Indian to complicate his argument, creating the dramatic personae of cowboy clown and plastic Indian poet, who discuss the terms of the “city treaty.” Odette’s film, too, uses these Hollywoodized tropes to foreground a racialized view of the local geography through which the characters pass. A good example occurs early in the film, in a five-second atmosphere shot that shows the Man sitting on the left end of a bench at a bus stop, prior to his first meeting with Ben. The bench advertises a local restaurant, and we can read a portion of the advertisement that is not blocked by the Man’s body: it reads “Oyster Café.” Five minutes later in the film, Ben sits on the same bench playing the harmonica, and his position on the right-hand side reveals the text that was previously blocked by the Man’s body. Now the visible portion of the sign shows the word “Prairie” with the phrase “wood-grilled” in smaller letters above it; to the far left is a caricature of a cowboy, hunkered down before

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a campfire. The juxtaposition of the images that frame the word “Prairie,” the cowboy and the Indian, reminds us not only of Winnipeg’s colonial history but also of its recent history. The phrase “cowboys and Indians” has taken on an even more sinister cast in Winnipeg since 1988, when John Joseph Harper, an Island Lakes Tribal Council member, was shot by police officers who were chasing a suspected car thief. The Winnipeg Police Service’s adamant assertion that the incident was not racially motivated led to the launch of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba in 1989. The phrase “cowboys and Indians” was used in the print media to describe the police’s animosity towards Indigenous citizens, and journalist Gordon Sinclair appropriated the phrase for the title of his award-winning book about the shooting and subsequent trial. Sinclair’s book, Cowboys and Indians: The Shooting of J.J. Harper, was released in 1999, the same year that Odette filmed Heater in downtown Winnipeg, and the phrase “cowboys and Indians” has continued to loom large in the local public consciousness, with many non-Indigenous people contending that Sinclair’s book treated the police too harshly.4 In that book, Sinclair demonstrates the semiotics of the cowboy-and-Indian motif on the Winnipeg landscape with a photo that shows a three-storey cartoon cowboy advertising the bar at the Westbrook Inn alongside the war-bonneted logo used by a Mohawk station beside the hotel, only a few blocks from the site of the Harper shooting (88n). Odette’s use of the Prairie Oyster Café’s bench advertisement tweaks precisely these visual markers, which are made even more loaded by the time and place in which Heater was filmed.5 Even the word “wood-grilled” on the bench, visible only when Farmer sits on it, recalls the Métis phrase “les bois-brulés,” made popular in Canadian literary discourse by Margaret Laurence’s 1974 novel The Diviners and Rudy Wiebe’s 1977 novel about the Red River Rebellion, The Scorched-Wood People. While such a term can seem dizzyingly colonial in terms of its violent connotations—something both Laurence and Wiebe examine in their novels—the terms of usage are important: Métis people have used the term to infer the strength that can endure through nearly insurmountable adversity, as in wood that has been burned (by history, by violence, by ideas of racial purity) but still stands strongly. The phrase’s connotations of pride and violence necessitate its inclusion as part of Odette’s subtextual revelation in Heater. Race and space are further complicated in Heater by the ways in which Ben’s Indigenous status is discursively effaced even while visually affirmed. In his first scene in the film, Ben explains to a government worker that he was robbed and so has no identification, which in terms of this scene means having neither a status card nor a birth certificate to prove he was born on a northern reserve. Without these forms of institutional documentation,

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Ben is not “legally” or governmentally recognizable as an Indigenous person, although he is visually and verbally recognized as Indigenous by white characters throughout the film. In fact, the first thing the Man says to Ben is a racial reference that also acts as a filmic allusion: “Hey,” says the Man, “you look like the guy from that movie—that big Indian.” In the timehonoured tradition of the wise fool, the mentally unstable social outsider names not only that which is obvious but socially unsayable, but also that which is necessary to our understanding of the narrative. Admittedly, the Man’s utterance could refer to any number of films starring a large Indigenous man, but given the context and the tone of the utterance, the filmic “big Indian” whom Ben most resembles is Will Sampson as Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, appropriate here for the irony of a mentally ill man recalling an Indigenous character from a film about mental illness. There are other markers too; Bromden’s silence, in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, stems from a refusal to speak within a system that is unwilling to acknowledge his voice or the terms of his reality. In the film, Bromden’s choice to speak to McMurphy occurs precisely because McMurphy recognizes Bromden’s intelligence and anger as no other white character does. In Heater, Ben does not respond right away to the Man’s initial overture; he meets the first utterance with silence, forcing the Man to repeat the allusion. Throughout the film, Ben’s choice to speak or not becomes more poignant as he (and the viewers) realize that his speech is rendered ineffective by his circumstances and by the assumptions white characters make about his size and stature. Even though Ben consistently uses his speech to make clear and articulate observations about his situation and to ask cogent questions about how to change his circumstances, his implicit and often explicit criticism of the system within this speech reaps only suspicion—Benjamin’s “true suspect”—and elision—“the hidden man.” Ben is refused room in a boarding house; he is refused a reissue of his stolen documents; and he is patronized or regarded as aggressive whenever he asserts the urgency of his needs. In one of the film’s greatest ironies, Ben joins forces with the schizophrenic Man because the Man, despite his chemical tics and the obvious handicaps of his illness, listens to Ben. The pair may be viewed as an oddly effective parallel of Kesey’s McMurphy and Bromden: a skinny crazy white man with a plan and a “big Indian” who helps him carry it out. A comparison between Heater and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest may also prove useful for discussing the “white-out” potential of these two films with Indigenous characters and non-Indigenous writers and directors. Both Ben and Bromden have their ethnicity read as a liability in the institutional systems in which they live; both have an acute understanding of the dynamics of power; both are thwarted by loopholes

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in the system. In both films, the friendship between the two men becomes the pivot on which the plot turns, and the pairing of the white and Indigenous characters suggests, with a certain social criticism, that only “crazy” white people are sympathetic to Indigenous characters.6 Odette gets plenty of cultural and historical mileage out of Winnipeg landmarks as the two men are shown walking through some highly recognizable spaces, but their route is significantly altered by the restrictions the Man proposes. His particular delusions of persecution, which are never explained, dictate that certain streets will burn his feet if he crosses them, so he must follow a circuitous route to arrive at any given destination. Having established this in an earlier scene in which the Man uses a three-point strategy to cross the intersection at Main and Higgins, Odette shows the accommodating move again at Portage and Smith by showing his protagonists exiting the frame at right to head east to cross Smith Street, then offcamera, proceeding north to cross Portage, then west on Smith to appear in frame again, performing a circuitous three-point move from the southwest corner to the northwest corner of the intersection of Portage and Smith. The resulting shot, in which the camera frames the street while “waiting” for the actors to reappear upscreen right, draws attention to the artificiality of the narrative and reawakens the viewer’s awareness of the “white camera eye” filming the screen Indigene. As the actors leave the frame, the north-facing camera focuses on a man approaching the camera from the north side of the street; either an extra or a pedestrian, he is an Indigenous man of approximately the same height and build as Gary Farmer, wearing a similar style of blue warm-up jacket as the actor wears as Ben. The pedestrian walks straight towards the camera to a distance of three feet, then turns and disappears to the right of the frame as our protagonists reappear on the far side of the street. The man in the blue jacket is inside the city but outside the narrative; he walks into the frame but exists outside the controlled image of the Indigene produced by the film. In offering this “real” walker in the city, Odette leaps into documentary mode for a few seconds and manages to suggest that his film is both more and less real than viewers have supposed. Odette films the enunciation of a walker whose story remains unavailable to the viewers but is intimated to be similar to Ben’s by the pedestrian’s physical similarity to the lead actor—an allusion to the real on a parallel with the production of Gary Farmer/Ben as an allusion to Will Sampson/Bromden. Ben ultimately deviates from the circuitous walking pattern when he demands that they take a more expedient route to the store. In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, Ben asserts the correctness of his plan by grabbing the Man and dragging him bodily across a forbidden “burning”

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street. This scene changes the relationship between Ben and the Man from one of convenience to one of genuine caring. The Man’s response to the deviation is heart-rending; he shrieks in pain and fights Ben all the way, and finally collapses, hysterical, on a bus bench on the opposite side of the street. Ben, full of apprehension at the results of his own strength, offers an apology for his action; he lights his last cigarette and delicately places it between the sobbing man’s lips. The traditional gift of tobacco operates as both a medicinal remedy and a gift in this scene, and the choice of this gift and this location is not incidental to the action, and to the place of Indigeneity in this film. In a later scene, Ben explains to the Man that quitting smoking alerted him to the significance of tobacco as a privilege and a gift. In the men’s final scene together, the Man repays the loan of the cigarette by offering two cigarettes and insisting silently that Ben take them, emphasizing his surprising understanding of the gift exchange as vital in a continuing friendship. Odette has chosen the site for the first gift of tobacco well; the bench where the two characters recover from the trauma of crossing the street is located on the grounds of The Forks, the commercial/cultural space at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, which was the original meeting and trading place for the Cree and Ojibway peoples of the area, and which is still used as a powwow site today. As an example of what Benjamin calls the “colportage phenomenon of space”—a collapsing of time-space so that “everything potentially taking place in this [space] is perceived simultaneously” (418)—the choice of The Forks as a site of violence, fear, and recognition within the film is very appropriate. The “colportage phenomenon” even encompasses the site’s future as the location of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which promises to have a strong “First Nations Focus” with a permanent exhibit called “Indigenous Communities in Canada” in which Indigenous storytellers will discuss the historical and contemporary experiences of First Nations peoples, with a Human Rights emphasis (Rollason 2007, A5). Heater suggests an urban culture in which Indigeneity is under erasure, and as with the earlier example of the Prairie Oyster bench, another reference to Indigeneity takes place both inside and outside the narrative frame. Halfway through the film, the Man and Ben huddle in the tiny public washroom of a doughnut shop to discuss their next step, once again crushed into a tiny space to reinforce visually that there is no room for them in any interior space. As they leave the washroom, Odette zooms in on a graffito written in permanent marker on the inner door. The graffito outlines an urban prairie “recipe” for “Instant Indian,” claiming that a chemical catalyst is necessary to “create” an “Indian,” but that the effect

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will be immediate: “Just add booze or hairspray, Lysol, Fucken Wagon Burners eh!” Invoked here is the urban stereotype of a “drunken Indian” (who also, apparently, manages to be a Western stereotype of a “wagon burner”—a conflation that seems as logically unlikely as it is offensive). The “eh” that ends the graffito marks the statement as Canadian, although not interrogative. The camera zooms in on the graffito, with its perversely cheery tone and air of barroom ribaldry. As the door closes on Ben’s back, the two-line declaration seems to fit onto his back like a target or a “Kick me” sign. Instant Indian: just add racist doggerel. Hasten, Brothers, on Your Way: Urban Reserves, Filmic Reserve Near the film’s end, the two protagonists part with an agreement to meet the next day, and the narrative appears to offer a grittily hopeful ending, as though aligning with Buck-Morss’s contention that “flânerie was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social space” (103). This is true enough for the Man, who returns to the ATM lobby where we first saw him, a bit better for his day. He now has food, cigarettes, a new coat, medical attention for his feet, a friend, a plan to meet that friend the next day, and, at long last, a place to plug in the heater, which he does, rapturously lighting a cigarette from the red glowing coils. But Ben fares less well. The racist doggerel of the bathroom graffiti, with its conflation of contemporary urban stereotype with Hollywoodized Western cliché, comes to life in Ben’s final scenes in the film. Without a place to sleep, Ben continues to walk, leaving the streets lined with commercial businesses and late-night haunts, until he walks through a pair of stone portals that mark the entrance to Armstrong’s Point, an old-money community also known as The Gates, located adjacent to one of the most impoverished areas of Winnipeg. Originally built to establish the boundaries between the wild prairie and civilized lawn, now the gates indicate a border between the low-income housing and rooming houses on one side of the street and gracious mansions on the other. Although the stone portals still stand, the gates that used to bar the district are no longer locked at night, mostly because such measures have been ineffective in keeping the wealthy community separate from less-moneyed citizens, and the residents of Armstrong’s Point have found that police surveillance does a better job than gates. In the film, Ben no sooner passes through the gates when a police cruiser appears behind him and two officers demand that he stop walking and turn around. The older officer steps out of the vehicle to ask Ben where he is going, and Ben’s reply of “home” is especially poignant to viewers who have watched him meet the locked door of the rooming house where his rifled bag of possessions has been thrown onto the porch, and the similarly locked doors of three homeless shelters. The policeman’s

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cruelly wry reply, that “wherever home is, it isn’t here,” reflects the socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood surrounding them and serves as an ironic reading of Indigenous land claims in Manitoba. Wherever home is for Ben, it most definitely and traditionally is “here,” half a block from the banks of the Assiniboine River, not even a mile from The Forks. The location of the beautiful homes built on traditional land underscores Ben’s walking as a speech act, one that declares him an “Instant Indian” by his presence in that exclusive space at that hour of the night. Although the circumstances between this scene and the Harper shooting are different, all resemblances between the scene and the historical incident are unmistakable from the moment the police vehicle appears onscreen. The policeman echoes Cuckoo’s Nest and the racist slur of the bathroom graffito when he taunts Ben’s silence with the quip: “Do ya talk, Chief?” The close-up on Farmer’s face makes it clear that the character knows exactly what is at stake in this scene and exactly how the two policemen are reading it. Ben is an Indigenous man carrying a bag through an exclusive district late at night, and if throughout the film Ben’s act of walking has enunciated for the viewers the pain of homelessness, the police read this walking as implied or potential criminality. They receive Ben’s one-word answers as evasive rather than frightened; to the viewers who have watched his volubility and grace for the whole film, we can see that he speaks as little as possible because, as with the social worker in the first scene, he understands his communication to be buried beneath the specular object of his ethnicity. The tension of this scene is contrasted with the final scenes of the Man, curled up and smoking rapturously in the Laurentian Bank’s ATM lobby. As the heater glows red with warmth, the film cuts to Ben being led to the cruiser, where he is given a ticket for littering the pristine grounds of the Gates with his cigarette butt. He silently takes the ticket and walks away from the cruiser into the cold night, followed by the final racial utterance of the film, the policeman’s shouted send-off: “If I hear of any trouble around here tonight, I’ll have to haul in your Indigenous ass.” Ben’s receding figure is swallowed by darkness as the film cuts back to a close-up of the glowing tip of the Man’s cigarette. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy comes up on the soundtrack, the tenor singing “Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn, / Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen” (Hasten, Brothers, on your way / Exulting as a hero in victory). Viewers would be hard-pressed to gloss as heroic either Ben’s final condemnation to walk forever into the hopeless, and homeless, space, or even the temporary safety won by the Man, holed up in same ATM lobby where we discovered him at the film’s beginning. The Man is not the only one who has gone to ground by the ending. Odette’s camera ends where it began: with a crane shot outside the Lau-

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rentian Bank, the camera soaring over snowplows and Christmas lights, with a few cars but no walkers in sight. In this final shot, it becomes clear that the text that has been written by these walkers will remain unreadable to those who place themselves above and beyond the practice of everyday homelessness. When Ben walks into darkness, when the Christmas lights of downtown dominate the screen with their glowing reminder of Christian ideology and the commodification of spirituality, Odette gives us a disconcerting visual reminder of the Canadian tendency to “whiteout” the Indigenous presence in film. Not for nothing does Buck-Morss suggest that a “politics of loitering” recasts the flâneur as a romantic conception now swallowed by the vicissitudes of urban geography and by the spatial practices of racism: “Flaneurs, like tigers or pre-industrial tribes, are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passageways” (102). She also warns that political oppression may make “existence in public space . . . more likely to be synonymous with state surveillance” (as in the social worker’s insistence on Ben’s identification), “public censure” (the graffito), and “political constraint” (the police episode) (118). It is impossible to view Heater merely as a character study or a low-tech road movie, for the film’s ending sharpens the quantifiable social differences between the mentally stable Indigenous Ben and the schizophrenic white Man. Initially, the film does appear to invite viewers to read the characters as “equalized” through their differences in race and mental health, but any attempt at social equivalence is undone by the film’s proposal of different outcomes for each character, suggesting bleakly but clearly that a crazy white man will fare considerably better than a sane Indigenous man, that the privileges of race trump the logic of sanity. In situating the act of walking as the film’s central action, Heater affirms Indigeneity as that which is symbolically central to the film but remains culturally perpetual and discursively effaced in the prairie urban centre. In Heater, the Indigenous flâneur passes through space in search of space to call home, but remains unrecognized: homeless, comfortless, and subject to interrogation. The flâneur as social suspect becomes an “Instant Indian”: just add surveillance.

Notes With thanks to Ute Lischke and Wendy Pearson for welcoming this paper to the conference, and special thanks to John Roscoe for drawing my attention to Heater. 1 Michael Greyeyes presented a thoughtful paper at the Indigenous Film and Media conference at Wilfrid Laurier University, “He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film,” which suggested a number of ways that a politically conscious Indigenous actor could influence a film.

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2 Gary Farmer is Cayuga from the Six Nations near Brantford, Ontario, and so is historically linked to the Iroquois Confederacy. Ben’s tribal affiliation is never made explicit, but the performative subtext of a contemporary “Iroquois” portraying a man “of the gutter” lends a piquant historical twist to Balzac. 3 The phrase immediately following Scofield’s declaration that “This city is made of blood” is worth noting. Implying that the “women who forgot the taste of limes” have ancestors who annihilated Indigenous peoples, Scofield writes “wîni / stains their grandmothers’ aprons.” Wîni, which Scofield translates from the Cree as bone marrow, is echoed in the Ojibway word for muddy water—ounipig, or Winnipeg, the name of the city. Knowing that the two languages are distinct does not entirely erase the violent connotations of a river of bone marrow as the city’s eponymous metaphor. 4 Despite his good intentions to record a local travesty of justice, I cannot hold up Sinclair’s book as an example of objective journalism. Sinclair’s choice to refer to himself in the third person throughout the narrative is among the book’s stranger rhetorical choices. 5 A television film about the Harper shooting, patterned after Sinclair’s book, was filmed in Winnipeg in 2003, directed by Norma Bailey. 6 Peter Dickinson’s reading of Bromden as one more example of the “invisibility of the screen Indigene” is not quite accurate, in my view; stating that Sampson “fades into the background in Forman’s film, a mostly mute witness to a white masculine striving against institutional authority” (Screening Gender, 79) misses the point of Sampson’s intelligent and wry performance. Bromden’s escape at the film’s end ought to remind viewers that despite the dimensions of Jack Nicholson’s performance as McMurphy, Sampson’s Bromden is the One who flies over the (white) cuckoo’s nest.

Fifteen

Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk DAVINIA THORNLE Y

The Price of Milk (2001), directed by Harry Sinclair, is a quirky mainstream improvised film that plays with stereotypes usually associated with Aotearoa/New Zealand regarding race relations between the indigenous Māori and the Pākehā (settler descendants) majority. The film assumes a subversive magical realist take regarding national land disputes and issues of ownership—contentious subjects that, as I discuss shortly, are always foremost in the minds of Aotearoa/New Zealanders, whether they arise in everyday interactions, mediated representations, or political struggles. Edward Said’s prescription provides a structure for thinking about the impact of Sinclair’s film on these debates between Māori and Pākehā. Said suggests a threefold approach to combating the impact of colonizing images—in effect, theory (and performance) as a type of political weapon. First . . . a new integrative or contrapuntal orientation in history that sees Western and non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected by imperialism. Second . . . an imaginative, even utopian vision which reconceives emancipatory (as opposed to confining) theory and performance. Third . . . an investment neither in new authorities, doctrines, and encoded orthodoxies, nor in established institutions and causes, but in a particular sort of nomadic, migratory, and anti-narrative energy. (Culture and Imperialism 279) Said’s vision is relevant to an examination of The Price of Milk for several reasons, which I will foreground as I progress through my argument. 301

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An underlying theme in the film is the transfer of property from Pākehā to Māori—in direct contrast to actual historical events. The Price of Milk’s Pākehā and Māori characters have an ongoing relationship—much like the one posited by Said—because of the constant negotiations that take place. This relationship changes as the narrative progresses due to the fact that Sinclair improvised the script and rearranged the shooting order throughout the production process. Instead of being “confined” by the accepted conventions of feature-length filmmaking, Sinclair has used those conventions as a springboard for his own “imaginative, even utopian vision.” The Price of Milk rebelliously touches on several contentious cultural issues through magical illusion and imagery. In this respect, the film represents a departure from previous Aotearoa/New Zealand films in terms of both its comic structure and its use of magical realism (Horton 60). Likewise, finding examples of films similar to The Price of Milk proves difficult. After all, magical realist feature film comedies that deal with Indigenous issues constitute a slender sub-genre indeed. Like Water for Chocolate (1993, dir. Alfonso Arau) and Macario (1960, dir. Roberto Gavaldón), both Latin American films, and The Time of the Gypsies (1990, dir. Emir Kusturica), a florid Eastern European piece, are the few that come to mind. The Price of Milk’s uniqueness is not a failing, however. Rather, the sheer originality of Sinclair’s vision—he manages to juggle all of the aforementioned categories and locate them within an antipodean landscape—may be The Price of Milk’s foundational strength. Moreover, in its end effect, this uniqueness represents a chance for cinematic and possibly ideological “emancipation” on the part of its audiences. Given that Sinclair is Pākehā, it seems reasonable to take a moment to expand on how I see this cinematic and ideological release being wrought by The Price of Milk. By transposing the socio-cultural roles of both Māori and Pākehā through the film, Sinclair is slyly stepping out of a veritable boxing ring currently set up around Aotearoa/New Zealand cultural politics, particularly regarding filmic representation. By forcing Pākehā to abandon a central spectatorial position in order to identify with Rob and Lucinda (the film’s main Pākehā characters), the film occupies a kind of liminal space between Māori-made film and the vast majority of mainstream (read white-produced) cinematic products from this country. Given this, while The Price of Milk is not an Indigenous film, it by no means sits easily with the latter category either. I have written in more detail about this in articles dealing with the films Once Were Warriors (1994, dir. Lee Tamahori) and Pictures (1981, dir. Michael Black), and I will use The Piano (1993, dir. Jane Campion) as a comparative example shortly, but suffice to say now that I believe Sinclair’s vision is progressive rather than reaction-

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ary. For this reason alone, his work deserves the comprehensive unpacking I attempt here, precisely so that we can understand how such work has an impact on conventional understandings of race relations in the national cultural realm. This is a very different kind of film, due in part to the “anti-narrative energy” of its improvised production style, as suggested by Said. The Price of Milk doesn’t seem to be about much of anything; the story constantly digresses, and each new scene is an exercise in trying to locate a narrative thread. This work is usually in vain, however. Seemingly the film follows the fortunes of the aforementioned Rob and Lucinda, a dairy farming couple so “perfectly in love,” as the synopsis puts it, that “they have nowhere to go but awry” (Matthews 55). In an ill-hatched plot to test Rob’s love for her, Lucinda decides to swap his entire herd of cows for the return of their connubial quilt. This quilt was “borrowed” at the start of the film by their neighbour, a flighty old Māori kuia (elderly woman) who suffers from a “Princess and the Pea”-like syndrome of never being able to stay warm, despite the fact that her gang of minders have “borrowed” several other quilts to add to her already groaning bed. The film makes clear that the kuia felt she was justified in “borrowing” the quilt because earlier, Lucinda had run her over while navigating a tricky back road in her beat-up Holden Kingswood station wagon; nonplussed, the kuia popped right back up and continued walking, muttering as she disappeared into the bushes. When Rob learns of Lucinda’s subterfuge, he moves out to the barn and takes up with Lucinda’s best friend, Drusophila. The rest of the film is divided between Lucinda’s wrangling with the magical kuia to get Rob’s cows returned, her stubborn planning of their wedding in the hope that Rob will forgive her and return, and Rob and Drusophila’s mismatched affair, which ends badly. Included is the appearance of an Indian family, owners of the local 4 Square Food Market, who pitch in by providing saris and tandoori for Rob and Lucinda’s eventual nuptials in a field surrounded by the returned cows. Rather than trading blows, then, Sinclair prefers to challenge both his audiences and the wider “chattering classes” using a method that combines visual magic tricks with humour; what the film actually has to say about the indebtedness of Pākehā to Māori, however, is far from light or easily forgotten. As this brief summary suggests, The Price of Milk’s position on Māoritanga (Māori culture) is to slip the issue of sovereignty and its relation to landownership in throughout the film, so subtly that at first it is difficult for the audience even to notice. The film highlights one of myriad ways that racial hybridity can be approached: by allowing a sense of play. The film eases back on the politics for a while and highlights the interconnectedness

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of Māori–Pākehā relationships through comedy, subtle innuendos, and a wacky dose of surrealism. Animated sitcoms are able to touch on much more contentious issues regarding race and social mores than “realistic” sitcoms can because viewers perceive the former as less real. In much the same way, The Price of Milk’s magical realist format allows it to step outside the social taboos ordinarily imposed on mainstream dramatic narratives.1 These relative freedoms include the freedom to avoid stereotyping (as I will discuss later, The Price of Milk is at pains to suggest otherwise in its representation of the kuia’s Māori helpers), as well as freedom from the pressure to downplay certain issues or only present them from one perspective, usually that of the dominant ideology. As Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris suggest, magical realist texts are by nature “subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural structures” (6). By following what I have termed “the land issue theme” throughout the film (as represented by the struggle between Lucinda and the kuia for possession of the marital quilt), I show how the use of magical realism in The Price of Milk makes it possible for Sinclair not only to sidestep common stereotypes, but also to teasingly address much debated and well-worn concerns regarding ownership, reparations, and national cultural differences. Another primary requirement of magical realist texts relates to the normality accorded to fantastic events. Within the narrative of such a film, the impossible becomes probable and the incredible seldom merits recognition; in this way, the “doctrines and encoded orthodoxies” Said warns of (279) are avoided. For the audience to enter into such a contract with the filmmaker, it helps if the primary characters are themselves far removed from anything resembling conventionality, and in Rob and Lucinda, we have such a couple. They are both weird and lovable. Lucinda collects numerous tiny pairs of baby shoes, stockpiling them in a suitcase, but claims she doesn’t want kids. Rob greets his cows every morning by their tag number—“How ya doing, #57?” “Feeling better, 41?” “Easy, easy, #110, calm down girl”—and is followed around by his agoraphobic dog, who, until the last few scenes of the film, never comes out from under his own personally fitted cardboard box. Rob and Lucinda like to share dinner and a bath simultaneously, while sitting in a rusty old tub planted in the middle of one of the cow paddocks (an Aotearoa/New Zealand idiom for farmed fields). At the end of their meal, Lucinda washes the dishes in the bathwater, while Rob dries. In one such encounter, as Lucinda is fishing around in the water for more dirty dishes, she discovers an engagement ring Rob has hidden for her. She screams with delight, they hug, and both disappear under the water.

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The importance of magic intervening in the everyday is established early on in the film through a series of vignettes. The first clue the viewers have that everything is not quite as it seems—over and above the fact that Rob and Lucinda are far from your ordinary, staid couple—occurs during a scene where Lucinda begins to seduce Rob out near the cowshed. As Rob lifts her dress over her head, Lucinda vanishes and appears again a few paddocks over, dressed now in the overalls and gumboots that Rob had shaken off when they first embraced. This scene is followed by Lucinda’s encounter with the enigmatic kuia, a woman who has the ability to be run over by a station wagon and keep right on moving. She heads into the bushes—sporting a delightful furry, orange pillbox hat, which will appear again within the narrative—while Lucinda chases her, yelling to check whether she is all right. The kuia throws back a cryptic suggestion: “Keep warm.” This theme continues to guide the kuia’s actions as she “borrows” the couple’s quilt to add to her ever-growing collection and, as such, will be discussed in more detail shortly. Additionally, cars colliding and people surviving horrific accidents are common throughout The Price of Milk and point to still other magical realist moments in the film. When Lucinda and Drusophila take a corner too fast and end up upside down on the other side of the road, they use the unexpected (and literal) “down time” to smoke a joint and discuss whether the spark is going out of Lucinda and Rob’s relationship. The viewer gets the feeling that this is not the first time they have ended up in this predicament. Once Rob’s best friend, Brian, takes the same corner and lands his own Holden Kingswood with a thump upside down on top of the girls’ car—not five minutes later—this feeling is confirmed. In The Price of Milk, characters evidence droll acceptance regarding the complete illogicality of most situations they find themselves in. Even the title refers to the film’s alignment of two substances that do not normally occupy the same semantic space: love and milk. Lucinda ruins an entire vat of fresh milk by insisting on swimming in it—yet another of her hare-brained schemes to “reignite the fire” in their relationship. After shouting at her about the high price of milk, Rob thinks better of resorting to scolding—and instead joins her. But Lucinda’s actions, while fetching, also foreshadow her eventual decision to swap Rob’s cows for the return of their quilt, as well as the break between them caused by her actions. She will learn the hard way how much both milk and love cost, how both are intimately connected in their world of lush hills and farmland, and how sometimes good intentions are simply not enough in the games couples play. This is also clear in Lucinda’s interactions with the kuia, where quilts and cows can be seen as signifiers in the larger national power struggles

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over who owns what, who has rights to what, and why—such as the contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand debates over tino rangatiratanga [selfdetermination] and the Treaty of Waitangi. In 1840, the Treaty was signed, legalizing the rule of the settlers—most of them from England and Scotland—over Māori. This document was signed by representatives of the British Crown and five hundred Māori leaders but was never honoured by the colonizers. Later on, independence from Britain in 1911 required that a coherent Aotearoa/New Zealand identity be established; settlers assumed that this would be shaped according to Pākehā ideals. Mark Williams outlines Pākehā thinking at that time: “opinion held that the Māori, unlike the native peoples in other settler societies, were fortunate to be the recipients of a policy of benign assimilation.” They were to be “raised to the level of European civilization,” thus facilitating the transition to “one New Zealand people” (20). In practice, this synthesis by assimilation caused a “massive erosion of traditional Māori values. There was not so much a synthesis of cultures as a negation of things Māori” (Beatson, qtd. in Harding 137). Interestingly, in the early 1900s most Aotearoa/New Zealand films had Māori themes but were made from the perspective of the white population. Filmmakers appropriated Māori legends, traditions, and sites as material for stories such as How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride (1913, dir. Gaston Méliès), The Mutiny of the Bounty (1916, dir. Raymond Longford), and The Birth of New Zealand (1922, dir. Harrington Reynolds), which featured a re-creation of scenes from the signing of the treaty. The first nationally organized and recognized Māori protest over land occurred in 1971 when Nga Tamatou, a radical Māori activist group, demonstrated against the government-sponsored Treaty of Waitangi Day celebration. This demonstration, together with Nga Tamatou’s proclamation of a day of mourning for the loss of 63 million acres of Māori land, embarrassed the government. The Treaty of Waitangi Act was passed in 1975— ostensibly to return Māori land—but the body in charge of these decisions, the Waitangi Tribunal, was hampered by the fact that it was in an advisory capacity to the national government (i.e., empowered to make suggestions but not to enact change) and could only hear claims for land lost from 1975 onwards. Throughout the 1980s, “land became the [primary] symbol of Māori alienation and subjection to the will of the Pākehā majority” (Walker 512). In 1985, the Labour government passed the Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act, making the Waitangi Tribunal’s reach retrospective to 1840 and awarding it self-governing power. Since then, large areas of land and coastal fishing rights have been returned to the Māori people. In some cases, financial compensation has been made also.2 However, over the 150 years outlined here and of the approximately 150 films made in Aotearoa/

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New Zealand during this time, only four have attempted to address the appropriation of Māori land, the sacking of Māori culture, and the racism inherent in Aotearoa/New Zealand society. These are Rewi’s Last Stand (1925, dir. Rudall Hayward), Utu (1983, dir. Geoff Murphy), Patu (1983, dir. Mereta Mita), and Ngati (1987, dir. Barry Barclay)—the latter two of which were made by Māori directors (Dennis and Bieringa). The first inkling the audience has that the quilt theft may hold extratextual references, then, is when Lucinda visits the 4 Square to try and buy a replacement. Drusophila, who works there, breezily quips that there has been “quite a lot of quilt theft lately. So I hope you don’t want a new one—because we’re completely out! . . . And blankets—” She gestures to the empty shelf space where the quilts and blankets are usually stored. Obviously, quilt theft is neither uncommon nor unusual in that area, just as battles over land (particularly the distribution and ownership of it) continue to be central to Aotearoa/New Zealanders’ notions of national identity. That the quilt was literally stolen off Rob and Lucinda’s sleeping forms in the dead of night echoes the contemporary sentiments of many Māori tribes, who protest that their land was historically bought out from under them. “In magical realist fictions, we witness an idiosyncratic recreation of historical events, but events grounded firmly in historical realities— often alternate versions of officially sanctioned accounts” (Zamora and Faris 169). Reversing these “historical realities”—making Pākehā assume a position up until this point held by Māori—forces reflection by Pākehā around these issues. In addition, the reversal of perspective locates the film in a different camp than those that allow “white viewpoint characters” to look ethnographically at Indigenous groups. Again, this is a cheeky nod to Said’s prescription regarding the integration of Western and non-Western experiences, especially when the analogy is furthered by looking at the role of land in Māori mythology and culture. Land not only provides income and sustenance—as it does for Pākehā—but also represents the very foundation of Māori spirituality, forming their world view and everything in it. Māori culture is based on a direct lineage stretching from the ancestors, who in turn arose from the forced separation of Ranginui (sky father) and Papatūānuku (widespread foundation or Mother Earth), gods who were the sky and the earth. As Margaret Orbell recognizes, “the history of the world is the history of ancestors (tupuna)” and this history constitutes religious understandings for the Māori. Therefore, according to various Māori tribal beliefs, “human society and the physical world came into existence at the same time. Each is inseparable from the other” (5). One cannot consider a person without also acknowledging their attachment to the physical world.

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In this respect, the land is what keeps Māori people “warm” (as the kuia hints to Lucinda right after the accident), just as Rob and Lucinda’s quilt stands as a tangible symbol of their love for each other. The Price of Milk even opens with the credits sewn into the quilt; unseen hands—the same unseen hands that will later steal this exact quilt—stretch out the folds to display the words more clearly. In a sense, the quilt stands in for the larger life that the young couple have made together, and it is its “everyday-ness” that makes most concrete the similarities between it and the land. Like the ground under the characters’ feet in The Price of Milk, the quilt’s constant simple presence only registers when it is stolen. Suddenly, who owns what is up for negotiation. The theft of the quilt also marks the point at which Lucinda is plagued by doubts about her and Rob’s relationship. Tellingly, this doubt is first planted by Drusophila, who mentions a magazine article she read about how fighting often spices up a stale romance. A few days later, walking home after one such failed attempt to reignite their “stale” relationship, Lucinda spies the kuia she recently ran over. The kuia is airing out Lucinda and Rob’s quilt on the front lawn, as coy as you please. Much like Pākehā who now live comfortably on what was Māori land, the kuia considers the quilt hers and is even bold in displaying it publicly. When Lucinda angrily approaches the kuia, demanding she give back what is rightfully Lucinda’s, they tussle over the quilt. Also like the Pākehā in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the kuia is not willing to easily give up what she now considers her property. The methods used to gain the quilt (and the land in Aotearoa/New Zealand) have been conveniently forgotten, so indignation seems righteous—in her eyes. The kuia denies the quilt is Lucinda’s, insisting she bought it at a church fair. The quilt rips in the middle from their struggle and she shoos Lucinda away, hissing “now see what you’ve done—you stupid girl.” It is ironic that during the development of this theme, Māori and Pākehā assume roles that reverse the discrimination and stereotyping directed by Pākehā onto Māori throughout Aotearoa/New Zealand’s history. Obviously this is largely done in the context of a contemporary lighthearted film for comedic value, but it also draws attention to the unequal power relations between the two groups and how the actions of one group (Pākehā) have indelibly influenced the other groups’ (Māori iwi [peoples or nations]) self-concepts. Māori struggle with an almost constant barrage of Pākehā-influenced ideas regarding how Māori themselves think, behave, and interact. This means that many Māori shy away from watching “themselves” in various media, given that they know they are seeing a majority-sanctioned view of what Pākehā imagine it means to be Māori. It also means that oftentimes,

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Māori unknowingly berate and stereotype themselves, using ideals and standards that originate from outside their own culture and are therefore inaccurate and often impossible to meet (Alia and Bull). In The Price of Milk we see a similar situation: Lucinda has to contend with the kuia’s withering assessment of her as not only grasping and audacious because she dared to ask for the rightful return of her quilt, but now even as “stupid.” The kuia’s comments align Lucinda with the “bad, radical Māori” that Sue Abel discusses—Māori who take it upon themselves to speak up when they see something is amiss in contemporary society and who are just as quickly silenced by mainstream Pākehā ideology (see Abel, Chapter 11). Lucinda speaks up, and the kuia’s only response is to dismiss and belittle her claim. After Lucinda is unsuccessful in recovering her quilt, she determines that her only recourse is to steal it back. Sneaking back to the kuia’s house that night, she peers through the window. Suddenly she is surrounded on all sides by the kuia’s minders, but their immediate intent is not to harm her, but merely to get her to keep quiet and, hopefully, leave. In some respects, the minders seem as much—if not more—afraid of the kuia than Lucinda. After Lucinda whispers to them that the kuia has her quilt, the minders urgently tell her, “Don’t worry about it! You’ll only make things worse—just get out of here.” In their bumbling compliance with the kuia’s muddled and irrational demands (she does, after all, possess an inordinate number of quilts and still is always cold), the minders seem akin to all those Aotearoa/New Zealanders who prefer the status quo, those quiet masses who resent claims regarding the legitimacy of the Treaty of Waitangi and who would prefer to let bygones be bygones. One other point about the kuia’s minders is worth mentioning here, especially in relation to common national stereotypes—those that position Māori as brutal thugs who always roam in packs, dressed in leathers and headscarves. The Price of Milk’s minders are also suitably decked out, but when they turn around we see that these threatening black leather jackets in fact sport patches saying “Manawatu Golf Club.” These “thugs” are practising their swing techniques rather than threatening anyone. By employing this subtle visual sidestep, The Price of Milk manages to foreground an implicit assumption about the dangerousness of most Māori, especially young males. For such a joke to succeed, the audiences for the film must hold this belief, but I would suggest that it can also be seen as a synecdoche for many Pākehā beliefs about the “inherent” untrustworthiness of Māori. Put quite simply, if such an idea did not hold currency in mainstream Aotearoa/New Zealand society, the producers would not be able to include a joke that works off of it.

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In answering dominant portrayals such as those seen in one of Aotearoa/ New Zealand’s best-known films, The Piano, critics like Leonie Pihama have spoken out against the film’s easy association of Māori with all that is base, natural, uncivilized, sexual, and fecund (especially in contrast to the white, “civilized” settlers). In an earlier article I discussed the debate around The Piano and the pitfalls that Jane Campion faced in directing, concluding that Campion was blinkered in her representation of both the white main characters and the supporting Māori cast, largely because of her own position as a Pākehā (“Duel or Duet”). Taking a different approach in The Price of Milk, Sinclair takes pains to show how frequently these types of cinematic stereotypes also associate Māori with violence. In foregrounding this assumption, the viewers begin to see the extent to which such beliefs are not only ideologically suspect but also statistically skewed. Every young Māori male cannot be a criminal lout, although the media often suggest as much. Like every other racial group—including Pākehā—Māori like to do a variety of things with their spare time; and as the film suggests, why wouldn’t one of those things be golf (oftentimes seen as a quintessentially “white” game)? In this way, The Price of Milk employs a low-key approach to racial discrimination, one that causes audiences to question their stances on several volatile national issues without even being completely aware that those beliefs are being brought to the surface, brushed off, and examined. David Callahan, in his article on “The Absent Pākehā in New Zealand Film,” puts forward the thesis that the failure to present accurate and wellrounded Pākehā characters in national films can be traced back to a fundamental denial on the part of Pākehā across Aotearoa/New Zealand society. This denial occurs on two levels: first, Pākehā refuse to accept that they are Pākehā first and foremost, before they are throwbacks to a far-removed British culture; and second, Pākehā also do not often acknowledge that they require Māori cooperation as much as or even more than Māori (who have long been positioned as depending on Pākehā systems of support). In other words, one side of Said’s prescription may have been acknowledged (Pākehā to Māori), but not the other (Māori to Pākehā). Callahan’s points prove useful not only when we consider how they foreground Pākehā denial about the interconnectedness of both races, but also if we examine the relationship between Lucinda and the kuia in The Price of Milk as a direct reversal of these limited perspectives. In the film, the kuia takes on many of the qualities associated with Pākehā denial: from feeling compelled to take what belongs to Lucinda, to then claiming it was hers all along, to not being willing to discuss ways to equitably return the quilt or swap it for something else—particularly if there is even a suggestion that

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the giving back may inconvenience or discomfort her in any way. Later in the same encounter with the minders, when Lucinda asks why the kuia needs all those quilts, they reply “She’s cold. What’d you think?,” as if this is explanation enough. The kuia’s obsessive need to “keep warm” can be tied back to the stance taken by Merata Mita, a prominent Māori activist and filmmaker, in her discussion of the role and representation of Pākehā characters in Aotearoa/New Zealand films. If, as Mita states, the national film industry is a “white, neurotic one,” and if repression and fear are the overriding concerns in most Pākehā films, it becomes clearer why The Price’s of Milk’s narrative works to position the kuia in place of the Pākehā—in this case, making her the neurotic one. Pākehā colonial dislocation and unease, their feelings of absence and unsure identity, are inversely highlighted in the film (particularly as compared to the presence of “identity, resolution and survival” in films made by Māori, as noted by Mita)(47). In addition, Callahan suggests that the often troubled nature of Aotearoa/New Zealand film can be traced back to “embattled and strained efforts to avoid dealing with what . . . Charles Taylor terms the need for ‘recognition’ (Taylor 25), a need inflected by not only standard postcolonial uncertainties but also by the more largely un-admitted need for recognition as people who belong” (52). Here, the kuia worries about “keep[ing] warm” and sees Lucinda and Rob’s quilt as a way to solve that problem. Much like Pākehā, she “borrows” from others in order to gain a feeling of warmth, belonging, or “a place to stand” (commonly expressed in Māori as tūrangawaewae) for herself. Finally, in a fit of pique once she realizes that the old woman really believes the quilt is hers and that she will not simply give it back because Lucinda asked her to (plus, the minders are intent on barring her way, even if she could hatch a plan to steal it back), Lucinda exchanges Rob’s cows for the quilt. As I noted earlier, from that moment on, everything begins to go horribly wrong for the couple. Eventually the narrative winds its convoluted way towards a final faceoff between Lucinda and the kuia. When Lucinda states that she wants to buy the cows back to appease Rob—all other avenues exhausted—and asks how much it will cost, the kuia quips “How much have you got?!” After reflection, she softly says to Lucinda: “I wish I could help you, but you know those cows are worth more than $400,000—be reasonable.” Seeing that Lucinda looks close to crying with frustration, the kuia suggests a cup of tea, but in such a way that it is quite clear she is aware that a cup of tea is a poor replacement for—or a distraction from—much more important issues. At last the kuia squarely asks Lucinda: “What’s the thing you love the most?” At this point, she also reveals the fluffy, fluorescent-orange hat she

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was wearing when Lucinda ran her over. Lucinda gasps, realizing that the kuia is one and the same mysterious woman (who appears to be immortal). She asks, “Is that why you’re doing this?” The kuia hastens to say, “No, no, I get run over all the time—hey, we all have to make sacrifices.” And she is quite clear on what will be an appropriate “sacrifice,” or exchange, for the cows (keeping in mind that this swap would never have had to take place if the kuia hadn’t ordered the minders to steal the quilt to begin with). At the end of the scene, the camera closes in on the kuia wearing Lucinda’s engagement ring as she methodically continues to darn the rip in the quilt. Lucinda has given up her relationship with Rob—the thing she loves the most—in order to return his cows to him. Without someone to share it with, the quilt is of no use to her now either. Such is the price of milk. This scene is particularly telling because the kuia undertakes actions normally associated with the historical mindset of the Pākehā. These include standing firm on an economic ideal and belatedly offering the ubiquitous kaputi (the Māori transliteration for a “cup of tea”); clearly, a case of “too little, too late,” as well as a direct reference to the “beads and blankets” subterfuge of Native American lore. Interestingly, The Piano also references Pākehā appropriation through the depiction of a land exchange between Stewart, the main Pākehā character, and the Māori. Baines, another Pākehā who is more sympathetic to the Māori cause, acts as interpreter. Predictably, Stewart offers guns, beads, and blankets, framing the negotiations in the light of indulgent colonial arrogance and a complete lack of understanding of the people he intends to do business with. Later, Stewart even complains to Baines, “What do they [Māori] want the land for? They don’t cultivate it, burn it back. How do they even know it’s theirs?” Baines sees fit not to reply. Even the kuia’s personality is aligned with Pākehā values as well as a national “market drive” ideology that privileges profit over tradition or equality. Pākehā values equate colonization with civilization, perceive land as “empty” in the wake of colonization and as useful only to the extent it provides for resources or livelihoods, and consider money to be the only form of—and reason for—exchange. The kuia originally wanted the quilt because she hoped it would provide her with the steady warmth she had been unable to find with only her own possessions—let us not forget she does, after all, methodically steal other people’s quilts with the assistance of her minders. Likewise, she operates solely according to economic rationales and Lucinda’s pleas as to the emotional and symbolic worth of the quilt fall, if not on deaf ears, then definitely on unsympathetic ones. In the end, it is Lucinda who does all the compromising: she must give up the most important thing she has in order to get back what belonged

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to her (and Rob) originally anyway. Lucinda’s struggle in The Price of Milk echoes that of the Māori inhabitants of Aotearoa/New Zealand: it is against an alien, unconcerned entity that claimed what belonged to them with absolute propriety and then refused to admit (until recently) they had done anything wrong or to make amends. By imbuing the kuia with Pākehā qualities, Sinclair is asking the largely Pākehā audience to examine its mindset regarding land disputes and race relations. As suggested by other scholars of Indigenous media, many in the audience would have gone to Sinclair’s movie precisely because it did not sound like a “worthy,” “historically correct” (which to many people equates with “boring”) watch, in the way a film made by a minority or Indigenous director might have (Davis, “Remaking” 9). Allowing for this presupposition, when they see the kuia being by turns recalcitrant, stubborn, stingy, and uncaring regarding Lucinda’s plight, some audience members may begin to question her inflexible stance and, in doing so, question their own logic regarding these issues. The Price of Milk, then, provides a much needed form of “corrosion within the engine of system” (Erickson, qtd. in Zamora and Faris 6). The film’s handling of race and land issues is subtle and lighthearted—indeed, those issues are often lost on viewers who are not particularly self-reflexive. That said, it does present a fresh way of approaching a difficult and combative topic. Sinclair’s vision, his “emancipatory performance” (following Said’s definition, touched on at the start of this chapter), combats colonizing ideas by taking the national debate into an entirely different paddock— one that introduces the audience to hard questions about power through magically inflected soft comedy.

Notes 1 See, for example, John Alberti’s collection, Leaving Springfield. 2 See, for example, Claudia Orange’s work on the treaty in her book The Treaty of Waitangi.

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Glossary

balanda

Gunalbingu

person of European ancestry (“Hollander”)

blackfella

Aboriginal Australian

blak talk

Aboriginal dialect English

les bois-brulés

French

lit., the scorched-wood people

colportage

French

the work of a colporteur, or peddler of religious books; sometimes used to refer to any kind of book peddling

daro

Sámi

non-Sámi person

flâneur

French

one who strolls about aimlessly; a lounger; a loafer; in modernism, the disinterested watcher for whom city life is a spectator sport

flânerie

French

strolling, sauntering; idleness; aimlessness; the act of being a flâneur

haka

Māori

traditional Māori war dance

hikoi

Māori

march

iwi

Māori

peoples or nations 315

316

GLOSSARY

ka whawhai tonu mātou

Māori

we will fight on against you; translated as “Struggle without End” in Ranginui Walker’s book of the same title

Kaunihera kaumātua

Māori

Māori Elders Council

kaupapa Māori

Māori

conceptualization or vision of Māori principles

koru

Māori

a traditional element in Maori design based on the spiral shape of an unfurling silver fern frond; used as a logo by Air New Zealand

kuia

Māori

a Māori female elder or elderly woman

Lapp-djavul

Swedish

Lapp-devil

lavvo

Sámi

tents; dwellings made of wood and skins

lingua franca

Latin

a language widely used as a means of communication among speakers of other languages

mā koutou

Māori

for you

mā mātou

Māori

for us, but not for them

mā rātou

Māori

for them

mā tātou

Māori

for everyone

mana wahine

Māori

respect for or authority of Māori women

mise-en-abyme

French

literally, placed in the abyss; in art and film, a technique in which an image or scene contains a smaller copy of itself

GLOSSARY

317

modus operandi

Latin

way of operating, method

Nga kaiwhakapumau i te reo

Māori

guardians of the language

noaidi

Sámi

shaman, pathfinder

noaidevuohta

Sámi

Shamanism

ounipig

Cree

muddy water (Winnipeg)

pākehā

Māori

New Zealander of European ancestry

Papatūānuku

Māori

Earth mother and representative of the land, which gives birth to all things

par excellence

French

quintessential; the best of its kind

poumuri

Māori

back (rugby position)

Prairie oysters

bull’s testicles (in Canada); usually eaten deep-fried

rangatahi

Māori

youth

Ranginui

Māori

Sky Father

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

French

the splendors and miseries of courtesans—a novel by Honoré de Balzac

tangata whenua

Māori

indigenous people, people of the land

taonga

Māori

a tangible or intangible treasure

te ao Māori

Māori

the Māori world

te Māngai Pāho

Māori

Māori Broadcasting Funding Agency

Te reo

Māori

the Māori language (also “te reo Māori”)

318

GLOSSARY

te reo Māori ngā tikanga Māori

Māori

Māori language and customs

tino rangatiratanga

Māori

self-determination, sovereignty; authority; in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi, it refers to Māori control over all things Māori

tupuna

Māori

an ancestor

whanaungatanga

Māori

relationship; kinship; connection; friendship

wîni

Cree

bone marrow

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344

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Smoke Signals. Dir. Chris Eyre. ShadowCatcher Entertainment, 1998. Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man. Dir. Alanis Obomsawin. National Film Board of Canada, 1997. Ten Canoes. Dirs. Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr. Vertigo Productions / Fandango Australia, 2006. Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises. Dir. Alanis Obomsawin. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 2006. You Are on Indian Land. Dir. Mort Ransen. National Film Board of Canada, 1969.

Index Abel, Sue, 27–28, 175–88, 309 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), 133, 142n2, 191 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: alternative historical experiences of, 68–69; authenticity, and contemporary identity, 61–63, 138; blackfella filmmakers counterstories, 67, 68–69; blak talk, 21, 64–65, 78n3; Desart Committee, 77, 80n14; Dreamtime stories, 74– 75; life expectancy, 24, 39n26, 138, 139; Maralinga atomic bomb tests, 194; New Media Arts (NMA), 19, 189–97; Northern Territory Emergency Response Act, 23, 157–58; pedophilia allegations, 133, 138; population growth, 5, 35–36n3; Stolen Generations, 78–79n5, 79n8, 83, 100–101n7, 100n6, 156–57; Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, 192–93; urban Aboriginal culture, 82; Year of Mourning, 100n4; Yolngu people, 73. See also Australia; Australian films Aboriginal Filmmaking Program (NFB), 9, 37n14 Aboriginalism, invisibility of subaltern history, 65–66, 77

Aboriginality: Australian constructions of, 72–73, 77, 79n10, 138, 140; redefining of, 141–42 Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), 22, 113, 222, 239 Aboriginal Tent Embassy (Australia), 7 Across Arctic America (Rasmussen), 109–10, 125, 129n5 activism, role of media in, 7–8, 299n1 actors, Indigenous: deconstruction of Indian image, 48–49; evolution of roles, 19; non-Native actors in Native roles, 55 Adair, Joe: Navajo Film Themselves, 226–27 agency: of extraordinary economies, 256–57; recuperation of, 4; and self-definition, 24; and selfrepresentation, 72, 76; and skin colour, 140, 141–42 Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, 29; Cache Collective, 199, 216–17n2 AIDS, 101–2n16; “face of AIDS” images, 101n15 Aird, Michael, 90–91 alcoholism: and cultural trauma, 11; drunken-Indian stereotype, 297, 300n6 Aleiss, Angela: Making the White Man’s Indian, 236–37 Alexander, Marc, 178

346

INDEX

Alexie, Sherman, 10, 38n21, 234, 236; The Business of Fancydancing, 46; Reservation Blues, 45; Smoke Signals (Eyre), 45–46 Alfoldy, Sandra: Crafting Identity, 273 Alia, Valerie, 202 Allakariallak, in Nanook of the North, 108–9 Allen, Chadwick: global Indigenous literary studies, 25–26 Allen, Paula Gunn, 236, 245n3 alterNATIVES, 237 Amazon basin: Video in the Villages project, 8, 18, 37n9 American Indian Contemporary Arts: Indian Humor, 236 American Indian Film Festival, 45 American Indian Movement (AIM), 7 Anana (Mother) (Arnait Video Productions), 210–11 ancestors, connection to, 8, 75–76 Angilirq, Paul Apak, 22, 113, 203, 205 anti-colonial films, as Third Cinema, 15 Aotearoa/New Zealand. See New Zealand Aotearoa Television Network (ATN), 177, 178 The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 289, 290 A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors) (Gallois, Carelli), 8 Arnait Collective, 29 Arnait Video Productions, 29, 199–201; Anana (Mother), 210–11; digital media, 207; fundraising, 213; goal of, 201; Qulliq (Oil Lamp), 209–10; southern reception, 201; Before Tomorrow, 215; video production training, 213–14 Aroha Films, 178 art: artist as healer, 277; as bridge between cultures, 77, 80n14; vs. craft, 32–33, 273; and cultural authenti-

city, 28–29, 138; and racism, 279; and reclamation of cultural knowledge, 266–67 art films, 45 “ArtsAlterNative” (Barnes), 243–44 Aslaksdatter Skum, Elen, 165–66, 171n17 assimilation policies: and Indigenous population disappearance, 5–6, 36n5; in settler/invader countries, 4. See also under specific countries (Canada, Australia, etc.) Atanarjuat (Kunuk), 9, 22, 24, 113, 144–45; Camera d’Or prize, 204; as commercial success, 222; dual audiences of, 26, 159, 171n14; dualism of myth and history, 155; funding, 204; historical reconstruction, 114–15, 145, 147; Inuit survivance, 158–61; pacing, as alternate sense of time, 150; visual sovereignty, 161, 171n15 Attwood, Bain, 65 audience: assumptions of Indigenous life, 209, 211–12; awareness of Indigenous film, 9; broadcast innovations, 30; dual addressing of, 26–27, 159, 162, 171n14; education of non-Indigenous audiences, 76, 159; expectations of, 20, 26; induced guilt, 136; participation of in interactive media, 221; permission to laugh, 239; as political actors, 261–62; role of in cultural collaborations, 215–16; as spectators and witnesses, 241; types of, 27 Australia, 78n1; Aboriginal art, expectations of, 28–29; Aboriginal population growth, 5, 35–36n3; Aboriginal Tent Embassy, 7; assimilation policies, 36n5, 78–79n5, 78n3, 132, 133–34, 140; Bicentenary celebrations, 82–83,

INDEX

100n4; “black armband” view of Aboriginal relations, 67–68, 79n7; Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, 82; Bringing Them Home report, 83, 100n6; citizenship rights, 7, 36–37n8, 78–79n5, 100n4; commodification of Indigenous culture, 61–67; cultural genocide policies, 6, 23, 36n5, 78–79n5, 170–71n13; Desart Committee, 77, 80n14; Howard government, 23, 67–68, 79n6, 79n7, 83, 100n6, 133–34, 157, 191; Inter-Arts Council, 191–92; land issues, 70, 71; “Little Children Are Sacred” report, 23, 39n25, 133; Maralinga atomic bomb tests, 194; mythology of “sameness,” 133–34; neoconservative racist ideology, 68, 79n8; New Media Arts (NMA), 28–29, 189–97; New Media Arts Board, 191–92; Northern Territory Emergency Response Act, 23, 157–58; pedophilia allegations, 39n25, 133; politics of Aboriginal recognition, 156–57, 170–71n13; Redfern Riots, 133, 142n1; Rudd government apology, 100–101n7, 134, 192; as settler-nation, 81; Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), 84, 101n9; Stolen Generations, 78–79n5, 79n8, 83, 100–101n7, 100n6, 134, 156–57; terra nullius, and Mabo decision, 83, 100n5; voting rights, 7, 36–37n8; white history of, 65– 66, 78n5; Year of Mourning, 100n4 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 133 Australian Cinema after Mabo (Collins/Davis), 83 Australian films, 78n1; Australian Rules (Goldman), 72; Babakiueria (Featherstone), 72, 79n11, 132,

3 47

135; beDevil (Moffatt), 12, 81, 83, 136; Beneath Clouds (Sen), 13, 20, 63, 69–72, 77; Black Talk (Blair), 23, 24, 131–33, 138–40; Confessions of a Headhunter (Riley), 20, 63, 68, 77; Green Bush (Thornton), 136; Heaven (Moffatt), 81, 102n18; Jedda (Chauvel), 63; Mimi (Thornton), 136; Night Cries (Moffatt), 81, 84, 102n18, 136; Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce), 15, 36n5, 45; Samson and Delilah (Thornton), 13, 136; Yolngu Boy (Johnson), 72. See also The Djarn Djarns (Blair); Nice Coloured Girls (Moffatt); Ten Canoes (de Heer, Djigirr) Australian Rules (Goldman), 72 authenticity, issues of, 37n9, 55; art, and cultural practices, 28–29, 138; commodification of Indigenous culture, 61–67; and contemporary identity, 61–63, 138; in historical narrative, 20; igloo building, portrayals of, 160–61; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn), 115; racialized bodies of Indigenous peoples, 86–90; and selfrepresentation, 73; skin colour, 132, 140; of urban Aboriginal culture, 82; white representations of Aboriginal people, 66–67 Avingaq, Susan, 203, 213, 215 awards and nominations: Atanarjuat (Kunuk), 204; Black Talk (Blair), 138; Confessions of a Headhunter (Riley), 79n9; The Djarn Djarns (Blair), 78n1; Heater (Odette), 286; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk/Cohn), 103; Yellow Fella (Sen), 78n1 Baartman, Saartje (“Hottentot Venus”), 21, 86, 167

348

INDEX

Babakiueria (Featherstone), 72, 79n11, 132, 135 “Bad Grrrl Bravado” (Fusco), 85 Baker, Cassandra Malangarri, 151 Balintago, Kanakan, 19, 37n12; Busong, 14 Balzac, Honoré de: Indigenous characters as flâneurs, 290, 291 Bangarra Dance Theatre, 191 Bangsted, Helge, 105 Bank, Rosemarie, 52 Banks, Dennis, 7 Banning, Kass, 29; production values, Igloolik Isuma Productions, 208–9 Barclay, Barry, 16; on Fourth Cinema, 15, 38n20 Barking Water (Harjo), 13 Barnes, Herbie: “ArtsAlterNative,” 243–44 Barok Film: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn), 103 Baron, Cynthia: on work of Tracey Moffatt, 81–82, 84–85 Baudelaire, Charles, 289, 291 Bear, Jackie, 243 Bearwalker (Cheechoo), 12 Beckett, Jeremy, 72 beDevil (Moffatt), 12, 81, 83, 136 Bellfy, Philip, 240 Beneath Clouds (Sen), 13, 20, 77; as allegory, 71; as counterstory to colonial history, 63; identity, and belonging, 69–72 Benjamin, Walter, 291; The Arcades Project, 289, 290; flâneur as critical trope, 287–88; flâneur as social suspect, 288–89 Bennett, Tony: The Birth of the Museum, 217n4 Benning, Sadie, 9 Beresford, Bruce: Black Robe, 49 Berger, Sally, 202 Berkhofer, Robert: The White Man’s Indian, 236

Berlin International Film Festival: The Djarn Djarns (Blair), 78n1 Bhabha, Homi: Aboriginalism of colonizer/settler, 159–60 Birket-Smith, Kaj: Thule Expeditions, 105–6 The Birth of New Zealand (Reynolds), 306 Black, Taiarahia, 186 Blackmore, Ernie, 30, 61–80, 148; Aboriginalism of colonizer/settler, 159–60; Aboriginal “voice,” 20–21; cinema as contemporary form of storytelling, 64–65; counterstories, and colonial history, 63–65; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65 Blackout Collective, 193 Black performance, history of, 46 Black Robe (Beresford), 49 Black Talk (Blair), 23, 24, 131–33, 138–40; breathlessness, metaphor of, 139; Dendy Award, 138; viewer response to, 140 Blainey, Geoffrey, 79n7 Blair, Wayne, 69; narrative structure of, 132, 135, 139; self-representation, 23–24, 131–33; use of humour, 135–36 Blair, Wayne: works: Black Talk, 23, 24, 131–33, 138–40. See also The Djarn Djarns (Blair) blak talk, 21, 64–65, 78n3 Blu-ray technology, 10 Boas, Franz: cultural relativism, 106 Bogle, Donald, 46 Bollywood, 14 Bolton, Rena Point, 32, 265, 277, 279 Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Cooperative, 82 Borat, 246n7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 263n5 Bowling for Columbine (Moore), 9 Brand, Dionne, 101–2n16

INDEX

Brant, Beth, 26 Braveheart, Maria Yellow Horse: Historical Trauma, 10–11, 38n18, 156–57, 170–71n13 Brice, Pierre, 17 Broome, Richard: social relations and behaviour, codes of, 74–75 The Bronze Screen (De Los Santos, Racho, Dominguez), 44 Bruce, Lenny, 234 Bruckheimer, Jerry, 54 Buck-Morss, Susan, 285, 289–90, 297, 299 Buffalo 66, 46 Bunungurr, Bobby, 169n5 Burinyila, Jimmy, 169n5 Burnstick, Don, 241–42 The Business of Fancydancing (Alexie), 46 Busong (Balintago), 14 Butler, Judith: gender as performative entity, 259–61 Cache Collective, 199–217, 216–17n2; audience participation, 212, 214– 15; curatorial strategy of, 209–12, 215–16 Callahan, David, 310, 311 Campion, Jane: The Piano, 302, 309– 10, 312 Canada: Aboriginal activism, 7, 8; Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), 22, 113; Anik A satellite, 202; assimilation policies, 210, 273; CBC Northern Service, 112–13, 201–2; citizenship rights, 7, 36–37n8; colonialism, wilful forgetting of, 171n19; Department of Indian Affairs, 254; funding agencies, 203, 204; Gradual Civilization Act, 253–54; Indian Act, status issues, 249, 253–54, 272–73; Indigenous history, erasure of, 251–52; Indigenous population

349

growth, 5, 35–36n3; Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), 22–23, 112, 202–3; Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), 112; Inukshuk project, 112, 129n7; media development in Canadian Arctic, 112–14, 201–4; Nisga’a Treaty land dispute, 237, 245–46n6; Oka Crisis, 8; paternalistic approach of government, 5–6, 36n5, 272–73; residential schools, 6, 36n5, 210, 273; settler–First Nations relationship, 5–6; Southerners associations with the North, 211–12; Stephen Harper on colonialism, 171n19; Tarriaksuk Video Centre, 203–4; Telefilm Canada, 204; TeleVision Northern Canada, 112–13; UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Declaration of Aboriginal Rights), 280; voting rights, 7, 36–37n8. See also Arnait Video Productions; Igloolik Isuma Productions; National Film Board of Canada (NFB) Canada Council grants, 203 Canadian films: Dance Me Outside (McDonald), 19, 39n24; Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin), 8, 225; My Name Is Kahentiiosta (Obomsawin), 8, 225; Passchendaele (Gross), 19; Prince George Métis Elders project, 30, 221–32; Rocks at Whiskey Trench (Obomsawin), 8, 225; Rude (Virgo), 19; Spudwrench–Kahnawake Man (Obomsawin), 8, 225; Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (Obomsawin), 32, 248–49, 254; You Are on Indian Land (NFB), 6–7, 36n7, 227. See also Atanarjuat (Kunuk); Hands of History (Todd); Heater (Odette); It Starts with a Whisper (Niro); Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy

350

INDEX

Stew (Taylor); The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn) Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 273 Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 296 Canadian Museum of Civilization, 266, 279–80 Cannes Film Festival: Atanarjuat (Kunuk), 204; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk/Cohn), 103; Yellow Fella (Sen), 78n1 Cardinal, Tantoo, 47, 48, 49 Cardinal-Schubert, Joane, 32, 265; Dead River Scrolls, 277; The Lesson, 275–76 Carewe, Edwin, 6 Cariou, Warren, 5–6 Caro, Niki: Whale Rider, 15 Carpenter, Edmund: history as selective process, 63–64 Casey, Karen, 191 Cassidy, Barrie, 133 Catlin, George, 17 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 239; CBC Northern Service, 112–13, 201–2; The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, 240–41, 242–43, 245; funding, 204 The Celluloid Closet (Russo), 93 Central America: Indigenous filmmaking, 18, 37n12 Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Centre for Indigenous Advocacy): Video in the Villages project, 8, 18, 37n9 Certeau, Michel de, 285, 286, 289, 291 CGI technology, 35n1 Challenge for Change (CFC) project, 227, 228 Chang, David, 11 Chauvel, Charles: Jedda, 63 Cheechoo, Shirley: works: Bearwalker, 12; Johnny Tootall, 13

Cheu, Hoi F.: stories as agents of change, 269, 280; on women’s cinema, 266 child abuse. See sexual abuse Christianity, Inuit conversion to, 22, 23, 103, 104–5, 111, 123–26, 127, 130nn16–17 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 287 cinematic taxidermy, 111–12; of ethnographic films, 3–4, 22; Indigenous reappropriation of, 16 cinéma-vérité, 225 citizenship rights, 7, 36–37n8, 78– 79n5, 100n4 City Treaty (Francis), 292 Cixous, Hélène: on “writing woman,” 272 Clark, Helen, 178, 181, 187n4, 188n5 Clifford, Laurence, 139 Clutesi, George, 47 Cohn, Norman, 203; on collaborative nature of Igloolik Isuma Productions, 205; Igloolik Isuma Productions, 22, 113; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk/Cohn), 103– 30; Kingulliit Productions, 216n1; Kunuk Cohn Productions, 215 collaborations, limits of, 214–15 collaborative filmmaking: Arnait Collective, 29; Chris Eyre, 4; ethnographic participant observation, 107, 129n4; Igloolik Isuma Productions, 29, 204–8; of Inuit in Nanook of the North, 4, 6, 107, 262–63n3; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn), 103– 30; Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project, 222–23; Shelley Niro, 4; Ten Canoes (de Heer/Djigirr), 73–76, 80n13 collectivity, and visual culture theory, 200–201 Collins, Felicity: Australian Cinema after Mabo, 83

INDEX

colonialism: assimilation policies, 4, 5–6, 36n5; colonial ethnography, 22; counterstories to, 63–65; deconstruction of by self-representation, 77; erasure of Indigenous populations, 5–6, 88; and gender identity, 32; Historical Trauma, contemporary effects of, 10–13, 38n18, 156–57, 170–71n13; and interracial desire, 21–22; justifications for conquest, 86–87; land, legal ownership of, 70, 71; neo-paternalism of, 156–57; non-Indigenous representations, 20; vs. self-determination, 205; and sexuality, 101n12; storytelling strategies of colonial history, 132–33; stranger metaphor, 159, 168; talking back to, 31–32; violence against Indigenous people, 68; wilful forgetting of, 167, 171n19 colonial privilege, 132 colonization: as civilization, 312–13; and disregard for cultural law, 153–54; historical relationship to Indigenous experience, 13–14; impact on traditional cultures, 63; and Indigenous deculturation, 4, 36n5; and Indigenous identity, 25; as one-way cultural process, 271–72; as shared secret, 12; white culture as liberating agent, 66 Columpar, Christine: on Fourth Cinema, 15; Unsettling Sights, 16; on work of Tracey Moffatt, 81 comparative turn, in indigenous textual studies, 24–25 Confessions of a Headhunter (Riley), 20, 63, 68, 77, 79n9 Cooper, James Fenimore: Indigenous characters as flâneurs, 290–91 Corbière, Jeannette, 255 counterstories, and colonial history, 63–65

3 51

Cousineau, Marie-Hélène, 199, 203, 204; feminist ethnography, 213–14; Fuse magazine interview, 215; Before Tomorrow, 215; video production training, 212–13 Cowboys and Indians (Sinclair), 293 Crafting Identity (Alfoldy), 273 Crazy Horse, ethnographic re-enactment of, 50–52 Crimp, Douglas, 101–2n16 Crosbie, Tom, 148; on Flaherty’s portrayal of Inuit, 160; past as source of contemporary guidance, 154– 55; on work of Kunuk, 159 cultural genocide, 6, 36n5 cultural knowledge: exchange of, 112, 115–16, 118–19, 120–22; museum relationship with, 211–12, 217n4; past as source of contemporary guidance, 154–55; women as keepers of, 266–67 cultural politics of art vs. craft, 32–33, 266–67, 273 cultural reclamation, ethnographic sources of, 114–15, 145, 147, 148– 49, 170n10 cultural relativism, 106 cultural specificity, 226 Curtis, Edward, 17 Cvetkovich, Anne, 102n20 cyber-flânerie, 287 cyberTribe, 196–97 Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Nelson), 63 Dance Me Outside (McDonald), 19, 39n24 Dance to Miss Chief (Monkman), 17–18 Dandridge, Dorothy, 47 Dann, Lucy, 191 Davidson, Jason, 29, 193; “X-Ray” art style, 195

352

INDEX

Davis, Therese, 148; Australian Cinema after Mabo, 83; mythical past, and present, 146, 155–57, 169n7 Davy, John, 178 Daystar/Rosalie Jones, 266 Deacon, Destiny, 191 The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour (King, CBC), 240–41, 242–43, 245 Deadly Currents (Jacobovici), 225 Dead River Scrolls (Cardinal-Schubert), 277 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN), 133, 280 decolonization: cross-cultural comparisons, 24; humour, use of, 233– 34; role of storytelling in, 270; and visual sovereignty, 161, 171n15 Decolonizing the Lens of Power (Knopf), 16 deculturation, racializing effects of, 4 de Heer, Rolf, 149, 170n9; myth of Yolngu isolation, 155–56. See also Ten Canoes (de Heer, Djigirr) Deloria, Vine, 236 Del Rio, Dolores, 47 Derrida, Jacques: genre, and generic categorization, 134–35 Dickason, Olive: on government regulation of First Nations peoples, 5–6 Dickinson, Peter: Screening Gender, Framing Genre, 288, 291 digital divide, 228 digital film technology: in documentary filmmaking, 30; in filmmaking, 8, 35n1 digital media: distribution of, 201; DVD/Web-based structure, 221–22, 228–32; interactive technologies, use of, 222, 224, 229–30; maang (messagestick), 193–95; and New Media Arts, 189–90; in Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project, 222, 224

distribution issues, 14, 26, 45, 46; Web-based interactive media, 221–22 The Diviners (Laurence), 293 The Djarn Djarns (Blair), 20, 23–24, 78n1, 131–33, 136–38; commodification of Indigenous culture, 61–65; Crystal Bear (Berlin International Film Festival), 78n1; Dreamtime Centre, 61–62, 78n2, 137; reclamation of culture, 137; sexual abuse, and white patriarchal violence, 20, 61, 137, 138; use of humour, 137–38 Djigirr, Peter, 147–48, 170n9. See also Ten Canoes (de Heer, Djigirr) Djulibing, Frances, 151; on importance of heritage and ancestors, 75–76 documentary filmmaking: approaches to, 29–30; commercial success of, 9; vs. dramatic features, 9; of “media missionaries,” 274; silencing of Native people by outside filmmakers, 270; “Voice of God” narration, 31 documentary films: A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors) (Gallois, Carelli), 8; Bowling for Columbine (Moore), 9; The Bronze Screen (De Los Santos, Racho, Dominguez), 44; Deadly Currents (Jacobovici), 225; Forgotten Warriors (Todd), 270; A Good Day to Die (Salt, Mueller), 7; Hands of History (Todd), 32–33, 233, 265–81; From the Ikpeng Children to the World, 8; An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim), 9; Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin), 8, 225; Kasta Pâ Land (Forced Ashore) (Johansen), 171n18; The Learning Path (Todd), 270; March of the Penguins (Jacquet), 9; Nanook of

INDEX

the North (Flaherty), 3; No More Secrets (Todd), 270; Oaivveskaldjut (Give Us Our Skeletons) (Simma), 7, 166; Prince George Métis Elders project, 30; Qaggiq (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 209; Qulliq (Oil Lamp) (Arnait Video Productions), 209–10; Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew (Taylor), 31, 233, 238, 239–40, 241–45; Rocks at Whiskey Trench (Obomsawin), 8, 225; The Slanted Screen (Adachi), 44; Spudwrench–Kahnawake Man (Obomsawin), 8, 225; Trudell (Rae), 7; unsituated documentary, 226; Voice-Life (Todd), 270; Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (Obomsawin), 32; You Are on Indian Land (NFB), 6–7, 36n7, 227 Dodson, Michael, 77; white representations of Aboriginal people, 66–67 Donohoe, Sinead, 11 dot painting, 28 Doxtator, Deborah, 211 dramatic feature filmmaking, 9–10, 14–15 dramatic feature films: Dance Me Outside (McDonald), 19, 39n24; House Made of Dawn (Morse), 14; Like Water for Chocolate (Arau), 302; Once Were Warriors (Tamahori), 45; Passchendaele (Gross), 19; The Piano (Campion), 302, 309–10, 312; Samson and Delilah (Thornton), 13, 136; Skins (Eyre), 9, 11, 12; Smoke Signals (Eyre), 10, 13; Whale Rider (Caro), 15. See also Atanarjuat (Kunuk); beDevil (Moffatt); Beneath Clouds (Sen); Heater (Odette); Ofelas (Gaup); The Price of Milk (Sinclair); Ten Canoes (de Heer, Djigirr) Dreamkeeper Film Festival, 45

353

Dubois, Thomas: on Ofelas, 146–47, 161, 162–63 Duncan, Carol: Civilizing Rituals, 217n4 Durand, Yves Sioui: Mesnak, 12 DVD technology, 10, 222 Edison, Thomas, Sioux Ghost Dance, 11 education and training: access to, 9, 37n14, 44, 113, 213–14, 227, 228; mentorship, 44, 47, 53 Edwards, David, 71 El Grito de la Selva (The Cry of the Forest), 14 ethnography, and ethnographic films: as cinematic taxidermy, 3–4, 22; and cultural reclamation, 114–15, 145, 147, 148–49, 155–56, 170n10; documentary tropes of, 97; ethnographic participant observation, 107, 129n4; Indigenous reappropriation of, 16; “Native” as expert, 226–27; participatory action research (PAR), 227; and participatory research, 223–24; salvage ethnography, 107, 111–12; Sioux Ghost Dance (Edison), 11; sovereignty as act of self-representation, 254; talking back to, 248, 262– 63n3; Thule Expeditions, 22–23, 103, 104, 105–12; of vanishing cultures, 3–4, 35n2; zombie images, 4. See also Nanook of the North (Flaherty); self-ethnography; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn) Etter-Lewis, Gwendolyn, 251 Evans, Michael Robert, 29, 202; Fuse magazine authorship controversy, 205–6, 207–8 Evans, Mike, 30, 221–32; and Prince George Elders project, 223 experimental short films, 9 Eyde, Marianne, 37n12

354

INDEX

Eyre, Chris, 4, 245n4 Eyre, Chris: works: Skins, 9, 11, 12; Skinwalkers, 16; Smoke Signals, 10, 13, 45–46; A Thief of Time, 16 family, universal dynamics of, 76 Fanon, Frantz: culture, and colonization, 63 Faris, Wendy B., 304 Farmer, Gary, 47; comparison to Sampson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 34, 294–95, 300n6; in Heater, 33–34, 286, 287; political sensibilities of, 287, 299n1; in Powwow Highway, 287 Featherstone, Don: Babakiueria, 72, 79n11, 132, 135 female gaze, and sexual politics, 81, 100n2 “feminine-ism,” 271 Feminine Moments (website), 84 feminist ethnography, 213–14 feminist film theory, and work of Tracey Moffatt, 81–82 feminist objectivity, 251 feminist perspective: of racial and sexual “others,” 21–22; in work of Tracey Moffatt, 84, 86–87; “writing woman,” 272 feminist standpoint theory, 32 film festivals, 45; Cannes Film Festival, 78n1, 103; Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, 78n1; Planet IndigenUs, 194; screening of Indigenous films, 14, 26; Sydney International Film Festival, 138; Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), 103; Vancouver International Film Festival, 286; Vernacular Terrain 2, 194 filmic effects: black-and-white/colour film technique, 75, 149–50; cinéma-vérité, 225; documentary

technique, 210–11; doubled moments, 164; flashbacks, 137; Heater (Odette), 285–86; Indigenous languages, use of, 18, 74, 96, 146; light, and lighting, 128; mise en scène, 288; non-linear narrative, and interactivity, 225, 228; Ofelas (Veiviseren, Pathfinder), 164; power relations, and camera angles, 119, 120, 122, 126–27, 130n13, 152; retrospective storytelling, 116; reverse shot, 16–17, 18; shot/reverse shot, 17; of Wayne Blair, 139–40; in work of Todd, 274–79 filmmaking (Indigenous): access to technology, 8; commonality of humour, 135; cultural specificity of, 226; determination of genre, 135; documentary aesthetic of, 15; editing software, 8; education and training, access to, 9, 37n14, 44, 113, 213–14, 227, 228; as electronic storytelling, 122–23, 267–68; evolution of, 6–9; funding, 14, 44, 46; Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, 18–19, 39n23; Indigenous languages, use of, 18, 74, 96, 146; lack of dramatic features, factors in, 9–10; mentorship, 44, 47; of northern Europe, 18; politics as by-products of, 69; production facilities, access to, 14; promotion and distribution, 14, 45; reverse representations, 16; storytelling traditions, specificity of, 134 Fink, Hannah, 142 First Cinema, 15 First Nations peoples: art as “craft objects,” 273; art practices, 32–33; Curve Lake First Nation, 233; definitions of Indian status, 253–54; erasure of history, 251–52, 253;

INDEX

Gradual Civilization Act, 253–54; honour song, 274–75; Indian Act, 210, 249, 253–54, 272–73; life expectancy, 5; population growth, 5, 35–36n3; potlatch ban, 273, 277, 279; residential schools, 6, 36n5, 210, 273; seven generations concept, 268; Six Nations, 248, 251–52, 300n2; storytelling, and Trickster narratives, 31. See also Inuit people; Métis people; North American peoples Flaherty, Robert: comparison to Kunuk, 160–61, 205; on distortion, 4; Eskimo orientalism of, 160–61; ethnographic approach of, 107, 115, 129n4, 262–63n3; Inuit collaboration with, 4, 6. See also Nanook of the North (Flaherty) flâneur, and urban flânerie: as critical trope, 287–88; of Indigenous people, 290–91, 300n2; reprivatization of social space, 297–98; social and political history of, 289–91; as social suspect, 33–34, 286, 288–89, 294, 297–98, 299 Flavell, Te Ururoa, 183 Fogo Process, 227 Foley, Doug, 287 Forgotten Warriors (Todd), 270 Foster, Stephen, 30, 221–32; and Prince George Elders project, 223 Foucault, Michel, 209; power, and agency of resistance, 90; reverse discourse, concept of, 91 Fourth Cinema, as taxonomic category, 15–16, 38n20 Fox, Derek Tini, 27, 176, 178 Francis, Marvin: City Treaty, 292 Franklin, Richard: Samson and Delilah, 13 Fraser, Jenny, 19, 28–29, 30; artistic practice of, 195–97; cyberTribe,

355

196–97; Hand in Hand exhibition, 84; Indian Cowboys/Cowboy Indians, 195–96; on New Media Arts, 189–97 Fraser, Malcolm, 157 Freuchen, Peter, 114, 115; Thule Expeditions, 104, 105–6 funding: Canada Council grants, 203; of Indigenous films, 14, 44, 46, 204 Fusco, Coco: “Bad Grrrl Bravado,” 85 Fuse magazine, 29, 215; authorship controversy, 204–7 Gandhi, Mahatma, 181, 182 Gaski, Harald, 161 Gaten, Moira: political corpus as masculine entity, 260–61 Gaup, Mikkel, 144 Gaup, Nils: Alta-Kautokeino dam protest, 166; filmic effects, 164; interpretation of oral narrative, 162; The Kautokeino Rebellion (Guovdageainnu Stuimmit), 165–67, 168; political agenda of, 165–67, 168. See also Ofelas (Veiviseren, Pathfinder) (Gaup) gaze: anti-colonial gaze, 114–15; critical gaze of subordinates, 90, 101–2n16; female gaze, 81, 100n2; oppositional gaze, 101–2n16 gender, constructed nature of, 81, 99n1 gender performativity, of female portrayals, 259–61 gender relations: and colonialism, 32; crafts as female, 32; Dance to Miss Chief (Monkman), 17–18; as explanatory trope, 86–87; female sexuality, 81; gender transgression, 96; and interracial desire, 21–22; racialization, and sexualization, 21–22, 84, 86–90, 101n12; and sexuality, 39n22; and sexual politics, 81, 100n2

356

INDEX

George, Chief Dan, 47–48 Getino, Octavio, 38n19 Ginsburg, Faye: “Blak Screens and Cultural Citizenship,” 83; selfrepresentation, shift towards, 6–7 Gittings, Christopher: deconstruction of racism, 287–88 Goldberg, Jonathan: gender as explanatory trope, 86–87, 101n13 Goldman, Paul: Australian Rules, 72 A Good Day to Die (Salt, Mueller), 7 Grayden, William, 194 Grayson, Richard, 99 Greene, Graeme, 47 Green Grass, Running Water (King), 240, 292 Greyeyes, Michael, 18, 19, 41–57, 299n1; buffalo hunt experience, 51–52; on CSI: Miami, 53–54; deconstruction of Indian image, 48–49, 53; ethnographic reenactment of Crazy Horse, 50–52; on filmmaking, 44–47; on “hidden transcripts,” 46, 56; on mentors, 44, 47, 53; modern stereotypes, 53–54; non-Native actors in Native roles, 55 Grieves, Genevieve, 191 Grieves, Vicki, 79n8 Gronau, Anna, 32; It Starts with a Whisper (Niro), 248, 262n1 Gross, Paul: Passchendaele, 19 Groves, Aroha, 191 Groves, Denise, 77 Gudthaykudthay, Philip, 147–48 Gulpilil, David, 146, 149, 154–55; Ten Canoes (de Heer/Djigirr), 73–76, 80n13 Gulpilil, Jamie, 145, 151 habitus, and construction of meaning, 249–50, 251, 263n4, 263n5 Hætta, Aslak, 166, 167

Haggie, Sonya, 186 Hall, Dannielle, 70 Hamby, Louise: on Ten Canoes, 148, 169n5, 169n7, 170n11 Hands of History (Todd), 233, 265–81; art, and reclamation of cultural knowledge, 266–67; autonomy, and cultural specificity, 273; cultural politics, 32–33; feminine-ism, 271; film proposal to NFB, 275; as political storytelling, 266–68; women as keepers of cultural knowledge, 266–67 Hansen, Leo, 105 Haraway, Donna: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 225; situated knowledges, 30, 32, 250–51 Harding, Sandra, 32 Harjo, Sterlin: Barking Water, 13 Harper, Elijah, 252, 257, 263–64n9 Harper, John Joseph, 293, 300n4, 300n5 Hartley, John, 184 Hayakawa, Sessue, 47 Hayes, Michael, 88 healing: power of humour, 31, 233–34, 236, 239, 241, 244; and trauma theory, 11–12 Heater (Odette): comparison to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 34, 294–95, 298, 300n6; displacement of space through race, 289; flâneur as social suspect, 33–34, 286, 297–98, 299; locations, historical significance of, 296, 297–98; marketing tag for, 286–87; opening frame, 285–86, 298–99; as quest narrative, 286; racialized view of local geography, 292–93, 300n3; recipe for “Instant Indian,” 296–97, 298; soundscape, 286, 298; status, institutional documentation of, 293–94; tobacco, as

INDEX

traditional gift, 296; “white camera eye,” awareness of, 295; Winnipeg, urbanized space of Indigenous history, 292, 300n3 Heaven (Moffatt), 81, 102n18 Henderson, Ian, 148, 150, 153, 169n5 Herman, Jimmy, 47 Hermanus, Oliver: Shirley Adams, 12 Highway, Tomson, 234, 236; Kiss of the Fur Queen, 11–12 Hill, Richard, 272–73 Hillerman, Tony, 16 Historical Trauma: contemporary effects of, 10–13, 38n18, 156–57, 170–71n13; in work of Tracey Moffatt, 85–86, 101n11 history: authenticity of historical narratives, 20; counterstories, and colonial history, 63–65; dualism with myth, 155, 170n11; invisibility of subaltern history, 65–66, 77; mythical past, and present, 146, 155–57, 169n7; as selective process, 63–64; self-representation, and historical accuracy, 68–69 Hodge, Ben, 65 Hollywood, 52; buddy movie, 33–34, 286–87; casting process, 54–55; dramatic feature film releases, 14, 46; as First Cinema, 15; as incitement to response, 10; modern stereotypes, 53–54, 296–97, 300n6; revisionist Western era, 48–49; road movie genre, 33–34, 286–87; role of “Indians” in, 4, 6, 19, 50–52; shift towards self-representation, 6, 48–49, 53 Holocaust, 10 homelessness: of flâneur, and urban flânerie, 289–90; in urban environment, 34, 157, 286, 287 home screening technologies, 10 homosexuality. See sexuality

357

Honarpisheh, Farbod, 6 Honey Moccasin (Niro), 263n4 hooks, bell, 269; agency, and resistance, 90; memory as site of remembering, 255; oppositional gaze, 101–2n16; subjecthood, 247; talking back, 247, 262 Horomia, Parekura, 182; Māori Television Service Bill, 177–78 Horse, Michael, 47, 53 “Hottentot Venus,” 21, 86, 167 Houle, Robert, 271 House Made of Dawn (Morse), 14 How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride (Méliès), 306 Huhndorf, Shari: continuity of past and present, 158, 161 humour, 31; in Aboriginal self-expression, 132; aspects of, 236; as bridge between cultures, 241–42; definitions of, 241–45; in dual addressing of audiences, 27; of Elders, and elderly women, 243; healing power of, 233–34, 236, 239, 241, 244; limits of, 243; and magic realism, 35; as means of dealing with life, 236; and mockery, 23–24, 132, 135–36; perception of, 237–38; and political correctness, 236–38, 245n2; racist/sexist jokes, 238; selfdirected, 238–39; and self-mockery, 241–42; survival humour, 238, 244–45, 246n7; Ten Canoes (de Heer/Djigirr), 74; trickster role, 238–39, 278–79; in work of Wayne Blair, 135–36 Hunter, Boyd, 170–71n13 Hutcheon, Linda: double-talking, 160 ICAN (Indonesian Contemporary Art Network), 196 identity: adaptability, and the colonial experience, 25; ambiguous spaces

358

INDEX

of, 85; Australian constructions of Aboriginality, 72–73, 77, 79n10; connection to cultural traditions, 75; and cultural knowledge, 266–67; and decolonization, 270; institutional documentation of, 293–94; link to community, 255; mixed identities, 234–35, 242; reclamation of through storytelling, 64–65; and self-representation, 69–72, 141–42; “speakin’ out blak” as form of resistance, 64–65, 78n3 Igloliorte, Heather, 201; audience, and reception literature, 206–7 Igloolik Isuma Productions, 130n19, 216n1; Cache Collective exhibit, 199–201, 209–16; collaborative filmmaking of, 29; digital media, 207; dual addressing of audiences, 26–27; economic benefits to community, 204; electronic storytelling, 122–23; founding of, 113, 130n10, 203, 205–6, 217n3; Fuse magazine authorship controversy, 204–7; mandate of, 113–14, 201; media development in Canadian Arctic, 201–4; “Nunaqpa,” 205; Nunavut: Our Land (television series), 113, 158, 210; production values, 208–9; Qaggiq, 209; Qarmaq (Stone House), 209–10; southern reception, 201; Tarriaksuk Video Centre, 203–4. See also Atanarjuat (Kunuk); The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn) Ihimaera, Witi: comparative turn, in indigenous textual studies, 24–25; Whale Rider, 15, 45 From the Ikpeng Children to the World, 8 I Made a Camera (Moffatt), 92 An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim), 9 indexical relationship: of racialized bodies, in scientific imagery, 86–

90; to truth, 3–4, 35n1 Indian Film Unit (NFB), 30; creation of, 7; You Are on Indian Land, 7, 36nn6–7 Indigenous cinema, as Fourth Cinema, 15–16, 38n20 Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, 18–19, 39n23 Indigenous peoples, 37n10; cinemagoing experience, access to, 10; as ethnographic subjects, 3–4, 5; image of as site of contest, 44 Indigenous television. See television Indonesian Contemporary Art Network (ICAN), 196 intercultural communication, 12 International Digital Art Projects, 194 Internet, 30; democratization of mass media, 201; streaming video, 8, 9; Web-based interactive approaches, 221–22; YouTube, 221 Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), 22–23, 112, 202–3; funding, 203; relationship to Igloolik Isuma Productions, 205, 217n3; Walrus Hunter, 203 Inuit people: cinematic realization of history, 115–28; collaboration in Nanook of the North, 4, 6, 107, 262–63n3; conversion to Christianity, 22, 23, 103, 104–5, 111, 123–26, 127, 130nn16–17; cultural hybridity, 208–9; dog teams, skill with, 109–10; government resettlement, 210; history of contact, 147; and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), 108; hybridity, 29; impact of media on cultural traditions, 112–13, 122–23, 202; language, 106–7, 202–3, 210; oral traditions, 114–15, 120–22, 130n14; place names, 110, 129n6; population

INDEX

growth, 5, 35–36n3; radio as communications tool, 213; residential schools, 210; spirituality, 22, 104, 120–21, 123, 126–27, 130n17, 145, 159; survivance of, 158–61; syllabic writing, 106–7, 116, 130n12; taboo system, 104, 107, 116, 121, 123–24, 161; TeleVision Northern Canada, 112–13; traditional culture of, 106, 123–24, 130n15 Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), 112 Inukshuk project, 112, 129n7 Isuma Distribution International, 216n1 Isuma Productions. See Igloolik Isuma Productions Isuma.tv, 8, 216n1 It Starts with a Whisper (Niro), 32, 248, 249, 262n1; dream sequences, 256–57; First Nations identity, image of, 257; gender performativity, 259–61; Six Nations history, 252, 263–64n7; survival as occupation of multiple habitus, 259; visual sovereignty, 254, 257–58, 264n10; walking sequence, 258–59 Ivalu, Julie, 203 Ivalu, Madeline, 203, 213; Before Tomorrow, 215 Jackson, Lisa: Savage, 4 Jackson, Michael: Thriller, 4 Jackson, Peter: Lord of the Rings, 147 Jacobovici, Simcha: Deadly Currents, 225 Jedda (Chauvel), 63 Jensen, Doreen, 32, 265, 266–67, 277–78, 279–80 Johansen, Harry: Forced Ashore (Kasta Pâ Land), 171n18 Johnson, Stephen: Yolngu Boy, 72 Jones, Daystar/Rosalie, 266 Jones, Jonathan, 82

359

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn), 22–23; archival photographs, use of, 127; audience, 104; Camera d’Or prize, 103; cultural knowledge, exchange of, 112, 115–16, 118–19, 120–22; European culture as “other,” 129; horizontal filmmaking approach, 113–14; Inuit perspective of first contact, 117–19; light, and lighting, 128; pacing, 128; post-colonial approach, 114; power relations, and camera angles, 119, 120, 126–27, 128, 130n13; production budget, 113; retrospective storytelling, 116; script research, use of oral tradition in, 114–15, 128; sound motif, 119, 124, 125, 126–27; sources for, 104, 106, 128–29; synopsis, 104–5; Tivaajut ceremony, 123, 130n16 Kahnawake, land ownership issues, 253, 264n10 Kahnesatake, land ownership issues, 253, 264n10 Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin), 8, 225 Kalafatic, Carol, 270; First Nations filmmakers as storytellers, 267–68 Kanamori, Mayu, 191 Kane, Margo, 47 Kaplan, E. Ann, 77 Kasta Pâ Land (Forced Ashore) (Johansen), 171n18 The Kautokeino Rebellion (Guovdageainnu Stuimmit) (Gaup), 168 Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore, 238 Kelly, Don, 241, 242 Kermit the Frog, 234–35 Khoi San people, 13–14 Kihara, Shigeyuki: Hand in Hand exhibition, 84 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 181, 182

360

INDEX

King, Thomas, 234, 236; The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, 240–41, 242–43, 245; on defining Indigenous humour, 238; Green Grass, Running Water, 240, 292; The Truth about Stories, 268 Kingulliit Productions, 216n1 Kiss of the Fur Queen (Highway), 11–12 Knabe, Susan, 3–40, 81–102 Knopf, Kerstin: Decolonizing the Lens of Power, 16; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, 22–23, 103–30 knowledge systems: alternative knowledges, 64; past as source of contemporary guidance, 154–55; situated knowledges, 30, 31 Komi people, 18 Koopu Wairangi, “Wai’s Word,” 180 Krupat, Arnold, 15, 38n20; on dual addressing of audiences, 26–27 Kunuk, Mary, 203 Kunuk, Vivi, 210 Kunuk, Zacharias, 38n20; comparison to Flaherty, 160–61, 205; on death of oral history, 143; on education, and technology, 3, 14; on electronic storytelling, 122–23; on funding, 204; Igloolik Isuma Productions, 22, 26, 29, 113; introduction to videomaking, 202–3; Inuit audience, 104; on The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, 114–15; Kingulliit Productions, 216n1; Kunuk Cohn Productions, 215; on lack of theatres in Nunavut, 10; storytelling as oral history, 146. See also Atanarjuat (Kunuk); The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn) Kunuk Cohn Productions, 215 Kvens people, 18 Lacroix, Denis, 47, 49 land, and landscape: belonging, and

sense of location, 70, 71, 167; colonial seizure of, 157; connection to spirituality, 277; Kahnawake, 253, 264n10; Kahnesatake, 253, 264n10; land as “mother,” 74; locations, historical significance of, 296, 297–98; in Māori culture, 307–8; Nisga’a Treaty land dispute, 237, 245–46n6; and race relations, 312–13; role of in cultural identity, 152–53; of Six Nations history, 252. See also land ownership issues under specific peoples and countries Langton, Marcia, 21; Aboriginality as field of intersubjectivity, 72, 73, 77 language: and connections to place, 29; as decolonizing strategy, 28, 39n28; Inuktitut, 106–7, 202–3; loss of in residential school system, 210; Māori Television channel, 180; role of in cultural contact, 118–19; “speakin’ out blak” as form of resistance, 64–65, 78n3; subtitles, and Indigenous language, 18, 74, 97, 146, 171n14 Laurence, Margaret: The Diviners, 293 Lawrence, Bonita, 270 The Learning Path (Todd), 270 Le confessional (Lepage), 13 Lepage, Robert: Le confessional, 13 lesbianism, medicalization of, 88–90, 91 lesbian perspective, in work of Tracey Moffatt, 84, 86–87, 91 The Lesson (Cardinal-Schubert), 275–76 Lewis, Robert, 73 L’Hirondelle Waynohtêw, Cheryl, 271 Life of Pi, 46 Like Water for Chocolate (Arau), 302 Lindt, J.W., studio portraits, 88, 89 Lischke, Ute, 31, 233–46 Little Big Man, 48

INDEX

“Little Children Are Sacred” report (Australia), 23, 39n25, 133 Lord of the Rings (Jackson), 147 Low, Colin: “vertical film” structure, 229 Luhrmann, Baz, 69 Lyon, George, 110, 114 Macario (Gavaldón), 302 MacDonald, Tanis, 33–34, 285–300 magic realism: alternate versions of historical events, 307; Like Water for Chocolate (Arau), 302; Macario (Gavaldón), 302; normality of fantastic events, 304–5; in The Price of Milk (Sinclair), 34–35, 301, 302; subversiveness of, 304; The Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica), 302 Making the White Man’s Indian (Aleiss), 236–37 Mako, 47 Maktar, Martha, 203, 213 Mandela, Nelson, 181, 182 Māori Elders Council, 180 Māori films, 306, 307; Whale Rider (Caro), 15, 181 Māori people, 176; appropriation of legends in Pākehā films, 306; dual identity of, 184–85; iwi identity, 28; land, role of in Māori culture, 307–8; land ownership issues, 34–35, 176, 182, 188n7, 301–2, 303–4, 306–7; language, protection of in media, 177; non-violent protests by, 181–82, 306; stereotypes, 308–9, 310; Te Mangai Paho funding agency, 177; Treaty of Waitangi, 27, 175–77, 179, 187n2, 188n5, 306, 309. See also The Price of Milk (Sinclair) Māori Television: advertisements for, 181–82; Anzac Day programming, 180, 181, 188n6; and Aroha Films,

361

178; Ask Your Auntie, 185, 188n9; bilingual/bicultural programming, 28, 179–81, 186–87; channel tagline, 27–28, 180, 183; Code sporting program, 180; core audience, 180; counter-narratives of nationhood, 181–86; cultural advisory support, 179; cultural differences as demographic difference, 183; emergence of, 175–79; English language program, 180; as form of social agency, 179; mandate of, 179–80; Māori Television Service Bill, 177–78; media representation, 176; monthly viewership, 178; nation building agenda, 182–84; Native Affairs current affairs program, 180; political reception of, 177–78; programming challenges, 186–87; public broadcasting system as present-day resource, 27–28; ratings, 180, 188n6; and settler-centric media producers, 179; as tool of decolonization, 183–84; Treaty rights to representation, 179 Maracle, Lee, 278, 280; nature of Native storytelling, 268–69 March of the Penguins (Jacquet), 9 marginalization: talking back against, 247; of women, 253–56 Marks, Laura, 29; Fuse magazine authorship controversy, 204–7 Marrugeku Company, 29, 191; “Burning Daylight,” 193, 194 Masayesva, Victor, Jr., 7 Maskegon-Ishwew, Ahisiw, 271 Mather, Jim, 180 Mathiassen, Therkel, 114, 115; Thule Expeditions, 104, 105–6, 110 May, Karl, 17 McCall, Sophie, 159 McDonald, Bruce: Dance Me Outside, 19, 39n24

362

INDEX

McGloin, Colleen, 131–42; Aboriginal self-expression, 23–24 McKenzie, Catriona, 69 meaning, construction of, 249–50, 263n4 media: digital technologies, 30; forms of, 37–38n15; role of in Aboriginal activism, 7–8 mental health issues, 34; delusions of persecution, 295; of urban homeless, 286, 294, 300n6 mentorship, 44, 47, 53 Mesnak (Durand), 12 Messac, Régis, 290–91 Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, 78n1 Métis people: Lac Ste. Anne pilgramage, 224; as “les bois-brulés,” 293; population growth, 5, 35–36n3. See also Prince George Métis Elders project Miller, Susan A.: decolonization as process, 143, 148; Indigenousness, definition of, 155 Milroy, David, 69; catch up cultural production, 65 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 266; Naked Spaces, 224 Minygululu, Peter, 145 Mita, Merata: representation of Pākehā characters, 311 Mitchell, Mike, 7, 227 mockery: and humour, 23–24, 132, 135–36; in work of Wayne Blair, 135–36 Moffatt, Tracey, 32, 97; as artist, 83–84, 101n8; Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, 82; colonial traumas, reworking of, 85–86, 101n11; critical studies of, 81–82, 84–86; gender and sexuality in work of, 84, 86–87, 94–99; Launch of the First Fleet protest, 82–83, 100n4;

as member of Stolen Generations, 84; painted sets, 94, 102n18; racial and sexual archetypes of, 93–94, 102n17; reappropriation of ethnographic gaze, 91–92; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65; resistance to being categorized, 84–86; and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), 84, 101n9 Moffatt, Tracey: works: Backyard Series, 92; beDevil, 12, 81, 83, 136; Heaven, 81; Heaven (Moffatt), 102n18; I Made a Camera, 92; Nice Coloured Girls, 21–22, 81, 82, 92, 97–99, 136; Night Cries, 81, 84, 102n18, 136; Scarred for Life, 21, 82, 92, 94–96, 102n19; Scarred for Life II, 21, 82, 92, 94–96, 102n19; Something More, 21, 81, 82, 92–94; “Wizard of Oz, 1956,” 95–96, 102n19 Monkman, Kent: Dance to Miss Chief, 17–18 Moore, Michael: Bowling for Columbine, 9 Morgan, Tukuroirangi, 177 Morton, Erin, 29, 199–217 multi-monitor video installation, 230–31 Museum of Modern Art, 9, 269 museums, relationship with cultural knowledge, 211–12, 217n4 music videos: Dance to Miss Chief (Monkman), 17–18; Thriller (Jackson), 4 The Mutiny of the Bounty (Longford), 306 My Name Is Kahentiiosta (Obomsawin), 8, 225 My Paris (Scott), 287 mythical past, and present, 155–57 Naked Spaces (Minh-ha), 224 Nancy, Jean Luc, 214–15

INDEX

Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 38n20, 151; collaboration in, 4, 6, 107, 129n4; ethnocentric biases, 262–63n3; as point of origin, 3; starvation, 108–9 National Film Board of Canada (NFB): Aboriginal Filmmaking Program, 9, 37n14; Challenge for Change (CFC) project, 227, 228; cinéma-vérité, 225; digital film technology, 30; Hands of History (Todd), 233, 265, 272; Indian Film Unit, 7, 30, 36n6; Indian Film Unit (NFB), 227; mandate of, 233; Obomsawin as consultant, 248, 253; Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew (Taylor), 233; Studio B, 225; Studio D, 36n7, 37n14, 265; Studio One, 9, 37n14; You Are on Indian Land, 6–7, 36n7 National Gallery of Canada: “Land, Spirit, Power” exhibit, 205 national identity: and Aboriginal reconciliation, 71; politics of, 70 Native Features (Wood), 9 Native reality, of subaltern Other as “outside history,” 13 Native subjectivity, 45, 49 Navajo Film Themselves (Worth, Adair), 226–27 Nelson, Hilde Lindemann: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, 63 Nenet people, 18 Neville, A.O., 36n5 New Media Arts (NMA), 19, 28–29; artists and groups, 191, 193–95; and blak culture, 189–90; contrast to European fine art tradition, 190; dissemination of Aboriginal messages, 191; interdisciplinary basis of, 193; stylistic inspirations, 190–91; Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

363

Award, 192–93; and traditional art forms, 189–90 New Zealand: Aboriginal activism, 7; Anzac Day, 180, 181, 188n6; Aotearoa Television Network (ATN), 177, 178; appropriation of Māori legends in Pākehā films, 306; assimilation of Māori, 306; citizenship rights, 7, 36–37n8; Clark government, 178, 181, 187n4, 188n5; decolonization of the mind, 184; discourse of Māori mismanagement, 177, 178; dramatic feature film releases, 14; Foreshore and Seabed Act, 182, 187, 187n4, 188n7; land ownership issues, 34–35, 176, 182, 188n7, 301–2, 303–4, 306–7; Māori culture in global marketing, 176, 181; Māori Television Service Bill, 177–78; media deregulation, 177; race relations, 301–2; Radio New Zealand, 177; Television New Zealand, 177, 188n6; Treaty of Waitangi, 27, 175–77, 179, 187n2, 306, 309; voting rights, 7, 36–37n8; Waitangi Tribunal, 182, 188n7. See also Māori films; Māori Television Ngati (Barclay), 307 Nice Coloured Girls (Moffatt), 21–22, 81, 82, 92; Aboriginal women as landscape, 97–99 Nichols, Doug, 194 Night Cries (Moffatt), 81, 84, 102n18 Niro, Shelley, 18, 31–32; collaborative filmmaking, 4; on erasure of Six Nations history, 251–52; film as corporeal identity, 256; talking back against marginalization, 247 Niro, Shelley: works: Honey Moccasin, 263n4; It Starts with a Whisper, 32, 248, 249, 262n1; Overweight with Crooked Teeth, 263n4

364

INDEX

Nisga’a Treaty land dispute, 237, 245–46n6 Nispel, Marcus, 37n11 Nixon, Nicholas, 101–2n16 Nollet, Diane, 255 Nollywood, 14 No More Secrets (Todd), 270 North American peoples: Abenaki, 18, 225, 247; Anishinaabe, 241; Blood, 32, 265; Cheyenne-Arapaho, 16; Chickasaw, 6; Chippewa, 236; Cree, 17, 241, 271; Cree-Métis, 265; Gitksan, 32, 265, 267; Haida, 267; HoChunk, 6; Hopi, 7; Mikisew Cree, 32, 265; Mohawk, 6, 18, 26, 247; Pembina Chippewa, 266; Plains Cree, 18, 19; Saulteaux-Ojibwa, 271; Stol:o, 32, 265; Winnebago, 6. See also First Nations peoples Norway: dramatic feature film releases, 14; Sámi protest of AltaKautokeino dam, 7 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 10, 37–38n15 Noyce, Phillip: Rabbit Proof Fence, 15, 36n5, 45 “Nunaqpa” (Kunuk), 205 Nunavut: Our Land (television series), 113, 210 Oaivveskaldjut (Give Us Our Skeletons) (Norway), 7, 166 objectivity, and subjectivity, 225–26 Obomsawin, Alanis, 18, 31–32; erasure of First Nations history, 253– 54; film as bearing witness, 253; gender, and racialized discourse, 260–61; with National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 248, 253; as singer/storyteller, 248; talking back against marginalization, 247 Obomsawin, Alanis: works: Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance, 8, 225; My Name Is Kahentiiosta, 8,

225; Rocks at Whiskey Trench, 8, 225; Spudwrench–Kahnawake Man, 8, 225; Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises, 32, 248–49, 254 Odette, Terrance: awards and nominations, 286; filmic effects, 285–86, 288, 298–99; film pacing, 287; flâneur as social suspect, 33–34, 286. See also Heater (Odette) Odjig, Daphne, 248 Ofelas (Veiviseren, Pathfinder) (Gaup), 9, 24, 37n11, 143–44; doubled moments, 164; dual audiences of, 162; dualism of myth and history, 155; folktale versions, 146–47; leitmotifs, 162; political agenda of, 165; revival of Sámi culture, 161–62; stranger metaphor, 168 Oliver, Leona, 133 Once Were Warriors (Tamahori), 12, 45, 302 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 34; comparison to Heater (Odette), 294–95, 298, 300n6 oral narrative traditions: centrality of, 277; inclusion and connectivity of, 251; Inuit views of life, 114–15, 120–22, 130n14; as oral histories, 146, 169n6; recuperative power of, 255; relationship to Indigenous law, 150, 151; story versions, 146–47 O’Regan, Tom, 85, 92 Orientalism, 63, 65–66, 78n4, 87, 101n13, 159–60 Orlando (Potter), 271–72 Osborne, Helen Betty, 11, 275–76 otherness: ahistoricization of Indigenous peoples, 288; of European culture, 129; gender, and racialized discourse, 260–61; genre as sociohistorical category, 134–35; of

INDEX

Indigenous peoples, 66, 167; Native reality as “outside history,” 13; racialized polarities of, 82 Ouimette, Stephen: in Heater, 34, 285 Overweight with Crooked Teeth (Niro), 263n4 Page, Russell, 139 Page-Lochard, Hunter, 137 Palawan people, 14 Papua New Guinea, 14 Papunya Tula artists, dot painting, 28 Parr, Larry, 180, 186 Parry, William Edward, 110, 114, 129n6 participatory action research (PAR), 227–28 Passchendaele (Gross), 19 paternalism, of government policies, 5–6, 36n5, 272–73 Pathfinder. See Ofelas (Veiviseren, Pathfinder) (Gaup) Patu (Mita), 307 Pearson, Wendy Gay, 3–40, 143–71; cross-cultural comparisons of decolonization, 24 pedophilia, 39n25, 133 performativity: Squaw/Princess dichotomy of portrayal, 259–60 Perkins, Rachel, 83; Radiance, 13; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65 Peyer, Bernd, 236 Philippines, 14; Indigenous filmmaking, 19, 37n12 photographic studies: historical scientific imagery, 86–90, 101n14, 101n15; of J.W. Lindt, 88, 89; as restoration of familial continuity, 90–91 photoseries: Backyard Series (Moffatt), 92; I Made a Camera (Moffatt), 92; Scarred for Life (Moffatt), 82,

365

94–96, 102n19; Scarred for Life II (Moffatt), 21, 82, 94–96, 102n19; Something More (Moffatt), 21, 81, 92–94; Untitled Film Stills (Sherman), 99n1 The Piano (Campion), 302; cinematic Māori stereotypes, 309–10, 312 Pictures (Black), 302 Pijoan, Teresa, 258–59 Pilkington, Doris: Rabbit Proof Fence, 15 Pirie, Maeghan, 31–32, 247–64; research method, 250–51 Pitt, Damian, 70 Planet IndigenUs festival, 194 Poignant, Roslyn: “The Photographic Witness,” 88 Poitier, Sidney, 47 Poitras, Jane Ash, 32, 265, 277, 279 political correctness, and humour, 236–38, 245n2 Porter, Joy, 236 positionality between Indigeneity and camera, 19 Potter, Sally: Orlando, 271–72 poverty, 9, 37n13 power relations: and agency, 90; authenticity of racialized bodies, 86– 90; of colonialism, 66, 71–72; and colonial violence, 137; and induced guilt, 136; participatory research, 223–24; in use of camera angles, 119, 120, 122, 126–27, 130n13, 152 Powwow Highway, 287 The Price of Milk (Sinclair): anti-narrative energy, 303; land ownership issues, 303–4, 312–13; as magic realism, 34–35, 301, 302, 304–5, 307; reversal of stereotyping, 308– 9; stereotypes, and race relations, 301, 302–3; transposition of sociocultural roles, 302, 303–4 Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project, 232n1; as artist/

366

INDEX

social scientist collaboration, 222–23; cinematic approach, 225; division of labour, 223; DVD/Webbased structure, 228–32; interactive technologies, use of, 222, 224, 229–30; multi-monitor video installation, 230–31; narrative fragmentation, 230–32; participatory research relationship, 223–24; slide shows, 229; “vertical film” structure, 229 Prince George Métis Elders project, 30, 221–32 Prince George Métis Elders Society, 222 promotion and distribution, 14, 26, 45, 46 Qaggiq (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 209 Qarmaq (Stone House) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 209–10 Quechua people, 13–14 queer perspective: queer childhood trauma, 94–96, 102n19; racialized bodies, historical scientific imagery of, 86–90; in work of Tracey Moffatt, 84, 86–87 Qulitalik, Pauloosie, 203, 205; Igloolik Isuma Productions, 22, 113 Qulliq (Oil Lamp) (Arnait Video Productions), 209–10 Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce), 15, 36n5, 45 Rabbit Proof Fence (Pilkington, book), 15 racialization: racial stereotyping, satirization of, 79n11; and sexualization, 21–22, 84, 86–90, 101n12 racism, and colonial attitudes: among Native people, 235, 242, 246n9; and attitudes toward art, 279; as counterpoint to quest narrative, 288; and decolonization, 35, 63; in

Heater, 34; and humour, 238, 241, 242, 246n9; relationship to identity, 233; scientific racism, 86–90, 101n14, 101n15; in urban environment, 286–87, 288 Radiance (Perkins), 13 Raheja, Michelle: on collaboration, 4; Indigenous aesthetics, 16; invisible “Indians,” 38n20; Native heritage vs. “real” history, 13; Reservation Reelism, 4, 6; stranger metaphor, 159; visual sovereignty, 161, 167, 168, 171n15, 264n10 Rain, Edna, 240 Ransen, Mort, 6–7 Rasmussen, Knud, 114; Across Arctic America, 109–10, 125, 129n5; ethnographic approach of, 107–9, 111–12; Eurocentrc attitude toward Inuit mythology, 122; Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, 106; Inuit people, respect for, 106–7, 109–11; nostalgia for traditional Inuit life, 111–12; Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, 109–11; Thule Expeditions, 22–23, 103, 104, 105–12 r e a, 29; maang (messagestick), 193–95 reality TV, 221 Red Elk, Lois, 47 Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew (Taylor), 31, 233; definitions of humour, 241–45; healing power of humour, 239–40; self-directed humour, 238 Reid, Bill, 267 relational entities, 258 Reservation Blues (Alexie), 45 Reservation Reelism (Raheja), 4, 6 residential schools, 130n12; as form of deculturation, 6, 36n5, 155 resistance: agency of, 90; and catharsis, film as mechanism for, 32; deconstruction of Indian image, 49; to

INDEX

government policies, 6; humour as mode of, 135–36; and Indigenous political activism, 7–8; and selfrepresentation, 141–42; “speakin’ out blak” as form of, 64–65, 78n3; through film, 253; and visual sovereignty, 161, 167, 168, 171n15, 254–56, 264n10 reverse colonization narrative: Babakiueria (Featherstone), 135 reverse shot, in filmmaking, 16–17, 18 Reweti, Debra, 177 Rewi’s Last Stand (Hayward), 307 Rice, Donovan Jampinjimpa, 191 Riley, Michael, 191 Riley, Sally: ABC TV Indigenous Department, 68; Confessions of a Headhunter, 20, 63, 68, 77, 79n9; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65; Screen Australia Indigenous unit, 68; self-representation, and historical accuracy, 69 Robeson, Paul, 47 Rocks at Whiskey Trench (Obomsawin), 8, 225 Rogoff, Irit, 212; collectivity, and visual culture theory, 200–201; webs of connectedness, 214–15 romantic preservationism, 107, 115 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 291; cinematic taxidermy, 3–4, 6, 111–12 Ruby, Jay, on documentary video, 226 Rude (Virgo), 19 Ruffo, Armand Garnet: A Windigo Tale, 12 Running Fox, Joe, 53 Russo, Vito: The Celluloid Closet, 93 Ryan, J. Allan, 278; The Trickster Shift, 236 Said, Edward: colonization images, 301–2, 303, 304, 307, 310; Orientalism, 63, 65–66, 78n4, 87, 101n13, 159–60

367

salvage ethnography, 107, 129n4 Sámi people: Alta-Kautokeino dam protest, 7, 166; cultural revival of, 147, 161–62; drum, symbolism of, 162–63; fishing rights, 166, 171n18; historical relationship to Indigenous experience, 13–14; Laestadianism, conversion to, 165– 66; Lapp-djavul Sámi stereotype, 163; resistance to assimilation, 165–67; shamanism, and Christianity, 162–64; traditional spirituality, 159; yoik of, 162. See also Ofelas (Veiviseren, Pathfinder) (Gaup) Sampson, Will, 47, 294, 300n6 Samson and Delilah (Thornton), 13, 136 San Juan, Epifanio, 179 Savage (Jackson), 4 Scarred for Life (Moffatt), 21, 82, 92; queer childhood trauma, 94–96, 102n19 Scarred for Life II (Moffatt), 21, 82, 92; queer childhood trauma, 94–96, 102n19 Schellenberg, August, 47, 49 Schepisi, Fred, 69 scientific racism, 86–90, 101n14, 101n15 Scofield, Gregory: “Women Who Forgot the Taste of Limes,” 292, 300n3 The Scorched-Wood People (Wiebe), 293 Scott, Gail: My Paris, 287 Scott, James C., 46 Screening Gender, Framing Genre (Dickinson), 288, 291 Second Cinema, 15 Sedgewick, Eve, 102n19 self-definition: as act of agency, 24; Australian constructions of Aboriginality, 72–73, 77, 79n10 self-ethnography: A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors), 8; From the Ikpeng Children to the World, 8

368

INDEX

self-representation: and agency, 72, 76; as anti-colonialist deconstruction, 77; and authenticity, 20; continuity of past and present, 158, 161; and historical accuracy, 68–69; of Indigenous artists, 32–33; politics of, 131–33, 141–42; racialization, and sexualization, 21–22; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65; and self-determination, 77; shift towards, 6–7; “theirs” vs. “ours,” 226; “the known” vs. “the knowers,” 74; in work of Wayne Blair, 23–24 Sen, Ivan, 83; Beneath Clouds, 13, 20, 63, 69–72, 77; identity, and selfrepresentation, 69–72; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 64–65; short films, 69; Yellow Fella, 78n1 sexual abuse: in The Djarn Djarns, 20, 61, 137, 138; “Little Children Are Sacred” report (Australia), 23, 39n25, 133; Northern Territory Emergency Response, 23; pedophilia, 39n25, 133; queer childhood trauma, 94–96, 102n19; in residential schools, 11; Stolen Generations, 78–79n5, 79n8, 134 sexuality: and colonialism, 101n12; of colonized subject, 21; as explanatory trope, 86–87; female sexuality, 81, 99n1; fetishism, 93; and gender performativity, 259–61; gender transgression, 96; interracial desire, 93, 96; intersections with race and gender, 84; lesbianism, 88–90, 91; “proto-gay” kids, 95–96, 102n19; queer bodies, in historical scientific imagery, 88–89; queer Indigenous desire, 17–18, 91, 93, 96, 99; and racialization, 21–22; racialized bodies, historical scientific imagery of, 86–90; Two Spirit identity, 18,

39n22; white constructions of race and, 98–99 Shannon, Kathleen, 36n7 Sherman, Cindy, 81, 85, 99n1 Shirley Adams (Hermanus), 12 Shohat, Ella, 46 short films: Babakiueria (Featherstone), 72, 79n11, 132; Black Talk (Blair), 23, 24, 131–33, 138–40; Confessions of a Headhunter (Riley), 20, 63, 68, 77, 79n9; Dance to Miss Chief (Monkman), 17–18; The Djarn Djarns (Blair), 20, 23– 24, 61–65, 78n1, 131–33, 136–38; Green Bush (Thornton), 136; It Starts with a Whisper (Niro), 32; Mimi (Thornton), 136; Nice Coloured Girls (Moffatt), 21–22, 81, 82, 92, 97–99, 136; Night Cries (Moffatt), 136; Overweight with Crooked Teeth (Niro), 263n4; Savage (Jackson), 4; storytelling strategies of colonial history, 132–33 Shorty, Sharon, 243 Silverheels, Jay, 6, 47 Silverman, J., 269–70 Silverman, Kaja, 256–57 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Haraway), 225 Simma, Paul-Anders: Give Us Our Skeletons (Oaivveskaldjut), 7, 166 Sinclair, Gordon: Cowboys and Indians, 293 Sinclair, Harry. See The Price of Milk Singer, Beverly R.: Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens, 16 Singer, T. Benjamin, 89 Sioux Ghost Dance (Edison), 11 Sirove, Taryn, 29, 199–217 situated knowledges, 30, 31; talking back to colonialism, 31–32 Skins (Eyre), 9, 11, 12 Skinwalkers (Eyre), 16 The Slanted Screen (Adachi), 44

INDEX

Slums of Beverly Hills, 46 Smith, Jo, 27–28, 175–88 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai: voice, in counterstories, 63, 64 Smoke Signals (Eyre), 10, 13, 45–46 social malaise, 25 sodomy, 86–87 Solanas, Fernando, 38n19 Solito, Auraeus. See Balintago, Kanakan Somby, Mons, 166, 167 Somby, Nillas, 166, 167 Somerville, Siobhan: racialization, and sexualization of Indigenous peoples, 87; scientific racism, 89 Something More (Moffatt), 21, 81, 82; sexuality, and race, 92–94 Somsby, Nils, 7 South Africa: Khoi San people, 13–14 South America: Indigenous filmmaking, 18, 37n12; Indigenous population growth, 5; Quarequa Indians, colonialism of Spanish conquest, 87; as Third Cinema, 15, 38n19 South by Southwest, 45 spirituality: of Aboriginal culture, 75; belief systems, 122; commodification of, 299; shamanism, 104, 120– 21, 145, 159, 162–64; spirits, 123; taboo system, 104, 107, 116, 121, 161. See also under specific peoples (Inuit, Sámi, etc.) Spivak, Gayatri Chakavorty, 132 Spudwrench–Kahnawake Man (Obomsawin), 8, 225 Squaw/Princess dichotomy of portrayal, 259–60 Stalker Theatre Company, 193 Stam, Robert, 46 Starr, Floyd Favel, 240 Starrs, Bruno, 156 St. Cyr, Lillian, 6 Stephens, Tainui, 175, 176

369

Stephenson, Peta, 170n8 stereotypes: of commission/omission, 236–37, 245n4; and decolonization, 63; deconstruction of Indian image, 48–49, 53; and erasure of culture, 157–58; evolution of roles, 19; Hollywood’s influence on, 4; humour as means of breaking, 239–40; of humourless “Indian,” 234, 236; Indian “period” movies, 50–52; Lappdjavul Sámi stereotype, 163; as misrepresentations, 167; modern stereotypes, 53–54; and Native humour, 31; of pre-contact history, 156; and race relations, 34–35, 301, 302–3; racial stereotyping, satirization of, 79n11; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 65; Squaw/Princess dichotomy of portrayal, 259–60; urban Indian, 296–97 Stoler, Ann Laura, 101n12 Stoney, George, 7 storytelling: Aboriginal oratory vs. European story, 268–69; as agent of change, 269, 280; cinema as contemporary form of, 64–65, 122–23, 134; filmmakers as storytellers, 122–23, 267–68; as oral histories, 146, 169n6; as process of historicizing experience, 255; Trickster narratives, 31; Yolngu traditions, 73–74 stranger metaphor, 159, 168 streaming video, 8, 9 Studio One (NFB), 9, 37n14 subjecthood, 247 subjectivity: Native subjectivity, 45, 49; and objectivity, 225–26 Sullivan, Eve, 92 Summerhayes, Catherine, 12 Sundance Film Festival, 45 survival humour, 238, 244–45, 246n7

37 0

INDEX

survivance, 17; continuity of past and present, 158–61; and counterhistory, 23; decolonization practices, 160–61 Sydney International Film Festival: Black Talk (Blair), 138 Szymanski, Adam, 19, 28–29, 189–97 taboo system, 104, 107, 116, 121, 123–24 Taiwan Indigenous Television, 19 Tamahori, Lee: Once Were Warriors, 12, 45 Tarriaksuk Video Centre, 203–4 taxidermy. See cinematic taxidermy Taylor, Charles, 311 Taylor, Drew Haydon: alterNATIVES, 237; humour, and political correctness, 236–38, 245n2; and Kermit the Frog, 234–35; Me Funny, 236; as playwright-humorist, 234–35; Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock/Education Is Our Right, 233; as trickster, 238–39, 240; white audience, permission to laugh, 239. See also Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew (Taylor) teasing, as form of humour, 238 technology: access to, 8; broadcast innovations, 30; Fischer-Price PixelVision toy camera, 9; and retention of traditional lifestyles, 14. See also digital film technology Telefilm Canada, 204 television: Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), 22, 113, 222, 239; Aotearoa Television Network (ATN), 177, 178; CBC Northern Service, 112–13, 201–2; cultural difference, colonial domestication of, 180–81; cultural specificity of, 226; Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), 22–23, 112, 202–3; reality TV, 221; role of broadcasting in revitalization of

culture, 178–79; as teacher of cultural citizenship, 184; TeleVision Northern Canada, 112–13. See also Māori Television TeleVision Northern Canada, 112–13 Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 48 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, 192–93 Ten Canoes (de Heer, Djigirr), 9, 15, 20, 24, 77; black-and-white/colour film technique, 75, 149–50; camerawork, 152; colonization, and disregard for cultural law, 153–54; as counterstory to colonial history, 63; dualism of myth and history, 155, 170n11; film as archive, 74, 147–48; historical reconstruction, 147–48, 169n5, 170n9; inspiration for, 73; mythical past, and present, 146, 155–57, 169n7; Myth Time story, 149–52, 169n7; payback ritual, 151–52, 154; plot devices, 73–74; reclamation of identity through storytelling, 65; Star Wars reference, 74, 145, 146, 150; time frames, 149–50, 151; visual sovereignty, 161, 171n15 Terry, Jennifer: An American Obsession, 91 theatres, access to, 10, 37–38n15 A Thief of Time (Eyre), 16 Third Cinema, 15, 38n19 Thomson, Donald: photographs, use in historical reconstruction, 145, 148, 155, 169n5; and Yolngu people, 73 Thornley, Davinia, 34–35, 301–13 Thornton, Warwick, 61; Green Bush, 136; Mimi, 136; Samson and Delilah, 136 3D technology, 10 Thriller (Jackson), 4 time, as shaped by culture, 149–50

INDEX

The Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica), 302 tobacco, as traditional gift, 296 Todd, Loretta: cinematic vocabulary of, 277–79; filmmaking aesthetic, 269–71, 274–79; protocol of the circle, 276–77; on role of art and artists, 268; Sioux tradition, 265 Todd, Loretta: works: Forgotten Warriors, 270; The Learning Path, 270; No More Secrets, 270; Voice-Life, 270. See also Hands of History (Todd) Before Tomorrow (Cousineau, Ivalu), 215 Tootoosis, Gordon, 47 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF): The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk, Cohn), 103 traditional culture: authenticity of, vs. urban Indigenous population, 66–67; commodification of, 61–67 traditional lifestyles: retention of, 14 Traub, Valerie: gender as explanatory trope, 86, 87, 101n13 trauma: knock-on effect, 102n20; queer childhood trauma, 94–96, 102n19 trauma theory: abreaction process, 11–12. See also Historical Trauma Treaty of Waitangi (New Zealand), 27, 175–77, 179, 187n2 trickster role, 278–79, 280 The Trickster Shift (Ryan), 236 trickster tales, 31, 238–39; and Coyote, 240; Nanapush, 246n7 Trudell (Rae), 7 Trudell, John, 7 truth: distortion of, 4; indexical relationship to, 3–4 The Truth about Stories (King), 268 Tsotsi, 45 Tudball, Libby, 73 Twain, Shania, 242 Two Spirit identity, 18, 39n22

371

Uniikuup Productions, 191 United States: Aboriginal activism, 7; assimilation policies, 36n5; citizenship rights, 7, 36–37n8; cultural genocide policies, 6, 36n5; dramatic feature film releases, 14; Native American population growth, 5, 35–36n3; voting rights, 7, 36–37n8 Unsettling Sights (Columpar), 16 unsituated documentary, 226 urban flânerie. See flâneur, and urban flânerie Utsi, Nils, 144 Uttuigak, Celina, 203, 213 Utu (Murphy), 307 Valaskakis, Gail, 13 vanishing cultures, as subject of ethnographic films, 3–4, 35n2 Vanstone, Gail, 32–33, 265–81 Vernacular Terrain 2, 194 “vertical film” structure, 229 VHS technology, 10 Video in the Villages project, 8, 18, 37n9 violence, parental/societal against children, 94–96, 102n19 Virgo, Clement: Rude, 19 visual culture theory, and collectivity, 200–201 visual media technologies. See digital media visual sovereignty, 161, 167, 168, 171n15; marginalized habitus of women, 254–55, 264n10 Vizenor, Gerald: comic spirit of cultural identity, 236; survivance, 17, 158 voice: blak talk, 78n3; in counterhistories, 20–21; in post-colonial environment, 63–65; reverse ethnographic film practice, 33; self-representation, and contemporary identity, 62–63 Voice-Life (Todd), 270

37 2

INDEX

“Voice of God” narration, 31 voting rights, 7, 36–37n8 Waban-Aki (Obomsawin), 32, 248–49, 254; gender, and racialized discourse, 260–61; visual sovereignty, 254–56, 264n10 Waiãpi people: A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors), 8 Walden, Wayne, 184 Walker, Ranginui, 177 walking, and urban flânerie, 33–34; . See also Heater (Odette) Walrus Hunter (IBC), 203 Walsh, Mike, 156 Warlpiri Media, 191 Watson, Irene, 74 Web-based interactive approaches, 221–22 Weir, Peter, 69 Weller, Archie, 68 Whale Rider (Caro, film), 15, 45, 181 Whale Rider (Ihimaera, novel), 15 White, Matt, 11 The White Man’s Indian (Berkhofer), 236 whiteness, and “whitening”: racializing effects of deculturation, 4, 132; and racial privilege, 23–24 “white-out” of Indigenous history, 295, 299 Wiebe, Rudy: The Scorched-Wood People, 293 Williams, Inawinytji: art as bridge between cultures, 77, 80n14 Williams, Mark: on benign assimilation of Māori, 306 A Windigo Tale (Ruffo), 12 Windschuttle, Keith, 68, 79n8 Winnetou films, 17 Winnipeg: Harper shooting, 293, 300n4, 300n5; urbanized space of Indigenous history, 292, 300n3

Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens (Singer), 16 wireless devices, 30 women: Arnait Video Productions, 203–4; “feminine-ism,” 271; First Nations status, 210, 249, 253–54; honour song, 274–75; as keepers of cultural knowledge, 266–67; marginalized habitus of, 253–56; queer Indigenous desire, 17–18, 91, 93, 96, 99; racialized bodies, historical scientific imagery of, 86–90, 101n12; sexuality, and colonialism, 101n12; Squaw–Princess dichotomy of portrayal, 259–60; in work of Tracey Moffatt, 136 “Women Who Forgot the Taste of Limes” (Scofield), 292, 300n3 Wood, Houston, 38n21, 148; Native Features, 9; storytelling traditions, 134 Worth, Sol: Navajo Film Themselves, 226–27 Wounded Knee Massacre, 10, 11 Wounded Knee Occupation, 7, 11 Yellow Fella (Sen), 78n1 Yes No, Johnny, 47 Yolngu Boy (Johnson), 72 Yolngu people: history of contact, 147, 170n8; isolation myth of de Heer, 155–56, 170n8; respect for history, 145, 168–69n4; storytelling traditions, 73–74 You Are on Indian Land (NFB), 6–7, 36n7, 227 Young Deer, James, 6 YouTube, 221 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 304 zombie images: of deculturation, 4; Savage (Jackson), 4

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Books in the Film+Media Studies Series Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film Culture / R. Bruce Elder / 1989; Paper edition 2012 / xviii + 484 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-469-7 Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan / Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell, editors / 2006 / viii + 418 pp / photos / ISBN 978-0-88920-487-4 The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers / George Melnyk, editor / 2008 / xiv + 134 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-036-1 Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television / Zoë Druick and Aspa Kotsopoulos, editors / 2008 / x + 344 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-010-1 Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century / R. Bruce Elder / 2008 / xxxiv + 482 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-028-6 He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western / Roderick McGillis / 2009 / xii + 210 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-059-0 The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 / Jerry White / 2009 / xvi + 284 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-178-8 The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers / Brenda Austin-Smith and George Melnyk, editors / 2010 / x + 272 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-179-5 Feeling Canadian: Nationalism, Affect, and Television / Marusya Bociurkiw / 2011 / viii + 184 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-268-6 Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada / Barbara M. Freeman / 2011 / xii + 328 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-269-3 Canadian Television: Text and Context / Marian Bredin, Scott Henderson, and Sarah A. Matheson, editors / 2011 / xvi + 238 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-361-4 Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria / Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, editors / 2012 / x + 304 pp. / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-225-9 DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect / Bruce Elder / 2013 / viii + 766 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-625-7 Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville / Jerry White / 2013 / x + 204 pp./ ISBN 978-1-55458-935-7

The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard / Douglas Morrey, Christina Stojanova, and Nicole Côté, editors / 2014 / photos / ISBN 978-1-55458-920-3 Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Film, and Television / Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose, editors / 2014 / xxiv + 318 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-926-5 Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context / Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, editors / 2014 / xii + 376 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-335-5