Lessons with Leah: re‐reading the photographic archive of nation in the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division

Abstract

This article examines the negotiation of cultural memory within the photographic archive of the nation. As a case study, it focuses on representations of the Arctic and sub‐Arctic in photo‐stories dating from 1955 to 1971 and produced by the NFB Still Photography Division, an organisation that effectively functioned as Canada's national image bank. Photographic representations of the North reveal the dominant model of national identity that implicitly informs the Still Division's original mandate and typically reduced the First Peoples of the North as one of the Canadian nation's ‘Others’. This article proposes visual repatriation as a model for studying the photographic archive and returning agency to those it depicts. Specifically, it introduces ‘Project Naming’, a collaborative initiative of the Inuit college Nunavut Sivuniksavut, the Library and Archives Canada and the Nunavut Ministry of Culture.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Leah Idlout Paulson for speaking with me in preparation of this article. Many thanks to Darren Newbury and the two anonymous readers for Visual Studies for their extremely helpful suggestions. For invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article, I gratefully acknowledge Annette Kuhn, Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Robert Evans. I also wish to express my gratitude to Hellin Alariaq, Beth Greenhorn, Norman Hallendy, Martha Hanna and Sue Lagasi (of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography), Christine Lalonde, John Ough, Hélène Proulx‐Ough, and Jeff Thomas for help and conversation. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which has funded my research into the National Film Board's Still Photography Division. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the conference ‘The Photograph’ (University of Manitoba, 2004), the 2004 conference of the Association for Canadian Studies, and the 2005 meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.

Notes

1. A brief note on terminology: within the archive I have been studying extensively (the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division), the Aboriginal peoples of the Arctic and sub‐Arctic were referred to as ‘Eskimos’. The people of the North themselves reject this term. Most of the Aboriginal peoples discussed in this article instead call themselves Inuit (plural) or Inuk (singular). The language of much of north‐eastern Canada, Alaska and Greenland is Inuktitut, which has various regional dialects. Innuinaqtum is spoken in western areas of Nunavut (Greenhorn 2005).

2. Records now housed at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography note which specific departments initiated various assignments. The Departments of Public Works and External Affairs were among the most frequent clients.

3. Rather than being direct translations, English and French photo‐stories are relatively distinct. Though featuring the same layout of images, texts were written separately (Ough and Proulx‐Ough 2003).

4. Here I borrow Grace's use of the purposefully imprecise, enveloping descriptor because this term aptly reflects its more conceptual, less geographically bound applications.

5. According to the National Archives of Canada, between 1945 and 1961, photographs were numbered sequentially from 1 to 104,000 (starting at 10,000 to accommodate integration of additional photographs). In 1962, a ‘year‐range’ was adopted, with the year preceding a sequential list of images for that year (61‐5665) (Roytblat 2003). My thanks to Sarah Stacy and Andrew Rodger, Archivists, Photography Acquisition and Research Unit, for their help.

6. Norman Hallendy's system was used for images in the 1960s; earlier images apparently were not re‐classified. Each image was also organised geographically. In the early 1960s, Hallendy expanded the filing system, adding dozens more subject categories. Hallendy added the designation ‘special’ for what he called ‘great shots’ or the ‘juiciest images’ and added such fields as ‘scenic’ and an emphasis on nature. In short, his work as a neophyte archivist reflected the Division's overall tendency in the 1960s to aestheticise its holdings (Hallendy 2003).

7. One of the experts is Norman Hallendy of the NFB staff.

8. The paradigm of the white mentor is seen, for example, in ‘Canada's Northern Citizens Produce Unique Art: Lively Forms From Lifeless Stone’ (photo‐story 148, 11 March 1958) and ‘Eskimo Artists at Cape Dorset: When the Wind Blows They Make Prints’ (photo‐story 279, 21 February 1961), which both feature James Houston overseeing soapstone carving; scenes of young tuberculosis patients with attending nurses in ‘Charles Camsell Indian Hospital: For an Exclusive Clientele’ (photo‐story 188, December 1958); and ‘Eskimo Celebrations at Pelly Bay: Christmas in a Snow Cathedral’ (photo‐story 326, 11 December 1962), a pictorial featuring Father Vandevelde, a Catholic missionary in Pelly Bay, performing Christmas mass.

9. These Aboriginal interventions do not occur in isolation. Within contemporary art practice there has also been a recent ‘archival turn’ (Foster 2004; Simon 2002).

10. Among other notable Northern interventions in the photographic archive is the photographic database established by the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (hereafter the PWNHC). The PWNHC established an online repository of some 30,000 photographs dating from about 1900 to the 1970s, which had been culled from the Northwest Territories Archives. Although not exclusively devoted to Aboriginal history in the Northwest Territories, the PWNHC's mandate does stress its commitment to preserving ‘the history and culture of the Dene, Inuvialuit, [and] Métis [peoples].’ Photographs in the database originated as governmental records, church documents or personal photographic artifacts. Now these images are readily accessible on the web (http://pwnhc.learnnet.nt.ca/databases/photodb/htm). As with Project Naming, electronic technology has been critical to the form and success of the PWNHC photographic database. Through the web, these images are made accessible to geographically vast and diverse communities. The PWNHC encourages site visitors to correct or amend information in the database. In addition, it has established partnerships with the School Board of the Northwest Territories, facilitating use of the database photographs in the classroom (Ashbury 2004).

11. The visual repatriation project I am involved with engages Inuit youths to interview Inuit Elders. However, for this initial contact, I interviewed Leah Idlout Paulson myself. She will be interviewed again by Inuit youths during the course of this research project.