Indigenous Media Arts in Canada by Dana Claxton & Ezra Winton

Author:Dana Claxton & Ezra Winton [Claxton, Dana & Winton, Ezra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.4 We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice. Production still courtesy the National Film Board of Canada.

CONCLUSIONS

Children are not usually centred in documentary and film studies scholarship, although occasionally they are subjects of documentary films. The genre’s preoccupations with difficult subject matter and large-scale social problems, along with what documentary film scholar Bill Nichols has called its “discourse of sobriety” (an “instrumental power” to rep-resent and intervene in the real world, which makes documentaries “seldom receptive to whim or fantasy”), sometimes preclude engagement with the imaginative play that so often marks children’s storytelling and ways of being. Yet Obomsawin’s emphasis on children’s rights and education in her work gives particular shape to documentary filmmakers’ long-standing desire to track an explicit origin point in the instrumentality of film for social change. I saw this ethic unfold when Obomsawin screened her signature film, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, at the 2006 True/False Film Festival—a documentary film festival in Columbia, Missouri—where she also gave a master class on documentary sound and showed her recently completed short film Sig-wan. In addition to her screening and master class, Obomsawin asked if she could offer a storytelling session with children. For three hours at an evening youth workshop she told stories from her community to children aged four through twelve, and since the space had a kitchen, she taught them how to make bannock. The True/False festival had committed to educational outreach for many years, yet Obomsawin’s explicit request to visit with children was singular in the festival’s history to that point.10 The multiplicity of her teaching at the festival—across long-form documentary, short narrative film, live storytelling, and the masterclass for filmmakers—exemplifies an ecosystem of Indigenous media instruction that consistently includes children at the centre of its circle.

During her True/False masterclass, a filmmaker asked the big question for documentarians: “You said a little bit earlier that films could change the world. … I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about how this works?” The question provoked an impassioned response from Obomsawin:

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