Media for social change

Alanis Obomsawin
Born 1932 - Lebanon, New Hampshire

One of the most prolific filmmakers in Canada and named outstanding Canadian of the year in 1965, Alanis Obomsawin could rightfully be credited with leading an Aboriginal revolution of the arts through her documentaries that cut to the very core of cultural tensions within Canada, and by grace of their universal appeal, the rest of the world.

'I get very excited whenever I make a documentary. I love the form because I'm very concerned about educating people about what's going on. So much history can be lost if no one tells the story - so that's what I do. I tell the stories,' she says. 'This is my way of fighting for social change.'

The daughter of a hunting guide and a healer, Obomsawin grew up on the Odanak reservation (also known as Saint-François-du-Lac) northeast of Montreal and is a member of the Abenaki nation - from the word, wabanaki meaning 'land of the rising sun' or 'dawn's land' - which, at the beginning of North America's colonial period spanned southward across most of what is now New England, and north to Maine and Quebec. As swelling European populations displaced the Abenaki people, they were forced off their ancestral lands and into reserves in and around the Quebec City area during the 1670s under the auspices of the Jesuit missionaries. The main mission in Silliery, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, was eventually abandoned in favour of two major communities, the Odanak and the Wolinak, on the south shore.

Obomsawin grew up dealing with racism from the white community, but instead of turning inward with self-loathing, she dedicated much of her childhood to understanding and studying the history of her ancestors and learned what she could of the traditional songs and stories. She translated many of these stories to song, and made her professional debut as a singer on a New York stage in 1960. In 1967, Canada's Centennial Year, Obomsawin was approached by the National Film Board to be an advisor on a film about Aboriginal peoples. Motivated by her budding interest in film, with its potential to bring personal stories to a mass audience, Obomsawin made her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory in 1971. Produced by veteran nfb'er Wolf Koenig, Christmas at Moose Factory is a collection of children's crayon drawings showing different scenes of everyday life around the shores of James Bay. The voice of a young girl narrates the film, explaining what each drawing is, and how different - and in many ways how similar - life is for the residents of Moose Factory during the Christmas Season.

'My life changed when I was 12,' she says. 'My father died and I decided I wasn't going to get beat up at school every day by the other girls in the classroom. It was just a decision - just like that I said, 'no more.' And that's all there was to it. It stopped the next day.'

While Obomsawin's work has always been steeped in an appreciation for her ancestry and a desire for recognition of Aboriginal cultures, her work took a decidedly political turn in 1984 with the release of Incident at Restigouche, a film that chronicled the raid by the Sûreté du Quebec on the Restigouche Reserve and the Micmac people who lived there. The government, upon hearing complaints from white fishers, was looking to restrict the Native fishery and gave the police permission for two armed raids of the community.

From that point on, Obomsawin's films have taken a hard look at the relations between white and Aboriginal Canadians - and discovered that things haven't changed all that much since Europeans began colonizing and displacing Natives centuries ago. From Richard Cardinal, a film based on the diary of a 17-year-old who killed himself after being placed and displaced in 28 foster homes, to Poundmaker's Lodge, a movie that deals with the cycles of abuse, Obomsawin makes movies about the people who fall through the social net and are promptly swept under the rug.

'Expression is as natural as breathing. It's something I have to do. But I make documentaries because I think it's important to show people how we live and who we are. There are so many white people who live right next to reserves but they don't know anything about their neighbours. They have no interest in learning about another culture,' she says. 'I'm fascinated by human beings. I love listening to people tell their stories. Everyone has one to share, you know. If you listen, they will speak, so my job is to listen.'

While Obomsawin has made more than 16 films with the nfb, it was her documentation of the events at the Kanehsatake reserve in Quebec during the summer of 1990 that made her a household name in Canada. She was the only filmmaker to get behind the lines during what became known as the 'Oka Crisis' - when Mohawks protested the expansion of a golf course into sacred burial lands by blockading a road and a bridge - resulting in the film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. For most Canadians, Obomsawin's lens caught the blatant injustice of the situation that almost every news organization missed as government and police spin-doctors vilified the Mohawk warriors as terrorists with unlimited arms and ammunition. Obomsawin, on the other hand, showed us real people behind the bandanas - people who were willing to die for their cause.

'That was an important movie because it was the one story of injustice that the white media actually paid attention to. It was important to show the other side because no one else was going to do it. It was a story about the land, and how over the past 270 years it has been taken away from all the First Nations in North America,' she says. 'I think it empowered people. Anytime you tell someone's story, people don't feel so alienated. They feel someone actually heard what they had to say ... Our people are almost always ignored.'

A recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts for her 'longstanding career and significant contribution to Canadian filmmaking,' Obomsawin is also a member of the Order of Canada. She remains committed to salvaging the remnants of her culture, which is threatened by extinction. Less than three percent of the 1,900 surviving Abenaki people can speak the language, which is part of the Algonquin language group.

'In the last 30 years, there has been a lot of progress. They are starting to teach Native languages in universities, but there is so much work to be done. I'm very thankful to the National Film Board for giving me the chance to make these movies because it's all part of the process. I hope things will change and that white culture will embrace Native culture, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.'  

Selected filmography: Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) | Mother of Many Children (1977) | Amisk (1977) | Canada Vignettes: Wild Rice Harvest Kenora (1979) | Canada Vignettes: June in Povungnituk - Quebec Arctic (1980) | Incident at Restigouche (1984) | Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) | Poundmaker's Lodge: A Healing Place (1987) | No Address (1988) | Walker (1991) | Le Patro Le Prévost 80 Years Later (1991) | Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) | My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995) | Spudwrench - Kahnawake Man (1997) | Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000)