ABSTRACT

Alanis Obamsawin’s films have documented the historical and contemporary struggles of the Inuit, Me´tis, Cree, Mohawk, Ojibway, and Mi’ gmaq peoples. Her films, all made at the National Film Board, grow out of a first career as a songwriter, storyteller, and educator, and from her lifelong commitment to political activism on behalf of Canadian first nations peoples. At their most fundamental level, Obamsawin’s films have given native peoples an opportunity to be heard in a number of poignant recordings of their experience. Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) used children’s drawing to evoke life in an isolated northern community. Mother of Many Children (1977) is composed of interviews with women from many groups to paint a composite portrait of native matriarchy. The text of Richard Cardinal: Cry from the Diary of a Me´tis Child (1986) was taken from the words of a 17-year-old boy who committed suicide after a short lifetime in institutions and foster homes. In many of her films, Obamsawin (also known as

Kolilawato) herself is a major presence, adopting the style of the storyteller, to present not simply the immediate subject before her but also the broader contexts of native experience that have shaped it. She speaks calmly and often with great sadness. As

Pick writes, ‘‘Her work demystifies notions of disinterested observation in cinema direct by inscribing her presence in the film, as narrator and subject. In her hands, documentary practice becomes a rhetorical intervention that places the enabling subject at the centre of discourse’’ (Pick, 1999: 77). It is in this mode that Obamsawin’s film Poundmaker’s Lodge; A Healing Place (1987) documents life inside a native-run treatment centre for drug and alcohol abuse, while arguing that the problem itself is the inevitable product of a long history of cultural dispossession. She uses a similar approach in No Address (1988), a film focusing on the Montre´al Native Friendship Centre, as a means of exploring the larger issue of displaced natives in urban centers. If Obamsawin’s work, as Jerry White suggests,

has been to create an imagined native community (White, 2002: 371), that work came to fruition after the 1990 Oka Crisis. Native attempts to prevent the appropriation of an ancient burial ground near Montre´al ended in a shoot-out with Que´bec Police, followed by a 78-day standoff between armed natives and the Canadian Army-while other natives blocked a commuter bridge to Montre´al. Obamsawin’s response was four films. The first of these, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993)

interspersed Obamsawin’s footage from behind the native lines with an historical essay tracing the crisis to the first treaties between the Oka natives and French settlers. My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995) is a portrait of an Oka protester held by authorities for refusing to identify herself by anything other than her native name, and Spudwrench-Kahnawake Man (1997) depicts a steelworker who found himself a warrior behind the barricades. Obamsawin’s fourth Oka film, Rocks at Whisky Trench (2000), provides historical and social context for an incident in which angry Montre´al suburbanites stoned a convoy of native women and children leaving the blockade. In her recent film Is the Crown at War with Us?