Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context

Reverse Shots

Film and Media Studies Series

Film studies is the critical exploration of cinematic texts as art and entertainment, as well as the industries that produce them and the audiences that consume them. Although a medium barely one hundred years old, film is already transformed through the emergence of new media forms. Media studies is an interdisciplinary field that considers the nature and effects of mass media upon individuals and society and analyzes media content and representations. Despite changing modes of consumption—especially the proliferation of individuated viewing technologies—film has retained its cultural dominance into the 21st century, and it is this transformative moment that the WLU Press Film and Media Studies series addresses.

Our Film and Media Studies series includes topics such as identity, gender, sexuality, class, race, visuality, space, music, new media, aesthetics, genre, youth culture, popular culture, consumer culture, regional/national cinemas, film policy, film theory, and film history.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submissions. For further information, please contact the Series editors, all of whom are in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University:

Dr. Philippa Gates

Email: pgates@wlu.ca

Dr. Russell Kilbourn

Email: rkilbourn@wlu.ca

Dr. Ute Lischke

Email: ulischke@wlu.ca

Department of English and Film Studies

Wilfrid Laurier University

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5

Canada

Phone: 519-884-0710

Fax: 519-884-8307

Reverse Shots

Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context

Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, editors

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Reverse shots : indigenous film and media in an international context / Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, editors.

(Film and media studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-335-5 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-55458-425-3 (pdf).—

ISBN 978-1-55458-426-0 (epub)

1. Indigenous films—History and criticism. 2. Indigenous peoples in motion pictures. 3. Indigenous peoples and mass media. I. Knabe, Susan, 1962–, author, editor II. Pearson, Wendy Gay, 1954–, author, editor III. Series: Film and media studies series

PN1995.9.I49R49 2015                   791.43’63529                   C2014-903397-4

                                                                                                      C2014-903398-2

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover image: Coyote o:t Ku’ty (Haute Couture) Series, #1 (mixed media, 2008), by Renée E. Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.

The chapter Ka Whawhai Tonu Māou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoar/New Zealand, by Jo Smith and Sue Abel, appeared in different form in the New Zealand Journal of Media Studies 11.1 (June 2008).

© 2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

PART I DREAM MAKERS

INTRODUCTION

Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media

Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe

ONE

He Who Dreams: Reflections on an Indigenous Life in Film

Michael Greyeyes

PART II DECOLONIZING HISTORIES

TWO

Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices

Ernie Blackmore

THREE

Taking Pictures B(l)ack: The Work of Tracey Moffatt

Susan Knabe

FOUR

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Arctic History as Post/Colonial Cinema

Kerstin Knopf

FIVE

Australian Indigenous Short Film as a Pedagogical Device: Introducing Wayne Blair’s The Djarn Djarns and Black Talk

Colleen McGloin

SIX

Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away": Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes

Wendy Gay Pearson

PART III MEDIATING PRACTICES

SEVEN

Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous Television in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Jo Smith and Sue Abel

EIGHT

Superhighway across the Sky … Aboriginal New Media Arts in Australia: A Remix and Email Conversation between Adam Szymanski and Jenny Fraser

Jenny Fraser and Adam Szymanski

NINE

On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South

Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove

PART IV DOCUMENTARY APPROACHES

TEN

The Prince George Métis Elders Documentary Project: Matching Product with Process in New Forms of Documentary

Stephen Foster and Mike Evans

ELEVEN

Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone": Native Humour and Its Healing Powers in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew

Ute Lischke

TWELVE

Situating Indigenous Knowledges: The Talking Back of Alanis Obomsawin and Shelley Niro

Maeghan Pirie

THIRTEEN

I Wanted to Say How Beautiful We Are": Cultural Politics in Loretta Todd’s Hands of History

Gail Vanstone

PART V OTHER PERSPECTIVES

FOURTEEN

Filming Indigeneity as Flânerie: Dialectic and Subtext in Terrance Odette’s Heater

Tanis MacDonald

FIFTEEN

Playing with Land Issues: Subversive Hybridity in The Price of Milk

Davinia Thornley

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

1.1 Kent Monkman, Crowfoot re-creation photo

1.2 Kent Monkman, untitled installation with screening of A Nation Is Coming (1996)

4.1 Apak accepts the gift of the salt

4.2 Avva relates Inuit intellectual knowledge

4.3 Nuqallaq and Umik preach

4.4 The converted sing hymns

6.1 An unnamed warrior (Johnny Buniyira) holds the camera and stares into the lens

8.1 Aroha Groves, detail from Connections2, virtual reality installation

8.2 Burning Daylight, Marrugeku Company, 2009

8.3 r e a, detail from maang (messagestick), three-channel DVD and sound installation

8.4 Jason Davidson, Falcon Wings for Hope, detail from Street Machine, 2010

8.5 Jenny Fraser, detail from Indian Cowboys / Cowboy Indians, video installation, 2009

10.1 Schematic diagram of interactive structure of DVD

10.2 Screen shot from DVD Studio Pro during production, illustrating interactivity among elements

10.3 Screen shot from Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Lac St. Anne interview

10.4 Screen shot from Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project, Elder’s introduction

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the hard work, patience, and collegiality of all of the contributors to this book. It’s been a long road, but we are very proud of the results. We also want to thank Ute Lischke, David McNab, and Gail Vanstone for their part in the organization of the conference that was the inspiration for this book—Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, held at Wilfrid Laurier University in May 2007. In particular, we want to thank our editor, Lisa Quinn, for her hard work and invaluable advice, as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose generous and helpful comments were an inspiration in getting to the finish line. We would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support of both the conference and this edited collection. Finally, we would like to thank Renée Bédard for allowing us to use one of her artworks on the cover of the book.

Part I Dream Makers

Introduction

Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media

WENDY GAY PEARSON AND SUSAN KNABE

My work is to educate our people … to put them back on the ground where they come from, and also to educate the outside world, to tell them we don’t live in igloos anymore and we’re as involved in high-speed Internet as you are. And when we cry, ice cubes don’t come out of our eyes.

— Zacharias Kunuk, qtd. in Sonia Gunderson

Running Fast to Preserve Inuit Culture

The Past in the Present: On Taxidermy, Zombies, Resistance, and Reappropriation

Very shortly after the motion picture camera was invented, along with the technology to process film and to screen the results before audiences, Indigenous peoples all over the world suddenly found themselves in front of the lens, their lives and cultures subject to the camera’s apparently indexical relationship to the truth.¹ The truth produced by these early cameras and the filmmakers behind them was, by and large, a visual exploration and commemoration of what were assumed, at the start of the twentieth century, to be rapidly vanishing Indigenous lives and cultures.² This is the story behind, for example, Robert Flaherty’s famous—perhaps infamous—Nanook of the North (1922). Fatimah Tobing Rony writes that in film history, Nanook is, importantly, seen as a point of origin: it has been called the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film (99). But, as Rony and other contemporary scholars examining Nanook have revealed, this well-known narrative of Indigenous peoples and film is at best partial and at worst inaccurate. Rony argues that in their hunt for authenticity, ethnographers like Flaherty produce frozen images that are akin to cinematic taxidermy (99). She notes that since indigenous peoples were assumed to be already dying if not dead, the ethnographic ‘taxidermist’ turned to artifice, seeking an image more true to the posited original. When Flaherty stated, ‘One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit,’ he was not just referring to his own artistry but to the preconditions for the effective, ‘true’ representation of so-called vanishing culture (102).

At its most negative, ethnographic film might be said to produce Indigenous peoples as zombies, simultaneously dead and alive (reflecting as well the spirit of taxidermy, which is to make the dead object look alive), or perhaps alive despite having been declared dead. That, too, is the result of colonization, which from the mid-nineteenth century worked hard in most settler/invader countries to produce non-Indigenous people inside Indigenous skins. The zombie image, more popularly accessible than the more academic notion of taxidermy, has a real power, one very successfully exploited in Lisa Jackson’s short film Savage (2009), where a young girl delivered to a residential school in the 1950s arrives to find that her classmates-to-be have been transformed into zombies. The whiteness of their faces reflects the whitening of their self-understanding as cultural subjects—something the film emphasizes through irony when the children dance, ahistorically, to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Regardless of how the audience understands the whitening of Michael Jackson’s own face, his image undergirds Lisa Jackson’s short film in order to further ironize the colonializing and racializing effects of deculturation.

Without disputing the charge of taxidermic practice made against non-Indigenous ethnographic filmmakers or the zombie effects of deculturation, Michelle Raheja has also argued that it is at least as important to foreground the ways in which the Inuit instructed [Flaherty] on how to work collaboratively, according to their views of social and cultural interaction, as a form of aesthetic and technical diplomacy (Reservation Reelism, 195). Raheja goes on to argue that the collaborative tradition begun by the Inuit in the 1920s has carried forward to the present as the collaborative filmmaking projects of artists such as [Chris] Eyre and [Shelley] Niro suggest (195). It is important to keep in mind Raheja’s thoroughly documented recuperation of Indigenous agency, not only in terms of their own filmmaking practices but also in their collaborations with non-Indigenous artists and filmmakers and even in their attempts to influence and correct the steamroller that is Hollywood’s influence on representation. Thus people interested in Indigenous representation in film and video no longer need to concentrate solely on the taxidermic nature of ethnography or the influential stereotype-driven and stereotype-creating effects of the mainstream film industry; instead they can focus on resistance from Indigenous people within mainstream and national cinemas even before turning to the filmmaking history of Indigenous peoples themselves.

The partiality and inaccuracy of the narrative that positions Indigenous peoples only and always as the ethnographic subjects of the supposedly white technology of the motion picture can thus be explored in a number of different directions. That Indigenous peoples have not vanished, despite the fervent wishes of much of the European settler/invader populations (and others, in other parts of the world), seems self-evident. Nevertheless, what is evident to Indigenous peoples themselves and to their allies may not be overtly visible in populist discourse, or may simply prove unpopular with populations that have yet to come to terms with their racist past, let alone acknowledge a racist present. The desire for Indigenous disappearance from what is claimed to be no longer Indigenous land is reinforced by the evidence of both populist and governmental panic when censuses in the early twentieth century began to reveal that, at least in Canada, the Indigenous population was actually growing. Panics over First Nations, Métis, and Inuit population growth have continued throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first century in relation to the fact that, despite having a lower life expectancy, Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing group in Canada (in fact, outside of immigration, they are the only group experiencing population growth). Similar increases in Indigenous populations have been noted in Australia, the United States, and parts of Latin America.³ In the Canadian context, Warren Cariou trenchantly asks what this means for Canadians’ ideas of themselves:

It is ironic that the entire project of colonialism in North America was predicated upon a very different population prediction: a belief that Native peoples of this continent would inevitably die out when they were faced with the putative superiority of European civilization. The fact that North America’s Native people are not dying out, then, creates a crisis in western culture’s idea of itself. If the Indians are still here, and are even increasing in number, then what does that mean for the legal and moral legitimacy of a colonial culture that has displaced them from their land?

The desire for Indigenous disappearance from Canada also reflects historical changes in the relations between First Nations people and settlers. Prior to the War of 1812 (the point at which Indigenous numbers in central Canada began a rapid decline), First Nations people were regarded as valuable allies. By the mid-1850s, however, the paternalistic approach to governing First Nations people was firmly in place: Olive Dickason calls the First Nations the most regulated peoples in Canada …; their lives would be interfered with at every turn, down to the personal level (283). Residential schooling was the most effective (and symbolic) result of the shift from regarding First Nations people as sovereign allies (or, indeed, sovereign enemies) to wards of the Crown. In Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, residential schooling, to one degree or another, became the most direct form of deculturation and the locus of governments’ genocidal intent.⁴ Whether by means of warfare, starvation of Native peoples on inadequate reservation lands, cultural genocide (represented in the United States by the common saying, Kill the Indian, save the child), or the Australian breed the black out policy, Indigenous peoples in many settler-colonial nations were effectively under attack.⁵ Acknowledgement and tacit (or overt) approval of the methods and motives of such attacks underlie the taxidermic impulse that Rony identifies. At the same time, however, public racism and/or indifference as well as government policies found themselves confronted by many forms of Indigenous peoples’ resistance. Indigenous film today reflects a tradition begun by the earliest Indigenous filmmakers and by those who saw themselves, even if they were not seen in return, as collaborators in cinematic representation; it is also deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the histories and historical traumas that inform the lives of contemporary Indigenous peoples.

In relation to film itself, Raheja’s Reservation Reelism (2010) is an excellent example of the ways in which the common perception that Native Americans were merely Hollywood’s victims, or perhaps its dupes, starts to be dismantled by a more detailed, more complex perspective of the role of Indians in Hollywood. Raheja details how Hollywood Indians attempted to take control of their own depictions on film, from the early directorial efforts of James Young Deer (Ho-Chunk) and Edwin Carewe (Chickasaw) to the work of actors like Jay Silverheels (Mohawk) and Lillian St. Cyr (Winnebago). All of these people attempted to influence how Native Americans were represented on screen. Raheja builds on earlier work by scholars such as Faye Ginsburg who have investigated the actual roles that, for example, the Inuit played in the making of Nanook; they not only appeared in front of the camera (which is all that audiences then saw and all that most audiences see even today) but also served as technicians, camera operators, film developers, and production consultants (Screen Memories 39). Ginsburg also investigates a more institutional shift towards self-representation by Indigenous peoples in her work on the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) documentary You Are on Indian Land (1969). While most film histories attribute the film to director Mort Ransen, Farbod Honarpisheh has pointed out that even Ransen himself maintained that "the Indian Film Unit⁶ in general, and [Mike] Mitchell in particular, [were] the main creative forces behind" the documentary (82).⁷ Ginsburg, however, is more concerned with the historical perspective and particularly with producer George Stoney’s effect on the creation of the Indian Film Unit at the NFB. Ginsburg argues that

You Are on Indian Land signaled a crucial shift in assumptions about who should be behind the documentary camera, one that has had a lasting effect on First Nations film and video production in Canada. Stoney’s strong support at the time for the training and equipping of Canada’s first Native film crew, under the leadership of Mohawk activist Mike Mitchell, was a catalytic message to Canada’s First Nations communities, underscoring their concern to represent themselves both politically and in the media. (The After-Life of Documentary 66)

Ginsburg notes the particular synchronicity of both You Are on Indian Land and the founding of the Indian Film Unit: It is significant that the timing of the film coincided with the first wave of the modern movement for Aboriginal political rights in Canada and clearly helped to make those efforts visible (66). This was as true in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, where Indigenous political activism was marked by governmental and populist resistance but also by specific gains, primarily in the areas of citizenship and the right to vote.⁸ In the political turmoil of the 1960s, issues of representation came to the forefront everywhere. Victor Masayesva Jr., the Hopi photographer and videographer, notes that the turmoil of Indian activism in the late sixties and early seventies played a major part in exposing Native American peoples to the role of the media and how it could be used to advantage … ‘By-for-and-about’ became the criteria by which everything about Indians was to be judged (qtd. in Younger, 36). The 1960s and 1970s were a time of Indigenous protest movements around the globe—for example, the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the battle with the US government at Wounded Knee, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, and Sámi protests against the planned dam at Alta-Kautokeino. That this period still resonates for Indigenous communities in North America can be seen in recent documentaries like Trudell (USA, 2005) and A Good Day to Die (USA, 2010), about, respectively, AIM activists John Trudell and Dennis Banks, and like Oaivveskaldjut (Give Us Our Skeletons) (Norway, 1999), which tells stories interwoven through Alta dam protester Nils Somby’s relationship to the leaders of the nineteenth-century Kautokeino rebellion. In Canada, the Oka Crisis of 1990 has inspired a number of Indigenous documentaries, most famously Alanis Obomsawin’s award-winning Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which used Obomsawin’s on-the-spot footage along with news photography and other sources to create an extraordinarily powerful depiction of what it was like for the protesters. Obomsawin followed this up with three more films about the Oka Crisis: My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995), Spudwrench—Kahnawake Man (1997), and most recently Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000).

The advent of digital film technology and of home computers capable of running editing software has made some aspects of filmmaking even cheaper and more accessible in most parts of the settler-colonial world. For others, however, particularly people in remote or inaccessible regions, access to technology is still limited. This lack of access has been combated to some extent by a number of initiatives, from the long-running Video in the Villages project, which provides cameras and training to peoples along the Amazon basin and which was initiated in Sao Paulo by the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Centre for Indigenous Advocacy) in 1987, to the online distribution project that is Isuma.tv, which enables Indigenous film producers from anywhere in the world to upload their films to be viewed freely by everyone.⁹ Indeed, these two projects have come together in films like A Arca dos Zo’é (Meeting Ancestors), where Chief Waiwai of the Waiãpi documents his visit to the newly contacted Zo’é (2008). That film can be viewed on Isuma.tv via streaming video or, alternatively, in a low-bandwidth version.

The desire to use video technology to contact and learn about others is evident in another Video in the Villages film, From the Ikpeng Children to the World (2001), a documentary made quite literally by Ikpeng children, who explain their everyday lives and ask the children in the imagined audience if they too share these day-to-day experiences of school, chores, and play. The Ikpeng children made their film in response to a video-letter from the children of Sierra Maestra in Cuba, who similarly documented everyday life in their village. The Ikpeng children demonstrate how clearly they understand the transformations occurring in village life, referring constantly to how tasks like hunting, fishing, and food preparation were done by their grandparents and how they are done now. The result is an extraordinary, breathtaking act of self-ethnography, one that preserves for these children and their future aspects of their own cultural heritage and evidence of their continuity as a people who are, indeed, threatened by settlers’ increasing incursions into Ikpeng lands.

Within Indigenous cinemas, shorts, experimental films, and documentaries all thrive, sometimes without and sometimes alongside full-scale dramatic productions.¹⁰

From the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the production of Indigenous documentaries grew tremendously. Like most marginalized cultures, Indigenous people worldwide had access to documentary film in ways they did not to the production of dramatic features. Documentary requires a camera, some film processing technology, and some degree of editing skill. Fiction, by contrast, requires a developed script, actors, and a great deal more industrial apparatus. Similarly, experimental short films can be made for very little money: the Museum of Modern Art includes in its display films by the non-Indigenous artist Sadie Benning shot on Fischer-Price’s PixelVision toy camera for less than $200. Indigenous artists in the West have historically had similar access to the technology required for documentaries and experimental film, but not, unless they were involved with Hollywood or with their own national cinemas, to more expensive dramatic filmmaking. While documentary cinema thrives everywhere, dramatic filmmaking matters because it is what most people associate with cinema; it is what people in the West and elsewhere where cinemas exist are still primarily prepared to pay to see. The recent commercial and popular success of a very small number of documentaries (Bowling for Columbine and other films by Michael Moore, March of the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth) is an ironic testament to the dominance of dramatic features in most spectators’ understanding of the cinema. It is also, perhaps, one reason why Indigenous films are not well known to non-Indigenous audiences, despite the success of Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes. Indeed, even a dreadful Hollywood adaptation has not brought the Sámi film Ofelas (Veiviseren or Pathfinder [1989]) to the consciousness of non-Indigenous audiences.¹¹

Even today, few Indigenous films are dramatic features. Houston Wood counted fifty-one Indigenous feature films, worldwide, in Native Features (2008), and we can add perhaps another fifty films that have been produced since the publication of Wood’s book or that were not included at the time.¹² The lack of dramatic features is striking. Obviously, this is partly a consequence of the relative poverty of many Indigenous populations (in the documentary that begins his second feature film, Skins [2002], Chris Eyre makes the point that the film’s setting, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, had the lowest individual income in the United States in 2006—less than $3,500 per capita).¹³ In part, though, it is also driven by access to training: more feature films come from places where Indigenous people have had access to education in filmmaking, whether by attending film schools or through dedicated training facilities, such as the NFB’s Studio One and Aboriginal Filmmaking Program.¹⁴ Until the advent of the Internet and digital streaming, yet another cause was lack of access to films that might serve as models (or as incitements to response, in the case of Hollywood and other forms of stereotyping and misinformation). In addition, if we consider Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s argument that Western cinema production has divested itself of many earlier functions (which still resonate for many emerging Indigenous traditions), and that cinema no longer happens in the cinemas (166), we cannot escape the irony that, for many Indigenous people, cinema has never happened in the cinemas.¹⁵

Atanarjuat’s director, Zacharias Kunuk, notes that when the filmmakers wanted to screen the film for their own community after it was completed in December 2000, they showed it in a gymnasium because there are no theatres in Igloolik (Public Art 18). They also made a thousand VHS copies and sent them to the co-op stores in other communities to distribute it throughout Nunavut. Nunavut doesn’t have a theatre system (18). The dearth of commercial cinema-going experience, where films were available first via satellite television and then on various home screening technologies (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, now 3D)—combined with the historical emphasis on documentary and short filmmaking, suggests that Indigenous people’s relationship to film differs from that of non-Indigenous Westerners, even before we introduce issues of cultural aesthetics, oral storytelling, narrative convention, and politics—both the politics of representation and politics in relationship to sovereignty, land claims, and cultural and linguistic survival.

Today, as more and more cultures begin to make dramatic features in addition to documentaries and short films, visions of Indigenous life proliferate. So, too, do visions of the effects of the past on the present. While relatively few Indigenous dramatic features attempt to represent pre-colonial history directly,¹⁶ virtually all Indigenous films reflect the ways in which the colonial past and the still-colonial¹⁷ present affect the lives and stories of Indigenous peoples. Sherman Alexie’s Arnold Joseph in Smoke Signals (1998) imagines that he could do away with the colonial past: Poof, wave my hand! The white people are gone, sent back to where they belong. Poof! London, Paris, Moscow. Poof, poof, poof! Wave my hand and the reservation is gone. The trading post and the post office, the tribal school and the pine trees, and the drunks and the Catholics, and the drunk Catholics. Poof! While some Indigenous filmmakers and audience members share Arnold Joseph’s fantasy, others concentrate on representing the consequences of colonial history and the enduring effects of what Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart calls Historical Trauma—cumulative social-cultural trauma spanning across generations which stems from massive cataclysmic events such as the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 or the Holocaust (Chang et al.)¹⁸

Historical trauma manifests itself in Indigenous films in many ways. In Chris Eyre’s Skins, two brothers, the police officer Rudy and the alcoholic veteran Mogie, find themselves reliving not only their familial past, through flashbacks and moments when the past comes to haunt them, but also the past of Wounded Knee. When Rudy revisits the location where two drunken youths killed another Native man, Corky, he trips and hits his head on a rock; his visions include images from both the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) and the Wounded Knee Occupation (1973), images that indicate the extent to which Rudy is affected by massive cultural trauma across generations. Structures of repetition and dualism abound throughout the film. Chang, Donohoe, and White note that

although Rudy seems to come to a personal confrontation with historical trauma in losing his brother, the greater cultural trauma caused by alcoholism and its link with colonialism remains a toxic, repetitive presence in the community as Rudy learns that not only is the liquor store being re-built, but is going to be twice the size and have two drive-thru windows.

They conclude that

in trauma theory, abreaction is the process of narrating the original trauma in order to confront and heal that trauma. Abreaction becomes the act of the film itself as it narratively and structurally struggles to deal with the intrusive repetition of trauma and healing through coherent representation, and Chris Eyre becomes a kind of Rudy figure, a vigilante attempting to benefit his community through honest narration.

The theme of being haunted by the past is not uncommon in Indigenous art. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to escape the irony that the first ever film of First Nations’ peoples was Thomas Edison’s Sioux Ghost Dance in 1894 (Knopf, Decolonizing 55). In literature, the haunting of the present by the past is exemplified by Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, where the narrator is haunted by a number of aspects of the recent colonial past, including the sexual abuse he suffered in residential schools and the brutal and for a long time unsolved murder of Helen Betty Osborne. Ultimately, however, in coming to terms with the death of his brother from AIDS—a death portrayed as sad but at the same time as joyous, life-affirming, and intensely funny (particularly in the ways in which First Nations people keep the Catholic priest out of the hospital room)—Highway’s fiction ultimately embraces a model of healing that, as in Skins, remains deeply conscious of the nature of the original traumas. Within Indigenous cinemas, we see similar narrative patterns of repetition and historical trauma in films as diverse as Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993), Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994), Shirley Cheechoo’s Bearwalker (2000), Oliver Hermanus’s Shirley Adams (2009), Armand Garnet Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale (2010), and Yves Sioui Durand’s Mesnak (2011). Moffatt says of beDevil that Bedevil is a very playful, old-fashioned word that no one really uses any more. It means ‘to haunt and taunt.’ The style of the film is teasing. You’re following characters who are haunted by something, and I suggest perhaps we’re all a little haunted in a way, and we probably don’t ever come to terms with it (qtd. in Summerhayes, Haunting Secrets, 14). Catherine Summerhayes analyzes the three separate stories that make up beDevil, each of which is based on a ghost story told within Moffatt’s family and each of which relates a story involving Aboriginal, mixed-race, white, and other immigrant Australians, and argues that the film performs a specific intercultural communication between indigenous and non-indigenous people that suggests that there are ‘secret’ stories embedded in this relationship (22). Summerhayes concludes that

through her persistent juxtaposition of the easily visible against the difficult to see and the easily heard against the difficult to hear, Moffatt is concerned with the exposure of secrets. But this exposure does not necessarily provide resolution in the sense of offering answers, nor does it suggest a resolution that gives a sense of social healing as described in E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of how film can be used in order to reverse the imperial gaze. (22)

In contrast to Skins, beDevil refutes the possibility that we can use film to come to terms with and to heal from traumas, be they historical or contemporary. It is useful to contrast these two films, for they remind us that Indigenous filmmaking comprises a wide spectrum of political positions, anti- and post-colonial ideologies, and, indeed, attitudes towards embracing or rejecting particular forms of identity (which can include gender and sexual identities, as well as varying Indigenous and mixed-race identities). By contrast, the notion of shared secrets both created and hidden through encounters with the non-Indigenous provides a commonality between the two films, in that both rehearse the experience of living in a world where colonization itself can become a shared secret, denied if not by the colonized then certainly by the colonizers.

Gail Valaskakis argues that Native reality is grounded in the experience of being inscribed as subaltern in the history of Others and as subjects in one’s own heritage (Indian Country 71). She notes that the distinction between Native North America heritage and ‘real’ history situates Indians ‘outside history,’ where they can be erased, displaced, reified, and named (76). Furthermore, colonialism has coded many Indigenous peoples, particularly those in settler-colonial countries, as always already in the past (Raheja, Reservation Reelism 15), thus complicating an already complex relationship to history and Historical Trauma. Indeed, the very notion of Historical Trauma rejects the limiting of Indigenous peoples to a pre-colonial past and emphasizes a reality grounded in the present notwithstanding ‘real’ history. Nevertheless, Indigenous filmmakers and their audiences, as Raheja states in the context of Native Americans in Hollywood, have been forced to examine themselves through the eyes of others, [which] necessitated a looking backward through the mists of history because Indigenous peoples had been written out of the present and the future of the United States through various forms of discursive genocide (15). In part because of the crucial political and cultural importance of recoding themselves as present, many Indigenous films invoke contemporary settings and narratives to show the enduring nature of Indigeneity and to refute a long history of colonial practices that have ascribed the value of absence and disappearance to Indigenes (15). Thus some of the best-known Indigenous films have contemporary settings, although they are arguably not without reference to the past and, particularly, to the historical encounter with colonialism. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals is perhaps the foremost example of this; other such films are Rachel Perkins’s Radiance (1998), Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds (2002), Shirley Cheechoo’s Johnny Tootall (2005), Sterlin Harjo’s Barking Water (2009), and Richard Franklin’s Samson and Delilah (2009), to name just a few.

That the present carries the past around like a child on its shoulders is not a new insight, nor is it unique to Indigenous peoples. (Indeed, the above quotation is from Robert Lepage’s Le confessional [The Confessional], where the context is the Québécois exhortation to remember the past, memorialized even on the province’s licence plates with the slogan je me souviens—I remember.) Nevertheless, the effects of history mark contemporary Indigenous lives and cultures in very particular ways—ways that are shared among Indigenous peoples and at the same time locally specific, for not even the experience of residential schools was the same for everyone everywhere. Furthermore, the experiences of, say, the Khoi San of South Africa, the Quechua of the central Andes, and the Sámi of northern Scandinavia all reflect significantly different relations to the history of colonization, which stretches over one thousand years for the Sámi but is quite recent for the Khoi San and the Quechua and even more so for some of the tribes of the Amazon Basin. Not surprisingly, we see both similarities and differences in films from these regions; that said, it is only from the very recently colonized that we see films that argue for the retention of traditional lifestyles and the avoidance of much of today’s technology. Two examples come to mind: Kanakan Balintagos’s Busong (2011), which is in part about the effects of the mining industry on the lives of the Philippines’ Palawan peoples; and El Grito de la Selva (The Cry of the Forest, 2008), a re-enactment of the true story of Indigenous people’s fight against logging companies in Bolivia. In both cases, the filmmakers see only partial, small benefits to embracing contemporary industrial technologies and commercial/urban ways of life at the cost of more traditional lifestyles, even if, like the Ikpeng children, they know that change is inevitable. Nevertheless, the very fact that these peoples have turned to cinema to express these preferences indicates the utility of some new technologies for Indigenous purposes. As our epigraph from Zacharias Kunuk indicates, Indigenous peoples adapt contemporary technologies to their own purposes, even if one of those purposes is to remind their own people about where they have come from. It is often difficult for Indigenous people to make choices regarding their interactions with technologies, particularly in the face of commercial and political pressure to allow logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, and large-scale agribusiness to encroach on Indigenous lands. Ironically, both of these films demonstrate that another use of film technology can be to resist, or at least to negotiate the costs and benefits of, these very encroachments on Indigenous lands and ways of life.

Indigenous dramatic features have gained a lot of ground in the last decade, going from a scattered handful to a dozen or so a year. The first Indigenous feature film, House Made of Dawn, was released in the United States in 1972; it was more than a decade before four more Indigenous dramatic features appeared—two from New Zealand and one each from Papua New Guinea and Norway. Compared to Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, or even the national film production of many countries, this is a small number of dramatic films in a relatively short span of history. Nevertheless, it is remarkable, especially given the extent to which Indigenous peoples are scattered in small numbers around the globe and have rare and decidedly uneven access to funding, production facilities, and promotion and distribution deals (very few Indigenous dramatic features receive a theatrical release outside the film festival circuit). Furthermore, precisely because Indigenous films (at least in the West) come under the rubric of independent or art house cinema, at least in relation to dramatic films, Indigenous cinematic practices express different relationships to history, including the history of film, and often deliberately introduce an aesthetic that Indigenizes any or all of Hollywood, European art house, or Third Cinema.¹⁹ In addition, Indigenous films often embrace not only specific local cultural practices, languages, and narrative styles, but also a documentary aesthetic that responds, in part, to the history of ethnographic filmmaking to which many Indigenous groups have been subjected and to which, as Arnold Krupat points out, individuals and cultural groups may respond in remarkably diverse ways.²⁰ In this way, Indigenous cinemas produce their own particular modern Indigenous subjectivities. Barry Barclay’s attempt to organize all Indigenous cinemas under the heading of Fourth Cinema is a riff both on the growing use of Fourth World to designate Indigenous peoples (and to distinguish them from indigenous peoples such as the English in England, the Thai in Thailand, or even settler descendants in Australia, Canada, and the United States) and on the idea that Hollywood constitutes a First Cinema, European art films a Second Cinema, and anti-colonial films (originally from Latin America but now from all over the developing world) a Third Cinema. Barclay introduced the idea of Fourth Cinema in a talk at the University of Auckland in 2002, during which he concluded that, while some Indigenous practitioners might make films that sit within existing forms of cinema, others may seek to rework the ancient core values to shape a growing Indigenous cinema outside the national orthodoxy (qtd. in Columpar, Unsettling Sights xi).

Christine Columpar points out in the preface to Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film that as the linchpin of a polemic, Fourth Cinema, like the most politically uncompromising definitions of Third Cinema, speaks persuasively to the ideological and aesthetic stakes of Indigenous cinema. As an actual taxonomic category, however, it inherits a problem fundamental to the three-cinema model from which it derives, which is to say, the difficulties of delineating clear differences between the three forms of cinema given the complex interactions between them and between them and national cinema cultures (xiv). The issue of Fourth Cinema as a taxonomic category becomes even more complex when one considers the interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers and the difficulties of deciding exactly who is, and who isn’t, Indigenous.²¹ Some of these complexities become apparent when one compares the reception given Whale Rider (written by Māori novelist and academic Witi Ihimaera and directed by Pākehā [non-Māori] Niki Caro) and Rabbit Proof Fence (based on a book by Aboriginal Australian Doris Pilkington and directed by the non-Aboriginal Phillip Noyce) with the reception given Ten Canoes (written and directed by Rolf de Heer, with additional directing credits going to Peter Djigirr) and Skinwalkers and A Thief of Time (both directed by Cheyenne-Arapaho Chris Eyre, but based on novels by the non-Indigenous writer Tony Hillerman). Of these five films, only Ten Canoes is generally regarded as Indigenous and thus as part of an emerging Fourth Cinema. Yet this identification has been made based largely on the creative role of Djigirr and other Aboriginal members of the cast and crew in shaping Ten Canoes, rather than on aesthetics and/or politics.

Nevertheless, Michelle Raheja notes that Indigenous film has its roots in specific Indigenous aesthetics with their attendant focus on a particular geographic space, discrete cultural practices, notions of temporality that do not delink the past from the present or future, and spiritual traditions (Reservation Reelism 16, 17). Although some—perhaps many—Indigenous filmmakers debunk the notion of a common Indigenous filmmaking aesthetic, Barclay’s attempt to define the commonalities of Indigenous film is still valuable for its recognition of the political and the historical in Indigenous filmmaking, including its revaluation of the human relationship to land, its differing relation to temporality, and, most importantly, its reappropriation of the ethnographic and taxidermic gaze with which we began.

Reverse Shots: Turning the Camera Around

While the reality of Indigenous filmmaking is complex and the historical picture much more complicated than admitted by contemporary populist discourse (and, often, by official national historical texts), both in terms of the survival and enduring presence of Indigenous peoples and in terms of their representation within the dominant genres of ethnography and the western, there remains some basic truth to the notion that, for most of the twentieth century, Indigenous peoples were situated in front of, not behind, the lens. We have called this anthology Reverse Shots as a way of bringing to bear several observations about Indigenous cinemas, including that the ways in which Indigenous filmmaking reverses or modifies the relationship between camera and subject are commonly reflected in titles of books about Indigenous films: Beverly R. Singer’s Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, Kerstin Knopf’s Decolonizing the Lens of Power, Corinn Columpar’s Unsettling Sights. Titles like these emphasize how Indigenous peoples in many different regions around the globe have seized control of the camera and its attendant technologies to create reverse representations as projects of unsettling and decolonizing settler-colonial cultures.

The title of this volume also refers to how the reverse shot in filmmaking is used to frame a character’s response or to