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Research Prompt #6 - Indigenous Life and Sovereignty - Part 1

Prakash Krishnan, Concordia University

Part 1 - Introduction

Since time immemorial, various nations of peoples have lived within and across the borders of the country we now call Canada. Since the arrivals of Europeans onto the shores of the continent of Turtle Island (differently referred to by varying Indigenous nations) or “North America”, settlers have been documenting the livelihoods, cultures, rituals, skills, and knowledges of the peoples whose lands they effectively colonized. Indigenous peoples’ intimate knowledge of the lands, climate, flora, and fauna on which they lived has been invaluable to settlers who have benefitted greatly from this sharing of knowledge. In addition to the economic benefits Europeans reaped from the fur trade and other ventures, support from Indigenous people was what allowed the early settlers to survive the harsh winter climates with which they were unfamiliar.

In the nearly 500 years post-contact, numerous attempts at the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada have taken place. This includes incidents of germ warfare via blankets infected with smallpox, ecocide from the destruction of territory and food sources and territorial displacement, ethnocide through forced adoption of Catholicism and Christianity, mandatory religious and Western-assimilationist residential schooling, governmental bans on Indigenous cultural practices including hunting and fishing, and femicide and forced sterilization of women and Two Spirits.

As these genocidal practices continued and the domineering white settler society made it increasingly difficult for Indigenous communities and peoples to practice and maintain their traditions, religions, ceremonies, language, and crafts, several attempts were made to “preserve” these cultures through documentation. With the arrival of film technology in Canada, many sponsored films were produced to document and memorialize Indigenous people and their cultures. In several of these films, the complexities and nuances of various individual nations, cultures, communities, and families and reduced to travel and tourism props as interesting and quirky features that pepper the vast and rich Canadian landscape. Others are more ethnographic in their approach. Situating the camera as an “objective” eye, these films, often produced for educational purposes, depict the lives of various Indigenous peoples, though frequently without specific mention of their unique cultural histories or identifiers. Instead, they focus mostly on various crafting, hunting, and fishing techniques, sometimes making note of regional specificities when referring to specific topographical contexts.

The following films are listed in response to the following research question: How has Indigenous life and sovereignty been depicted within Canadian-produced educational, sponsored, and industrial films? The inclusion criteria for these films are non-fiction films that centre the lives of Indigenous peoples, communities, and their cultural practices. Travelogues and tourism films that depict Indigenous peoples as accessories to settler figures or as symbols of Canada’s diversity and multicultural policies were not included in order to centre the lives, experiences, and voices of Indigenous peoples, who arguably consist of one of the most marginalized and invisibilized within the Canadian film and media landscape.

Related Published Works

Canadian Tourist Association, Conservation Films (1954): 2.

Gouvernement du Québec: Ministère des Communications, Direction générale du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel, Catalogue des films d’archives, volume 1 (Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1976), 34.

Gouvernement du Québec: Ministère des Communications, Direction générale du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel, Catalogue des films d’archives, volume 2 (Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1978), 13-14, 28.

Jessup, Lynda, “Marius Barbeau and Early Ethnographic Cinema,” in Around and About Marius Barbeau: Writings on the Politics of Twentieth-Century Canadian Culture, Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse and Gordon Smith, eds. (Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008), 269-304.

Jessup, Lynda, "Tin Cans and Machinery: Saving the Sagas and Other Stuff," Visual Anthropology 12 (Spring 1999), 49-86.

Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978.

Motion Picture Distributors and Exhibitors of Canada, Canadian Motion Pictures 1914-1932 (June 1932), 4-5.

National Film Board of Canada, Films by Other Producers Distributed in Canada by the National Film Board of Canada/Films de divers producteurs distribués au Canada par l’Office national du film du Canada (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, c.1968), 4.

Office du film du Québec, Catalogue général des films 16mm (Quebec City: Office du film du Québec, 1964), 340.

Service de ciné-photographie de la province de Québec, Films 16mm: édition 1956-57 (Quebec City: Service de ciné-photographie, 1956): 193, 254, 314.

Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada. Winnipeg: Highwater Press, 2016.

Archival and Museum Collections of Interest

Arthur Lamothe Collection
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
475 boulevard De Maisonneuve Est
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H2L 5C4
numerique.banq.qc.ca/ressources/details/LAMO
According to BAnQ, “French-born, Quebecer filmmaker Arthur Lamothe devoted most of his work to promoting a better understanding of Indigenous communities in Quebec, primarily that of the Innu, their language, and culture” (Author's translation). This collection includes a series of 80 additional films documenting the life and culture of Indigenous peoples in Quebec that are not included within the research prompt.

The Potlach Collection
U'mista Cultural Society
#1 Front Street
PO Box 253
Alert Bay, British Columbia
Canada VON 1A0
umistapotlatch.ca
Since 1922, some of the treasured masks and ceremonial objects of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw had been in the hands of museums in Canada, England and the United States, taken away at a time of great sorrow when a law deemed the potlatch was illegal. After years of effort, many of the confiscated treasures were successfully repatriated to their rightful owners, the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, and are now housed carefully in the U'mista Cultural Centre. This is called' The Potlatch Collection'.