Since she was very young, multidisciplinary artist Alanis Obomsawin has worked for a better understanding of indigenous realities. For his 92nd birthday, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) is dedicating a retrospective to him.
One day, at the age of 12, after the death of her father, Alanis Obomsawin decided to no longer look down in the face of humiliation. She, who “got beaten” after Canadian history lessons at the Trois-Rivières school she attended, made a promise to herself to keep her head held high in front of these children who were harassing her, because she was Abenaki, a “savage” as they called her, the only one in the school at the time.
Since then, the prodigious filmmaker, who is celebrating her 92nd birthday, has not stopped working to increase understanding of the indigenous realities of Canada. The new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art — temporarily moved to Place Ville Marie — Children need to hear another storya retrospective of all of his work, bears witness to this.
Tell another story
“I was like, ‘If kids knew a different story, they wouldn’t be so mean,’” she says. Alanis Obomsawin made education her hobby horse, in her youth as a model and as a singer, telling stories to children in schools, then, obviously, as a filmmaker at the National Film Board, since 1967.
In 1964, she was seen in episodes of Radio-Canada and CBC television shows tirelessly explaining the realities of her people. “Progress is a very beautiful word, which the white man appropriates, but sometimes, for Indians, it is a very sad word,” she told the host of the show The Observer. She doesn’t flinch either when he offers to eat bear, because it’s the totem animal of her clan. However, in indigenous culture, members of a clan are specifically forbidden from eating their totem animal.
As a singer, in the 1960s, she toured Canadian prisons where there were a high percentage of Aboriginal people. “Someone told me there were a lot of Aboriginal people in prison. I said to myself: “There are members of my family in prison, I’m going to go see them,” she says. I was the first to do this! »
It was after she campaigned for the construction of a municipal swimming pool in her community of Odanak that cinema entered Alanis Obomsawin’s life. The National Film Board asked her what she thought about the representation of Aboriginal people on screen. “I told them: ‘We never hear them speak,’” she says. She then takes the camera to tell, and make them tell, their story. His first feature-length documentary, Mother of so many childrenfocuses on the role of indigenous women in communities in 1977. Children have always been at the heart of her work.
Someone told me there were a lot of Aboriginal people in prison. I said to myself: “There are members of my family in prison, I’m going to go see them.” I was the first to do this!
The indigenous point of view at the heart of crises
In the 1980s and 1990s, she delved into the crises and political divisions of the Indigenous people of Quebec, with the film The events of Restigouche, in 1984, then with Kahnesatake. 270 years of resistanceon the “Oka crisis” of 1990. In an interview, she recalls the extremely tense climate that prevailed in Quebec around these latest events. After the outcome of the crisis, which she filmed from inside the barricades, with the insurgents, she fears showing up in restaurants and being insulted.
The Anishinaabe artist Caroline Monnet, who created the mural that accompanies the exhibition, remembers having seen Kahnesatake. 270 years of resistance when she was in Europe. “I was 12 years old, and it was the first time I saw Indigenous people on screen,” she says.
“It was very difficult,” remembers Alanis Obomsawin, about the 1990s, following the Oka crisis.
Spread culture
She tirelessly made films to promote fundamental elements of indigenous cultures, including Sigwanwhich explores indigenous understanding of animals. In an interview, she remembers the stories that her father, who was a hunting and fishing guide, told in Odanak, where there was no electricity and no running water. “It was by oil lamp. The guides told real or historical stories, and animals always had a place there. There were often very comical episodes about animals. As we didn’t have images, each of us made a different film in our heads,” she says.
In 2010, she was inspired by her own traumatic experience, at the Trois-Rivières school, to make the film When all the leaves have fallen. Today, she says she is “always happy to come back to Canada” because the indigenous cause has made enormous progress there in recent years. She said to her people: “You can pursue the professions you want now. There are funds and programs to support you. »
Always magnificent, determined, smiling, she receives this retrospective like a gift. 20 years ago, she believes, it would have been unthinkable that such an exhibition would be dedicated to him.