Four Points on an Aesthetic Map: Aboriginal Media Art in Canada

Ever since I took a teaching position at the Ontario College of Art and Design five years ago, I filter almost all of the films and videos I see through a pedagogical lens: what does this work teach? What kinds of discussions might it provoke with students? How does it connect to larger issues or reflect directions in media art? Not every good film or video is equally teachable. If all the threads are neatly bound, for example, it may be hard to pry open an entry point to begin analysis. Some great films and videos offer little to discuss. But when students are genuinely provoked to think or to question, that is when lights go on, when the opportunity to learn presents itself.

The films and videos I have selected for Non-Compliance—Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of A Métis Child (1986) by Alanis Obomsawin, Qaggiq (Gathering Place) (1989) by Zacharias Kunuk, Colonization: The Second Coming (1996) by Thirza Jean Cuthand, and Buffalo Bone China (1997) by Dana Claxton are all teachable works. While they might not be the most well known Aboriginal productions, or even the defining work by each artist, I have chosen them because of their intrinsic value as films and videos, and also because they exemplify four significant directions within Aboriginal media art production in Canada over the last twenty years. They map out different conceptual and political preoccupations, genres and aesthetic strategies. They also facilitate a discussion of various kinds of production and diverse locations for Aboriginal media art. With roots in the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, Igloolik Isuma began making television documentaries, and Qaggiq (Gathering Place) marks a transition towards a new hybrid practice. Alanis Obomsawin is one of Canada’s most lauded documentary makers and Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, is a prime example of advocacy filmmaking. Dana Claxton is firmly established as a contemporary artist—or perhaps what Luiseño artist James Luna calls a “contemporary traditionalist”—and the single channel video of Buffalo Bone China was one element of a gallery performance and installation piece. Finally, Thirza Cuthand’s early videos were produced off the grid, but their public attention was made possible by the network of queer and Aboriginal media art festivals.

In Video for Artists, a full year introductory course that covers production, history and criticism of the medium, I do not teach a special unit on Aboriginal media. Instead, I show Qaggiq in a class on lighting and camera, and Richard Cardinal to illustrate approaches to non-fiction. I use the documentary Guarding the Family Silver (2005), by Maori filmmakers Toby Mills and Moana Maniapoto, to generate discussion on the complexity of copyright and intellectual property issues. My intention is that students—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—come to recognize the contributions of indigenous practitioners to the art as a whole. At the same time, we discuss the cultural and political specificities of each work, and the stakes: why has this artist chosen to make this work? Why is it important that this work exists?

Métis/Cree filmmaker and theoretician Loretta Todd, links the question of Aboriginal aesthetics to that of sovereignty: “…as media makers, we have not lived up to the responsibilities that extend from generations of storytellers to both create something that is uniquely our own and insist on the management of our own cultural resources.”[1] Her apparent pessimism aside, coloniality is a good place to start in any consideration of Aboriginal aesthetics, not just because it is an enduring preoccupation for First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists, but crucially because the concept of aboriginality and the practices of indigenous panethnicity arise from this condition. Why else might we be searching for common strands in the work of artists of Abenaki (Alanis Obomsawin), Inuit (Zacharias Kunuk), Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux (Dana Claxton) and Cree Scots Irish (Thirza Jean Cuthand) ancestries? Each of the selected films and tapes do in fact reference the primal scene of colonization—obliquely in Qaggiq, bluntly in Buffalo Bone China; with poignancy and quiet anger in Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, with humour in Colonization: The Second Coming—but working variously with the languages of documentary, fiction and experimentalism, in single channel and installation formats, video and film, exhibited in the white cube, the black box and the TV set, each takes a unique path towards decolonizing the moving image.

By the time motion pictures were invented near the turn of the 20th century, an imperial outlook was deeply engrained in European and Euro-American cultures, and early cinema reflects these attitudes, directly and subconsciously. It isn’t difficult, for instance, to recognize a colonial reverie at the heart of what is considered the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon (1902). In this classic, French pioneer director Georges Méliès, conjures up a band of explorers who build a bullet shaped rocket to fly them to the moon, where they encounter and fend off hostile lunar natives before escaping back to earth[2]. In the first documentary film, Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the natives are not hostile but, according to the intertitles, “The most cheerful people in all the world—the fearless, loveable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo.” Flaherty’s film popularized the stereotype of the Inuit as noble primitives, but the iconic image of Allakariallak as Nanook, tasting a gramophone record in ignorant wonder, elides the fact that the Inuit served as Flaherty’s technical assistants and shot footage for the film[3]. Finally, among the first film vignettes presented by American inventor Thomas Edison were titles like Sioux Ghost Dance (1894) and Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys (1898)[4]. The Western genre that followed shifted over time from sometimes sympathetic representations in the silent era (D. W. Griffith’s The Redman and the Child, 1908), to downright racist propaganda (John Ford’s Stagecoach, 1939), to liberal revisionism in the wake of the Civil Rights movement (Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, 1990). But with rare exception, the centre of its action remained the white male protagonist. By suturing the viewer’s consciousness to the perspective of the settler, these films function to justify colonialism and promote a consensus around Western domination as the natural, desirable way. Replace Native North Americans with Africans or Mexicans or Vietnamese or Arabs in most Hollywood fare, and the lessons are the same.

First Nations people negotiate and resist the legacy of the Western in various ways. Curator Richard Hill recalls his Cree mother’s casual deconstruction of the Western for him as a child: “Do you notice that the Indians are always the bad guys?" "Do you notice how they try to make the Indians look scary?"[5] And Tewa/Dine' filmmaker and visual anthropologist Beverly R. Singer, describes the activism of Native performers in Hollywood against the negative stereotypes and for better working conditions. These included actors from Canada such as Mohawk Harold Preston Smith, who under the stage name Jay Silverheels portrayed Tonto on The Lone Ranger television series (1949-1957)[6]. The work of Chief Dan George is similarly noteworthy. The most challenging yet effective response, however, may be when Aboriginal people take up the camera to produce their own images.

Qaggiq (Gathering Place) (1989), directed by Zacharias Kunuk of Igloolik Isuma, was the first Inuit-produced film or video to receive wide international circulation. Until then, the screen presence of the Inuit was largely confined in the south to nature documentaries and ethnographic films, and still defined by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. The two works share a similar look due to the historical signifiers of dog sleds, igloos and seal skin clothing, and to the snowy landscapes—though it must be said that Igloolik is over a thousand kilometres north of Nanook’s Inukjuak. Both works also fall in a territory between documentary and drama. But despite the superficial similarities, the two films are crucially different. In contrast to Flaherty’s falsification of history, Kunuk re-stages Igloolik life in the 1930s with an eye for detail: the Inuktitut spoken uses no English loan words or phrases, but tobacco, tea and southern made kettles are all in evidence. Whereas Flaherty obfuscates the impact of contact with Europeans on Inuit life—his film was underwritten by the French fur company Revillon Frères, a competitor to the Hudson’s Bay Company—in Qaggiq a character sings, “White people are coming. Let’s help one another.” While Nanook of the North renders the northern landscape spectacular, the cinematography in Qaggiq avoids wide panoramas, and instead represents the snowy environment as ordinary, domestic space. Finally, while Flaherty used film to capture what he saw as a dying culture—what Fatimah Tobing Rony calls the “taxidermic” impulse[7] —Kunuk uses video to keep Igloolik culture alive.

Qaggiq (Gathering Place) is the first in the Unikaatuatiit (Story Tellers) series of one-hour dramas, which also includes Nunaqpa (Going Inland) (1991) and Saputi (Fish Traps) (1993). It establishes Igloolik Isuma’s method of historical recreation developed by Zacharias Kunuk with American born video artist and the company’s cinematographer Norman Cohn, elder Pauloosie Qulitalik, and the late Paul Apak Angilirq. In this video one can see the unique approach to storytelling that would be more fully realized in feature projects like Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2000) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006).

Kunuk explains that, “People in Igloolik learnt through storytelling who we were and where we came from for 4000 years without a written language.”[8] Storytelling is particularly central to indigenous peoples because their narratives about themselves and about the world are marginalized or appropriated by the narratives of the dominant, official culture. Métis filmmaker Marjorie Beaucage writes, “Stories are medicine, they are our connection to the sacred power that is in all things.”[9] There is an urgency in the storytelling for Kunuk who sees a link between the loss of culture and the high rate of suicide among Inuit youth: “…we want to show how our ancestors survived by the strength of their community and their wits, and how new ways of storytelling today can help our community survive another thousand years.” [10]

Compiling Aboriginal histories in eastern Canada, Bonita Lawrence works towards decolonizing the practice of historiography by relying not on the records of the colonizer but on the knowledge-carriers of indigenous elders and scholars: “For Indigenous peoples, telling our histories involves recovering our own stories of the past and asserting the epistemological foundations that inform our stories of the past.”[11] In the Igloolik Isuma productions the technology of video allows the people to tell their own history in their own way. Re-enactment serves as a mnemonic device through which the community recalls and, in very concrete ways, relives its past. Yet even while delighting in the production’s effects on participating elders and youth, Kunuk does not romanticize or overstate what is possible: “These people in the tape are 1990s people. I can only try and take them back to the time when traders just started coming. Also, what they remember.” [12]

Qaggiq’s scenario is minimalist: “A late-winter Inuit camp in the 1930's. Four families build a qaggiq, a large communal igloo, to celebrate the coming of spring with games, singing and drum dancing. A young man seeks a wife. The girl's father says no, but her mother says yes...”[13] In the end, boy gets girl, but the slight narrative—we don’t even know the names of the characters—serves mostly to structure the “ethnographic” elements: the games, singing, dancing and marriage proposal. The people of Igloolik inhabit the characters of their forebears with joy and enthusiasm, which brings a special energy to the video. There are no shot-reverse shot set-ups as in the classic fiction film; the fluid camera simply pans back and forth, documentary style, following the action. The standpoint of the camera is that of a participant recorder, and at times performers glance almost conspiratorially into the lens. The result is a dynamic tension between the codes of documentary, fiction and ethnographic filmmaking.

Looking at Qaggiq with a class sometimes barely out of their teens, I am aware of the pacing. From the stunning opening scene where the dog sled slowly materializes out of the flat white background of snow and sky, the editing is languorous with few of the cinematic elements that quicken the pace of conventional films, such as cross-cutting. Kunuk says, “We like to show it slowly, just run the camera. It’s more real.”[14] Not surprisingly, perhaps, my young urban students express being refreshed by work like this precisely because it rejects the frenetic pace of contemporary commercial media. Qaggiq embodies the attentiveness that Loretta Todd invokes in opposition to a “culture of noise”: “Let’s say that being attentive is in contrast to a culture of noise. And let’s say attentiveness reflects a principle connected to how Aboriginal people come to knowledge. Attentiveness is also directly related to our institutions of governance: oral tradition requires precision of knowledge combined with creative expression. And I would say that attentiveness refers to our senses as well as our minds.” [15]

Alanis Obomsawin’s filmmaking is the epitome of attentiveness. And it elicits attentiveness. Every year I screen Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) for my second year video students, and every year there is a stunned silence when the film is over. At a time when mass media employs dizzying digital effects and sensational confessions to enthral a jaded and distracted viewer, the enduring potency of this quiet film, now over twenty years old, is a tribute to its maker. Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child treats the suicide of a Native teenager who since the age of four had moved in and out of twenty-eight foster homes, group homes, shelters and lock-up facilities in Alberta. There had been an inquiry into Richard Cardinal’s death, but the film refuses to turn Richard’s life into a “case.” No social workers or experts are interviewed, only Richard’s brother Charlie and several foster parents. Richard’s subjectivity is asserted through readings from his diary—entitled “I Was a Victim of Child Neglect”—and by the use of a young actor (Cory Swan) in dramatic re-creations. The result is an indictment of systemic racism and neglect, but one that never compromises Richard’s individual humanity. Alanis Obomsawin rejects the stance of objectivity that is so common in journalistic discourse: “I can’t separate myself. Some people say that’s wrong….But I don’t want to be an outside eye looking in. All my life, wherever I go I feel the story of the people.” [16]

Everything about Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child bespeaks the careful pedagogy that makes Obomsawin’s work so powerful and so persuasive—the documentary is credited with triggering policy changes in Alberta. The film opens with images of a beautiful young boy collecting fireweed blossoms in a sunlit field. It is shot close up with narrow depth of field and in slight slow motion, the effect of which is to draw us into the emotional orbit of the character. Over the plaintive sound of a flute, a young man reads from Richard’s diary: “I was born in Fort Chipewyan. That much I know for certain, because it’s on my birth certificate. I have no memory or certain knowledge of what transpired over the next few years. I was once told by a social worker that my parents were alcoholics, and all of us kids were removed for this reason.” From this sad but poetic scene the image dissolves to a photograph of 17 year-old Richard Cardinal, dead and hanging by a rope from a stand of birch trees. The snapshot format, normally associated with records of holidays and birthday parties, is shocking. Grabbing the viewer’s attention within the first two minutes, the film then proceeds to answer the question of why such a sensitive and eloquent young man would purposely end his life. By the conclusion of the film, when we know what Richard experienced, we understand his decision.

Like Qaggiq, Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child draws on the vocabularies of both fiction and documentary. But whereas Kunuk creates a form that occupies the space between the genres, Obomsawin combines them, harnessing the affective power of dramatic narrative and the discourse of factuality associated with the documentary. It is as if both directors mistrust the ability of the established languages of film and video to adequately represent their subject matter. They must create new languages to have their stories register in the way they intend them. It is perhaps because of this frustration that Aboriginal makers have been at the forefront of innovation in time-based media.

Both Kunuk and Obomsawin are supported by institutional infrastructure—he with Igloolik Isuma and she at the National Film Board of Canada—and by professional production teams. But the improved quality and relative accessibility of home video recording technology, editing programs such as iMovie, and web-based exhibition platforms like YouTube, have enabled “do it yourself” filmmaking to flourish. Requiring few resources other than a camera, a computer and a fertile imagination, the resulting homemade approach has ushered in new aesthetics and new voices in video art. At the age of sixteen, Thirza Jean Cuthand made her first tape, Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995). While still a teenager, her short, self-reflexive videos travelled the world to festivals and galleries. Cuthand’s DIY tapes revel in low-tech production values and no-budget art direction juxtaposed with a confessional first person narration that treats sexual taboos with frankness: lesbianism and bisexuality, intergenerational sex and sado-masochism all figure in her early works. There is a startling clarity and honesty in her observations about people, human relationships and society, but any resulting abjectness or sentimentality is undercut by the wit and irony in her writing and sound-image juxtapositions.

Colonization: The Second Coming (1996), Cuthand’s second tape, involves aliens (played by a couple of cardboard cut-outs) and a space ship (a vegetable steamer) inadvertently summoned to the narrator’s back yard when she switches on her new vibrator. Telling her they have come to colonize the earth, she exclaims, “ Colonization, again? If you don’t mind, I’ve already been colonized.” She recounts explaining to them that, “in spite of my white skin I was actually a treaty Indian and I was coming from 500 years of oppression and genocide. And to top it all off I was also a dyke, which meant I was doubly oppressed. And of course being a woman on earth was hard as well.” She invites the aliens in for tea, but after five hours of listening to essays by American Black feminist academic bell hooks, they beg to be excused.

Commenting on Sadie Benning’s videos, American teenage prodigy and the artist whose work Cuthand’s most closely resembles, Catherine Russell writes, “the diary mode becomes a space of cultural transgression and critique, a site where she can become anyone she wants and is thus able to transcend any assigned roles of gender and age.” [17]
The self-sufficiency of the DIY production mode allows Cuthand to fully explore, without the scrutiny or permission of others, her identity as a “Cree Scots Irish bipolar butch lesbian two spirited boy/girl thingamabob in Saskatoon.”[18] But still, the spatial dimension of her work reveals the paradox of youth: the psychological development of an adult trapped in the geography of a child. So even as her plots involve aliens, witches and queens—super-mobile creatures—what we see are the everyday objects and environments that constitute an ordinary teenager’s world.

Cuthand is a child of the digital age and her work has few precedents among Aboriginal practitioners. From the early 1990s, Vancouver-based Dene artist Zachery Longboy had produced performances and videos on gay sexuality, two-spirited identity and HIV/AIDS, but his aesthetic reference points are ceremony and nature. By contrast, the diegesis in Cuthand’s tapes is everyday and urban. Apart from Sadie Benning’s Pixelvision diaries, Cuthand’s tapes have most affinity with non-Native queer DIY artists such as Allyson Mitchell and Steve Reinke. In her later video Through the Looking Glass (1999), Cuthand’s character refuses to choose between the path of the red queen and that of the white queen (played by performance artists Lori Blondeau and Shawna Dempsey, respectively), and it is therefore appropriate that her work bridges several millieux. Her insistent hybridity and engagement of popular culture prefigure the concerns and sensibilities of a younger generation of First Nations artists such as Kent Monkman, with his Cher-inspired alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and his homo-porn pastiches of Paul Kane and Lawren Harris, and Mohawk-Italian Canadian cyber provocatrice Skawennati Tricia Fragnito whose projects reference contemporary mass culture, from music video to the celebrity-chic animal rights group PETA.

Authorial presence is a marked feature in the work of both Thirza Cuthand and Alanis Obomsawin. In Colonization: The Second Coming, the artist’s body is truncated by the framing, so we see her hands, feet and crotch, but never her face. The narrator’s telling us of her Treaty status is never “proven” by phenotypic evidence. In the video that follows, however, Working Baby Dyke Theory: The Diasporic Impact of Cross Generational Barriers (1997), she does not mention that she is Aboriginal, but we see her face, which with the epicanthic folds in her eyes—specifically noted in Through the Looking Glass (1999)— points to her Cree ancestry. In Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, Alanis Obomsawin’s visual presence is made through cutaway shots as she listens to subjects during interviews. Her voice over narration forms the narrative spine of the documentary. Authorial presence, which characterizes all Obomsawin’s productions, functions in two ways. First, it acknowledges the film’s construction and point of view. Second, it establishes for viewers, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, that we are watching a film made by an Abenaki woman. Establishing Aboriginal female authorship would have been particularly important in the 1970’s when there were few Indigenous filmmakers.

The tension between seeing and telling in Cuthand and Obomsawin, is paralleled by that between seeing and touching in Dana Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China (1997). In the nineteenth century, calcium phosphate ash made from buffalo bones was used to produce bone china, the highest grade of porcelain. The artist uses this fact as the starting point for a treatise on the relationship between the refinement of high European culture and the colonial violence and genocide that enabled it. Devoid of narration or didactic text, the video comprises only four visual components: archival footage of buffalo herds, a still image of a bison skull, video footage of a china dinner set, and a performance by a young Aboriginal man (Anthony McNab Flavel). [19]

The first five minutes of this nine-minute tape features a repeating montage of buffalo herds running on the plains. The footage is de-saturated to black and white, slowed down to a stuttering pace, zoomed in and re-shot off a video monitor so that the scan lines form a mesh across the screen. The duration of the sequence underscores the one-time majesty of the North American bison herds, which are estimated to have been between 30 and 60 million. The slowed motion allows us to appreciate the magnificence of the buffalo but the grainy almost tactile surface of the image—the skin of the video, to borrow film scholar Laura U. Marks’ term[20] —emphasizes the irretrievable distance of that era. The soundscape, which incorporates Native drums and chanting, reminds us of the relationship of the Plains Indians to the bison, their source of food, their spirituality and most material needs. To subdue the First Nations, if not to annihilate them outright, in the nineteenth century both the American and Canadian governments adopted a policy to exterminate the bison[21]. In 1874, The United States Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, testified before Congress, “The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization.” [22]

The protracted buffalo montage ends with the image of a man aiming a rifle. Following this, fast inter-cutting between close-ups of a bison’s head as the animal trips and falls, a bleached bison skull, and the silent scream of the Aboriginal performer links the shared fate of the buffalo and the buffalo people. The video then switches to colour as the camera slides over a large service of formal china in pink and white with gilded edges. Tight shots following of a pair of hands lightly caressing the porcelain suggests a desire to recover something of the lost bison. The close-up elicits a bodily response in the viewer, what Laura Marks theorizes as haptic visuality, when “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch”.[23] The effect is even more astonishing when the performer’s long black hair brushes over the dishes. As the tactile effect of the shot causes us to recall the feeling of hair across our own skin, our subject position fuses with that of the china, and hence the buffalo.

Because of the pervasiveness of American cinema and television internationally, most immigrants and international students arrive in Canada already “knowing” about Aboriginal people even before they ever meet someone of Dene or Anishinaabe ancestry. I therefore want to arm my students with techniques for deconstructing dominant discourses, but also expose them to alternative sources of knowledge. As students of film and video, they must understand the power of the moving image and cinema’s complicity with domination, but be inspired by its libratory potential.

As a teacher in a studio program, I also contextualize and historicize the films and videos I show in class. Yet, I encourage students to question not just the categories, but also the usefulness of categorization. Whose interests does it serve to debate whether this or that film or video is truly cinéma vérité, or truly dogma? Not the artists’. So while I have tried to locate these four films and videos within a spider’s web of larger conceptual, aesthetic, political, historical and ethical relations, I hope I have been sufficiently attentive to the internal terms of reference within each work. I do not believe there to be a defining Aboriginal aesthetic; however, when we take account of how these works individually bend the languages and technologies of the moving image, and, where necessary, invent new lexicons in their storytelling, we begin to appreciate the breadth and depth of aesthetic strategies developed by Aboriginal artists.
 

Buffalo Bone China, Dana Claxton, 1997, 9:00, video, distributors: Vtape, Video Out

Colonization: The Second Coming, Thirza Jean Cuthand , 1996, 3:30, video, distributor: Video Pool

Qaggiq (Gathering Place), Zacharias Kunuk & Igloolik Isuma Productions, 1989, 58:00, video, distributor: Vtape

Richard Cardinal: Cry from the Diary of a Métis Child, Alanis Obomsawin, 1986, 30:00, 16mm, distributor: National Film Board of Canada

1. Loretta Todd, “Polemics, Philosophies and a Story, Dana Claxton, Steven Loft, Melanie Townsend, eds., Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture, Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 2005. 110.

2. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 109.

3. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 115.

4. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, 17.

5. Richard William Hill, “Jeff Thomas: Working Histories,” Jeff Thomas, A Study of Indian-ness, catalogue, Toronto: Gallery 44, 2004, 9.

6. Beverly R. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 19.

7. Tobing Rony,101.

8. Zacharias Kunuk, “The Art of Inuit Storytelling,” Igloolik Isuma website: http://www.isuma.ca/

9. Marjorie Beaucage, “Aboriginal Voices: Entitlement Through Storytelling,” Janine Marchessault, ed., Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1995, 214.

10. Zacharias Kunuk, “The Art of Inuit Storytelling,” Igloolik Isuma website: http://www.isuma.ca

11. Bonita Lawrence, “Rewriting Histories of the Land: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada,” Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002, 25.

12. “Interviews: Zach Kunuk,” Peter Steven, Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video, Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993, 163.

13. Synopsis on the Igloolik Isuma website: www.isuma.ca

14. Steven, 161.

15. Todd, 120-121.

16. “Interviews: Alanis Obomsawin,” Peter Steven, 184.

17. Catherine Russell, “Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self,” Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor, eds., Lux: A Decade of Artist’s Film and Video, Toronto: YYZ Books & Pleasure Dome, 2000, 150.

18. Artist biography on the website of Thirza Cuthand’s distributor, Vtape: www.vtape.org

19. Buffalo Bone China was originally staged as a performance and installation in which the single-channel video formed one element.

20. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000

21. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1989, 60.

22. “ The Buffalo Harvest,” Case Study of The Inventory of Conflict and Environment (ICE), American University, Washington, D.C., Website: www.american.edu/TED/ice

23. Marks, 162.