This article first appeared in the print issue of Canada's indispensable POV Magazine, Issue 65, Spring 2007. To order a subscription of POV, visit the Documentary Organisation of Canada's (DOC) site.
In Alanis Obomsawin’s deceptively simple first film, 1971’s Christmas at Moose Factory, children’s drawings of the holidays are explained and given context by the disembodied voices of the artists themselves, whose faces fade in at the conclusion. In the most recent offering from her now 35-year career with the NFB, the heartfelt tribute and cautionary tale Waban-aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, Obomsawin devotes a great deal of screen time to modern-day basket makers, artists, and canoe builders, who explain the history and tradition of their craft as they practice it. If one wishes to locate a “deeper” stratum of meaning below Obomsawin’s forthright and impassioned sense of social commitment and social justice, it might well reside in this emphasis on the tangibility of Canada’s Native peoples, the material traces of their past and the material immediacy of their present—both of which, as Obomsawin so unforgettably depicts, the Canadian government has worked hard (and expensively) to efface...
Read more & comment | posted by on March 17, 2007 in features | reviews | film & video | Canada | Mohawk Nation | Quebec | North America | documentary | First Nations filmmaking | land struggles | representation
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