Indigenous documentary in Canada, from Obomsawin to a new generation

Cape Breton has an older name, Unama'ki, and I was a grown man before I heard it used without a footnote. The films about First Nations that reached my school gym on the NFB circuit were nearly all made by people looking in from outside, with a narrator explaining what the pictures meant. Some of them were sympathetic. Very few let the people on screen decide what the film was about.

That changed, slowly and then decisively, and much of the change happened inside the same National Film Board that had made those earlier films. What follows is a short history built around a handful of filmmakers and institutions, with a table of films at the end. It is not a survey. Indigenous filmmaking in Canada spans many nations, languages and ways of working, and an article that pretends to cover all of it is fooling itself.

Alanis Obomsawin

Alanis Obomsawin is Abenaki and spent her early childhood at Odanak, in Quebec. She came to the NFB in 1967, first as an adviser, after years as a singer and storyteller, and she has since made more than 50 films there. That background shows in the work. Her films are built on listening: long, patient interviews with people whose side of events had gone unrecorded, and her own calm voice guiding the viewer through stories the newspapers usually told another way.

Incident at Restigouche (1984) is a good place to see the method. In June 1981 the Quebec provincial police raided the Mi'gmaq community of Listuguj, then usually called Restigouche, in a dispute over salmon fishing. (Listuguj spells the nation's name Mi'gmaq; in Nova Scotia you will usually see Mi'kmaq.) Obomsawin sets the community's account against the official one and lets the gap between them do the arguing.

Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) is quieter and harder. It follows the short life of a Métis teenager in Alberta who died by suicide after years of being moved from one placement to another in the child welfare system, and it draws on his own diary. Both films are exact about who did what to whom.

Kanehsatake, summer 1990

In the summer of 1990, a plan to expand a golf course in Oka, Quebec, onto land that included a pine forest and a cemetery claimed by the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) community of Kanehsatake turned into a standoff. A police raid on the barricade in July left a Sûreté du Québec corporal dead, and the confrontation that followed lasted 78 days, drawing in the Canadian Army before it ended in late September. Obomsawin went behind the barricades and stayed.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) is the result, and more than thirty years on I still think it is the essential film about the crisis. Most television coverage came from behind police and army lines, and the images that went round the country were of masked warriors and razor wire. Obomsawin's camera is on the other side, among the people inside, and the film lays out the long history of the land dispute (the 270 years of the title) before it lets the confrontation play. She makes no pretence of neutrality and has no need to. The film is careful with facts and generous to the people it shows.

She returned to the events of that summer in further films, and she kept working at the Board well into her eighties. If you have time for only one of her films, make it Kanehsatake. If you have time for two, add Richard Cardinal.

The Indian Film Crew

Obomsawin did not remain the only Indigenous filmmaker at the Board. In the late 1960s, under the Challenge for Change program, the NFB set up the Indian Film Crew, a group of First Nations trainees who learned to shoot, record and edit so that communities could be filmed by their own people. Willie Dunn, a Mi'kmaq singer and filmmaker, made The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968) in this period: a short built from archival photographs and his own song about the Siksika leader Crowfoot and the treaty era. You Are on Indian Land (1969) recorded a Mohawk blockade of the international bridge at Akwesasne from the protesters' side of the line.

The crew was short-lived, and its members went on to other work. The principle it tested has lasted much longer. The people in front of the camera should also be behind it, and should have the main say in what the film is for.

Isuma and Atanarjuat

In 1990 Zacharias Kunuk founded Igloolik Isuma Productions in Igloolik, now part of Nunavut, with Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik and Norman Cohn. Isuma worked in Inuktitut with Inuit crews, and much of its early video work recreated Igloolik life of earlier decades, with community members on both sides of the camera.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) is a feature drama rather than a documentary, but it belongs in this story. It retells an Igloolik legend in Inuktitut with an Inuit cast, and it won the Caméra d'Or, the prize for a first feature, at Cannes in 2001. What it carries over from Isuma's documentary work is time: long, unhurried scenes of travel, work and talk, close attention to how things are actually done on the land and the ice, and very little explanation offered to southern viewers. The run across the sea ice is the scene everyone remembers. The patience around it is what gives it weight.

Kunuk and Isuma kept working in both forms, and in 2019 Isuma represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. IsumaTV, the online platform the collective built, has put a large library of Inuit and other Indigenous media within reach, in many languages.

Tasha Hubbard and nîpawistamâsowin

Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan, was shot and killed on a farm near Biggar in August 2016. In February 2018 a jury in Battleford acquitted the farm's owner of second-degree murder. Tasha Hubbard's nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (2019) is about Boushie's death and the trial that followed, and about his family's refusal to let the case be filed away. It opened the Hot Docs festival in Toronto in 2019.

What Hubbard does is harder than reporting. She places a single case inside the longer history of the Prairies, so that one verdict carries the weight of everything that happened on that land before it. The film is angry in places and earns its anger with evidence and patience. The trial also put peremptory challenges, which let lawyers strike potential jurors without giving a reason, at the centre of a national argument, and Parliament abolished them in 2019.

I would show this film to anyone who thinks of documentary mainly as a way of delivering information. It informs, certainly. It is also an act of witness by a filmmaker with a stake in the outcome, and it makes no apology for that.

The institutions behind the newer work

Some infrastructure helps explain why there is now more of this work than any one viewer can keep up with. APTN, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, went on air nationally in 1999 and gave Indigenous documentary a broadcaster with a mandate to carry it. The Indigenous Screen Office, founded in 2017, funds Indigenous screen storytellers and argues for a fairer share of public screen money. And the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, held in Toronto each October, is the best single place to see what Indigenous filmmakers from Canada and other countries are making now, across documentary, fiction, shorts and digital work.

A newer generation of documentary makers has come up with those institutions already in place. Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, an Inuk filmmaker from Iqaluit, made Angry Inuk (2016), which takes on anti-sealing campaigns from the point of view of Inuit whose livelihoods depend on the hunt, and argues its case with energy and precision. Hubbard's work belongs to the same moment. So do many shorts that never reach a cinema and turn up instead at festivals, on APTN and on the NFB's site. Dev Raghunathan's field guide to Canada's documentary festivals puts imagineNATIVE in context with the rest of the calendar.

Where to start

Many of the NFB titles stream free at nfb.ca. Watch Kanehsatake first, in one sitting, and count how often Obomsawin lets a person keep talking well past the point where a television editor would have cut. Then look up the October programme at imagineNATIVE, pick a shorts block from filmmakers whose nations and languages are new to you, and sit in the dark with it.