Indigenous Film & Media Guide

In more than twenty powerful films, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has waged a brilliant battle against the ignorance and stereotypes that Native Americans have long endured in cinema and television. In this book, the first devoted to any Native filmmaker, Obomsawin receives her due as the central figure in the development of indigenous media in North America. Incorporating history, politics, and film theory into a compelling narrative, Randolph Lewis explores the life and work of a multifaceted woman whose career was flourishing long before Native films such as Smoke Signals reached the screen. He traces Obomsawin's path from an impoverished Abenaki reserve in the 1930s to bohemian Montreal in the 1960s, where she first found fame as a traditional storyteller and singer. Lewis follows her career as a celebrated documentary filmmaker, citing her courage in covering, at great personal risk, the 1991 Oka Crisis between Mohawk warriors and Canadian soldiers. We see how, since the late 1960s, Obomsawin has transformed documentary film, reshaping it for the first time into a crucial forum for sharing indigenous perspectives. Through a careful examination of her work, Lewis proposes a new vision for indigenous media around the globe: a “cinema of sovereignty” based on what Obomsawin has accomplished.

Alanis Obomsawin was born during a solar eclipse: an event that foreshadowed her destiny as a storyteller. Katerina Cizek's portrait of this extraordinary artist, layered with animation, music and image, beautifully recalls Alanis Obomsawin's work. Obomsawin began her career as a singer, visiting schools and prisons. "I had no idea about filmmaking," she says. "Never even thought about it." It was her interest in children that prompted a visit to a residential school in James Bay, where she asked the children to tell their own stories and make drawings to accompany them. The film, Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), launched her career with the National Film Board of Canada. Over the next thirty years, Ms. Obomsawin would document some of the most startling events in Canadian history including the armed standoff between the Canadian Army and Mohawk warriors in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Alanis Obomsawin's films span a broad cross section of social issues, but they are always intensely and immediately human. "For me, a real documentary is when you're really listening to somebody; they are the ones that will tell you what the story is, not you."

Since director Zacharias Kunuk was awarded the Camera d'Or Award at Cannes in 2001, Igloolik Isuma Productions has been among the most well-known and influential indigenous film companies in the world. Isuma's premier movie, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) - the first-ever feature film produced by the Inuit and presented entirely in the Inuktitut language - has received numerous awards and critical acclaim.