Festival honors documentary makers

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Two of the world's eminent Native documentary filmmakers from opposite sides of the globe started in much the same place.

"As I grew up I wanted to make it better for other children...I started going around to classrooms to talk directly to them" about what was happening to First Nations people, "because no one was teaching them this," said Montreal-based Alanis Obomsawin, creator of the multi-award winning Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and more than 20 other documentaries about the struggles of First Nations communities.

"Ever since I could remember as a kid, I've actually been on a collision course with political and social reality in this country," Maori filmmaker Merata Mita told a New Zealand interviewer.

These celebrated Aboriginal women were honored at the First People's Festival in Montreal, with a retrospective of Mita's work and an exhibit of another side of Obomsawin's creativity-prints of engravings she makes of her dreams.

"For many years I've been wanting to draw what I dream," she told Windspeaker, as she rocked in a small chair in the kitchen of her Montreal home filled with the sharp odor of burning wood on a misty, grey June day.

What Obomsawin sees in her sleep at first seems at odds with her films about such well-known confrontations as the Oka Crisis, the standoff between Native lobster fishers and the non-Native community and authorities at Esgenoopetitj (Burnt Church, N.B) and 1981's Quebec Provincial Police raids on another Mi'kmaq community, in her documentary, Incident at Restigouche.

For example, a print of The Sleeping Bears shows a dozen of the animals wrapped tightly in blankets dozing peacefully at the entrance to what looks like a tipi; Woman's Life in the Tent depicts a mother crouched before a Singer sewing machine as an infant sleeps beside her and birds watch from nearby perches.

But as Obomsawin explains, her films are as much about peoples as they are of retelling events.

"I think it's important for (viewers) to understand that those people have a life and they have traditions...to (see) their everyday life and the historical portion of it too."

In her latest documentary, Is the Crown at War With Us?, the Abenaki filmmaker who was born in the U.S. state of New Hampshire but grew up on the Odanak reserve in Quebec, depicts a community that sees no alternative to survival but to continue a way of life that for 11,000 years has been centred around the sea.

It's a familiar tale, she says. What happened at (Burnt Church) "is a repetition of what happens when you're asserting your rights...the humiliation when you're being pushed around...It's always (about) resources and land issues."

The 13th edition of the Montreal festival featured other such struggles documented in film, such as Take Back the Land! about the fight over Secwepemc territory taken to build a ski resort in the interior of British Columbia, and Palabras Zapatistas (We Speak) about an Indigenous peoples march to Mexico City.

But the event's two-week-long film and video series also told other types of stories, from Canada and around the globe, including Attache ta Tuque, about the young Algonquin Sam, who flees the Russian mafia across central Quebec.

And it traveled back in time to update the famous 1922 documentary Nanook of the North to the accompaniment of Inuit throat singers and a piano.

Some artists chose to recount fading legends of their people in A Game of Creation, an exhibition of seven chess sets commissioned for the festival, which is held in both Montreal and the nearby Mohawk community of Kahnawake.

Allan Gregoire's pieces represented the betrayal of the Innu people by the Nenenots (red-faced men), who switched sides at the last minute to fight with the Inuit against the Innu, earning themselves the name Naskapis (traitors or toughs).

Christine Sioui Wawanoloath translated her fascination with the story of Klooskombe, the greatest mythological hero in the Wabanaki culture, int fantastic figures carved from deer antler and decorated with abalone.

"No one knows (the myth) hardly any more," she said in an interview. "We lost the oral tradition, so we weren't told or taught" about it.

Those myths recall the dream stories of Obomsawin's engravings, which she calls "the best therapy" from her documentary making. But her better-known work continues in her current project, a return to Restigouche, the site of one of her first films about a police raid on Native fishermen.

"These issues are always very urgent," she said. "They're not easy, but it must be done."

The community of Restigouche, she added, is much stronger today. "They've been fighting for a very long time and not giving in and really believing that they have rights to their resources."

But Obomsawin sees other confrontations in Canada's future.

"It's going to happen again. I know that. But we're making progress."

"I think that one day our people will have our place and their rights, and then it's going to be a different life for the future generations ... I've seen changes and the rest of the country is much more aware."