Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic

Abstract

Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic Channette Romero (bio) Indigenous women’s animated films are emerging as some of the most engaging contemporary digital media. Unfortunately, much like women’s animation in general, this growing body of work has garnered sparse critical attention. This essay seeks to call attention to the growing field and to prompt increased study of its aesthetics. Analyzing works by better-known filmmakers/artists like LeAnne Howe, Diane Obomsawin, Lisa Jackson, and Heid E. Erdrich alongside less well known filmmakers Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Gyu Oh, I hope to highlight the range of innovation in Indigenous women’s animation, as well as its political motivations. Examining Howe’s Noble Savage Learns to Tweet (2015), Arnaquq-Baril’s Sloth (2011), Obomsawin’s Walk-in-the-Forest (2009), Oh’s I Am but a Little Woman (2010), Jackson’s The Visit (2009), and Erdrich’s Pre-Occupied (2013), I demonstrate some of the field’s most prevalent formal characteristics: frequent use of flat design, growing popularity of cutout collage animation, reclamation of Indigenous domestic arts and crafts in the digital realm, privileging of spatial relations, connective aurality, and the emergence of hybrid cinematic-literary films that attempt to contribute to real-world activism. I contend that these six aesthetic strategies are employed in an effort to raise viewers’ political consciousness in the service of Indigenous rights. Calling attention to the ways that mainstream animation’s stylistic conventions work to “naturalize” imperialism, Indigenous women’s formal experimentations with animation seek to disrupt deep-seated settler ideologies. These films blend the genre’s conventional techniques with Indigenous designs and domestic arts in an effort to assert the ongoing vitality of Indigenous women’s art and storytelling traditions. Actively situating themselves and their viewers within arts traditions that historically [End Page 56] helped humans negotiate their interdependent place within the natural world, Indigenous women’s animation shows how the digital realm is yet another of the dynamic communication networks Indigenous peoples in the Americas have long navigated with alacrity and complexity. Exploring films digitally produced and distributed, I argue that Indigenous women’s innovations in the animation genre work to bolster tribal political, cultural, and spiritual sovereignty. Increasingly cheaper digital technology has led to an exponential growth in Indigenous women’s animation, with many films digitally produced and then distributed and viewed globally online. While digital cameras, computers, and the Internet are all obviously newer technology, multimedia production is not new to Indigenous peoples; it fits within a long tradition of sophisticated communication networks. Trade routes, well traveled by Indigenous peoples in the Americas, historically utilized nonlinear designs and infographics to pass messages long distances within and between tribes. These complex informational networks joined other messaging systems like wampum belts, petroglyphs, symbols, traps, and monuments, all based on interactive mnemonics between visual design and oral storytelling. Because the messages required audience interpretation, Matt Cohen contends, “something like multimedia literacy” characterized “communications norms” (2). Cherokee scholar Angela Haas asserts that Indigenous peoples are “the first known skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas” (78). Returning to the earliest definition of “digital” as literally referring to fingers, digits, that code information, whether in computer languages or wampum, Haas demonstrates Indigenous peoples’ “long-standing intellectual tradition of multimediated, digital rhetoric” (94).1 Mohawk-Jewish multimedia artist and scholar Steven Loft argues that Indigenous peoples “have always ‘mapped’ our environments” through storytelling and signage; multimedia has continuously functioned as “a spiritual, cosmological, and mythical ‘realm’” that “provided a direct link between the past, present, and future” (174–75, 178). While Indigenous peoples and their communication networks have obviously changed over time, their long-standing storytelling, design, and networking traditions provide a strong basis for contemporary digital multimedia. The lack of oversight online also offers a space for highly political commentary, providing a freedom of expression that might not be possible in more established filmmaking, publishing, and museum venues. As Joanna [End Page 57] Hearne notes in her introduction to this volume, “digital platforms for aesthetic production and activism, such as social media networking, low-cost independent short-form film and animation production, and web-based distribution systems, are far more available to Indigenous women...