The Indigenized Lens
Jennifer Gauthier’s Talk on Identity and North American Indigenous Cinema
“Internationally, indigenous peoples are taking the camera back,” said Jennifer L. Gauthier at the start of her presentation to students on Tuesday. The talk, hosted by Concordia’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, aimed to compare indigenous cinema in Canada and United States in order to showcase its vital role in reconstructing identity.
Gauthier, associate professor of Communication Studies at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA, has spent many years researching the evolution of national identity in North American cinema from 1939 to 2009. With the creation of institutions such as the National Film Board, cinema has been one of the most significant tools for developing a shared national identity, especially as much of it is funded by the state.
There has been an rise, however, in the use of the camera. As Gauthier explored in her comparative study of indigenous cinema, the development of indigenous filmmaking has allowed for cinema to take on a new political role: to confront misrepresentation within popular discourse and to reconstruct identity for “formally colonized people” in a way to involve the revitalization of the culture.
Indigenous cinema has been growing since the onset of the Indian Film Crew in the 1960s. The Crew came about as a result of programs set up within the NFB and the Challenge for Change Program, their objective being to “document problems and help people come up with solutions,” according to Gauthier.
This was one of the foundational moments in indigenous cinema, allowing for the creation of three groundbreaking films: The Ballad of Crowfoot, These Are My People and You Are on Indian Land, perhaps the most significant of the three in inciting social change and creating new representations of Canada’s First Nations.
Being “one of the most controversial,” it showcased a non-violent protest staged by members of the St. Regis reservation regarding the ability for First Nations individuals to cross the border freely and without paying duty taxes on bought items.
“This film used the event to raise awareness of identity issues,” said Gauthier. “It played a strong political role, as the style of the film, specifically the usage of emplacement, places you in the location, [and the] camera work puts the viewer inside the protest… to be really in the midst of things.” By creating this film and using this event as evidence of issues of identity and land treaties of that time, it put indigenous social issues into the mainstream media.
This film was the foundation for the creation of further films that confronted the state, like Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Oka Crisis, which documented the Oka Crisis and once again “put the viewer on the inside and let native peoples speak for themselves.”
The element of letting people tell their own stories is a key aspect in indigenous cinema, allowing stereotypes to be confronted and colonial narratives to be deconstructed. Within indigenous cinema, interviews and emplacement of the viewer and the director are used to depict the narrative.
“It disturbs the hierarchy between the audience and the film-maker, making the viewer an active viewer,” as well as letting “the people tell their own story,” said Gauthier. This characteristic is unique to indigenous cinema both north and south of the border.
In Gauthier’s terms, it “turns Hollywood conventions upside-down and speaks back to the colonizer, mimicking a western style but putting a new twist on it, the moment of anti-colonial counter-textuality.”
Despite this strong similarity of aesthetics and confrontations of colonial representation of North American First Peoples, Gauthier notes that there are stark differences in Canadian and American indigenous cinema, much of it as a result of the institutions from which they are funded.
“NFB films are overly political and funded by the state, whereas those films within the United States are made in the context of the Sundance Institute. Robert Redford—that’s it, the icon of American masculinity—is the head of the Sundance Institute.”
The result of this is that indigenous cinema in the United States “still work within the framework of traditional American cinema.”
It allows both the filmmaker and the viewer to reconstruct ideas of identity and representation, in hopes of shedding light on social issues facing North America’s indigenous population. This form of film-making, in Gauthier’s eyes, is the greatest use of the camera, creating a shared “connection between cinema and identity,” continually showcasing the power of the indigenized lens.
__600_375_90_s_c1.jpg)