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Creation stories

2023; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/728368

2575-1433

Ikaika Ramones,

Education and Islamic Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumCreation stories Carrying our elders of Indigenous media Comment on Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. 1993. Alanis Obomsawin, director. National Film Board of Canada.Ikaika RamonesIkaika RamonesPrinceton University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreI ulu no ka lālā i ke kumu.The branches grow because of the trunk.Without our ancestors we would not be here.—ʻŌlelo Noʻeau #1261 (Pukui 1983)Thirty years after the release of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), this now classic Indigenous film chronicles the Oka crisis in a way that burns this event into the Canadian national and world consciousness. The scenes that Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin captured and revealed to the world are powerfully resonant; they could be in this week's headlines. The film is at once past and present, mediating Indigeneity as both endurance and transformation. Since Obomsawin began her pathbreaking film work in 1971, Indigenous media-makers have blossomed into a global movement emerging from diverse communities, and encompassing an astonishing range of formats and genres. Obomsawin shared a special friendship with Māori filmmaker Merata Mita; together as inspirational cultural activists and dedicated mentors, they helped to unleash the creativities and commitments of decades of Indigenous filmmakers. As Jesse Wente (Ojibwe), chair of the Canada Council for the Arts and founding Executive Director of the Indigenous Screen Office, explains:When I think of that meeting of Alanis and Merata in Guelph [in 1984], with the first pairing of the two films, I now tend to think of that as "the creation moment." We think of why curators return to, think of any art, the early practitioners … Why are we still interested in Godard or the people who started the French New Wave? Because they were the spark that actually started the fire. For Indigenous cinema, it really does trace back to Merata and Alanis.(quoted in H. Mita 2018)As "the creation moment," Mita and Obomsawin's meeting set Indigeneity in cinematic motion, becoming what I consider our "genealogical fountainhead" for contemporary and future Indigenous media. The "catalytic imagery" of their films would "become visible sparks that affectively produce as much as they refract politicized publics," as Raminder Kaur (2022) notes in her discussion of legacies of anti-racist media that catapult images into collective awareness. Drawing on the Hawaiian ʻōlelo noʻeau1 (wise saying) in the epigraph above, I regard the work of Mita and Obomsawin as the trunk from which the many branches of Indigenous media have sprouted. By mediating ancestral stories and relationships in ways that resonate with present conditions, First Nations media are a means to understand the endurance and transformations of Indigeneity in motion. Mita and Obomsawin's close relationship, films, mentorship, and stories are our "creation moment" as Wente suggests; much like the creation stories of my own people, Kānaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians), they tell us where we come from and how to carry our ancestors into our future. I have elsewhere argued that "genealogical being" allows Indigenous filmmakers to resist commensuration with hegemonic ontologies, the grounds for the "endurance of difference" (Ramones 2023).2 Ethics of kuleana (relational obligations) tie the self, nonhuman kin, ancestors, and other relations to shape "genealogical being."3 Thus, the cosmogonic positions of Mita and Obomsawin in our genealogies of First Nations media critically shape our ongoing practice of cinematic Indigenous storytelling.At their fabled meeting at a 1984 film festival, Obomsawin and Mita were the only two Indigenous filmmakers screening their works: Mita's Patu! (1983) and Obomsawin's Incident at Restigouche (1984). As Obomsawin recalls: "We watched each other's films and, I don't know, it was a very important feeling. It was as if we knew each other for a long time, although we had never met" (quoted in H. Mita 2018). Patu! tells the story of mass civil disobedience by New Zealanders—Māori and non-Māori alike—against a 1981 tour of the Springboks, the white South African rugby team. People from all walks of life joined in a common anti-apartheid struggle, meeting intense police brutality in scene after scene that Mita chronicled. Obomsawin's Incident at Restigouche, seen by many as a precursor to Kanehsatake, chronicles violent police raids attempting to restrict Native salmon fishing of the Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation. Paired at the festival, the films portrayed unbridled police violence against Indigenous communities' calls for justice. During production, Mita and Obomsawin met police intimidation, and abuse, and later faced institutional censorship. Mita was harassed, even strip-searched by police searching for her raw footage, while her children recalled police coming through the house with dogs looking for the film material. As another son, Heperi Mita, recounts in his remarkable feature documentary about his mother, Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen (2018): "My family was under siege, and I can feel my mother's anger in every frame of Patu!" Much like in Kanehsatake, Obomsawin placed herself on the front lines filming Incident at Restigouche. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB)—Obomsawin's lifelong employer—told her that she could not interview white people for her film, limiting her to interviews with First Nations people—an order that Obomsawin defied (Lewis 2006: 48–49). Mita also encountered criticism from funding bodies; the issue was even raised in parliament, as to why she would produce such a radical work. As Obomsawin describes her relationship with Mita: "I felt there was a lot of feeling and experience that were very similar in terms of fighting for a voice for our people. I think we became very closely related, like a sister. And of course, we drank whiskey together!" (quoted in H. Mita 2018). In the decades since Incident at Restigouche and Patu! screened, Indigenous media-makers have forayed into drama, horror, comedy, animation, streaming series, and even Hollywood. Following Mita's sudden passing in 2010, to honor her legacy the Sundance Institute created an annual Merata Mita Fellowship for Indigenous women preparing to direct their first feature film.4What genealogical groundings does this creation story teach us? Despite coming from opposite sides of the globe, Mita and Obomsawin laid a shared groundwork for bringing millennia of Indigenous storytelling into the format of the moving image, all while extending the rigor, creativity, and protocols of Indigenous storytelling. They mediate the living histories and relationships anchored to place, rather than dealing in reified essentializations. Another elder of Māori cinema, the late Barry Barclay, theorized the uniqueness of Indigenous cinema as voicing the "living knowledge" tied to place, palpably animated by a "force or presence of long history. It is a prior history of and a sense of place and being" (Turner 2013: 165). For Barclay, this differs from tropes of Indigenous peoples that are too often hegemonic in mainstream media. In Kanehsatake, a narrator reads the words of the Mohawk Chief Joseph Onasakenrat from almost three hundred years ago, rejecting attempts by the Montreal bishop to dispossess and relocate his people: "We will never go there; we will die on the soil of our fathers, and our bleaching skeletons shall be a witness to nations yet unborn." Two hundred and seventy years later, Quebecois police and the Canadian military once again backed threats of dispossession. In Kanehsatake, Obomsawin interviews Chicky, a young Mohawk woman behind the barricades, who speaks along the same lines as Chief Joseph:Somebody had asked me, "How far are you willing to go?" I said, "Six feet under." I think that's what's gonna happen. … That's what they want, huh? Shut the Indian—keep the Indian nation down where they had them for so many years. If I go to jail, I'm gonna walk through those doors in honor, I'm not going in as a junkie, nothing to be ashamed of. And when I come out, I'll teach my children and my grandchildren to fight.As Chicky says that there is "nothing to be ashamed of," Obomsawin's voice is caught by the microphone solemnly whispering, "Yeah." Obomsawin weaves the words of Chief Joseph with those of Chicky, two hundred and seventy years later, showing how a "living knowledge" and commitment to their lands truly has force in the world, their lives, and in the film. Barclay himself cautioned against tropes of the embattled Native activist. Obomsawin's portrayal avoids such stereotyped portrayals; Kanehsatake and the other Oka films are intimately personal and concrete in conveying the living knowledge and transgenerational experience that animated Chicky. In 2008, Mita reflected on Obomsawin's approach, which I also offer as an implication for ethnography: "The absence of stereotypical Indians in all her films has significantly altered the discourse of ethnic authenticity … The range of people involved is diverse, and there is no mythologizing, no fixation on history—the focus is on the present, and definitely there is no romanticism" (M. Mita 2008: 15–16). Around the same time of their meeting, Mita spoke publicly about the release of the feature film Utu (Murphy 1983) in which she acted; the film tells the story of a Māori warrior in the 1870s who sought revenge after British soldiers killed his people. Far from presenting a mummified trope of a "Native warrior," the film shows relationships, the animating power of genealogy, and even contradictions as the Māori warrior was once allied with British forces. As Mita explains: "My primary goal is to decolonize the screen, and to indigenize a lot of what we see up there. I see this style developing; it's something from the collective cultural consciousness that comes back from way back in time" (quoted in H. Mita 2018).The emergent Indigenous cinema that Mita and Obomsawin helped spark was not abandoning "tradition," but was organically coalescing to give voice and image to that living knowledge "that comes from way back in time" while deploying powerful new modes of storytelling. Obomsawin and Mita created the gold standard regarding the responsibility of First Nations filmmakers, and anthropologists, to carry our ancestors and places with us. They offer models for Indigenous ethnographic practice—written or filmic—staying close to the ground with interlocutors while maintaining a foundation of ancestral presence.Mita and Obomsawin set a high bar for how to remain committed to living knowledges, indeed, our genealogies. The ideal is at times tempered by the real pressures of conceding "dialectical synthesis" with hegemonic media (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013: xxix–xxx). Speaking about the violent backlash against her production of Patu!, Mita says:What you're fighting are these kinds of entrenched attitudes that come from people who control money in the film industry. And you become very angry because it's an unfair fight. And a lot of your energy … is being diverted to fighting these institutions and trying to establish your own set of values.(quoted in H. Mita 2018)Despite the harassment of Mita and Obomsawin for their fearless work, and the attempts to censor Patu! and Incident at Restigouche, both filmmakers fought for their people's voices to be heard on their own terms. Both were accused of "bias," but in Mita's words, they were "trying to establish your own set of values." Occupied, surrounded, and outnumbered by dominant societies, Indigenous peoples tenaciously defend and grow our lifeways. Media provide a unique means of projecting, or "screening," our stories, values, and perspectives (Ginsburg and Myers 2006). As Mita eloquently puts it, "Indigenizing the screen means bringing stories that have not been seen by the world before, and understanding that the time that those stories are on screen is the time that we've captured not only the space up there, but we've captured the hearts and minds of the audience" (quoted in H. Mita 2018). At the 1984 screening where they first met, Obomsawin and Mita "captured" a time and space where Indigenous perspectives were dominant. Despite the marginalization and violence that we witness Native peoples facing in the films, their stories are resolutely told on their own terms. Consistent with practices of Indigenous ethnography, this subversively inverts the power dynamic that often relegates Indigenous peoples to the subordinate position. Thus, the colonial gaze is replaced with a searing yet intimate "Indigenous Gaze" on colonial violence. Kanehsatake is peppered with events that, when seen through that perspective, cast the settler police as savage, irrational, duplicitous, and hypocritical: these are the same archetypal traits so frequently hurled against Indigenous peoples. In the making of Patu!, one of Mita's sons describes how police saw the raw footage as "evidence" of criminality, while his family and demonstrators saw the footage as "evidence" of police terror. Decades later, the creative endeavor of casting the "Indigenous Gaze" remains in the proliferation of extraordinary Indigenous media-making, now recognized as part of world cinema.Patu! and Incident at Restigouche anchor subsequent decades of Indigenous cinema to specific political touchstones. Scene after scene, one cannot look away as Indigenous people and allies take center stage to meet unbridled police terror. The cinematography, cries of those bludgeoned by police, and scenes of bravery all seem more akin to war reporting, along with tender moments of reflection from an Indigenous perspective. "One cannot help but feel that she is at war—a war of a different scale and on a different level. The weapon that Alanis Obsomsawin shoots with is the camera," writes Mita (M. Mita 2008: 15). These films, as well as their production, were born from direct action and resistance to overt police terror. Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that policy toward Indigenous peoples has expanded from overt repression to governance through modes of recognition and so-called reconciliation. As colonized subjects, Indigenous peoples can come to see the constrained terms of recognition "as their own," eventually identifying with the terms of the "master" (2014: 39). Coulthard's model of a "resurgent politics of recognition" calls for Indigenous peoples to turn away from the problematics of recognition, and borrowing from Fanon, to experience self-affirmation through struggle. "The necessity of direct action" thus provides a means to self-actualize, not only rejecting colonial definition, but generatively growing Indigenous alternatives (2014: 165–68). Watching Kanehsatake's dramatic concluding scenes as the Mohawk warriors and supporters leave The Pines and consider what happened, it is clear how the struggle of directly defending lands and lifeways has self-affirming effects, even a form of healing from colonial denigration and trauma. In those scenes, the swelling of power and affirmation the warriors feel is palpable. Chicky reflects on her transformation:No more compassion. I've had it. I was raised a pacifist. I was raised that if you don't want to have prejudice on you, don't put it out [there]. And we went through a lot, but this has changed me. I've never been violent, I've never fought to hit out, to strike out. But now, don't look at me sideways, because I know, I'll never bow down to them. If this is civilized, I'd rather stay on this side of the barricade.Direct action made her resolute to "never bow down to them," while she was now sure that she was on the "civilized" side of the barricade, despite stereotypes about Native peoples being otherwise. Given recognition politics' propensity to entice some Indigenous peoples to identify with the terms of the colonizer, self-limiting our struggles to colonial institutions, Coulthard refers to the "necessity" of direct action. Kanehsatake, Patu!, and Incident at Restigouche are all instances of direct action in response to direct repression. While centuries of Indigenous struggle have met wins and losses, these films are touchstones of direct-action politics, foundational chronicles offering counternarratives that are too easily erased and forgotten.In 2023, I happened to rewatch these films on the third anniversary of my own encounter with police violence during the 2020 uprising against racist police terror. At the infamous "Mott Haven" crackdown in the Bronx, New York, I and a group of demonstrators were surrounded, beaten, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and taken away—I had lasting nerve damage from restraints, a head injury, and pepper spray shot at my genitalia. The screams and cries in the ending scenes of Kanehsatake echoed the harrowing sounds I heard when I was shoved into a pile of people four bodies deep. Surprisingly, this moment blending the auto-ethnographic proved to be healing. These genealogical fountainheads of Indigenous cinema provided grounding and empowering lessons. They cast a dominant Indigenous Gaze upon police terror, showing the undisputed value of direct-action politics, and became the sparks that ignited subsequent decades of Indigenous cinema. By voicing "living knowledges" and the spirit of place, they forged ways of cinematically carrying our ancestors with us. Thirty years after Kanehsatake, these foremothers still have much to teach us.Notes1. In upholding the official standard of contemporary Native Hawaiian scholarship, Hawaiian words are not italicized to avoid "othering" them, affirming that it is not a foreign language, and emphasizing a more central, as opposed to peripheral, position of indigenous knowledge.2. "Genealogy" is an inadequate English translation of the Hawaiian word, moʻokūʻauhau. Rather than a mere list of ancestors, the concept references an entire cosmology of relations and stories that form one's personhood, responsibilities, and serve as a conduit for mana (power, generative potency) (see Wilson-Hokowhitu and Meyer 2019).3. These ideas build on Native Hawaiian anthropologist Ty Kāwika Tengan's (2008: 167) theorization of "kuleana."4. See https://www.sundance.org/blogs/who-was-merata-mita/.ReferencesCoulthard, Glen. 2014. Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. 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In The past before us: Moʻokūʻauhau as methodology, edited by Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu, 1–8. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFilmographyMita, Heperi. 2018. Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen. (95 min.) Los Angeles: Array Now.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMita, Merata. 1983. Patu! (112 min.) Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMurphy, Geoff. 1983. Utu. (118 min.) New York: Kino Video.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarObomsawin, Alanis. 1984. Incident at Restigouche. (45 min.) Montreal: National Film Board of Canada.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1993. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. (1 hr. 59 min.) Montreal: National Film Board of Canada.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarIkaika Ramones, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) first-generation scholar from Kalihi, O'ahu. He researches the political economy and contestations of Indigeneity. His writing has appeared in American Anthropologist, Visual Anthropology Review, Oceania, and Abolition Journal. He is active in community-based Native Hawaiian education, media, and land restoration. He also directed and produced his prize-winning short film, No Retreat: 'A'ohe Hope e Ho'i Mai Ai.Ikaika Ramones[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 13, Number 3Winter 2023 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728368 PermissionsRequest permissions © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.