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Abstract
Since the 1960s, when First Nations crews began training at the National Film Board, indigenous filmmaking — mostly in the form of documentaries — has generally taken place on the margins of mainstream production in Québec. While the commitment to addressing native issues and portraying native lives of NFB documentarists like Alanis Obomsawin has been of immeasurable social and aesthetic value, recent productions have shown a veritable thirst among native peoples to tell their stories and cultural heritage through a fictional frame. This essay profiles three First Nations directors whose recent productions have included fictional film. Mohawk artist and filmmaker Shelley Niro has made several films that deal with Native women who are trying to find their way in a modern world without losing sight of who they are. Kissed by Lightening is her first, award-winning, full-length feature and offers a synthesis of several themes present in her previous work. Jeff Barnaby, a Mi'gmaq filmmaker, has made three short subjects that all deal with identity questions, but from a male perspective, and is currently editing his first feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Finally, Yves Sioui Durand, whose 2012 feature, Mesnak, is billed as the first Native feature film made in Québec, offers yet another example of how a creative artist, this time from the Huron-Wendat community of Wendake, gives voice to the identity crisis experienced by so many of his people who have lost touch with their culture, community or family in the vortex of modern urban life. While focusing on such key questions as identity and language, this essay also examines how native fiction film differs or borrows from the “Hollywood medium” that has exploited the “reel Injun,” to quote the title of Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond's documentary on the subject, for over a hundred years.
Notes
1. The terms “First Nations,” “Native,” “Aboriginal” and “indigenous” will be used interchangeably to describe individuals and groups, both status and non-status, who self-identify as belonging to the native population of Canada, regardless of location.
2. “Our History: The NFB Foundation: 1939.”
3. Defining what makes a film indigenous is controversial. Generally, a film directed by a native is enough to ensure the film is labeled a native production, while a film made by a non-native director but using native actors and themes is not necessarily sufficient to warrant the label. Such is the case with Denis Boivin's 2003 Attache ta tuque, which is not recognized as the first native feature film in Québec even though it is set in native communities in Québec and stars native actors, while Yves Sioui Durand's 2011 film Mesnak has been called Québec's first native film, because Durand himself is Huron-Wendat. I am indebted to Boivin for alerting me to this issue.
4. Quoted from The Invisible Nation’s DVD sleeve description.
5. Filmed in Nunavut in 1999, and released in 2001, the film won over 20 awards worldwide including a Caméra d'Or at Cannes and the Best Picture Genie in Canada. http://www.isuma.tv/isuma-productions/about (accessed July 24, 2012).
6. http://www.isuma.tv/lo/en/atanarjuat/filmmaking-inuit-style (accessed July 24, 2012). The Aboriginal Filmmaking Program supported over 20 productions or co-productions before its termination in 2001-2002. (Source: http://onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/ collection/film/?id=50131).
7. http://www.aptn.ca/corporate/facts.php (accessed July 23, 2012).
8. http://www.wapikoni.tv/univers/about. Almost 450 short films and music videos are currently available for viewing online via the Wapikoni website.
9. Mohawk directors Tracey Deer and Reaghan Tarbell are among those who began working in documentary. With support from the NFB, Tracey Deer made Mohawk Girls (2005) and Club Native (2008), before turning the former documentary into a concept for a television series, which is still in production as of July 2012 (http://www.rezolutionpictures.com/ productions/in-development/). Reaghan Tarbell made To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey (2008) with support from both the NFB and PBS (the Public Broadcasting System in the US). She has recently returned to university to pursue film studies (unpublished personal interview), presumably to develop her filmmaking career in more commercial directions.
10. Neil Diamond's prize-winning 2009 road-movie documentary, Reel Injun, on the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, is a searing, well-researched commentary on how, from its very beginnings, Hollywood created and used stereotypical “Indians” (Diamond calls them “Injuns”).
11. Discussion with Shelley Niro, National Museum of the American Indian, July 2, 2011. Niro also dedicated her film It Starts with a Whisper to “native women around the world.”
12. Artist's Statement, Cultural Contrasts: Inner Voices/Outer Images (Stamford, CT: Stamford Museum and Nature Center, 1993), unp. Quoted in Abbott Citation1998, 336.
13. Because Niro resides in Ontario, some might object to her inclusion here with two native directors from Québec. However, given that the ancestral Mohawk territories covered lands now divided by both provincial and national borders, and given that the largest communities of Mohawk are located in Québec, and, finally, given that Mohawks consider themselves one people (within the Six Nations Confederacy) despite their geographically scattered reservations, it seems to me that an argument can be made for including Niro here. Indeed, the border-crossing scene in Kissed by Lightning is clearly a critique of the inconvenience, unfairness, and indeed, offensiveness of government restriction of native peoples’ comings and goings. Excluding Niro would be tantamount to re-imposing colonial borderlines on a people who Niro herself shows as rooted in a formerly vast Mohawk territory, still accessible to them despite borders by virtue of the Jay Treaty.
14. Rabb recaps the US case and offers an extension of the arguments for the political influence of native thought to Canadian Confederation (Rabb Citation2011).
15. The paintings in the film are Niro's own. Niro admits that she drew on parallels she saw between pre-Peacemaker Haudenosaunee history and the Bosnian war, which was in the news at the time she was preparing to make the film (Kreimer Citation2011, 1).
16. Email correspondence with the author, July 2011.
17. The phrase is Barnaby's (indigenousartsnetwork.ca/artists/jeff_barnaby/interview/).
18. From Cherry English was shown at Sundance Film Festival, and earned several Golden Sheaf Awards at the Yorkton Film Festival. The Colony was named by the Toronto International Film Festival as one of Canada's Top Ten Short Films of 2007, and won awards at several festivals. Nominated for a Genie award, File Under Miscellaneous won Best Indigenous Language Film at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, the Grand Prize at the First People's Festival in Montreal, as well as Best Indigenous Cinema Film at Tulsa. Most recently, Barnaby's script for his current feature in production, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, was awarded the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award at the 2012 festival in New York.
19. Barnaby recently directed an episode for the third season of the Mushkeg Media/APTN television series Finding our Talk.
20. Barnaby first used the names Traylor and Maytag for characters in his self-produced short film, Red Right Hand (2004), a title that alludes to the vengeance of God in Milton, described as his “red right hand,” but which also picks up on the Indian as “red” man. Maytag being an American appliance brand, and Traylor sounding much like “trailer,” which is where the character of Maytag lives in The Colony, perhaps the repetition of these names suggests the influence of neo-colonialism that perpetuates the economic deprivation that continues to plague native people.
21. This symbolic dimension of the insects is discussed by Barnaby in the Krupa interview.
22. This recognition appeared in many major Québec newspapers at the film's release, including Le Devoir, Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse, and Voir Montréal.
23. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise noted.
24. Source: the Dossier de presse available on the film's website.
25. The motif of the fatal or tragic hunting trip is not a new one in Québec cinema. It appears, most notably, in Le Temps d'une chasse (Francis Mankiewicz, 1972) and more recently in Mémoires affectives (Francis Leclerc, 2004).
26. The earliest appearances of Canadian native peoples on film often show costumed “reconstructions” or dramatizations of customs that are not authentic or were no longer practiced. Such “imaginary Indians” can be seen in the films of Curtis or, indeed, in the early Lumière Brothers Association short of Mohawk dancers, available at http://www.cinemamuetquebec.ca/content/movies/5?lang=fr. My thanks to Denis Bachand for indicating this source.