FIRST PEOPLES, FIRST SCREENS IS A PROGRAMMING SIDEBAR BY CINEMA POLITICA

To read more about this initiative: cinemapolitica.org/fpfs

Introduction

BY karRmen Crey

In 2011, as a part of my dissertation research, I surveyed the last several decades of Indigenous
audio-visual production in Canada, eventually assembling a database of 450 film, television,
video, and digital media works by Indigenous media practitioners. I was looking for trends guiding
patterns of production as a starting point on which to build further research, and was amazed
to see an extraordinary surge in the production after 1990, where numbers went from perhaps
dozens of productions to hundreds of works by dozens of filmmakers and artists over subsequent
decades.1 Further, Indigenous media emerged across the country in a wide range of social contexts,
organizations, and institutions.

1 - At that time I mainly focused on documentary and nonfiction media if I had added
narrative and experimental media to this database, these numbers would be even higher.

Image: Inuit Cree Reconciliation, Zacharias Kunuk and Neil Diamond, Canada, 2013

How do we account for this remarkable phenomenon, which took shape across a broad social
and geographical landscape? Histories of Indigenous production in Canada tend to revolve around
or reference the Oka Crisis of 1990 and attendant mainstream media coverage of the event, which
itself was emblematic of the confluence of the contemporary Indigenous sovereignty movement and
the emergence of alternative media committed to Indigenous self-representation. The Oka Crisis
began as a dispute between the Mohawk people of Kanehsatake and the municipality of Oka when
Okas mayor attempted to expand a golf course on to a Mohawk cemetery and ancestral territory.
The dispute escalated into a standoff between protesters the Canadian military that lasted 78-days
from July to September of that year. The confrontation dominated the Canadian news media for
the duration, with coverage centering on the image of the Mohawk warrior that became iconic not
only of the event, but of public perception of the protesters and their supporters. Masked, wearing
sunglasses, camouflage gear and carrying rifles, the warrior image amounted to an updated
colonial fantasy of the savage Indian, a projection of state and public anxieties about Indigenous
resistance and insurgency. As state and commercial media narrowed the representational scope,

Introduction to First Peoples, First Screens by Karrmen Crey

the deeply skewed image economy received a profound corrective with renowned Abenaki filmmaker
Alanis Obomsawins groundbreaking documentary, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993).
Kanehsatake went behind the lines on the Mohawk side of the conflict, adding historical depth to
Mohawk experiences of colonial state incursions on their territories, and a human dimension
to the protestors that mainstream news coverage fundamentally failed to articulate. Not only did
Kanehsatake provide an unprecedented perspective of the Oka Crisis, it eschewed traditional
documentary conventions of so-called objectivity to produce a sympathetic portrayal of the
Mohawk people and their history, while also explicitly critiquing state and mainstream colonial
practices and attitudes.
The Oka Crisis was one of the most visible conflicts between Indigenous people and the state,2
and shocked the nation into awareness that Indigenous grievances with the state are contemporary,
ongoing and unsettled, and as such marked a turning point in public consciousness and Indigenous
history. Further, Kanehsatake has become a touchstone for discussions of the intersections of
politics and aesthetics in Indigenous cinema and media, and its place in Indigenous cinema, Canadian
cinema, and world cinema is without question. At the same time, Im very aware that the history of
Indigenous media starts decades earlier, and it anticipates and intersects with the proliferation of
Indigenous production that has taken place over the past two-and-a-half decades. How can we talk
about the history of Indigenous media without addressing the role of Indigenous newspapers and
community radio, broadcasting and television, and Indigenous performing and visual arts traditions?
There is a long history of Indigenous engagement with media practices that has been shaped by the
twentieth-century Indigenous sovereignty movement, shifts in national cultural policy, intervention
in mainstream image culture around Indigenous representation, and ongoing developments in
media technologies, all of which Ive found to be crucial to shape any understanding of this more
contemporary media phenomenon.
While Indigenous people have long resisted and intervened in state colonial processes, the
twentieth century Indigenous sovereignty movement was catalyzed by Pierre Trudeaus notoriously
paternalistic and assimilationist white paper of 1969, a policy paper that proposed dismantling the
Indian Act the only piece of federal legislation acknowledging Indigenous peoples distinct rights
and unique relationship with the Crown in order to absorb Indigenous people into the Canadian
mainstream. It ignored recommendations by Indigenous people who participated in the consultation
process, and did not include provisions for Indigenous rights, or dealing with land title and rights

2 - A year before in 1989, Elijah Harper, and Indigenous Member of Parliament in Manitoba,
singlehandedly halted the Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional amendment package
designed to bring sovereigntist Qubec into the Canadian Confederacy. The Meech Lake
Accord required unanimous consent from the Manitoba assembly; Harper, however, refused
to consent because the amendments were pursued without consultation with Indigenous
peoples. The Accord ultimately failed, and along with the Oka Crisis, demonstrated that
protests by Indigenous people could successfully halt the business-as-usual of the state.

Introduction to First Peoples, First Screens by Karrmen Crey

issues.3 The policy paper provoked widespread protests from Indigenous groups and organizations
across Canada that ultimately led to its demise a year later, but not before it had initiated a panIndigenous political mobilization dedicated to Indigenous sovereignty that would drive Indigenous
politics to the present. The Indigenous sovereignty movement demanded recognition of Indigenous
peoples distinct cultural heritages and political traditions as the basis for the right to govern their
own affairs and territories without state interference, and that Canada acknowledge these rights and
abide by its commitments to Indigenous peoples as affirmed in provisions of the Indian Act and later
in Canadas Constitution Act, 1982.
Indigenous sovereignty refers not only to political autonomy, but also necessarily extends
to cultural autonomy. As Loretta Todd discusses in Notes on Appropriation, Indigenous title
and rights encompass our cultures, languages, and religions; therefore, the rights to Indigenous
peoples cultural representation belong to Indigenous people alone, thus the crucial connection
between sovereignty and self-representation. Writing in 1990, Todd responds to discourses of
Indigenous sovereignty being worked over in legal and political spheres, but extends these debates
into the cultural sphere, intervening in the ongoing colonial practice of cultural appropriation of
Indigenous cultures that continues to occur in mainstream art and cultural production. Noting that
while legal questions of Aboriginal rights and title are played out in the courtroom, she argues that
for Indigenous artists,
...our struggle is played out in other institutions, in the galleries, museums, academies,
cinemas, theatres and the libraries and schools, as well as the marketplace. Here, the
appropriation is performed in the guise of multiculturalism, so-called cross-cultural
understanding and good old-fashioned artistic license, as well as, should I add, profit and
career enhancement.4
Todd, like other Indigenous cultural theorists and artists before and since, reminds us that we cannot
separate the physical, juridical, and political dimensions of sovereignty from Indigenous cultures.
Since the colonial project has specifically targeted Indigenous cultures, languages, and religions for
extermination in order to terminate Indigenous peoples distinct identities, it is even more crucial
to attend to the cultural sphere and to questions of self-representation as a part of exploring and
exercising Indigenous sovereignty.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that throughout the latter half of the twentieth century,
Indigenous artists, organizations, and communities have seized opportunities for self-representation
in cultural and public spheres, where media play a central role. Indigenous communications societies
and newspapers bloomed in the 1970s onward with a mandate to define and represent social,

3 - The White Paper, 1969. Indigenous Foundations. Accessed January 29, 2016.
http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-white-paper-1969.
html.
4 - Notes on Appropriation, Parallelogramme 16, no. 1 (Summer 1990): p. 26.

Introduction to First Peoples, First Screens by Karrmen Crey

political, and economic issues significant to Indigenous peoples.5 As Canada sought to extend its
sovereignty into the North by expanding a broadcast infrastructure into the region in the 1970s and
1980s, Northern Indigenous communities - realizing that television could, as Lorna Roth describes,
serve as a tool for self-development/empowerment6 lobbied for an Indigenous broadcasting
policy and Indigenous programming, which would in 1991 result in Television Northern Canada
(TVNC), a dedicated Indigenous television network and antecedent to the Aboriginal Peoples
Television Network that launched in 1999. Meanwhile, in the 1980s through to the 1990s, Canada
entered a period of national cultural policy development in order to manage a changing social
landscape by acknowledging difference and incorporating it into the nation-state. Diversity
became the framework for cultural policy and Multiculturalism, which had been national policy
since 1971, became federal law in 1988. In a move responsive to this social and historical reality
and to the ongoing political pressures and advocacy of Indigenous communities, artists, and
activists programs, training, and funding streams for Indigenous artists emerged from art and
culture agencies, organizations, and institutions across the country. In this context, Indigenous
self-representation in film, television, and video began to flourish, powered by new and emerging
Indigenous media practitioners and by those who were already established in filmmaking, the visual
and performing arts, television, and news media.
While Ive described the intersecting strands of this history in only the broadest of possible
strokes, I hope what is conveyed here is that Indigenous media arts emerges from a broad and
complex media landscape, and extends from a history of Indigenous sovereignty that intervenes in
and negotiates the hegemony of the state, as well as dominant cultural currents and institutions,
to create spaces and places for Indigenous agency and self-representation. Developing an
understanding of the complexity of this landscape is the point. As I discussed at the beginning
of this piece, we as researchers and historians of Indigenous media can be hindered by the scope
and scale of our own research, which can reduce Indigenous media histories to certain sets of
filmmakers and film texts, and in the worst cases, there is the risk of covering over crucial aspects
of this history, including the work and lives of people who have participated in it. Given mainstream
and Hollywood cinematic traditions of homogenizing and flattening Indigenous peoples and cultures
into image stereotypes of the Indian, the recognition, acknowledgement and celebration of the
heterogeneity of Indigenous media arts is particularly crucial.
It goes without saying that the field of Indigenous media and art in Canada is incredibly varied,
representing the diversity of Indigenous cultures, perspectives, and concerns. Thats precisely

5 - Shannon Avison, Aboriginal Newspapers: Their Contribution to the Emergence of an

Alternative Public Sphere in Canada. M.A., Concordia University, 1996. National Library of
Canada, p. 133.
6 - First Peoples Television in Canada: Origins of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network,
in Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada. eds. Sigurjn Baldur Hafsteinsson, and Marian Bredin.
Univ. of Manitoba Press, 2010: p. 18.

Introduction to First Peoples, First Screens by Karrmen Crey

whats so exciting and fascinating about this field, and why its so gratifying to see it reflected in the
First Peoples, First Screens program, which features some of the most recent and exciting works by
Indigenous artists working in Canada. These works share a common history, but they wont always
resolve into common features, approaches, and ideas. Indigenous media will always exceed the
boundaries of the categories we attempt to use to organize it; in fact, the media texts themselves
often take up and challenge the very terms by which Indigenous media as a cultural category has
been thought about and understood, testing and interrogating received knowledge about identity,
nationhood, history, place. Put another way, the theory is in the text. The work of audiences and
academics is, I propose, to get at that specificity, not only in terms of the texts social context, but
the terms that these artists debate.
The rapid expansion of Indigenous media arts over the past several decades has been met
with increased public and scholarly attention, and the field of Indigenous media studies has grown
exponentially along with it. At the same time, it can be challenging to get access to and screen
this work; having spent the last five years in the United States, Ive been frustrated time and again
trying to get access to Indigenous production from Canada (let alone Indigenous media more
generally). While production opportunities have expanded, distribution has always been an issue
that has limited its audience potential. An enormous amount of credit is due to those who support
the distribution of Indigenous media: educational institutions, media collectives, independent
distribution organizations, broadcasters, and film festivals.
The First Peoples, First Screens program is therefore particularly significant and timely, recognizing
that Indigenous media and art not only need audiences, but that audiences are waiting for it. I thank
and congratulate Cinema Politica for its vision and dedication in creating this program, and also thank
the filmmakers for their insights, imagination, and commitment its truly been an honour!

Karrmen Crey is a member of the Cheam Band (Sto:lo Nation) and a PhD candidate at the University of California,
Los Angeles, where she is researching institutional contexts for Indigenous media production in Canada.
Previously, she was a researcher for a three-year research project that investigated conflicts arising from the
discussion of Indigenous issues in postsecondary classrooms, and their impact on students and instructors
(intheclass.arts.ubc.ca). She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and UCLA
Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2015-2016.
Twitter: @karrmencrey
What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom: intheclass.arts.ubc.ca