Indigenous Film & Media Guide

The visual medium has the potential to be a creative avenue for enhancing awareness, critical thought and social justice. Through the prism of collaborative filmmaking, academic-activists can enrich textual analyses while creating what Jacques Rancière calls a "sense of community" among participants. This article reflects on the process of co-producing an Indigenous youth-driven documentary film, Indian Givers, which is publicly available on YouTube. It discusses the applied practice of engaging in a collaborative process with the aim of countering Western models of knowledge. The film and this article each draw into focus the experiences and stories of Indigenous youth who live in a highly polluted place commonly referred to as Canada's "Chemical Valley." Informed by Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonism, I contend that collaborative filmmaking contributes to anti-oppressive and community engaged scholarship by facilitating intercultural dialogue, offering a reflexive and relational approach to research, co-creating knowledge and contributing to social action. This paper reflects on some of the challenges of collaborative filmmaking in order to contribute to academic-activist research. As an anti-oppressive research tool, collaborative filmmaking provides a forum for resistance to dominant colonial discourses while creating space for radical difference in pursuit of decolonization.

This is the first book that comprehensively examines Indigenous filmmaking in North America, as it analyzes in detail a variety of representative films by Canadian and US-American Indigenous filmmakers: two films that contextualize the oral tradition, three short films, and four dramatic films. The book explores how members of colonized groups use the medium of film as a means for cultural and political expression and thus enter the dominant colonial film discourse and create an answering discourse. The theoretical framework is developed as an interdisciplinary approach, combining postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, and film studies. As Indigenous people are gradually taking control over the imagemaking process in the area of film and video, they cease being studied and described objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of Indigenous cultures. The book explores the translatability of Indigenous oral tradition into film, touching upon the changes the cultural knowledge is subject to in this process, including statements of Indigenous filmmakers on this issue. It also asks whether or not there is a definite Indigenous film practice and whether filmmakers tend to dissociate their work from dominant classical filmmaking, adapt to it, or create new film forms and styles through converging classical film conventions and their conscious violation. This approach presupposes that Indigenous filmmakers are constantly in some state of reaction to Western ethnographic filmmaking and to classical narrative filmmaking and its epitome, the Hollywood narrative cinema. The films analyzed are The Road Allowance People by Maria Campbell, Itam Hakim, Hopiit by Victor Masayesva, Talker by Lloyd Martell, Tenacity and Smoke Signals by Chris Eyre, Overweight With Crooked Teeth and Honey Moccasin by Shelley Niro, Big Bear by Gil Cardinal, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk.

How do you dismantle the colonial myth of POCAHONTAS? Disney's portrait of the Indian Princess has been indelibly pressed into young minds: she is naïve and noble, sexualized, innocent, and in need of a white saviour to win her heart. In reality, Indigenous women have always played strong and valued roles in their communities, leading by will and courage. Western society has created the archetype of the Good Indian, frozen in time, smiling and helpful. Together, we will decolonize this stereotype and examine portrayals of Indigenous people in Hollywood and beyond.

The memory of a racist cartoon weighs heavily on Jeremy’s youth, so he sets about carving a new image in his own mind. In doing so, a new world of Indigenous culture is unlocked by past mentors and a community of content creators.