The Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance: Indigenous Self-Government in Moving Image Media

Abstract

The Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance:Indigenous Self-Government in Moving Image Media Karrmen Crey (bio) In 2014, the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival hosted "indigiTALKS: Following that Moment," a session that focused on experimental video projects created by Indigenous artists in Canada in the early 1990s. Their work was framed as an origin point for the ideological and formal strategies developed by subsequent generations of Indigenous artists who not only challenge colonial representations of Indigenous people but also test and reflect on the video apparatus and its role in these meaning-making activities.1 This session emphasized the role that the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance (AFVAA), an Indigenous media-and arts-based organization, played in this history as a catalyst for the rise of Indigenous media in Canada. Four years later, at the 2018 festival, this sentiment was reinforced through a retrospective for one of the AFVAA's original and core organizers, Marjorie Beaucage (Métis), an accomplished experimental filmmaker, activist, and community leader in Canada.2 Lisa Myers (Anishinaabe), the curator of both sessions, is [End Page 175] not alone in recognizing the AFVAA's contributions to the Indigenous media wave that began in Canada in the early 1990s.3 However, its public acknowledgment at imagineNATIVE, the largest Indigenous media festival in the world, recuperates the AFVAA's role in this phenomenon and in the development of contemporary understandings of Indigenous media as a creative practice and a cultural category. One of the AFVAA's goals was to support the development of an Indigenous media language that links Indigenous cultural politics of the era with the formal features of screen representation. The AFVAA operated on the principle of Indigenous self-government, a term arising from Indigenous sovereignty movements of the latter part of the twentieth century in North America. Indigenous self-government refers to the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves according to their own nation-and community-specific political traditions and structures.4 Consistent with this principle, the AFVAA advocated for Indigenously controlled programs and resources within Canadian cultural institutions. The AFVAA's mission was to enact institutional self-government by "visioning new partnerships, based on Self Government [sic] principles, with cultural institutions and funding agents."5 These partnerships were intended to support the development of an infrastructure for Indigenous media and arts by creating dedicated resources and Indigenously controlled spaces within these institutions to sustain Indigenous creative production. The exact design and operations of these spaces were necessarily open and undefined in order to parallel the principle of self-government: Indigenous self-government does not have content per se, or, in other words, there is not one prescriptive form of self-government that can be applied to different Indigenous communities and nations; instead, self-government must be developed and tested on the ground as the right and purview of Indigenous communities.6 The AFVAA's partnerships echoed these premises but also sought to extend them into art and media production, where the politics of self-government was to be exercised and represented through experiments with the formal features of media technologies. The AFVAA thereby contributed to the production of an influential and widespread discourse of Indigenous media that weds cultural politics to the textual and technological features of moving image media, as I will discuss in a small sample of the organization's activities. The roots of the AFVAA were established in April 1991 at a meeting that brought together forty-five Indigenous filmmakers, performers, artists, and journalists to create an organization that would promote and practice [End Page 176] Aboriginal self-government in the arts.7 The AFVAA subsequently took shape as a group consisting of a thirteen-member Steering Committee with representatives from regions across Canada and established artists and media practitioners as advisors, including Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki), Wil Campbell (Cree-Métis), Bernelda Wheeler (Cree, Assiniboine, Salteaux), and Maria Campbell (Métis).8 The AFVAA's mission was to bring Indigenous politics into the cultural sphere by "promot[ing] and encourag[ing] the interdisciplinary art form of film and video production" along with creating "new cultural storytelling forms within the principles, values and traditions of Aboriginal Self Government...