21/10/06, Sarah Hampson, Love and genocide
Post
Alanis Obomsawin
After decades of telling other people's stories, the aboriginal filmmaker focuses on the tragedies of her own people. The power is still there, but the anger is gone.
In her 36-year career of making award-winning documentaries, she has indicted the federal government countless times for its treatment of Canada's aboriginal people. But Alanis Obomsawin acted for only one reason. Love.
"I don't feel anger," the soft-spoken activist-filmmaker says. "During my lifetime, I did feel a lot of anger. But I realized that it was not what I should be concentrating on. I should concentrate on love. It's the reason I've done everything that I have done. Love for the [aboriginal] people. Love for the children. I want them to have a better place than I had."
Her latest film, Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, marks the first time she has told the story of her own people, their history and current challenges in Odanak, the village in Quebec where she grew up. It makes its debut at the closing night gala for the annual imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival tomorrow in Toronto.
"I always wanted to do something with my own people," she says. "But I was busy with other stories that urgently needed to be done. I am 74. I am still healthy, and I felt that now is the time to do it."
There is a regal quality to Obomsawin, a calmness in her speech and demeanour and in the expressions that pass across her beautiful face. Over the years, she has been decorated with many honorary degrees and awards, and her way of being suggests a deeply felt understanding of her role. Her manner of dress has a ceremonial quality to it, as if she has learned from her ancestors the power of costume. A small woman, she wears a floor-length skirt and vest, custom-made, and an elegant black shawl by Montreal designer Marie Saint Pierre that has silky ruffled edges and a large collar. Flamboyant in attire but serene in manner, Obomsawin looks like a chic, modern-day Indian chief who wishes to tell stories to anyone who will listen about how we should treat one another.
"I never feel I want to speak on their behalf," she says of the aboriginal people who have been featured in works such as Rocks at Whiskey Trench, one in a series about the 1990 Oka crisis; Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, her 1986 examination of an adolescent suicide; and Is the Crown at War With Us?, her 2002 documentary about the conflict over fishing rights, to name a few. "I want them to be heard."
A member of the Abenaki Nation, Obomsawin was born in New Hampshire and at six months of age, came with her mother to the Odanak reserve northeast of Montreal, where she lived until she was nine. The nine years she spent as an only child of her parents on the reserve were the happiest of her life, she says. "I never knew I was poor. You could go to any house, and you belonged. There was the scent of sweet grass everywhere, or of ash, when people were working with it. Men were making canoes and women were making baskets," she recalls in a hushed voice.
Waban-Aki may be about her people, but it is not autobiographical. The story of the Abenaki is more like a parable that traces the fate of so many aboriginal nations, from pride to disenfranchisement. The overriding message is about their fight for identity and, on a universal level, of the human need to belong to a community. "It makes an individual or a family sick not to know what their roots are," she says.
Her film attacks the government for the sexual discrimination of the Indian Act, which saw native women who married white men lose their status as aboriginals. Native men, meanwhile, who married white women, were allowed to keep theirs. "It created generations of people who were excluded, who suffered hardships, who were reminded in so many ways that they did not belong," she explains. In 1985, Bill C-31, an amendment to the Indian act, addressed some of the issues (it allowed for the reinstatement of women who had lost their status through marriage, for example) but still prevents some part-native children from fully claiming their aboriginal identity and securing their right to inheritance on a reserve.
"It is genocide," she states in a clear, soft manner, folding her long thin hands with their manicured nails on the table. "The main thing was so the government could terminate their responsibilities to the [aboriginal] nations. The more you eliminate a race, the more you try to assimilate them, you don't have to worry about their claim to the resources on their land."
Obomsawin's political awakening came at a early age. When she was nine, the family moved off the reserve to live in Trois Rivieres, where her father had found work as a guide for wealthy hunters and fishermen. The only aboriginal in the local school, she suffered racial taunts and beatings. After high school, she learned stenographer skills, but it was in recounting native history and teaching white children aboriginal games and songs that she found a sense of purpose. She successfully tried her hand at a variety of other occupations, from singing to modelling, and in 1967, after being profiled in a CBC TV feature, she was invited by the National Film Board to make educational kits about aboriginal culture. Soon, she was making full-length documentaries.
An interview with her is filled with stories, many long and lovingly told, about her mother, her activist efforts, why she never married ("It was never what I dreamed about, perhaps because of the work I felt I had to do"), and the progress she has witnessed. "The changes we have seen in the last 30 years are enormous. We have our own TV network [APTN], our own university in Regina, most reserves have radio stations."
Her films have helped heighten awareness of the problems, she says, giving the example of the Alberta government's decision to make changes to their child-welfare laws in the wake of her film about Richard Cardinal.
She tells me one of her dreams, which she often depicts in her etchings, engravings and paintings. It came over 50 years ago, when she was a young woman, after she had fought to raise money for a swimming pool on the Odanak reserve when she heard that children had been banned from the one in the neighbouring village for being "savages." Her initiative angered many people, even some on her reserve who felt she was being too aggressive and seeking attention for herself. One night, she had a dream that she was walking down a street on the reserve. People whose faces were white came to the doors of the houses and slammed them shut. She arrived at the church and heard voices saying, "She is going to make trouble for us." They buried her alive, and in her dream, she died. The next thing she knew, she was alive again. But she was part-woman, part-animal. She had huge antlers on her head. And she thought, "Ah, no one can see me. But I can see them all."
Just like the filmmaker she later became, I think silently to myself as I look at her across the table, at her small, playful smile, the steady gaze of her doe-like brown eyes, and the tail of her dark braid that runs over one shoulder.
After decades of telling other people's stories, the aboriginal filmmaker focuses on the tragedies of her own people. The power is still there, but the anger is gone.
In her 36-year career of making award-winning documentaries, she has indicted the federal government countless times for its treatment of Canada's aboriginal people. But Alanis Obomsawin acted for only one reason. Love.
"I don't feel anger," the soft-spoken activist-filmmaker says. "During my lifetime, I did feel a lot of anger. But I realized that it was not what I should be concentrating on. I should concentrate on love. It's the reason I've done everything that I have done. Love for the [aboriginal] people. Love for the children. I want them to have a better place than I had."
Her latest film, Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, marks the first time she has told the story of her own people, their history and current challenges in Odanak, the village in Quebec where she grew up. It makes its debut at the closing night gala for the annual imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival tomorrow in Toronto.
"I always wanted to do something with my own people," she says. "But I was busy with other stories that urgently needed to be done. I am 74. I am still healthy, and I felt that now is the time to do it."
There is a regal quality to Obomsawin, a calmness in her speech and demeanour and in the expressions that pass across her beautiful face. Over the years, she has been decorated with many honorary degrees and awards, and her way of being suggests a deeply felt understanding of her role. Her manner of dress has a ceremonial quality to it, as if she has learned from her ancestors the power of costume. A small woman, she wears a floor-length skirt and vest, custom-made, and an elegant black shawl by Montreal designer Marie Saint Pierre that has silky ruffled edges and a large collar. Flamboyant in attire but serene in manner, Obomsawin looks like a chic, modern-day Indian chief who wishes to tell stories to anyone who will listen about how we should treat one another.
"I never feel I want to speak on their behalf," she says of the aboriginal people who have been featured in works such as Rocks at Whiskey Trench, one in a series about the 1990 Oka crisis; Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, her 1986 examination of an adolescent suicide; and Is the Crown at War With Us?, her 2002 documentary about the conflict over fishing rights, to name a few. "I want them to be heard."
A member of the Abenaki Nation, Obomsawin was born in New Hampshire and at six months of age, came with her mother to the Odanak reserve northeast of Montreal, where she lived until she was nine. The nine years she spent as an only child of her parents on the reserve were the happiest of her life, she says. "I never knew I was poor. You could go to any house, and you belonged. There was the scent of sweet grass everywhere, or of ash, when people were working with it. Men were making canoes and women were making baskets," she recalls in a hushed voice.
Waban-Aki may be about her people, but it is not autobiographical. The story of the Abenaki is more like a parable that traces the fate of so many aboriginal nations, from pride to disenfranchisement. The overriding message is about their fight for identity and, on a universal level, of the human need to belong to a community. "It makes an individual or a family sick not to know what their roots are," she says.
Her film attacks the government for the sexual discrimination of the Indian Act, which saw native women who married white men lose their status as aboriginals. Native men, meanwhile, who married white women, were allowed to keep theirs. "It created generations of people who were excluded, who suffered hardships, who were reminded in so many ways that they did not belong," she explains. In 1985, Bill C-31, an amendment to the Indian act, addressed some of the issues (it allowed for the reinstatement of women who had lost their status through marriage, for example) but still prevents some part-native children from fully claiming their aboriginal identity and securing their right to inheritance on a reserve.
"It is genocide," she states in a clear, soft manner, folding her long thin hands with their manicured nails on the table. "The main thing was so the government could terminate their responsibilities to the [aboriginal] nations. The more you eliminate a race, the more you try to assimilate them, you don't have to worry about their claim to the resources on their land."
Obomsawin's political awakening came at a early age. When she was nine, the family moved off the reserve to live in Trois Rivieres, where her father had found work as a guide for wealthy hunters and fishermen. The only aboriginal in the local school, she suffered racial taunts and beatings. After high school, she learned stenographer skills, but it was in recounting native history and teaching white children aboriginal games and songs that she found a sense of purpose. She successfully tried her hand at a variety of other occupations, from singing to modelling, and in 1967, after being profiled in a CBC TV feature, she was invited by the National Film Board to make educational kits about aboriginal culture. Soon, she was making full-length documentaries.
An interview with her is filled with stories, many long and lovingly told, about her mother, her activist efforts, why she never married ("It was never what I dreamed about, perhaps because of the work I felt I had to do"), and the progress she has witnessed. "The changes we have seen in the last 30 years are enormous. We have our own TV network [APTN], our own university in Regina, most reserves have radio stations."
Her films have helped heighten awareness of the problems, she says, giving the example of the Alberta government's decision to make changes to their child-welfare laws in the wake of her film about Richard Cardinal.
She tells me one of her dreams, which she often depicts in her etchings, engravings and paintings. It came over 50 years ago, when she was a young woman, after she had fought to raise money for a swimming pool on the Odanak reserve when she heard that children had been banned from the one in the neighbouring village for being "savages." Her initiative angered many people, even some on her reserve who felt she was being too aggressive and seeking attention for herself. One night, she had a dream that she was walking down a street on the reserve. People whose faces were white came to the doors of the houses and slammed them shut. She arrived at the church and heard voices saying, "She is going to make trouble for us." They buried her alive, and in her dream, she died. The next thing she knew, she was alive again. But she was part-woman, part-animal. She had huge antlers on her head. And she thought, "Ah, no one can see me. But I can see them all."
Just like the filmmaker she later became, I think silently to myself as I look at her across the table, at her small, playful smile, the steady gaze of her doe-like brown eyes, and the tail of her dark braid that runs over one shoulder.
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