In 1969, the young Abenaki singer and activist Alanis Obomsawin, newly hired as a consultant at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), took part in a televised roundtable discussion with the activist-author Jane Jacobs and Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver, among other woman panelists. The conversation was part of the series Take 30, a “women’s program” hosted by the journalist turned politician Adrienne Clarkson, who invited panelists to discuss a range of subjects, such as domestic life and politics. When the topic of violence as a means to combat oppression arose, the conversation became especially heated. Obomsawin declared, “I hate violence,” and calmly continued to explain that she still believed in the power of peaceful negotiation, no matter how the oppressor would try to rob Indigenous people of their dignity. To her mind, Indigenous people could never be destroyed. Twenty-one years later, Obomsawin was a filmmaker still working at the NFB when a war broke out in Kahnawà:ke, an Indigenous reserve near Montreal, over a golf course that was set to be built on a Mohawk Nation sacred burial ground known as the Pines. This conflict between the land defenders and the police, which later escalated to involve armed forces, lasted from July to September of 1990. Obomsawin remained behind the barricades, despite the risks, documenting everything with her camera until the bitter end. In an interview she gave to Radio-Canada when she finally exited the war zone, she tearfully said that the people there had “no choice” but to use violence. This emotional sound bite signals a shift that took place within Obomsawin, away from the staunch position on violence that she articulated decades prior on the televised panel.
Archival clips of the 1969 roundtable and the 1990 interview with the press are both featured in The Children Have to Hear Another Story, a major touring retrospective organized by the curators Richard Hill and Hila Peleg, which is currently on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) and will travel to MoMA PS1 in March.The exhibition comprises thirteen of Obomsawin’s films, hours of television excerpts, letters, photographs, baskets crafted by Abenaki artists, artifacts, archival materials, and more than twenty original drawings and etchings by Obomsawin. Across six decades, she has diligently shared Indigenous stories with the world, and along the way, she has unabashedly expressed herself and her convictions. At ninety-two years old, Obomsawin is busier than ever: she released eight films in 2023 and another in 2024, titled My Friend the Green Horse, and will soon debut Dr. Bryce and TB (working title). Obomsawin’s work is singular because of the care with which she holds her subjects, their voices and stories, which is immediately apparent on screen. A singer, activist, and filmmaker, she is also a master listener. It is a radical act to document Indigenous people as they are—their concerns, culture, daily life, hopes and dreams—while our government continues to systemically suppress communities across the country.
Alanis Obomsawin, Christmas at Moose Factory (still), 1971. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), Obomsawin’s earliest film, is a prime example of how she holds her subjects in care. Since the very beginning of her career, she has been committed to telling a different story about Canadian history than the one taught in schools. This first film is as much authored by Obomsawin as it is by the fifty-three young Cree children featured in it, since their voices narrate a montage of their own hand-drawn scenes depicting daily life during Christmastime. Christmas at Moose Factory was shot on location at a residential school in a small Ontario town. The camera humorously zooms in and out of the drawings, bouncing around within the frame to animate the way the young artists explain their work. In one scene, vigorous strokes of white wax crayon convey the heavy December snow, and in another, we see the O-shaped mouths of family members who are screaming during an encounter with a black bear. The child narrator explains, “We looked and then we saw a black bear standing up. Then the kids start screaming so the bear ran in the bush. … There were nine of us there, and we were scared.” The children’s faces are revealed at the end of the film in a touching slideshow of photographs.
The original drawings from Christmas at Moose Factory take pride of place in the first room of the exhibition at MAC. Over fifty years later, they remain vibrant and expressive testaments to the validating attention Obomsawin gave to each child’s perspective. This was only the first of many projects she made while working for the NFB, and it is remarkable how effectively she used the resources of a federal agency to counter the dominant racist, white-supremacist, colonial narrative. In the 1970s, Obomsawin released two film series: History of Manawan (1972), which told the history of the Québec reserve from the perspective of the Atikamekw elder Cézar Néwashish; and L’il’wata (1975), a series of shorts that shared personal narratives about puberty and other subjects from people of the Líl̓wat Nation, a small British Columbia community. She also designed education kits to accompany these two series and distributed them in schools across the country. They could contain film strips, coloring books, photographs, vinyl records, and even handmade toys. Two of these kits, among the few remaining editions, are installed at the center of the first gallery at MAC. When policies and education systems are dictated by a government and church that equate Indigenous people with the land, while also devaluing this land, the implication is that Indigenous people are without rights, culture, language, or humanity. It is thus a radical act to depict and propagate anything to the contrary. Obomsawin’s films and outreach initiatives with children let them know they were seen, and the support and funding of her work by the NFB meant that their country would see them too.
Alanis Obomsawin, Cry from the Diary of a Métis Child (still), 1986. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Even as Obomsawin persistently directed resources to foreground Indigenous stories with films that treat Indigenous people’s lives as nuanced and valuable, she maintained a clear-eyed awareness of the violence and hardships that systemic inequity causes. Her film Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) tells the heartbreaking story of a young boy’s life and the horrors of the foster-care system that led to his suicide. It is narrated by an actor named David Mitchell, who reads from Cardinal’s diary, and features interviews with the boy’s brother and numerous former foster parents. In the first minute of the film, a photograph of Cardinal’s suicide appears, which is difficult to look at. Obomsawin holds us in this discomfort, confronting and unsettling her audience to convey the deep sadness and frustration of Cardinal’s story.
In multiple documentaries Obomsawin shot in the 1980s and 1990s, she channeled her anger around countless injustices against Indigenous people. Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) are among the most evocative examples of works in the history of Indigenous filmmaking that depict moments of organized resistance against state violence. The former is a documentary about the brutal raid by Québec provincial police in 1981 against Mi’kmaq fishermen in the Restigouche reserve and how this event affected the community’s battle for sovereignty. In her interview with former fisheries minister Lucien Lessard for the film, Obomsawin directly confronts him on his actions as they affected the “Salmon War” in Restigouche, and his fundamental beliefs about Québécois settlers, Indigenous people, and what they are each entitled to. “We [Indigenous people] always shared,” says Obomsawin. “You took, took, took. Instead of being proud of us, you talk of your history, your Québec. The history of Québec does not begin with the French Canadians.” This moment in the film, and Lessard’s exasperated reaction, has been widely discussed over the decades and offers audiences a real sense of Obomsawin’s power as an activist and documentarian. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance documents an event that was years in the making. By 1990, the town of Oka in Québec had already been expanding for centuries onto territory claimed by the Mohawk people. Tensions that had been boiling finally came to the fore with the proposed plan to expand a golf course into the Pines, leading to an armed standoff. If cameras hadn’t been present in the Kanehsatà:ke war zone, even worse violence likely would have occurred. Obomsawin’s sheer presence as one of the last people with a camera behind the barricade held the armed forces somewhat accountable for their actions. Her television appearance after leaving the Pines, along with other archival clips in the MAC exhibition, underscores how her relationship to serious issues like violence and self-defence in the fight for Indigenous rights has shifted over time as a result of her decades of bearing witness.
Alanis Obomsawin, When All the Leaves Are Gone (still), 2010. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
In a guided tour of the exhibition with the artist that I attended, Obomsawin spoke about her film When All the Leaves Are Gone (2010), and how it depicts a young girl named Wato whose experiences are based on Obomsawin’s childhood. It is her most personal project to date. Wato cries in class as her teacher reads aloud from a textbook that describes Indigenous people as savages, violent, and cruel. Later, the young girl is chased down a street and beaten up by two classmates. Wato seeks refuge in her dreams, where she finds solace with two horses who dance and play with her. I felt compelled to ask Obomsawin about her views on violence during the tour. She had been very jovial with everyone until that point, because the tone of the tour was celebratory and social, with fans asking her to autograph their box sets. But her face changed at my question, and she replied that it was “a very serious thing.” From a young age, she made a commitment to stand up for herself and to fight back against injustice. Even now, when she has established herself as one of Canada’s greatest living artists, I could feel that she isn’t ready to sit comfortably while there is still so much work to be done for Indigenous people’s rights.
With over twelve hours of footage to discover, The Children Have to Hear Another Story is impossible to consume all at once. Yet Obomsawin’s care and commitment is immediately apparent in each work, compelling viewers to be present and pay close attention to the films they choose to sit with. Obomsawin’s influence, made more powerful because of how she platformed and nurtured the voices of others in her work, is also palpable throughout the exhibition. Today, a work like Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance can be viewed in conversation with the film Kanàtenhs—When the Pine Needles Fall (2022), directed by the Mohawk author and activist Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who is a generation younger and featured in Obomsawin’s earlier film as a key figure in the Kanehsatà:ke resistance. Through her commitment to advocating for the rights and freedoms of Indigenous communities in Canada, Obomsawin has carved a space for the voices of the oppressed where there wasn’t one before. Her legacy is already cemented in history, and yet she is still an employee of the NFB, with multiple films underway: her work is never finished.
