Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
| Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Alanis Obomsawin |
| Produced by |
|
| Written by | Alanis Obomsawin |
| Starring | Alanis Obomsawin |
| Music by |
|
| Cinematography |
|
| Edited by | Yurij Luhovy |
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
119 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is a 1993 feature-length film documentary film by Alanis Obomsawin, chronicling the 1990 Oka Crisis.
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film won 18 Canadian and international awards, including the Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and the CITY TV Award for Best Canadian Feature Film from the Toronto Festival of Festivals.
Rejected by Mark Starowicz of CBC Television, the film premiered in England, instead, on Channel Four. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance made its North American premiere at the Toronto Festival of Festivals.
In his book, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker, film scholar Randolph Lewis writes:
When the film was released in 1993, the CBC continued its long-standing neglect of Obomsawin's work, in this case arguing that she needed to slice thirty minutes from the two-hour film to make room for commercial breaks. [..] Colin Neale, the executive producer who worked with Obomsawin on the film, rebuffed the network's demand. [...] Eventually, public interest in Kahnesatake overpowered the CBC's bureaucratic reluctance, and the network aired it on January 31, 1994.
Brian McIlroy, in his chapter on Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance for the book The Cinema of Canada, states that:
It is clear that without Obomsawin's 1993 film, the history of Oka circa 1990 would be dominated by [Prime Minister Brian] Mulroney's assertion, reproduced in the documentary, that the armed Mohawks were criminals and illegally wielding weapons.
In every narrative there is a narrator, a voice, an author. Unfortunately, this voice is never truly objective. There is always some underlying bias, agenda, or philosophy guiding the perception of the narrator. As history itself is a narrative, the viewpoint of the narrator can have a profound effect on history and its meanings. This has a particular impact on those who traditionally have not had a voice. One such group that has historically been lacking mainstream representation is the Native American. The history and traditions of Native American peoples have, for the most part, been passed down through oral traditions. This leaves these peoples with little written record. On top of this, indigenous peoples in both the United States and Canada have been subject to a great deal of persecution. From being stripped of their traditional homelands and sacred sites to being subjected to forced assimilation through boarding schools, Native American peoples have been unable to represent themselves, to share their stories with the mainstream. Instead of being able to represent themselves, indigenous people have historically been represented to the western world by outsiders. Outsiders such as anthropologists, ethnographers, and others who often emerge from the very people and social viewpoint that have benefitted from the oppression of indigenous peoples. This has led to ethnographic documentaries that, in their attempt to explore another culture, end up misunderstanding and even exploiting native cultures. This tends to continue the mainstream narrative of indigenous inferiority. It is in this context that Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is worth noting in the history of documentary. This film is remarkable because of the intent of the director, an indigenous woman who approaches documentary in order to explain more deeply the indigenous experience from an indigenous perspective. In Alanis Obomsawin: Vision of a Native Filmmaker, the author explains that the goal of all Obomsawin’s work “whether in singing or storytelling or filmmaking-has been a fight for inclusion of our history”.
...
Wikipedia