Indigenous Filmmakers Research Articles

The “Grandmother” of Indigenous Filmmaking in New Zealand

Abstract With reference to Heperi Mita’s documentary Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen (2018) about his mother, Merata Mita, this article illustrates the importance of Indigenous filmmaking by providing insights into the work and life of New Zealand’s first female Māori filmmaker who made a feature-length narrative. Film is an important part of identity formation and shapes the perception of (Indigenous) cultures and peoples. From the late 1970s onward, there is a growing movement in Māori filmmaking which led to changes in the representation of Māori culture in film and influenced Indigenous filmmaking on a global scale. Merata Mita plays a major role in bringing Māori behind and in front of the camera and paved the way for Indigenous female filmmakers.

Seeing our world in 16:9 aspect ratio

AbstractA reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades.

Indigenous filmmaking practices: healing in times of climate crises

The psychological impacts of the climate crisis and its triggers can have long-lasting consequences for public mental health. Many indigenous communities have an in-depth understanding of these impacts, and some of their filmmakers have depicted them through their audiovisual work. By challenging colonial perspectives, these indigenous filmmakers offer invaluable insights into how communities might navigate into adaptation and recovery to cope with the challenges brought about by climate change. Unfortunately, audiovisual work has often been overlooked in climate-related disaster studies despite its significant contributions. Drawing on community-based feminism and the decolonial turn, I sought to explore the healing practices employed by communities in Upper Xingu, Brazil, through the practice of indigenous filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro. To achieve this, I drew on audiovisual analysis of Takumã Kuikuro’s documentaries and records (short videos) from the decolonial panorama. Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the filmmaker and three members of the People’s Palace Projects, who have worked closely with Takumã, culminating in a validation meeting. I highlight three key findings for this article: (i) healing through rituals as esthetic and ethical-sacred practices within the territory, (ii) bodies in collectivism, and (iii) cascading effects on healing audiences: weaving networks from reciprocities. In seeking a discussion of the findings, I contend that there is an inextricable bond between the community-based healing responses to the climate crisis shown by Takumã’s lenses and the Politics of the Bodies proposed by the Colombian philosopher Laura Quintana, allowing us to frame the decolonial understanding of healing as a political and collective action both within and with territories. Therefore, placing the indigenous cinema as a source of knowledge will enable us to bring community-based discussions that disaster risk reduction has neglected due to its embeddedness in epistemic injustice, from which at-risk communities have been predominantly seen as incapable of knowing their geographies. The rituals and collaborative practices grounded in reciprocity demonstrate forms of adaptation in which mental health becomes a collective responsibility woven into nature at its core.

Decolonizing Documentary Spaces

In this paper we consider how grassroots community partnerships can transform academic spaces into creative and interactive sites of Indigenous agency and advocacy. Focusing on two projects based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), we bring these initiatives into a discussion that takes into account the larger context of documentary filmmaking in the territory often referred to as Québec. We address how each project uses care and collaboration towards a practice of visual sovereignty. We start with a discussion of the First Peoples’ Postsecondary Storytelling Exchange (FPPSE), an Indigenous led, multi-institutional, five-year initiative using decolonizing film and research methods to understand the needs and aspirations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis post-secondary learners. This multi-year project involved 22 communities, 10 nations and generated over 100 video stories. The group used talking circles, filmmaking, and community engagement as methods to validate indigenous ways of learning and teaching. The facilitators created safe space through the sharing of food, the attentiveness to languages, the foregrounding of shared decision making, interactive methods and more. Following this, we discuss Circle Visions, a settler-initiated partnership project based at Concordia, which has collaborated with the non-profit Wapikoni Mobile since 2016 to facilitate care-full creative spaces on the university campus for emerging Indigenous artists. This initiative features an annual cross-platform media-making Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers with workshops focusing on animation, experimental video, podcasting, documentary, and 360-degree / VR filmmaking as a tool for decolonization. We reflect on how we can activate decolonized documentary spaces within existing settler institutions and use care-full methods to unsettle hierarchies, promote well-being, and foster Indigenous productions. We then offer some context about the documentary traditions that we are building on within the place now known as Quebec.

Producing Indigenous Media

AbstractThe following dialogue—with Indigenous filmmakers and anthropologists Dr. Angelo Baca (Diné/Hopi), Teresa Martinez‐Chavez (Zapotec), Dr. Teresa Montoya (Diné), and Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka ʻŌiwi)—charts the ethical protocols and decisions undertaken in the production of documentary films with and within Indigenous communities. These films underscore the significance of prioritizing culturally specific protocols about knowledge production and its attendant impacts on media circulation. Each filmmaker considers the broader colonial legacies that have shaped various representations of Indigenous life and what refusing certain media conventions, such as digital distribution, might mean for theorizing Indigenous media practices in broader anticolonial frameworks.

Imaginaries of Abya Yala: Indigenous filmmaking in Latin America from a multimodal semiotic perspective

ABSTRACT This article argues that multimodal semiotics can provide an analytical lens to critically understand recent film and media production by Indigenous people and communities in southern and central Abya Yala (or Latin America). It suggests precise ways to analyse this film and media production as the emergence of alternative public or ‘counter-public’ spaces that allow for the expression of ‘emergent’ forms of Indigeneity that contest dominant modes of representation. The argument focuses not only on these Indigenous texts’ semiotic contents (their design and production) but also on their discursive features, distribution and reception. The article ends up revealing that a multimodal semiotic approach provides a very useful toolbox to make sense of the complex and multi-layered nature of the various emerging cinemas of Abya Yala. The article argues that this approach allows for a better appreciation of the diversity of Indigenous film production, while also facilitating a critical engagement with the issues this media production raises in terms of authorship and modes of representation, among other issues.

Abstract IA017: Two-row wampum & Indigenous cancer care services: Building respectful parallels of sovereignty along the cancer care continuum.

Abstract Quality-improvement (QI) roundtables collected shared voice of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cancer care providers working in and around ancestrally related Native Nations—Canada—USA. Findings were coupled with triangulated, aggregated, and de-identified Centers for Disease Control, Indian Health Services, and New York state information. Collectively, results spoke to the journey of Indigenous communities across the cancer care continuum, translating QI initiatives into community change via Indigenous patient navigation services wrapped in a framework of historical Wampum agreements between Indigenous Nations, Canada, and the United States. Outcomes discuss building cancer care collectives, translational QI methods towards in-person and virtual health care, and innovative grass-roots partnerships towards creative community outreach, engagement, and education. A short video documenting this QI journey was co-created with Indigenous film makers and US-based cancer center media and will be screened. Citation Format: Rodney Haring. Two-row wampum & Indigenous cancer care services: Building respectful parallels of sovereignty along the cancer care continuum. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr IA017.

Philip E. Phillis, Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

With this engaging work on the contemporary filmic representation of migration by Greek cinema, Philip Phillis enters significantly into the hotly debated the issue of migration en masse to Europe of the last decades, doing so with an approach that is both artistic and historical. In focusing on the border crossings that have particularly affected the geopolitical space of the Greek peninsula over the last thirty years, the author succeeds in proposing a thorough outlook to the migratory question through the analysis of its cinematic portrayals by Greek filmmakers or filmmakers active in the Greek area from 1991 to 2016. In fact, through a sensitive and intelligent operation, Phillis sets issues of a purely cinematic nature alongside an eminently political analysis, developing these in parallel throughout the book. This dual nature of the discourse is masterfully held together through the careful — and never superficial — descriptive analysis of the films covered and the ability to compare the poetics of the various directors with the need to re-give voice to migrants and refugees. In fact, Phillis, while praising many directors in his book, seems never to lose sight of the fact that “Greek immigration cinema is produced from a hegemonic position of enunciation since relevant power structures empower indigenous filmmakers rather than the migrants represented on film” (p. 11).

Animist Phytofilm: Plants in Amazonian Indigenous Filmmaking

Early films about plants offer a glimpse into the behavior of vegetal life, which had hitherto remained hidden from humans. Critics have praised this animistic capacity of cinema, allowing audiences to see the movement of beings that appeared to be inert and lifeless. With these reflections as a starting point, this article examines the notion of animist cinema. I argue that early movies still remained beholden to the goal of showing the multiple ways in which plants resemble humans, a tendency we often still find today in work on critical plant studies. I discuss the concept of animism in the context of Amazonian Indigenous societies as a springboard into an analysis of movies by Indigenous filmmakers from the region that highlight the plantness of human beings. I end the essay with an analysis of Ika Muru Huni Kuin’s film Shuku Shukuwe as an example of animist phytocinema.

Mysterious objects: exploring imaginary community, community imagination and cinematic translations of Scottish oral traditions within documentary film production and post-production

ABSTRACT This essay explores the multimodal translation of Scottish community oral cultures to cinema through a critical reflection upon aspects of the production and post-production of a feature-length documentary film, Mysterious Object. Guided by the work of cultural studies authors such as James Clifford and Stuart Hall, alongside reference to oral cinemas elsewhere in the world (such as the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Thailand, indigenous filmmakers in North America, and the films of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene in West Africa) reflection focuses upon some of the ironies, imbalances and contradictions inherent within the imperfect processes of transition when translating orality to screen. Discussion explores in particular the impact of cinematic translation upon changing experiences of time, the authority of the oral storyteller, and the manner in which an oral cinema may serve to articulate the collective imagination of the community.

“Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt”

This article addresses Indigenous film-maker, Lisa Jackson’s, skillful and strategic integration of selections of Western Art Music from the Early and Late Classical period in the soundtracks of her recent films. This strategy draws attention to indigenous perspectives on economic and cultural sustainability, as well as to the threat posed to indigenous continuity by colonialist legacies, past and present. In Jackson’s films, the excerpts from Western Art Music comprising the musical score “takes over” the narrative; their sound is pleasant, but unseen, insidious and triumphant, ultimately a duplicitous and malevolent dominating force. In my view, the selections from Western Art Music function as a metaphor for the unseen, insidious and ever-present forces of colonialism that control the negative behaviors and lives of the indigenous protagonists in the film narrative. This metaphor functions on both macro (formal and performative) and micro (melodic and chordal) levels. On a meta-narratival level, Jackson’s soundtracks draw attention to contemporary audience’s de-sensitization to the use of sonic repertoires in popular cinema and to the normalization of the congruence of sound and musical material and film narrative. Jackson’s adaptation of the musical material suggests that in order to shed colonialist legacies, we must also interrogate their often physical heard, but cognitively and critically unremarked, accompanying soundtracks.

Desire Lines

The films of Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/ Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) aesthetically intervene in photography and cinema’s historical complicities with settler colonialism. This article explores how Hopinka’s filmmaking practice undisciplines vision as it has been constructed and sustained by settler visual regimes. Situating close readings and his broader practice within Indigenous concepts and contexts, this article accounts for the ethical and political dimensions of Hopinka’s poetic approach. In analyzing the significance of Hopinka’s audiovisual methods, Ruíz introduces the architectural concept of “desire lines” to encompass Hopinka’s contributions to undisciplining vision, both on and off-screen. Selected films in this essay include: wawa (2014), Jáaji Approx. (2015), I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become (2016), Dislocation Blues (2017), and maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020). The postscript introduces the COUSIN collective, a collaboration between Hopinka and fellow Indigenous filmmakers Alexandra Lazarowich, Adam Khalil, and Adam Piron.

Screen Zombies, Alien Settlers, and Colonial Legacies

ABSTRACT You Are On Indian Land, a Challenge for Change documentary shot during a border-crossing blockade on Akwesasne territory (near Cornwall, Ontario) in 1969, helped interrupt the colonial legacy of Canadian cinema. Since then, activism in defense of Wet’suwet’en struggles to protect unceded territory, including remarkable uses of video and social media, carry on the transformative spark of this and other Indigenous films. Until recently, Indigenous filmmaking in Canada has mostly been relegated to informational and documentary programming because this is the genre sanctioned by colonial institutions. The commercial success of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), disrupted this gatekeeping, and the release of Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and Blood Quantum (2019) completely shattered the imposed barrier. Barnaby’s films are about the crimes of colonialism inflected through the zombie-horror and revenge-fantasy genres. This article weaves together these formative moments of Canadian documentary and fiction filmmaking with respect to issues of justice, land claims, and visual sovereignty, raising the question of what it means to represent Indigenous social struggles in popular film genres and what they say about the concept of Canadian identity.

Indigenous Cinema, the camera ashore, and House Made of Dawn

ABSTRACT This article explores the complexities of film authorship in relation to the 1972 film House Made of Dawn. Produced and directed by Richardson Morse, a non-Indigenous director, House Made of Dawn occupies a somewhat awkward position within scholarship on Indigenous Cinema. Using the film as a case study, this paper draws on Barry Barclay’s idea of Indigenous Cinema as the camera in the hands of Indigenous filmmakers to unpack notions of film authorship. The paper suggests that the answer to the question of who holds the camera is not always a simple one by drawing on interviews between Joanna Hearne and key figures in the filmmaking team of House Made of Dawn. In particular, this article argues that determinations of authorship must also consider the film’s source text by Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday as well as the input of lead actor Larry Littlebird. Failure to consider these forms of authorship serves to undermine Indigenous approaches to storytelling in favour of a Western model and subsequently undermines the input of the Indigenous authors of the film.

Review: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960, by Liza Black

Review: <i>Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960</i>, by Liza Black

Emergent film production in the Pacific: Oceanic strategies of connection and exchange

ABSTRACT Cultural policies that promote film production and exchange in small island states face numerous challenges (including training, funding, and infrastructure). Yet, in the Pacific, Indigenous film-making is a key strategy for redressing reductive framing of the region during the colonial period (which continues today), and the last 20 years has seen a growing movement towards greater Pacific Island film production. In addition, the creative industries (including film) are currently being explored as an alternative development pathway although this has met with mixed response from governments in the region. In this changing context, and recognising the political importance of Indigenous film production, this paper analyses the strategies of film-makers and other non-state actors in developing a regional film sector across Oceania – strategies of connection that potentially bring filmmakers and audiences together across the great ocean.

Truth and reconciliationcinema: an ethico-political study of residential school imagery in contemporary Indigenous film

This article explores an important facet of the New Wave of Indigenous filmmaking in Canada: residential school system history and imagery, its place in the historical archive, and the way it is being retold and reclaimed in films like Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), Savage (2009), Sisters &amp; Brothers (2015), Indian Horse (2017), and The Grizzlies (2018). While researching this topic, one unanswered question has left me feeling sometimes frustrated and often troubled: Is there a risk of producing pan-Indigenous readings, or worse, repeating the original propagandistic intentions of the original residential school photographs when they are used in new media?

Decolonial Queerness and 2 Spirit Becoming in Cree and Métis Video Art and Film: Thirza Cuthand's Indigenous Autotheory

Decolonial Queerness and 2 Spirit Becoming in Cree and Métis Video Art and Film:Thirza Cuthand's Indigenous Autotheory Thirza Cuthand and Lauren Fournier THIRZA CUTHAND (LITTLE PINE FIRST NATION) is an Indigenous filmmaker and video artist of Plains Cree and Scots descent. She was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on the colonized lands known by some as Canada, and currently resides in Toronto. Since 1995, she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, mental health, age, desire, trauma, love, colonialism, indigeneity, and land. Many of her works use tactics from performance for the camera and experimental video art, including monologues, to engage these issues from an embodied place. Her work has screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Cultural Diversity in São Paulo, imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, where her short film Helpless Maiden Makes an "I" Statement (1999) won an honorable mention. CUTHAND completed her BFA in Film and [End Page 503] Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and her Master of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has also written three feature-length screenplays, has created live performance art for festivals and galleries, and created the video game artwork A Bipolar Journey based on her experience living with bipolar disorder; this interactive work continues themes of mental illness, psychiatric institutionalization, colonialization, and trauma, which she's explored in earlier works like Love & Numbers (2004) and Anhedonia (1999). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. In 1999, she was artist in residence at the media arts artist-run centers Videopool and Urban Shaman, where she completed her experimental film Through the Looking Glass, which allegorizes Cuthand's Cree-Métis identity through the characters of a Red Queen and a White Queen. In 2012, she was an artist in residence at Villa Magdalena K. in Hamburg, where she completed her video Boi Oh Boi that follows the artist deliberating a possible gender transition through the performative use of a phallic banana. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Indigenous-run festival imagineNATIVE to make 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99, a video work that engages 2 Spirit identity in community through a [End Page 504] humorous pastiche of a television infomercial selling imaginary products tailored to the 2 Spirit community, including a beaded whisk, a nonslip lube mat, and a telephone support line that responds to problems specific to 2 Spirit people living in Canada. "Don't worry if you are just coming out as a 2 Spirited person, we have just the introductory special for you!" a smiling Cuthand announces to the camera. Both cheeky and sincere, Cuthand's performance for video uses humor and play to flesh out the intersections of indigeneity, queerness, and mad pride so central to her work, emphasizing the importance of kinship here to the health and well-being of queer Indigenous people living amid ongoing colonialism. This satirical impulse has been present through Cuthand's work from its earliest days, cohering even more explicitly in these later works. Her earlier work, like Working Baby Dyke Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. [End Page 505] Theory (1997), shows the artist working from a DIY practice of performing for the camera on her own—a way of working that is characteristic of histories of Canadian and Indigenous video art histories since the early 1970s. In her more recent works, she collaborates with others from her communities—whether Indigenous, 2 Spirit, and/or LGBTQ2SIA+—as seen in The Longform Lesbian Census (2017) made with Riki Yandt and Reclamation (2018), starring Lacey Hill, Cherish Violet Blood, and Elwood Jimmy. Cuthand consistently shows an adept ability to navigate difficult, heavy subjects in a way that is often playful, comedic, and cathartic...

Media Sovereignty and Digital Activism

This article describes and analyses a collaborative project that combines service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) objectives and goals with anthropological commitments to support an Indigenous filmmaking collective media centre in one Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó community, Brazil. We adapted curricular designs already in place in SLCE semester-long or summer abroad programs to incorporate decolonizing methodologies and symmetrical anthropological approaches to co-create media centre design recommendations for community partners. We designed the project to provide opportunities in which partners could critically engage with histories of mis/representation of Indigenous Peoples, dialogically learn about diverse cultural worldviews and ontologies, and confront stereotypes that are commonly associated with Indigenous Peoples engagement with technologies. We discuss how this work influenced how initial design recommendations for the media centre and collective. We conclude by reflecting on this projects’ approach to community-based projects and the synergistic outcomes and tensions that can result from co-creating transdisciplinary projects centred on addressing sovereignty and activism. Finally, we suggest that supporting digital activism and media sovereignty relies on fortifying relational networks of collaboration and respect.

Indigenous Cinema in Expansion: Challenges and Promises of an Intercultural Relationship

Les auteures dressent le portrait tant des défis actuels que des possibilités qui naissent des relations interculturelles se tissant entre commissaires et cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones dans le cadre du plus grand festival du film autochtone du Brésil, Cine Kurumin. Ce festival annuel, fondé en 2011, se déroule dans des villages ruraux autochtones, de même que dans des métropoles brésiliennes, attirant ainsi des auditoires variés. Le festival est ouvert aux cinéastes autochtones et non-autochtones qui produisent du matériel audiovisuel portant sur des sujets autochtones de partout dans le monde. Divers processus créatifs y sont encouragés grâce à l’organisation d’ateliers de scénarisation, et des partenariats établis avec des chaînes de télévision permettent une plus large diffusion des films sélectionnés. Alors que les productions audiovisuelles autochtones se développent, leurs contenus se diversifient ; elles englobent en effet de plus en plus de thèmes et de styles, de formats et de perspectives variées. En s’appuyant sur un cadre théorique postcolonial et décolonial, les auteures proposent de nouvelles perspectives sur un cinéma en pleine expansion ; les réalisateurs autochtones et leurs films circulent de plus en plus au sein de festivals non thématiques, reçoivent des prix et font rayonner leurs propres voix et points de vue auprès de publics variés, ce qui crée de nombreuses possibilités d’interactions et de dialogues interculturels. En outre, la mise sur pied de Cine Kurumin témoigne du pouvoir des productions audiovisuelles autochtones de générer des relations interculturelles entre cinéastes, commissaires et public.