Alanis Obamsawin: Visionary Female Native American Filmmaker Demanding Social Change

Alanis Obamsawin is one of Canada’s most acclaimed female filmmakers; she creates poignant and uncompromising documentary films about the history and culture of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, and issues affecting the First Nations. Obamsawin was born on Abenaki Territory in Lebanon, New Hampshire. At 6 months of age, Obamsawin and her mother returned to the Odanak reserve, her mother’s reserve, north east of Montreal. There, her mother’s cousin, Théophile Panadis, initiated Obamsawin into the history of the Abenaki Nation by teaching her the songs and legends of her people. At nine years of age, Obamsawin and her parents left Odanak for Trois-Riviéres, where they were the only Native family. Knowing very little French and no English, Obamsawin felt isolated, and she clung to the stories and legends of her people.

Storytelling is precisely what Obamsawin grew up to do. She started sharing her stories as a singer, writer, and storytelling in 1967, and then moved into the realm of film when she was invited to join the National Film Board as an advisor. She entered film with a strong vision, despite her lack of formal training. In an interview for Citizenshift, she says: “I did many things in my life in terms of work because I have been working since I was nine years old. And I became a filmmaker because people at the National

Film Board thought what I was doing was important, and they thought that if I were to come here I could continue this work in a bigger way that the film could travel on its own. And it is true, and I saw how powerful it was to be in this kind of place to tell the world about us.” Her films are driven by her vision to promote social responsibility, and they give a voice to a people who have been abused for generations. She says, “Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for themselves. I feel that the documentaries that I’ve been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our people to look at ourselves, at the situations, really facing it, and through that, being able to make changes that really count for the future of our children to come.”

Obamsawin is now a director at the National Film Board of Canada, and at 38 years of age, has made over 30 documentaries. Her most well known one is Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, about the 1990 siege at Oka crisis. The Oka Crisis was a land dispute between the Mohawk nation and the town of Oka, Quebec, which started on July 11, 1990, and ended on September 26, 1990. The conflict originated from a local dispute between the town of Oka and the Mohawk community of Kanesatake. The town of Oka was developing plans to expand a golf course and residential development onto land traditionally used by the Mohawk, including land that included a burial ground of Mohawk ancestors and sacred pineland.

The Mohawk nation’s land claim filed for the land near Kanesatake was rejected in 1989, marking the first of many conflicts between First Nations and the Canadian government. Many of these disputes were associated with violence, and at least one person died because of the Oka crisis. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Obamsawin’s film won 18 Canadian and international awards, including the Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and the CITY TV Award for Best Canadian Feature Film from the Toronto Festival of Festivals. On the site of the Oka conflict, Obamsawin was struck by the violence and injustice. “No matter what horrible things I see, I never get used to them. I refuse to. I fight for social change in everything I do. I’m so busy fighting that I’m always shocked when viciousness hits me right in the face.”

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance was rejected to premiere on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and instead premiered in England on Channel Four, and then made its North American debut at the Toronto Festival of Festivals. In his book, Alanis Obamsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker, film scholar Randolph Lewis writes: “When the film was released in 1993, the CBC continued its long-standing neglect of Obamsawin’s work. In this case, it argued that she needed to slice 30 minutes from the two-hour film to make room for commercial breaks. Colin Neale, the executive producer who worked with Obomsawin on the film, rebuffed the network’s demand. Eventually, public interest in Kahnesatake overpowered the CBC’s bureaucratic reluctance, and the network aired it on January 31, 1994.”

The films of Alanis Obamsawin have changed perceptions of Native American people. Throughout the history of film and literature, the representation of “Indian” has maintained an exotisized, primitive, “noble savage” image. She says: “Racism and prejudice exist there [at the National Film Board] like anywhere else. My history at the Board has not been easy. It’s been a long walk.” In Obamsawin’s other films, she raises socio-cultural issues of Native American people and Native American women in particular.

In Mother of Many Children, she explores the struggle of Native American women to balance tradition and their identity in a “modern world,” and in Poundmaker’s Lodge: a Healing Place, she presents the human voice of addiction, recovery, and the healing process.

She has fought to tell the stories of Aboriginal people from a distinctly indigenous vantage point, and it is characteristic of her work to allow the people to speak uninterrupted for a longer amount of time than is usually presented in the media. The Native American voice, in most instances, is limited to sound bites and blurbs for a given news story. Obamsawin often includes herself in her documentaries as narrator, woman, and as an indigenous voice. Her cinematic style is compassionate, simplistic, and her subjects raise questions of manipulation and control of image that exists in mainstream culture. It has been said that her films cease to be mere “documents” but affect the viewer through her passionate voice and the voice of struggle. Steven Loft, from Hopkins et al/Narratives, says, “For Obamsawin, film is indeed a “place,” and a site of power. Her films are profound political and artistic statements that assert an inalienable and inherent right to self-definition, self-awareness, and self-determination for Native people.”