“A dangerous tool in the wrong hands”: Sovereign technologies in Alanis Obomsawin’s Is the Crown at War with Us? and Barry Barclay’s The Kaipara Affair

ABSTRACT

Abenaki film-maker Alanis Obomsawin’s 2002 film Is the Crown at War with Us? and Ngāti Apa film-maker Barry Barclay’s 2005 documentary The Kaipara Affair depict tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and global capitalism through the lens of two distinct fishing rights struggles drawn from Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article examines themes of documentation, surveillance, and environmental resource extraction that echo across both films to argue that these technologies – as narrativized in Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s works – offer the potential for negotiation in a continuing anti-colonial resistance, both in the localized struggles of Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church in Canada and Tinopai in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and further suggest potential strategies for emulation across the (post)colonial globe. Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of the settler-colonial “net” is used to analyse the depiction of fishing practices as a contested arena for global capitalism and Indigenous stewardship that is narratively and aesthetically challenged by both film-makers.

KEYWORDS:

• Fourth cinema
• fishing rights
• Barry Barclay
• Alanis Obomsawin
• environmental humanities
• global capitalism

Introduction: Refusing elimination, envisioning survivance

Indigenous sovereignty has continually presented a problem for capitalist hegemony, particularly in contested environmental arenas. From resistance to efforts to de-collectivize communal land tenure within the US under the terms of the Dawes Act in 1887, to the more recent granting of legal personhood to environmental sites such as rivers and parks in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Indigenous peoples have continually asserted their rights through legal and cultural protocols, as well as actively defending these through organized opposition to private and state encroachment. With the end of the Cold War, however, came an apparent new consensus: neoliberal capitalism opened borders, transcended cultures, and united peoples in a common ambition of collective individualism. Indigenous articulations of sovereignty seemed doomed to be swallowed up in the envelopment of this new world order. Yet envisionings of Indigenous extinction have been a foundation of the settlement project since colonization – enshrined through technologies of documentation, surveillance, and resource extraction. The use of tools such as treaties between Indigenous peoples and colonial parties, the camera, and enhanced harvesting techniques (such as trawling) in the fishing industry formed a basis for the creation and maintenance of the settler-state through the construction of erasure narratives that effectively “disappeared” Indigenous peoples and their relationships to their lands in order to entrench the ongoing process of colonialism. Yet despite these insistent efforts, Indigenous peoples have consistently frustrated the eliminatory ambitions of settler-colonialism (Wolfe 2006) through realizing an “active sense of presence” that White Earth Anishinaabe theorist Gerald Robert Vizenor (1993, 1994) terms “survivance”. Connoting an enduring agency that comprises more than “surviving” colonization, survivance refuses both the eliminatory ambitions of settler-colonialism and those narratives that entrap Indigenous peoples into perpetual states of victimry, stereotype, and stasis.

A key way in which Indigenous peoples have insisted on this enduring resistance is through the production of literary and cultural texts that challenge the myth of erasure, often through the appropriation of colonial tools themselves. This article reads technological motifs that surface across two documentary films created by Indigenous directors. Abenaki film-maker Alanis Obomsawin’s (2002) documentary Is the Crown at War with Us? situates a struggle over the contemporary application of Mi’kmaq Treaty guarantees to subsistence rights within the context of the ongoing settler-colonial project of elimination (Wolfe 2006). Ngāti Apa film-maker Barry Barclay’s (2005) documentary The Kaipara Affair offers strikingly resonant meditations on the friction between Māori conservation mechanisms and commercial fishing encroachments that impinge upon the access to lands and fisheries granted to Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Through a panoramic presentation of concerns regarding overfishing by outsiders in the village of Tinopai, Barclay teases out tensions between settler-colonialism, resource extraction, and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty. Throughout both films, interviewees continually place the development of unsustainable environmental practices within the framing of the distinct yet historically resonant settler-colonial structures of Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. In light of these narrative architectures, I draw out how technologies of documentation (treaties), film (the camera), and environmental resource extraction (unsustainable fishing practices) are presented in both films as key aspects of creating and maintaining colonial domination as well as articulating sovereignty. The representation of these three themes is portrayed in both Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s films as technologies that are foundational to both settler-colonial domination and Indigenous sovereignty in ways that respond to the particular political contexts of Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church and Tinopai, the two communities represented in the films. In placing these two films alongside one another, I attend to the irregular purchase of global capitalism, (post)colonial representation, and Indigenous sovereignty as these present across the films’ thematic, political, and cultural preoccupations.

In taking technologies of documentation, surveillance, and resource extraction as the thematic focus in this article, it is first necessary to distinguish the parameters of how I understand “technology” as a term. Donna Haraway (1988) has pointed to the necessity of departing from a Eurocentric notion of industrial mechanics or computerized information processing. Instead, she points towards understanding technologies as “ways of life” and/or “skilled practices” (587). In considering technology as such, this article reads a series of technological motifs that are presented in both films as potentially liberatory tools through which to express specific articulations of Indigenous sovereignty. These include: treaty documentation, the camera, and metaphoric and material interpretations of the fishing net as a piscatory technology. These motifs are unevenly echoed in interviewee testimonies across both films, presenting a compelling opportunity to compare the film-makers’ representation and theorizing of these technologies in distinct ways. I consider how documentation processes in both Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand connect the legacies of each nation state’s partial and particular treaty relationships with divergent Indigenous groups to contemporary government-supported resource extraction endeavours. Turning to consider the camera, I situate this particular tool within the historical context of colonial ethnography and the myth of the “vanishing Indian” or “vanishing indigene” (Dippie [1982] 1991; Berkhofer [1979] 2011; Tallbear 2013, 513). From this, I read Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s filmic practices as sharing commitments to reclaiming and elevating Indigenous narratives, culture, and values, whilst diverging in their aesthetic style and, critically, their political ambitions.

Finally, in considering changing piscatory practices from sustainable Indigenous resource management strategies to increasingly extractive over-harvesting practices, I consider the contrast between sustenance practices and the mechanisms threatening these lifeways through state encroachment and commercial extractivism that are depicted in both films. Expanding on the films’ attention to the damage of large-scale harvesting mechanisms, I turn to discuss the metaphorical and material potential of the fishing net as an interwoven emblem of constraint and porosity (Bush 2014; Woolford 2014, 2015). In Obomsawin’s film, bureaucratic limitations on lobster pots, insistence on licences, and imposed seasonal restrictions are presented as conservation mechanisms by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), but are ultimately shown to function as technologies of constraint that further dispossess Mi’kmaq of their rights to sustenance fishing. In The Kaipara Affair, sustainable sustenance fishing practices such as the technique of the rāhui (a short-term seasonal ban on fishing) are contrasted with images of commercial trawler nets. Drawing on Andrew Woolford’s (2014, 31–32, 2015, 3–4) formulation of colonialism as a “series of nets” that form a “colonial mesh”, I read motifs of documentation, surveillance, and extraction across both films as examples of the enmeshed nature of settler-colonialism within geographic and historic contexts. The metaphor of the net, although somewhat anomalous in Woolford’s framing of the residential schooling system, is extremely apt in this analysis of Is the Crown at War with Us? and The Kaipara Affair, documentaries that draw attention to significant Indigenous fishing rights struggles of the early millennium in Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church, Canada and the Kaipara Harbour of Aotearoa/New Zealand respectively. In comparing these struggles, I consider the differing ambitions of Indigenous sovereignty in two distinct contexts. In Obomsawin’s film, sovereignty is presented as a central political-thematic concern for the community at Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church, whereas Barclay’s vision in The Kaipara Affair is of a coalition of Māori and Pākehā profoundly aware of the compound colonial and environmental crisis in which they are enmeshed.

Codifying colonial domination

Treaties surface in both Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s films. Although highly specific in (intra)national contexts, the power of documentation as a dual technology of dispossession and assertive sovereignty is explored in both films through the motif of treaties, setting both struggles within the legal parameters of settler-colonial relations as they stand in Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand.¹ I read the recurring mention of Mi’kmaq treaty rights reaffirmed through the 1999 R. v. Marshall decision (Union of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq n.d.) and The Treaty of Waitangi as documentation technologies that embody the practice of treaty-making as the investment of a document with legal power, symbolizing the role of codification in settler-colonialism.² Treaties are respectively presented as technologies of Indigenous sovereignty in Is the Crown at War with Us? and ambivalent dispossession in The Kaipara Affair – divergent representations that frame the specific ways in which both films grapple with different contexts of settler–Indigenous relations.

In the Canadian context, the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725–79 were signed between the British and a range of Indigenous nations whose ancestral lands span the north-eastern region of the US and Canada. For the purposes of this article, I will concentrate on the Halifax treaties of 1760–61 invoked in the R. v Marshall Supreme Court of Canada case (Supreme Court of Canada 1999) around which Obomsawin’s film is narratively structured. Early in the film, Herman Somerville, an elderly interviewee from the Burnt Church Reserve, gives an account of his first encounter with the knotty bureaucracy of federal law versus treaty-assured rights as it relates to his experience as a fisherman. “I had no [fishing] license”, he states, “I had a permit! Like, from the treaty – you know? From the Treaty?” (Obomsawin 2002). Somerville’s frustration leads into Obomsawin’s narration of the Supreme Court of Canada (1999) R. v. Marshall decision which affirmed the rights of Mi’kmaq to exceed legislated fishing requirements such as seasonality and licence permissions – as guaranteed to them by the treaties of 1760–61. Obomsawin glosses the series of events from 1993 to the final ruling in 1999 that eventually established the right to a “moderate livelihood” (Union of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq) – the foundational statement of the ruling that has been reiterated in subsequent fisheries conflicts across Mi’kmaq territory as recently as 2020–21.³ Somerville’s early mention of treaty rights can be interpreted as an articulation of sovereignty that is ultimately frustrated by settler ambitions to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their rights, despite these rights having been established through the settlers’ own technologies of codification. Mentions of the treaties act as a refrain throughout the film and are frequently invoked by interviewees as shorthand for the mutually assured rights delineated to Indigenous peoples. Their recognition by the settler-state transforms the treaties into sovereign technologies for the Mi’kmaq, affirming their recognized and mutually agreed rights in the settler-colonial sphere, a status that is commented upon by Allison Metallic, Chief of Listuguj First Nation. In his interview, Metallic evinces a connection between land-based sovereignty and legal victories, stating: “[I]n the Atlantic provinces, we have never surrendered our lands. Our treaties will be the mechanism that we need to use [ … ] in fighting with the federal government” (Obomsawin 2002; emphasis added). The relationship between land-based and legal sovereignty is articulated most clearly here by Metallic, but is echoed by multiple interviewees and thus narratively elevated as a central theme throughout the film.

The context surrounding The Kaipara Affair points to strikingly different political conclusions that emphasize the colonial logic engendered by treaties as technologies of Indigenous dispossession. Signed in 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi is regularly identified by interviewees in the film as the foundation of their dispute with the government over unsustainable fishing by outsiders. The English-language version of the document calls for Māori to “cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England [ … ] all the rights and powers of Sovereignty” in return for the “full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries” (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 2008). This cessation of sovereignty, although disputed due to crucial differences in meaning in the Māori translation of the text, forms the basis for the critique of the Treaty as a technology of dispossession that is presented in Barclay’s film.

Like the Mi’kmaq residents of Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church, the residents of the small settlement of Tinopai (both Māori and Pākehā) do not hesitate to link the linguistic manipulation and resulting dispossession of the Treaty with the situation the local fishing community faces in the early millennium. In a discussion of the relevance of the Treaty to the contemporary concerns of Tinopai residents, local activist Mikaera Miru labels the Treaty an “instrument” designed to “facilitate the peaceful movement of the white man into New Zealand” (Barclay 2005). Later, Miru vehemently questions whether the issuing of “documents” legitimates the forfeiting of Māori sovereignty, given the colonial privileging of European legislative frameworks over Indigenous laws. The most striking connection of the Treaty with Indigenous dispossession lies in Miru’s remark that “Europeans have been inventing pieces of paper that give them some status since the very first colonial encounters” (Barclay 2005). The language Miru uses – “instruments”, “documents”, and “pieces of paper” – strengthens the claim that the Treaty of Waitangi, as it is presented in Barclay’s film, can be read as a documentational technology that contributed to facilitating Indigenous dispossession in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Miru’s identification of a connection between documentation and the legitimation of colonial dispossession illustrates this further. In naming the “invented” nature of the Treaty, Miru identifies its ideological investment, thereby beginning a discursive dismantling of the power with which it is inscribed, and drawing attention to the privileging of European documentation practices. This shift contrasts sharply with the ambitions articulated by the Mi’kmaq interviewees in Obomsawin’s film, for whom the codified nature of their Treaty functions as tangible evidence of their indelible rights in contemporary legal battles. In both films, recurring mentions of rights, breaches, and documentation processes serve to connect these founding articles with contemporary struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. In so doing, Obomsawin and Barclay present distinct yet politically resonant critiques of colonial encroachment through elevating the voices of local opposition to technologies of documentation through the technique of documentary interviews.

Technologies of surveillance: The camera as an instrument of erasure

Impulses to capture, collect, and classify have underpinned the creation and maintenance of Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand as settler-colonial states. Haraway’s (1988) characterization of “the Western eye” as “a traveling lens” recalls the collapsibility between the surveying “eye” and the mechanized “lens”, inviting reflection on the role of the camera as an optic instrument in the making of the settler-colony, through its role in cartographic surveying as well as in entrenching typological systems of classification through anthropological photography. Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria’s ([1969] 1988, 79) identification of the ubiquity of the camera to the anthropologist is an emblematic critique of photographic technologies. In a similar vein, Vizenor (1998) directly links the camera as a technology of imagic dispossession with colonial histories (and contemporary realities) of live exhibition, and the retention of ancestral remains in museums. Elsewhere, in critiquing cameras as “instruments of institutive discoveries and predatory surveillance”, Vizenor lambasts the instrumentalization of the camera in creating and maintaining the myth of vanishment – freezing Indigenous subjects in a simulated stasis (1998, 146). In reading the camera as fundamental to the project of typological classification, he critiques the anthropological impulse to “poselock” Indigenous peoples within historic temporalities that dispossess them of the right to, and reality of, survivance (146).

In light of this historic context of imagic dispossession, one might expect a hesitation on the part of those who were subject to colonial documentation to utilize the camera as a tool of liberation. However, much like postcolonial literary reclamations of European languages, formal conventions, and generic parameters (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002), the camera, too, has been reclaimed as an emancipatory weapon, a “gun that shoots 24 frames a second” (Solanas and Getino 1970). In their iconic cinematic manifesto, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino argue that colonized peoples have a political imperative to visualize a liberatory cultural imagery. In order to resist the racist stereotypes and cultural essentialism of “First” (i.e. Hollywood) cinema, and in crafting an emancipatory process that extends beyond the liberal sympathies of “Second Cinema”, the authors propose a “Third Cinema” that appropriates the camera of the colonizer to the advantage of the colonized. However, despite an uneasy awareness of the history of imagic dispossession through colonial photographic and filmic practices, neither Obomsawin’s nor Barclay’s films fall into the trap of affixing binary notions of “Indigenous” or “settler” status to the cinematic technologies their directors are working within. Instead, as Seran (2015) notes in an analysis of ekphrasis in Māori literature, contemporary interventions in photography have transformed the once “unidirectional play of agency between western photographer and Indigenous subject [ … ] into something more dialectical”. The broader idea of visual sovereignty has been more widely theorized by Jolene Rickard (2011), and by Michelle H. Raheja (2010) who specifically attends to sovereignty in Indigenous film-making. Barclay’s own concept of a “Fourth Cinema” that Raheja draws upon, emphasizes imagic sovereignty as well as insisting on the need for Indigenized modes of filmic production and distribution that are capable of transcending market-based expectations for Indigenous cinematic genres, forms, and subjects. These theories and practices of filmic resistance, although certainly influenced by the liberatory potential of Solanas and Getino, move to view the camera not as an appropriated weapon, but instead seek to turn the instrument into a “friend” (Barclay [1990] 2015, 9).

Fourth Cinema rests on the ability to transmute the camera, once the exclusive property of the colonial anthropologist/ethnographer, into a sovereign technology through the intriguing act of befriending the machine. This reclaims the camera from the grasp of colonial typologies to serve the liberatory project of Indigenous self-representation – a recuperative practice that Raheja has termed “visual sovereignty” (2007, 2010). Thus, Barclay refutes an unnecessarily technophobic position that risks reinscribing problematic binaries between tradition and modernity that continue to position Indigenous peoples in a state of stasis. In his conception of “the camera on the ship” and “the camera ashore”, Barclay’s (2003) metaphor for the moment of colonial encounter serves as a distillation of his theory of Fourth Cinema. In imagining the camera, a colonial technology that cast Indigenous peoples as relics of the past, in the hands of the peoples on the shore (that is to say, Indigenous peoples) the instrument becomes a liberatory tool for documenting the globalized exploitation of Indigenous lands and lifeways by extractive colonial structures. Barclay’s method seeks to personify the camera, taming and reframing it in the eyes of local people into a trusted companion that can be confided in, rather than an instrument of imagic dispossession.

In Our Own Image, Barclay outlines how he employed this method during the making of the documentary series Tangata Whenua. In “mak[ing] the camera a listener” (Barclay [1990] 2015, 15–17), Barclay’s method sets his interviewees at ease through the use of a long-distance lens and microphone instead of conventional close-ups. The scenes of the hui, a community gathering/assembly, illustrate a similarly unobtrusive technique in The Kaipara Affair that exemplifies Barclay’s integration of the camera’s “eye” into a participatory community vision. In an early sequence, the camera is aligned with the observing heads of those attending the hui, gazing up at the speaker – recalling the perspective of the meeting participants. The sequence identifies viewers of the film with the community, interacting with the ebb and flow of the meeting. The camera here accounts for the multiple and varied perspectives of audience members rather than attempting to capture any singular essence of the community’s perspective on the complex and layered issues of fishing rights and resource depletion being debated. In Our Own Image, Barclay ([1990] 2015, 10) acknowledges his schooling in the British documentary tradition. However, through aligning the camera’s gaze with the eyes of the community, and regularly departing entirely from speaking interviewees to roam freely through shots of “impressionistic abstraction” (Murray 2008, 87), Barclay re-imagines the potential of the documentary genre. As Raheja notes in her reading of Ataranujat: The Fast Runner, these types of slow, often difficult sequences are also an exhibition of visual sovereignty (2007, 117), demanding the audience keep a patient pace-keeping with the community telling the story that resists the issue-based format of the “activist documentary” (Murray 2007, 154).

A similar effect is achieved in Is the Crown at War with Us?, albeit through different means. Obomsawin’s voice permeates her interviews with sensitive prompts, questions, and assents to participants’ testimonies. Episodes chronicling the historical, legal, and political context of Mi’kmaq treaty agreements as they relate to colonization, cultural erasure, and fishing rights are narrated throughout the film by Obomsawin herself. Although these are fairly standard documentary techniques, their effect is to “situate [Obomsawin] within the text” (Gauthier 2010, 29). The embedded position of Obomsawin as an Indigenous film-maker using technology to work in solidarity with communities towards the goal of sovereignty is brought to the fore, transcending the colonial inheritances of the form. This departure from the camera as an “all-seeing eye” to a sensitive, witnessing presence is further entrenched in a tense episode in Is the Crown at War with Us?, documenting an encounter between a DFO (Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans) patrol and Mi’kmaq fishermen on the waters of Miramichi Bay. In the ensuing scene, the camera’s lens is splashed as the Mi’kmaq captain of the documentary crew’s vessel swerves to avoid an aggressive DFO boat. The lens thus bears witness to the continuum of colonial violence that Indigenous communities are enmeshed within and reminds the viewer of the material threat faced by Obomsawin and her crew as they place themselves on the front lines alongside Mi’kmaq fishermen who are subject to frequent acts of violence by DFO patrols and non-Indigenous fishermen. The droplets that scatter the image of the lens recall Haraway’s metaphor of vision in determining the parameters of how and what we see by visually obscuring the image of the scene presented to the audience. Haraway’s call to establish “the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths” (1988, 581; emphasis added) is thus achieved in Obomsawin’s praxis of privileging Indigenous viewpoints. In amphibious and underwater scenes, Obomsawin enacts the idea of seeing from the depths through camera operation that figuratively privileges stories “from below” whilst literally integrating the camera in and under the contested waters of Miramichi Bay.

This vision from the depths contrasts sharply with technologies of surveillance that thematically surface in Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s films. Following the scenes of the camera being splashed is a prolonged shot of a DFO helicopter surveying the waters below (Obomsawin 2002). The camera is angled lens-upwards – a significant distinction from the downward gaze of those in the aircraft – and is allowed to transcend its inheritance as an instrument of colonial surveillance in order to share in a collective vision from below. A profoundly similar shot echoes in The Kaipara Affair – whereby the aircraft is eventually revealed to be carrying the Fisheries Minister to Tinopai – an arrival that has been anticipated throughout the film. In both films, the image of the helicopter exemplifies the idea of a vision from above that distinguishes the colonial gaze from the upwardly angled camera lens that represents the Indigenous vision from below in Obomsawin’s film.

An alignment between surveyance and surveillance is invoked by Obomsawin in the use of archival cartographic images that overlay her historical narration – and through frequent references to the threat of state encroachment on Indigenous families through surveillance technologies such as binoculars and the helicopter. These quietly signal the threatening potential for community fracture through assimilatory practices such as the residential schooling system. Throughout the film, Indigenous residents fleetingly make reference to this chapter in their community’s history. Herbert Somerville quietly reveals that he was removed from Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church at an early age. When prompted to elaborate, he falters: “I wouldn’t like to … talk about it at all. That’s how it was” (Obomsawin 2002). This mention of the residential schooling system sets the tone for the suspicious attitude towards technologies of surveillance presented in Obomsawin’s film. References to the relationship between schooling and the settler-colonial project of elimination pepper the ensuing interviews with children, adults, and elders. Accordingly, we can view the residential school system and child welfare-mandated removals as technologies of assimilation dependent on the surveillance of Indigenous communities. Two particularly striking scenes illuminate this: an interview with a fisherman explaining that he needs to make a profit in order to ensure that his children “start looking good in schools” and a later scene in which fishermen watch their children speeding away from them in a school bus whilst awaiting the verdict on their case on the courthouse steps (Obomsawin 2002). In the former, the perceived threat from the state – even after the formal end of the era of residential schooling – underscores the fisherman’s acquiescence to institutional dress codes in order to divert the surveilling attentions of the state. The relationship between social services and schooling is implicit here, but it is outlined clearly in Ojibwa education scholar Dennis McPherson’s (2011) analysis of the trajectory between the closure of residential schools and the increase in child removals by “well-intentioned social workers” (157) that became known as the “Sixties Scoop” (Johnston 1983). The triad of surveillance, schooling, and social workers is evidenced in the fisherman’s pragmatism on the need to turn enough of a profit to ensure his family does not attract unwarranted attention from social services that might offer an excuse for interference. In the school bus scene, the tension between Mi’kmaq families and the state schooling system is heightened; the yellow bus – an emblematic symbol of North American schooling – pauses opposite the courthouse, where Mi’kmaq fishermen wait to hear the verdict on their case. One comments on the shame he feels, saying: “us criminals [are being] dragged in front of our children” (Obomsawin 2002). The scene closes with the panning camera following the departure of the school bus, intimating a subtle sense of unease at what this departure may symbolize in the wider context of surveillance and schooling the film signals towards.

In both films, visions from above and below contrastingly illuminate the power dynamics inherent in global struggles for Indigenous sovereignty; yet The Kaipara Affair invites critical expansion beyond its own hyper-local dynamic. Whilst the footage of the helicopter approaching Tinopai appears an incongruous indulgence on the part of the central government, the image of the seabird that immediately follows the image of the helicopter offers a quintessential envisioning of freedom. Cut between these scenes are dramatic sequences of masked students reciting scenes from Plato’s Republic, a carefully selected yet understated addition that Stuart Murray (2008, 84) suggests “offer[s] telling insights into the power relations inherent in the governing of the Kaipara”. These highly curated scenes are further placed opposite a recitation from exiled Iraqi poet Emad Jabber – a figure whose presence in the film is a particularly sensitive commentary on the expansion of imperial dynamics beyond settler–Indigenous relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Jabber’s integration and equal narrative presence elegantly refute potential accusations of the concerns of Tinopai residents being founded in narrow visions of local protectionism, instead pointing to the varied violences of global capitalism whilst remaining firmly grounded in the specificities of place. This chimes with the commitment to place and land that Janice Hladki (2006) has identified in Obomsawin’s work. Through this commitment to local sovereignties, both films work to “re-territorialize against the deterritorialization of liberal capitalist democracy” (86) through identifying specific technological motifs that highlight conditions of Indigenous enmeshment within settler-colonial structures. These highly local power relations and contexts are aligned thematically with wider global struggles for sovereignty in both films – thus demonstrating the uneven textures and terrains of (post)colonial capitalism in a globalized world.

Piscatory extractivism and the settler-colonial mesh

Woolford has conceptualized forms of colonial assimilation as “a series of nets” thatwork to “entrap Indigenous peoples within the settler-colonial project” (2015, 3). Technologies of documentation, surveillance, and ethnographic erasure such as those I have analysed in this article can thus be conceptualized through Woolford’s analysis of the colonial netting that comprises the “mesh” of settler-colonial society. But it is the technology of the net itself – as it relates to Indigenous fishing rights struggles – that is particularly striking to consider as a mechanism that epitomizes settler-colonial constraints whilst leaving room for the kinds of porosity that are so central to Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s films. These lacunae allow for theorizations of Indigenous agency and navigation within settler-colonialism’s oppressive structure, thus envisioning the shifting ground upon which articulations of sovereignty, as “an overarching concept for interpreting the interconnected space of the colonial gaze, deconstruction of the colonizing image or text, and Indigeneity” (Rickard 2011, 471), are strategized and invoked.

The image of the net is particularly resonant in The Kaipara Affair’s contrasting presentations of Indigenous conservation practices such as the rāhui (a short-term seasonal ban on fishing) against the over-harvesting of fish and shellfish (particularly scallops, as Miru notes) by international trawlers and unwitting tourists. In a sombre sequence, trawling nets are seen to stretch for miles, choking off Tinopai’s stretch of the Kaipara Harbour from the Pacific Ocean. The imagery of the net symbolizes both the decline of traditional fishing practices and the entrapment of the Tinopai community in neoliberal policy decisions that encourage the abandonment of conservation techniques and favour extractive technologies in order to fulfil demanding transnational appetites. One of the Tinopai residents warns that even the innocuous fishing net can become a “dangerous tool in the wrong hands” (Barclay 2005), inviting a comparison of the use of small-scale set-netting on the part of local fisherman against the mass-harvesting of commercial fisheries. Trawling nets that enhance fishermen’s catch through their vast reach are thus presented as an extractive technology fundamentally at odds with the responsibilities to “land and life” that sovereignty necessitates (Tuck and Yang, 2012). The methods of commercial fishermen are further aligned with the technologies of documentation that are presented throughout the film when one resident angrily bemoans that “they [commercial fishermen] are taking more than they are legally entitled to take” (Barclay 2005; emphasis added). This snippet of dialogue links the exploitation of the natural environment with Miru’s critique of the Treaty as a documentational technology of settlement, as initially invoked in his positioning of the Treaty of Waitangi as an emblem of colonial dispossession. The language of colonization is further echoed by an elderly woman who refers to tourists taking shellfish unsustainably as “pillaging and raping” (Barclay 2005). This lexicon recalls both the gendered violence of colonization that was incurred under the auspices of settling the new nation and the looting of taonga (treasures) for the collections of curious Europeans. In linking the extractive technologies of commercial fishing with both the colonial tools of documentation and the language of anti-colonial resistance, The Kaipara Affair presents a community profoundly aware of its enmeshment in a compound structure of colonial dispossession.

Although the fishermen of Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church predominantly use lobster pots rather than nets, here Woolford’s metaphor recalls the enmeshment of Indigenous peoples within the myriad layers of settler-colonial “netting” (2014, 2015). The discussion of ostensibly environmentally conscious fishing practices such as seasonal licences and boundaries on fishing areas, as proposed by the Department of Fisheries, demonstrates the way in which conservation discourses can be weaponized as a technology of constraint against Indigenous peoples. An illuminating connection between conservational discourses and the historic and continuing dispossession of Indigenous peoples is made by a fisherman who, when asked for his opinion on the Department of Fisheries’ proposal to impose a boundary line for Mi’kmaq fishers, comments that “boundaries mean reservation” (Obomsawin 2002). Cloaked in the language of environmentalism, the DFO’s proposal is identified with the historic connection between conservation and land dispossession that has consistently characterized settler-colonial approaches to environmental protection.

Sadiah Qureshi (2013) has offered a thorough analysis of the relationship between 19th-century conservation discourses and coeval attitudes to stadial theories of human development which regarded the extinction of Indigenous peoples as an inevitable process. Qureshi argues that discourses of extinction came to define attitudes to Indigenous peoples in a way that closely relates to how early conservationists viewed natural elements at risk of endangerment. This, she suggests, contributed to a problematic lexicon of conservation that relies on “notions of wilderness in the American context to rationalize policies of Indian dispossession, forced removal from their traditional homelands, and the establishment of the world’s first national parks” (Qureshi 2013, 267). Building on Qureshi’s identification of this triad of (codified) policies, forced removal, and conservation initiatives, the environmentalist language invoked by the DFO in Is the Crown at War With Us? can be interpreted as a continuation of North American environmentalist impulses that dispossess Indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and illustrates a further example of the layers in the settler-colonial mesh that work concurrently across macro-, meso-, and micro-levels towards the assimilatory/eliminatory ambitions of settler-colonialism (Woolford 2015, 13; Wolfe 2006).

Conclusion: Technologies of resistance

In this article I have examined how the increasingly uneven purchase of capitalism in the 21st century has engendered tensions between struggles for Indigenous sovereignty within and beyond the structural framing of settler-colonial states. As explored in two documentaries that examine conflicts over fishing rights, I have offered a comparative analysis of how Obomsawin and Barclay, as Indigenous film-makers working in resonant yet highly distinct contexts, deploy technological motifs in order to comment on the double potential of these tools for Indigenous dispossession and anti-colonial liberation. Technologies of documentation, such as the founding articles of the Halifax Treaties of 1760–61 and the resulting Supreme Court of Canada’s decision that reaffirmed Mi’kmaq Treaty-assured rights and the Treaty of Waitangi have divergently engendered contemporary articulations and actions of Indigenous sovereignty and continued dispossession respectively. From this critical perspective I moved to consider the historic role of the camera in colonial societies, as an instrument of ethnographic erasure that has been reclaimed by both Obomsawin and Barclay in the service of elevating Indigenous narratives. The movement of the camera from a technology of dispossession to sharing in a vision from below led into a discussion of technologies of surveillance as invoked through the films’ imagery of surveying aircraft, residential schooling, and child removal policies, and global dialectics of oppression and resistance. Finally, I transposed Woolford’s (2014; 2015) conception of settler-colonial societal structures as a “series of nets” into the context of the Indigenous fishing struggles that are documented in Is the Crown at War With Us? and The Kaipara Affair. Through this, I offered a close analysis of both the particular extensions of Woolford’s metaphor in the case of specific fishing practices, such as Barclay’s symbolic representations of neocolonial extractivism in the image of the trawler net, and Obomsawin’s portrayal of thematic connections between enclosure, conservation, and Indigenous dispossession.

Despite the constricting nature of the settler-colonial mesh, Woolford is careful to emphasize the possibility for agential navigation that netting (by virtue of its propensity to “snag” and “tear”) engenders (Woolford 2015, 4). Though both Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s films situate contemporary struggles for Indigenous sovereignty within the oppressive continuum of colonization, both resist the stasis of victimry that Vizenor (1993, 1994, 1998) has repeatedly called critical attention to in cinematic and literary representations of Indigenous peoples. Through an attentiveness to sovereignty, local specificity, and collective liberation, both Obomsawin and Barclay thematically invoke technological motifs alongside material reclamations of colonial technologies and mediums (such as the camera and the documentary genre) to propose and elevate a theory and praxis of sovereign technologies through their respective films. In so doing, they wield technologies historically used to dispossess Indigenous peoples in Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church, Tinopai, and across the globe as tools of resistance in an ongoing assertion of sovereignty.

Declaration of conflicting interests

None.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professor David Stirrup and Dr Matthew Whittle at the University of Kent for generously offering their time and support throughout the development of this article. Thanks also to the two anonymous peer-reviewers and the journal editors for their helpful directions that have strengthened this piece. Finally, thanks to Steve Russell at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision for his enthusiasm about the research and assistance in accessing The Kaipara Affair.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England Doctoral Training Partnership studentship (CHASE DTP).

Notes on contributors

Shelley Angelie Saggar

Shelley Angelie Saggar is a Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE)-funded PhD researcher and museum worker based across the School of English and the Centre for Indigenous and Settler-Colonial Studies at the University of Kent, UK. Her project examines reclamations and contestations of the museum in Native American and Māori film and literature, asking how methods drawn from postcolonial and Indigenous literary studies can contribute to decolonial heritage practices both within and beyond the museum. She also works as a collections researcher at the Science Museum and Wellcome Collection, where her focus is on developing protocols for managing culturally sensitive items in the historical medical collections.

Notes

1. It is important to note that Canada has different treaty relations with distinct Indigenous nations encompassed within its contemporary borders. This is a very different context to the founding nature of the Treaty of Waitangi, which sets out national settler–Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to Māori as a collective of peoples, rather than distinct relationships with individual iwi.

2. The R. v. Marshall Supreme Court decision of 1999 affirmed the rights of Mi’kmaq to exceed legislated fishing requirements such as seasonality and licence permissions – as was guaranteed to them by the treaties of 1760–61 (see Union of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq n.d.).

3. From October to December 2020, disputes arose again between Mi’kmaq fishers from Sipekne’katik First Nation and non-Indigenous fishers in the region. In January 2021, Canadian outlet Global News reported that 23 people had been charged in connection with violence at a First Nations-owned and -operated lobster fishery (see Quon 2021).