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Alanis Obomsawin

University of Nebraska Press

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ISBN: 0-8032-8045-9

Preface

I laughed and explained that I was meeting a filmmaker named
Alanis Obomsawin. Because documentary filmmakers tend to labor
under a shroud of semiobscurity, I was prepared to add that she was
an important Abenaki filmmaker who had been at the NFB since the
1960s and had made more than twenty films, some of them classics. I
assumed I would have to throw out a few film titles like Kanehsatake
and Rocks at Whisky Trench to evoke a glimmer of recognition, at least
after an awkward pause in which I would begin to wonder about the
relevance of what I do for a living. But I had no such need.

"Mademoiselle Alanis!" he exclaimed with delight, his voice thick
with a French Canadian accent as he wove through the light midmorning
traffic. "Oui ... I watched one of her documentaries on
television last night."

"Really?" It seemed so improbable-Obomsawin's films had almost
never appeared on television in the United States.

"Oh yes," he said, grinning in appreciation. "Ah ... Mademoiselle
Alanis ... Elle est magnifique!"

At that moment my suspicion was confirmed: Alanis Obomsawin
was not the usual documentary filmmaker. In the few years since
this exchange with the taxi driver, it has come to seem emblematic
of how she is regarded by those who know her work. Other stories
come to mind: The student photographer who saw Obomsawin
shooting footage behind the razor wire at Oka and was inspired to
become a documentary filmmaker. The soft-spoken Métis woman,
hardly out of college, who glowed whenever her cinematic mentor
walked into the room. The prominent Native artist who gushed about
how Obomsawin had cleared a path for subsequent generations of
indigenous mediamakers. The list goes on for quite some time before
a dissenting word is heard, and even then it is muted in nature.

Indeed, by virtue of hermyriad accomplishments and lofty reputation,
Obomsawin could be considered the grande dame of Canadian
documentary filmmaking, if not the Canadian film industry in general.
Still one of Canada's most distinguished filmmakers at the age
of seventy-two, she has made almost two dozen documentaries about
the lives and struggles of Native people in North America. All these
films have their roots in her childhood experiences on the Abenaki
reserve called Odanak and in French Canadian towns such as Three
Rivers, where she spent her difficult adolescence. Then as now, creativity
was her salvation. After a stint as a fashion model, she found
widespread acclaim as a traditional Abenaki singer and storyteller on
the folk circuits of the early 1960s. With friends such as the novelist
and songwriter Leonard Cohen, she became a fixture in bohemian
Montreal until her Native activism prompted the NFB to hire her as a
consultant in 1967.

Within a few years of joining the NFB, she seized an opportunity to
direct her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), a study of life
in a small northern settlement based solely on children's drawings.
From that point forward, her career at the NFB blossomed, and she
added one of the first Native voices to the complacent Canadian
media landscape. Over the following decades, she has produced titles
such as Mother of Many Children (1977), Incident at Restigouche
(1984), Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986),
No Address (1988), and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993),
one of four films she made about her seventy-eight days behind the
barricades in the armed standoff known as the Oka crisis. Although
she has not received the audience she deserves in the United States, her
films have won numerous awards at film festivals in Canada, Europe,
and Asia, and Kanehsatake was shown on Japanese television to an
estimated audience of eighteen million. All her films have appeared
on Canadian television and in hundreds of schools and universities.

Few would dispute her stature as one of the leading figures in
indigenous filmmaking in the world-save, perhaps, Merata Mita
in New Zealand, no one has been as successful and influential over
the past decades. Obomsawin was one of the first Native filmmakers
inside the gated community of cinema, however it is defined, as well
as the first Native staff filmmaker at the prestigious NFB, perhaps
the greatest center of documentary production in the history of the
medium. Since breaking the barrier that kept Native people from the
power of the mass media, she has become one of the most prolific
and interesting documentary filmmakers of any age or background in
North America. With a reputation that extends well beyond Canada's
borders, she has been the subject of interviews and film retrospectives
from Auckland to Barcelona. Somewhat to my surprise, then,
is the fact that this book is the first one about this extraordinary
filmmaker-even more perplexing that it is the first book about any
indigenous filmmaker. How can this be true in the era of blossoming
indigenous media? In the era of Smoke Signals and Atanarjuat: The
Fast Runner?

I can understand this lacuna in the United States. Despite honored
appearances at Sundance and various American universities, Obomsawin
remains little known within a self-satisfied nation for whom
its northern neighbor seems to exist primarily for stand-up comedy
punch lines and rustic beer advertisements. Add to that the enduring
metaphysics of Indian hating, and the result is a terminal neglect of
all things Native in the United States, unless routed through dusty
Costnerian operas or Michael Eisner's animated minions. If colorful,
soft-focus Indians are always welcome in the European American
imagination, real Native people, especially those with inconvenient
desires and sharp-edged politics like Obomsawin, are not.

The absence of a book on Obomsawin, or any other First Nations'
filmmaker, is more difficult to understand in the Canadian context.
In recent decades, Canada has gained a reputation-perhaps not
fully deserved, as Obomsawin's films make clear-for casting a more
sympathetic eye on its indigenous inhabitants. On a personal level, I
know that driving north and crossing the border from Washington
State into British Columbia has brought this home to me. Moving
north through the Northwestern United States, one finds that the Native
presence is muted in general and utterly silent on state and federal
property along the main highway. Then, when passing into Canada
on the way to Vancouver, the first thing one sees is a totem pole
and other symbols of a strong First Nations presence, even on federal
land. Because such symbolic moments are not uncommon, American
tourists such as myself are often surprised by how enlightened Canada
appears in regard to its indigenous peoples, almost seeming to have
an appreciation for Native cultures that is rarely found in its southern
neighbor, not even in havens for Native fetishism like Sedona or Santa
Fe. In view of this general state of affairs above the Forty-ninth Parallel
as well as Obomsawin's prominence in the Canadian media, it is
harder to understand her relative absence in Canadian film studies,
unless one remembers the nature of that particular subfield. "Given
the fragmented, and underdeveloped, state of Canadian film studies,"
Zuzana Pick has observed, "the contributions of Native filmmakers
have yet to be documented." Yet the literature on Canadian cinema,
like that on indigenous media, has been growing the last few years,
enough so that it was, I suspect, just a matter of time before a dissertation
or book like this one came along. After all, Canadian writers
jump-started the serious interest in Obomsawin's work in the 1980s
and 1990s, producing a few articles that illuminated the path I would
take in this longer study.

Indeed, years before I began to contemplate this book, Canadian
scholars working in film studies had made a strong case for Obomsawin's
significance. Jerry White praised her as "a true social filmmaker"
whose work is "among the most vibrant and organically political
in Canadian cinema." In another outstanding article, Zuzana
Pick claimed that Obomsawin's films "constitute a compelling and
politically important contribution to a family album where the stories
of First Nations people in Canada are told, where their setbacks
and victories are recorded with anger, compassion, and respect." Noting
the impact of Obomsawin's efforts, Pick added that the filmmaker
"has been successful in altering common perceptions.... [H]er films
have fundamentally altered the way in which the cause of First Peoples
has been communicated to non-Native Canadians." In a similar vein,
when Obomsawin was awarded the Governor General's Visual and
Media Arts Award in 2001, a Native writer celebrated, in a brief but
thoughtful article, how much her "sensitive, intimate, and poignant"
documentaries have "changed perceptions of Native peoples."

Observers in the United States have not been entirely blind to
Obomsawin's accomplishment. One of the few exceptions has been
Bird Runningwater, who, as the programmer for the Native American
Initiatives at the Sundance Film Institute, has gone on record
about the importance of her cinematic project. "If you look at the
history of the Native image in film, the vast majority of it has been
created without the consent and most often without the control of
the Native person whose image is being taken and utilized in media,"
Runningwater has said. "I really believe Alanis is using a medium to
provide a voice and a story for a lot of people who historically have
not had that opportunity."

Despite these moments of acclaim, Obomsawin has not yet received
the attention that she deserves in the United States or even in
Canada, and this may be a symptom of her commitment to documentary
film, not exactly the most glamorous of métiers. The success
of Smoke Signals, Atanarjuat, and a handful of other fiction films
notwithstanding, nonfiction has been the medium of choice for Native
filmmakers in general and Native women filmmakers in particular.
Since the late 1960s Native filmmakers have produced dozens of
documentaries, creating a significant body of nonfiction work that
has never received the critical attention paid to Native literature, basketry,
painting, and sculpture-all of which might seem in synch with
the cultural traditionalism to which non-Native scholars have often
been attracted, even to the detriment of understanding new facets of
indigenous artistry and culture. I hope that this book will be useful to
scholars and Native communities because it offers the first in-depth
look at a key figure in the development of indigenous media across
the United States and Canada. I want to show that Native cinema
is more than Smoke Signals-that it possesses an unacknowledged
history going back to the 1960s, one with Alanis Obomsawin at its
center. Yet, even within the small world of "indigenous mediamakers,"
Native women have been slighted. For instance, the respected Hopi
director Victor Masayesva bills himself as the first Native filmmaker,
despite the fact that he was many years behind Obomsawin.

At the most personal level, I hope that my research will give Obomsawin
the credit that is her due. In an old-fashioned sense, then, this
book is an exercise in feminist canon busting that should prompt
readers to wonder why this woman has been ignored while new books
on Ford and Hitchcock crowd onto library shelves with every passing
week. I want to celebrate the new points of view that her work
brings to the cinema, and I hope to capture in prose something of
Obomsawin's unique cinematic vision. Studies like this one can, I
think, reveal how Native cinema has become as vital and interesting
as traditional art forms that have received far more attention and
resources. I don't mean to have the last word. There is always more
to be said about an artist of Obomsawin's caliber, and I hope that
this book will continue the conversation about her work until the
next scholar takes an interest. The same is true for other indigenous
mediamakers across North America: so many of them deserve the
careful appreciation that has been afforded visual artists with European
roots.

Let me say a few words about the shape of the book so that the reader
knows what to expect. Although I have used the wildly disparate
writings of Patricia Zimmermann, John Grierson, Richard White, Eva
Garroutte, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Leonard Cohen to make sense
of one of the great unheralded careers in nonfiction cinema, the
book follows a rather traditional chronological sequence. Here in the
preface, I describe the goals of the book and the motivations behind
it. I also introduce the notion of Other Visions, which alludes, not
just to other accounts of the past, but also to the pernicious process
of cultural "Othering" that Obomsawin has fought against. Much of
this is yet to come.

Then, in chapter 1, "Abenaki Beginnings," I examine the formative
influences that brought Obomsawin to the screen, providing the first
careful look at her difficult experiences on the Abenaki reserve at
Odanak, before she found success as a model, singer, and traditional
storyteller in the early 1960s. I make creative use of her friend Leonard
Cohen's fiction in order to glimpse something of her adolescence.

Chapter 2, "Early Films," explores Amisk (1977), Mother of Many
Children (1977), and Obomsawin's other half-forgotten films from
the 1970s and 1980s, using them to explore the emerging thematic
preoccupations of the filmmaker: the vulnerability of Native children;
the importance of pan-tribal solidarity; and the continuing
toll of Native-white conflict on First Nations. In addition, I attempt
to demonstrate that her filmmaking practice has deep roots in the
Abenaki oral tradition in which Obomsawin was raised.

Chapter 3, "A Gendered Gaze?" considers what Obomsawin was
bringing to the screen in addition to a Native storytelling aesthetic
during her first two decades of filmmaking. So much attention has
focused on her groundbreaking role as a Native filmmaker that it is
tempting to overlook the specific nature of her accomplishment, as
if being "first" and "most prolific" were prizes enough. This chapter
attempts to tease out the nuances of her vision in one crucial area: the
gendered position of her filmmaking and how it relates to aboriginal
women filmmakers, not just in North America, but also in other
settler-states such as Australia and New Zealand.

Chapter 4, "Documentary on the Middle Ground," gives an account
of Obomsawin's seventy-eight days behind the razor wire at Oka, one
of the great unacknowledged acts of courage in the documentary
tradition. After showing the importance of Native filmmakers as witnesses
in moments of political crisis, I examine the four films about
the Oka crisis that occupied Obomsawin's creative energies in the
1990s, using them to make some larger points about her media practice.
Transposing ideas that have been influential in history and anthropology,
I show how Obomsawin has functioned as a cultural broker
between Native and white on the "middle ground" of the Canadian
mass media and discuss the reasons why documentary might
provide an ideal meeting place between contemporary cultures-something
I explore at greater length in the following chapter.

Chapter 5, "Why Documentary?" asks a deceptively simple question.
In these pages, I hope to show why Obomsawin has relied exclusively
on nonfiction to share what she calls the voice of the people and
explore why Native filmmakers in general have turned to documentary.
Moving beyond issues related to indigenous media, I then engage
Mario Vargas Llosa's recent "Why Literature?" to show how common
assumptions about literature's role in transmitting ennobling human
values might also apply to documentary cinema as practiced by filmmakers
such as Obomsawin.

Chapter 6, "Cinema of Sovereignty," provides the first examination
of Obomsawin's most recent work, exploring two documentaries, Is
the Crown at War with Us? (2002) and Our Nationhood (2003), that
deal with bitter disputes over the natural resources of First Nations. In
this final chapter I set out the notion of a cinema of sovereignty to describe
the representational strategies that Obomsawin has developed
for Native people.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Alanis Obomsawin
by Randolph Lewis
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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