Indigenous filmmaking and futures
We are conceiving of indigenous media as not something that is just what we see on the screen. We really need to look at the context of production to understand it as a practice, as a form of social practice.
Willi Lempert:There are these narratives that are assumed about certain types of stories. These things can go different ways. The desire for resolution or for challenge and deficit in different genres.
Karrmen Crey:Well, hi, I'm Karrmen Cray. I'm associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. I'm also on my father's side, Stallo, from Chiam First Nation, which is in Southern British Columbia. I'm just starting us off by way of introduction. I'm also here with Willi Lempert, and we'll allow him to introduce himself as we launch into discussion of our both pretty recently published books on indigenous media that were published by the University of Minnesota.
Karrmen Crey:I'll let you take it away, Willi.
Willi Lempert:Thanks, Carmen. I'm really thrilled to connect with you about our books today. I'm an associate professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I've been looking forward to this for a long time to connect our books to the broader of Canadian and Australian indigenous media context.
Karrmen Crey:Yeah. I think this will be a really interesting conversation because my area of specialty really focuses much more on North America, though the global dimensions of indigenous media is, undeniable and absolutely a part of the Indigenous media histories that I know we're going to dig into a little bit today. I'm really excited to hear from you and about your experience. Is it appropriate to call it like Aboriginal media or is it indigenous media more recently? That seems to be a more recent term than in different histories of indigenous medias around the world.
Willi Lempert:I mean, that's a great question. So the distinction of indigenous in Australia at a sort of technical level is that it includes Torres Strait Islanders, whereas Aboriginal is very specifically to the continent itself. But you're absolutely right. It also speaks to even when considering the continent indigenous and then more recently, First Nations, as my understanding is a nod towards Canada's sovereignty movements has been something that's more recently been utilized to think about nationhood itself. So there's there's absolutely varying elements of why those terms are used, and indigenous is increasingly an important way of describing the media, even just sort of on the mainland.
Karrmen Crey:I know I'm gonna come back to this question, but maybe what we should do first is talk about what we're going to talk about, which are our books. Just by way of, general overview, my book is called producing sovereignty, the rise of indigenous media in Canada. So it looks at the indigenous media history from the nineteen nineties onward, and that time frame was primarily established by, me observing that indigenous media really exploded as of 1990 onward in Canada. My impetus for the research really had to do with how did this happen. Like, is 1990 onward?
Karrmen Crey:Why does it rise exponentially and not just in one area or one format, but across all available formats, film, television, video, digital media, all across Canada during that era, which it has continued to develop since. In a nutshell, that's what my book is about. Maybe I'll let you go, Willie.
Willi Lempert:Yeah, and just as a transition, I really loved engaging deeply with your book Producing Sovereignty. I think it's vital on so many levels. I learned a lot about the nuances of Canadian indigenous media, right? I sort of understood bits and pieces, but I think your book does a really fantastic job of bringing together the big picture of the various elements and of course the institutions that are engaged. That would have been more than enough, but I think you also do a great job of grounding the sort of big picture view within particular filmmakers and films and crucial issues.
Willi Lempert:And I especially appreciate how you highlight media and filmmakers that have received less attention while still keeping a sense of the big picture and the major movements. So very excited to talk about your book and to say a little bit about my book that was published in June, also through Minnesota. It's called Dreaming Down the Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema. It's based on thirty two months of fieldwork in Northwestern Australia, where I was embedded within indigenous production teams. I collaborated on dozens of films and the book follows a subset of these projects in and around the Balgo Aboriginal community in the Great Sandy Desert.
Willi Lempert:And throughout this project, I describe how the process of cinematic envisioning transforms how creators imagine and actualize Aboriginal futures during apocalyptic times. And so this book is sort of a subset of the films I focused on in my fieldwork and my dissertation, specifically around the film career of Kukucha elder Mark Mora. In his sort of entire film arc where I got to know him in the last decade or so of his life, Projects around Balgo, you know, in his project Java Java, which I'll talk a little bit about. He went to the Sydney Film Festival and Imaginative and really, you know, I was chronicling in this book how he fell deeper into this idea that films were a very important way of actualizing sovereign community futures on his country for his family. And so I'm really thinking about the films in terms of their total social lives throughout the entire sort of span of the process.
Willi Lempert:I talk about this idea of a broader visibility paradox around the flourishing sphere of indigenous Australian media, which I think connects to your discussion about Canada, particularly in the nineties, which I'm excited to talk about. So there's that, and at the same time, there's these escalating state policies of dispossession and defunding. And it's also in the context of a recent national referendum that was voted down, the first negotiations to establish treaties between Aboriginal nations and the Australian state. And so it really aims to understand the stakes of Aboriginal and settler state relations in this current context through sort of close attention to specific media projects.
Karrmen Crey:Great. So I guess there's so many parallels between our projects historically, socially, politically, in terms of not just like, state law and policy, but indigenous nationalism, sovereignty, and the role of media within these social movements and political debates. We can start really broadly. We've both been teaching now at universities and elsewhere for the better part of a decade anyway. And I think one of the first questions a lot of people has is when we talk about indigenous media, what are we talking about?
Karrmen Crey:Because it's not always going to be the same thing, and those definitions can shift and change over time. In my experience, you know, it's one of the most taken for granted questions, but it's actually a really important one. Sometimes I feel like I get asked what's indigenous media, and what people were really asking is, like, what makes indigenous media different from other media? And that kind of question framed with certain kinds of expectations is almost asking, you know, what are the features, aesthetic and otherwise, that I can define that describe indigenous media? And so it's almost like a category of descriptions that feels a little essentialist to me, when people are looking for, oh, I can describe it in this way, and it has these features, and it looks this way, and its politics are this way.
Karrmen Crey:And I find that troubling. And, you know, I think a lot of other people have challenged that way of thinking, you know, the cultural essentialist perspective. So how do you, Willie, answer this question?
Willi Lempert:I'm so glad you started with this often. The sort of fundamental questions are very deep and they're questions that animate the entire space and how people are thinking about things very sort of self reflexively. So I'll start with the relatively concise answer based on sort of my experience in Northwestern Australia and how people in the field and in my fieldwork described what Indigenous media was. It was understood as having three components, and I'll sort of elaborate on this, and I'm excited to hear your thoughts on how this plays out in Canada and in your work as well. But the three components were, one, media produced by an Indigenous run organization.
Willi Lempert:That was really important with an Indigenous person in the lead creative role. And there's a lot of layers to what that means and with a mostly Indigenous crew. And so this relates also to the particular context of of Indigeneity in Australia and the inclusion of non indigenous media crew, as well as how media qualities around production values and genre are considered and negotiated. One aspect that comes up a lot, and I'll use the term white fella, it's a very common, not necessarily judgmental word that's used in Aboriginal community media to mean usually a European Australian, but it can also be a broader term of someone who's not from the community or from away. And there's a long and ongoing discussion in the indigenous Australian sphere about how to consider the boundaries of who should be included in an indigenous project.
Willi Lempert:So one of the discussions that happens is on the one hand, there's this kind of essentialist purity politics about Aboriginal media. And I can't even think of another genre that's similarly framed around a group of people that has to face the sort of standard that a single non member can be perceived as polluting a film project. And people would often talk about the frustration of sort of not being allowed to have help without being questioned about the sort of purity of the project. So that relates to enduring colonial conceptions of Aboriginal people as radically other, and particularly in Australia imagined living temporally in the past as quote unquote the world's oldest continuing societies and then spatially in the desert out back away. So this is one of the areas in which strong indigenous organizations and creative leads and projects make really crucial and individual decisions based on deep experience.
Willi Lempert:There's a lot of stories of white fellows who've been considered to be really productive and core members of crews and a lot of stories of white fellows who've derailed entire projects. And in the book, have a chapter that talks about a model for white fellow roles and clear boundaries called fires, tires and paper. And this focuses on the importance of indigenous control over vision, materials and funding, with also white fellas often facilitating bureaucratic barriers toward these specific ends if specifically invited to do so. So there's that piece of who who's involved in the film and the sort of purity politics involved, there's another element that has to do with indigenous community membership in Australia as compared to Canada and The United States. So since there are not yet any treaties in Australia, community and tribal membership is not based on blood quantum requirements, and there's a different sort of set of economic stakes of official belonging.
Willi Lempert:And so membership is based on the three elements of established descent, self identification, and community recognition based on lived relationships with the community. So the topics of films emerge from those relationships with family and tend to organically develop from stories of family members on crews and in organizations. So there's that element too that is a little bit different in Australia than some other settler state contexts. And then briefly, there's other subtle issues around media qualities that connect to the cultural essentialist aspect of your question, which I think is so important. And I appreciate you bringing that up.
Willi Lempert:People would talk often about indigenous production values, specifically in workshops at festivals based on shared experiences with relations, communities and country. Faginsberg, as you talk about in your book, has this idea of embedded aesthetics in which aesthetics is connected to the social material dimensions of media and relations. And I was thinking a lot about this in your book with the discussion of cyclical storytelling and not having omniscient narrators. There are these qualities that are sort of emerge based on shared values, but it is it can slip into the sort of through Navajo Eyes famous project that you also mentioned in which it becomes quite sort of narrowly defined as a certain type of way of doing things and not others. So the final thing I'll mention is there are often really deep genre discussions at indigenous television networks about sort of where place certain programs and how to give awards and what awards meant.
Willi Lempert:There were a lot of debates about what falls into our culture category or our elders and our language. And these were, you know, negotiated and debated things, but things that were very deeply engaged and understood in incredibly sophisticated ways. And there's a sort of balance between making sure that there's not pressure to make media that aligns with narrow definitions of culture as only traditional practices in Aboriginal languages. In Australia, this often tends to be about dreaming stories and song lines. And yet at the same time, such projects are seen as really important by a lot of folks in the context of colonial dispossession and aging elders.
Willi Lempert:So that was one tension. And so there's that in the sense that those are really important projects. But there's also simultaneously a really self conscious focus to not have such constraints. Projects I was involved with, you know, span from music videos, stop motion animation, like comedy, sign language, visual dictionaries, dramas, desert trips, PSAs, commercials. So there was a lot of self awareness that there's a balancing of tensions around this essentialist danger while also honoring the fact that, you know, a lot of traditional culture projects were important to folks and communities.
Karrmen Crey:Probably when I was starting my research, when I started my PhD at University of California, Los Angeles in the film and television program, I think there was some confusion between the idea of content and context. So, you know, I had to first clarify a lot along exactly the lines that you were saying that it's, production by indigenous create an indigenous creator or creatives. And, that definition has gotten clearer even more in Canada, since all of the scandals of, pretendians in the indigenous media landscape here, which were in the news very prominently that really affected the in indigenous media communities here profoundly. I think it's been a deeply troubling and churning kind of time, and it reached into all areas. So I think in those tensions, in those conflicts, there's become an increased clarification of what we mean by, you know, by indigenous people.
Karrmen Crey:And it's along the lines, you know, that this gets you know, we have without diving headfirst into it, you know, the the by question has always remained, you know, the core of that question. Do indigenous people have creative control, direction of the project, whatever that project is? The head of the indigenous screen office, former head, Jesse Wente, he's Anishinaabe, and he has always spoken about indigenous media as by and for indigenous people. So the by has gotten increasingly clear as everybody's had to articulate what we mean by by. And that has been, you know, along the lines of that's been codified in some production context as more than 50% ownership of a production company has to be indigenous in order for them to qualify for funding that has been set aside for indigenous production, whatever that would look like, you know, often through state funding.
Karrmen Crey:And the Ford, though, as aspect of that formulation, I think, has always been very wide open. Like, what do we mean by four? And, you know, that looks like you're describing a lot of things, but it rests within a kind of, I think, as you've described it, an ethical question about you know, when we think about four, it involves relations with kinds of audiences, viewers. What do we show and not show? Like, it involves these kinds of ethical questions.
Karrmen Crey:Now when I started the project, I just started it really broadly and was like started with the buy as you know, just to open up as wide a lens on what that means in Canada specifically. Because I had to give it some shape. Otherwise, I would just go on and on and on, you know, looking all over. Even North America would have been too much to talk about. So just focusing on the Canadian context, you know, it was like, who, you know, who's who's identified as the director, the producer, the, you know, the lead, creative on this project?
Karrmen Crey:And then that gave me as kind of a big scope to be able to look at the patterns of production. Like, where are these creatives working? When are they working? What genre? What format?
Karrmen Crey:What institutions. You know? So it gave me a good way to develop a kind of, like, profile of what does this landscape really look like. And so I think the the debates around the four part of the formulation are something that the creatives are gonna work out what they mean by that, and that's not something I'm going to direct or dictate. It's but it does get at that indigenous producers have, you know, values, principles, and ethical orientations that lead them to make different decisions in the production, in the editing, in the, you know, screenings, you know, that whole the whole process of making the the media is going to be inflected by, different values.
Karrmen Crey:And that's, you know, ultimately where my research is going to be heading. But, really, what the book was looking at was, like, what do we what does this look like when we take the broadest lens that is reasonable and manageable to see really where are indigenous creatives working during this really significant time period in indigenous history, in Canada. So I think we're really, in so many ways, fundamentally aligned. So there's been, you know, the the questions around the, the purity of the project, I think, have kind of sort of sorted themselves out that yeah. Certainly.
Karrmen Crey:Like like, in my project too, I wasn't necessarily looking only at you know, if I was following the filmmakers, say, and, like, looked at their body of work, they were going to have different roles on different productions, and the extent of their creative input and control was always gonna be constrained in some way by the context of production, by funding, that sort of thing. But they're they've made creative decisions that contributed to the production, and I wanted to look at what those were. And sometimes they were really important interventions too. So if it was, say if they were brought on, say, as a guest director or some, you know, something like that, I was interested how they negotiated their role in that production and how they made decisions about how they were going to shape the project with their with their contributions, and a lot of that I found really on the production side of things. So and I think we really have a lot of that in common is that we are conceiving of indigenous media as not something that is just what we see on the screen.
Karrmen Crey:We really need to look at the context of production to understand more fully what it as a practice, as a form of social practice.
Willi Lempert:Yeah. I could not agree more. And I appreciate what you're saying about the fact that people have values of production. One of the things I was thinking about in my book and in reading yours is that you know, production values almost go without saying that they're just high or low, as in Hollywood production values. But people have different values and they're sort of cultures and traditions of values, which is very different than the question of the qualities of a genre, which is much more about something frozen in time and can veer into even, you know, the colonial pretty quick.
Willi Lempert:And to your point, you know, I was thinking too about how for at least decades now, people who, you know, indigenous managers and people running Aboriginal and indigenous media organizations in Australia, they have a very fine tooth comb and quick gut understandings of non indigenous people involved. It's almost impossible for someone to now derail projects. People are so experienced and understanding who will be someone who's interested in facilitating things in an appropriate way or someone who has got some other baggage coming along. So there's there's so much sort of top level also agency in very quickly making sure that people who shouldn't be there aren't there. And there's a lot of power in that and a lot of skill.
Willi Lempert:To this conversation, I wanted to connect to a question that I think relates, which has to do with the importance of, as one example, nonlinear storytelling in indigenous media that you have engaged as part of a sort of way into thinking more about kind of cultures of production values and kind of patterns of how people think about telling stories. I really appreciate in your book when you talk about Donna's story, the importance of cyclical storytelling that doesn't provide neat closure. And I thought you mentioned that a few times throughout the book, and it's a really powerful point that it has to do with the fact that these these deeper issues are not closed about indigenous women's, you know, violence against indigenous women amidst other issues to the importance of sort of humanizing people amidst really difficult topics. And I wonder if you can say something about, you know, how you think about that sort of non essentializing way of talking about those patterns of storytelling that you noticed in your book and and in your fieldwork perhaps beyond as well?
Karrmen Crey:So you're referring to Donna's story as a National Film Board of Canada documentary production. For those who don't know, the National Film Board of Canada is Canada's public film agency. So as a national film agency, its job has historically been to, you know, sort of represent Canada to Canadians and the world. You know, that's the sort of catch of its mission. And, historically, it's had a really bad track record of depicting indigenous people in Canada to Canadians.
Karrmen Crey:Like, I've screened some really to show my students examples, some deeply troubling, you know, films from, like, the fifties, sixties, you know, that are showing the happy assimilation of indigenous people into, you know, Canadian society, and this is really marking an era, of Canadian national identity that was very problematic for indigenous people and is just about to, at that era, going to trigger a major sort of indigenous nationalism movement that is going to carry through into today. But so as a kind of redress, the National Film Board of Canada's policy became, well, indigenous people should represent indigenous people and concerns, and this became, you know, a really guiding principle. And so their orientation shifted to setting aside funding and programs for indigenous filmmakers. And the chapter you're referring to in the book is focusing on Doug Cuthan. He is a Creed, like, journalist, documentary filmmaker, you know, editorialist, like author.
Karrmen Crey:He's just really worn a lot of hats, and I noticed he wasn't really discussed in the literature, which was interesting to me. I'm like, why did people overlook him? So I really made the this chapter about focusing on him. And, his critical you know, certainly has an unerring critical perspective and was very cautious in depicting the focus of the film, Donna Gamble, as a Cree woman who's working through addiction. And it it's kind of a portrait of a woman who has worked as a sex worker who has struggled with addiction, and she is transforming her life.
Karrmen Crey:She's really found a lot of her health and healing really through connection with her community and her culture. And there's a way where that story could have been plotted along the redemption narrative arc that a lot of documentaries, a lot of films really want to impose on human beings. That there's this sort of you know, you you you awry like a phoenix from the ashes. You arise and, you know, change your life through, you know, this romantic deeply romanticized connection with community. But this documentary is really different in that it's really about the work and complexity of that.
Karrmen Crey:Like, that that that's not just a simple thing to do, that there's a lot of trauma within families and certainly within Donna's that is there and a presence and that they are actively working to heal from, but this is a very deep history that marks indigenous families. You can't impose this, like, unproblematic narrative, and that was really about creating a portrait of, like, this is a real human person. Like, this is not a abstracted native woman victim narrative. Like, the that that really abstracts women into a signifier, you know, like a metaphor for Canada's failures and this you know, the West's failure, for indigenous people. And rather, it really is about the work of what recovery for addicts really looks like.
Karrmen Crey:And in the end, she relapses, and she goes the relapse isn't shown on camera. Donna narrates that to the camera that she did relapse. And the end is that she has now entered back into the cycle of recovery. So, really, it's structured. Doug told me that he really had to fight for that ending with the NFB because they wanted the hopeful, you know, inspiring ending that native people often represent for white people, like settler eyes.
Karrmen Crey:And he's like, no. This is he real. This is a human struggle, and that recovery is not a straight trajectory upwards towards, like, sobriety. It's a cycle that people are in their entire lives. Relapse is a part of recovery.
Karrmen Crey:Right? So it's inherently a cycle. And so she's in the cycle. Like, she's working through a cycle in the film. And I've just really appreciated how he really stuck to his, like, ethical and representational guns there and was like, no.
Karrmen Crey:We have to humanize, really humanize, and have some integrity towards what recovery actually looks like. If you really want to represent the struggle that many indigenous people are in, let's be honest about what that struggle looks like and stop romanticizing recovery for anybody, but let alone sort of tokenize her story to, like, inspire audiences. Like, to have the, you know, quote, unquote, inspirational story around what real human indigenous woman who is an inspiration to her community, who is, you know, a social worker who does workshops with high schools on sexual health, that she is an inspiration who can relapse. You know? Like, that doesn't make her any less.
Karrmen Crey:That ethical orientation, that's what I think about what like, he's intervening at the production level in terms of, like, really fighting for something that's real that was really crucial to tell that story and to advocate for her. And that he intervened in this kind of genre conventions of the sort of inspirational documentary in order to tell something different, and that was, I think, much more important than sort of tacking a false ending onto that. That would totally misunderstand her and misunderstand what addiction and recovery looks like. So that's kind of, like cyclical for me was kind of, like, you know, it's in the context of what was needed to tell that story. But I don't know, I think for you, you've talked about the cyclical aspects of different stories differently.
Karrmen Crey:So do you wanna talk a bit about why that sticks for you in terms of your own work?
Willi Lempert:Yeah, absolutely. And as a quick aside, I really appreciate how you come back to Donna's story toward the end of the book and connect it to TR's, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and the deeper points about reconciliation. While I have it in my mind, what I was thinking about is how there are these narratives that are assumed about certain types of stories. And there was one that was almost the opposite, but the same that played out in my fieldwork, where there was a PSA short video that was meant to get kids to go to school. And the film went great.
Willi Lempert:It was a local metal band, had songs. There was a lot of comedy in it. It was picking kids up from the basketball court, taking them to school, and they were happy to go. But the problem was they were happy to be playing basketball. They were happy to be walking around their community and not being at school.
Willi Lempert:And it was basically rejected because the critique is that the kids were too happy not being in school. And it led to sort of very strange set of conversations. Then they had to make a new one that was sort of morose and down about kids struggling. And so it just makes me think that these things can go different ways to desire for sort of resolution or for challenge and deficit in different genres. To the point of cyclical storytelling, you know, some stories like Mark, the story of Mark's life that I tell in my book, the life history near where he grew up in a mission out of town.
Willi Lempert:And that was a story that was sort of cyclically told. So he started at the present, kind of went deeper into the past. And so there are these stories that kind of feel like their cycles and how they're told and in their meanings and literally things happening again and again, policies and communities closing and reopening and these waves of colonial oppression that come in and out in different ways. But then at the same time, there is sometimes this over theorization of a radical difference around cyclical time that can make it seem like people don't live in the same reality at all. Rifkin's book Temporal Sovereignty, I think does a nice job of engaging this.
Willi Lempert:What I think is great about diving into particular media projects as they unfold and the people who are making them is you can really parse out to your point about the assumptions and the expectations that people are pushing against, but also the way in which things are directed not by some sort of deeper fundamental quality, but by by the topic and the context and the relations involved. The particularity of projects is really important. Cause there were also very linear music videos that were about going somewhere, of course. And I think the specificity becomes really important.
Karrmen Crey:Yeah. That was I mean, that ultimately, I think, what my the project in my book was about. There are parallels around demands for indigenous sovereignty for that format, like, indigenous nationalist movements. There are broad historical and social and economic forces at work that contribute to these trajectories that look a lot the same. But my problem is when people start ascribing, like, kind of sussing out, looking for these kind of essentialist readings of indigenous media based on broader patterns rather than looking very closely at under recognizing that indigenous nationalisms is not are particular and specific to indigenous nations or more abstractly political entities, however that is being formulated.
Karrmen Crey:And so indigenous nationalisms, you know, in Canada took shape around the rhetoric, the language of nationhood because it's being articulated within a social and political global order that only recognizes other nations. Right? So employing the the sort of westernized language and rhetoric of nationhood is to stake out a line and assert that uninterrupted territorial occupation, the ongoing political ordering of indigenous people, the relationships to one another and to place and the kin within that place, that structure, the laws that guide indigenous that indigenous, you know, nation, into the present. You know? This is something that is a global phenomenon, but the particularities of these communities, nations, the articulation of that sovereignty is going to look different.
Karrmen Crey:And if you're going to look at indigenous media, you have to get really contextual and specific in order to think about how are they articulating themselves, and what is the role of media in that. Or, you know, certainly, people collaborate on projects. You know, this is a real historical trend, and so seeking a tribal nationalism as the main lens for interpretation can get really complicated. And that's what I appreciated about looking at indigenous media in Canada was that this is really complicated. All the negotiations behind the screen and on screen or that were happening off screen and that affected the content on screen is an approach that I took.
Karrmen Crey:Really, my book looked at institutional analysis as a framework for reinterpreting indigenous media, which is an approach that bridges the production context with what ends up on screen. Like, we can understand the negotiations off screen as something that gets inscribed on screen. And the reason I took that approach is because it was one way of addressing the question of, like, how did indigenous media rise up across Canada in all of these institutions, all different all, like, provincial broadcasters, art galleries, museums, the National Film Agency, broadcasters? Like, how did it start taking shape in all of these institutions sort of all at the same time? So to start to, like, sketch out a feel of the landscape, I was looking at how are indigenous artists and advocates intervening in these established Canadian cultural and media institutions to create space for indigenous production that would then, you know, end up on screens in Canada and but largely, you know, often for indigenous audiences.
Karrmen Crey:So there's a form of engagement, I think, that's specific to indigenous nationhood that we need to think about in the sense that, certainly, in Canada, you know, we have the Indian Act, which was established in 1876, sort of a law governing like, historically, a very, very oppressive federal law that intervened overwhelmingly in the lives of indigenous people, setting up what are parameters for in legislating indigenous identity, setting up the reserve system, making indigenous people wards of the state. But, historically, you know, the Indian Act has been the one piece of legislation that acknowledges that indigenous people were here before settlers, before Canada was here, and it sketched out Canada's obligation to indigenous people. So dismantling the Indian Act is a complex thing. But what it has meant for indigenous people is, like, there are along with treaties, they exist as evidence of a nation to nation relationship between Canada and indigenous peoples, and Canada has an obligation to indigenous peoples. So if there's a kind of nation to nation acknowledgment there, that means Canada is obligated to create within federal and, provincial institutions space for indigenous people.
Karrmen Crey:So indigenous people intervening in those institutions is a way of saying, no. We you are obligated to include us here, and, therefore, our production here, our interventions are within these institutions, their production practices, their sort of genres, their forms of representation. And so I was interested. I'm like, okay. How are indigenous creatives negotiating those institutions, and then how do we see that end up on screen?
Karrmen Crey:And so Doug Cuthand is a great person to bring up. I mean, this is the approach I take to every, you know, filmmaker or organization that forms the core of the chapters is how are they intervening in these processes? How can we read what they're doing as these really sophisticated critical negotiations of conventional media practice? So we see that, you know, there's a chapter on the aboriginal people's television network looking at how do indigenous people take up reality television to represent indigenous epistemologies, for instance, in the program that I love called Indians and Aliens, which is a really great reality TV program, but it became a vehicle for foregrounding and validating indigenous understandings of off world phenomena that are unidentified aerial phenomena, I think is the term, is actually like, well, how do we understand the this phenomena through indigenous, like, Cree lenses? Like, how do we understand their relationship to unidentified aerial phenomena?
Karrmen Crey:And they did it through reality TV. So it's like this really amazing kind of production and really sophisticated, like, negotiation of reality TV exploitation and, like, mystery paranormal sort of reality television to tell a different story about, like, how do we understand these as actually in continuity with Cree encounters with the unexplained that go back way before settler presence was here. Really, institutional analysis allowed me to get at that range and get away from essentializing while at the same time really thinking about the negotiations that take place that end up on screen. And they're really sophisticated and really interesting and critical objects.
Willi Lempert:You know, I I was so interested in reading about Indians and Aliens. I watched just this sort of YouTube, I think, you know, sort of trailer for it. And it almost seems like it does this incredible feat by appealing to folks who might watch ancient aliens with almost the exact opposite takeaway at so many levels. And it made me think of Lisa Jackson, someone who shows up in your book, of course, her short animated film, The Visit, which is one of my favorites. And I was wondering if that was sort of connected to that in any way.
Karrmen Crey:Yeah. I would have to go back in to see like, I did an interview with Lisa that's actually coming out in a collection Joanna Hearn and I coedited that will be coming out at University of Minnesota. And I did an interview with Lisa about the visit, and it's, like, a documentary audio that is then animated on screen about a I believe it's a Cree communities, like, but more western than Indians and Aliens is more northern Cree in Quebec, what's now called Quebec. The family that she interviews that that makes up the documentary audio. I'm not sure where they were actually located.
Karrmen Crey:I feel like they were in Alberta, but I could be wrong.
Willi Lempert:Yeah. No. I can't remember, but I really appreciated that that section.
Karrmen Crey:And do you this in aliens might have been a 2000 it was in the February, but the visit is 2009. So they're in and around the same time. This it could be, you know, like, kind of identifying larger cultural patterns. Like, you and I both, out of necessity, talk about indigenous futurisms quite a lot. Like, you know, my book isn't so focused on it, but I know you've written about indigenous futurisms, previously.
Karrmen Crey:And it's something I've, like, out of necessity had to talk about because later February and well into February is a real big era for indigenous futurist work. And Lisa has done a lot of work with indigenous futurisms in in different platforms and genres. She did the VR project. Bedobin, first sight, is this immersive, like, a VR project, that Lisa Jackson did, and it was released in 2018. So I feel like, you know, we've seen a lot of indigenous futurist work, certainly from the 2000 the early two thousand tens and onwards just exploded.
Karrmen Crey:That is kind of symptomatic of a real surge. I wanna say Billy Ray Belcourt talks about this almost like a surge of vitality, not just within the language of resurgence as indigenous people having the energetic life giving resources to draw upon resistance, for political engagement, like the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls crisis investigation and activism, Idle No More, which was 02/1314. So all of this is happening in 2010. These major mobilizations, this incredible, like, waterfall of indigenous production that's kinda has this futurist orientation, and Bellcourt talks about it as indigenous people has have always had joy, have always had these life giving energies. But there is something more recently around this unbelievable surge of indigenous, like, vitality and looking towards the future and imagining the future as a part of not just surviving, but being alive, like, the energetic resources to do this work that the state and settler colonialism has really sought to extinguish.
Karrmen Crey:It's been about wearing indigenous people down, about, like, draining all those life giving resources for its own benefit, obviously, which is dispossession and occupation. So there there is something generationally that has shifted, I think. And I would also put something like revenge as a part of that energetic resource. Jeff Barnaby, the El Maya Tailfeathers, a Red Girl's Reasoning, these are revenge films, which I think point to, similarly, having the resources to be active in that way of really engaging and dismantling settler racism, colonialism, misogyny. I put like, personally, I put that kind of looking towards the future and the energy and joy of being together and working together that kind of representationally shows up as, you know, a lot of science fiction, fantasy, you know, speculative fiction tropes and genres.
Karrmen Crey:And I also put revenge up there because to be able to take revenge on something means you have the energy to do so. Right? So I'm seeing it as indexing something really important generationally. And I think, like, Lisa Jackson, of course, and, like, we she's such a pivotal figure in this. I don't know that she would describe herself as a futurist, but she certainly works in the genres along with, you know, so many other indigenous folks.
Karrmen Crey:Jeff Barnaby, who passed away, I think, in was it '20 you know, just a few years ago, and it feels honestly more recent than that. It was, like, awful and way too young. But he also played a key role in developing this this amazing body of work that really is about, like, what is our future going to look like? How are we going to have a future beyond the apocalypse of settler colonialism? So what does post apocalypse look like for us?
Karrmen Crey:And I think that's one of the question like, you've brought that up as well, like, this question of apocalypse.
Willi Lempert:Yeah. You know, in the process, I appreciate your discussion of futurism. I couldn't agree more. It's taken hold and this idea of apocalypse. I remember asking people if what they thought of that term, and I was expecting pushback because I don't want to overstate things.
Willi Lempert:So I wanted to be sure. But people said, that's right. You know, it it it works in terms of capturing the weight and gravity and to the point about the future. And I think you're right, it's animated by a lot of things, one of which is apocalyptic understandings of where the world is going for indigenous people and at some deeper levels as well. And one of the really interesting discussions I had with folks who had been in Balgo for a long time or and some folks who hadn't been there for a while, I was focusing a lot on the future.
Willi Lempert:It was coming up in a lot of films. When I would talk with people about the films and that theme, people's first reaction was, No, that doesn't come up in VAALGO. People don't use that word. It doesn't have a meaning in Kuguja and local languages, which is true in one kind of narrow way of thinking about things, which gets back to the sort of limiting way of thinking about what cyclical time is or isn't. But people were using it all the time by the mid and early twenty tens.
Willi Lempert:And it's in a lot of governmental, very cynical sort of jobs programs type of work. They'll be called future workers and those kind of things. But it seemed to really be animated by a global discourse that I think imaginative had a big role. A lot of this stuff is coming from Canada and Concordia University and Jason Lewis and Scott Wennady and a lot of really central folks like, you know, Lisa Jackson, Leanne Simpson. And it's interesting to me that it seemed to be making its way through indigenous activists and media circuits around the world to where in VAALGO, it's something people talked about all the time.
Willi Lempert:And I think you're right. It was often discussed, like in the future with some were very often directed directly to the prime minister. Like in the future, this is what we need. And it was often at the intersection of demands directly to the state, as well as plans and hopes and dreams for family amidst the backdrop that felt very apocalyptic. And while I was there, there were these lists going around where were going to defund most Aboriginal communities which are not protected by treaties.
Willi Lempert:So this is something that can happen quickly. The referendum for a voice was shut down that would have acknowledged in the constitution. There were a variety of things that that happened and there's treaty negotiations going on. But there is a sense that things are very dire, but people are also more connected than ever. And to this and in media, there's more technological ability too, that's just available around science fiction and VR and these kind of things.
Willi Lempert:So I think it's all come together in a way where the future has a very political, almost punk rock, but very hopeful kind of constellation of meaning from Standing Rock to a variety of protest movements like in Sydney and Canberra. There's this, seems to me and, you know, thinking about what you're saying, there is something that it speaks to that's deeper, that's of the moment and that is resonating around the world and echoing through media in technologies and specific topics. To that point, maybe sort of connecting two questions I was thinking about around Imaginative and I think appropriately connecting it to virtual reality and futurist media. So from my point of view, Imaginative was the film festival by far the most beloved throughout Australia by indigenous filmmakers and media makers. Wonder if you can speak to that confluence of what Imaginative does, and you have such a deep understanding of where it comes from institutionally, can you say a bit about why it's become such a vital global site on and off screen of media relations and that that excitement around futurity and new technologies that also is not in competition with other genres.
Karrmen Crey:Coming from in Canada, I sort of had this distorted idea about Imaginative. You know, people are like, it's the biggest indigenous film festival in the world. And I was like, that's really cool. And what started going when I was doing my PhD research. Cynthia Lickers Sage was one of the founders and was certainly a part of this Canada wide surge of indigenous media production and advocacy in the nineties.
Karrmen Crey:She actually worked in association with the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance, and she had gone to Toronto to kinda continue the work of media activism that had started with the alliance. And, you know, that's sort of one version of the story, but I definitely need to talk to her about her version of the story and sort of how that experience was for her. She went to Toronto and founded Imaginative. I think there are resources in Toronto that are very different than anywhere else in Canada, for sure, and its proximity to New York and just being a kind of real urban center in Canada. I think the resources were more amenable to supporting what ultimately became the size it is, which is really remarkable.
Karrmen Crey:Definitely, my next research project is looking at film festivals, fan conventions, these sort of areas that are a part of indigenous media cultures, like film cultures, production cultures. They're fed by things like festivals, by conventions that engage with thinking about these different media industries and what indigenous presence in them could look like. But my perspective of festivals is that they're not sort of an end point to a film. They're not just exhibition sites. They are actually engines for the production of indigenous media.
Karrmen Crey:In thinking about where do we get to see indigenous media, it's not often on mainstream screens. You know? Reservation Dogs, Rutherford Falls, Dark Winds, you know, Taiko, YTT, Largo kinda held up as, like, yeah. Of course. They made these unbelievable inroads production wise into mainstream film and television industries, and they're sort of what people recognize and see today.
Karrmen Crey:But when we think about indigenous media worlds, like the realities of where do you get your work seen, it is often at festivals. So people are often trying to get their work done within the cycle for submitting to festivals to get their work seen. The festivals themselves provide panels, events. Imaginative has these micro meeting industry sessions where filmmakers, producers, creatives can meet with industry experts to talk over their ideas. Putting creatives in direct contact with industry people is a way of fostering production.
Karrmen Crey:Right? It's trying to make those connections. They also have commissioned projects like the embargo and embargo two, projects that Dennis Goulet, who worked with the festival, I think, is artistic director for a while and set up these kind of collaborative short film what are they called? Incubators? I I don't mean to use Silicon Valley words, but pretty much, I mean, that's how they worked.
Karrmen Crey:It was like to get indigenous filmmakers working with one another to produce projects that would then be shown at the festival, they are fostering production. And this is something like, my next project is around indigenous production cultures and what do I mean by that. And looking at film festivals at, like, Indigipop x, the major indigenous fan convention, this is a way of talking about, like, what are these you know, what are thought of as parenthetical or peripheral activities that actually directly contribute to indigenous production and critically reflect on it. So Imaginative is one of those places, and it has themes every year, you know, sort of a a kind of focus, and indigenous futurist work has certainly been a focus there.
Willi Lempert:Yeah. I remember Bedobin was the title of two separate things. There was the VR, and then there was the one that I think maybe Leanne Simpson was involved with. It was so of the zeitgeist that that concept and particular term about the past and future meeting in the present was happening in multiple projects. And I really appreciate, you know, that there's like a there's a VR space, there's games, there's cookies being printed with this laser kind of like futurist printer.
Willi Lempert:You know, in Australia, my experience is the same that festivals are really the beating heart of the circulatory system of the media world. There's there's so many layers of festivals. And to me, what's really special about Imagine Native, just having attended and hearing what folks love about it, is it seems to achieve things that are quite separated in Australia. So for example, Djawadjawad, one of the films that I worked on for the longest period of time, its world premiere was in Balgo in the community at the art center. There were often sort of Friday night drive ins, which was a sort of primer white painted back of the basketball court.
Willi Lempert:People would drive their Land Cruisers and sit on blankets and watch these documentaries, local films. Often that was the place that things were played and people would, you know, talk about how they knew folks in the films, and it's a very relational place. Then when I talk about it in my book, sort of these expanding circuits and circles of circulation. So the sort of beating heart of the remote indigenous media sector when I was there was the National Remote Indigenous Media Festival. And so this would be at a different community throughout every year.
Willi Lempert:It's changed a little since, but has a similar role. They would have these indigenous community television film festival screenings at night. And those were introduced by community members and people would recollect things during the films. There were, you know, inside jokes, layers of meaning, lot of talking throughout the films. But even much more importantly, off screen, there were countless workshops around skill building, developing, you know, values of production.
Willi Lempert:People were camping, there were meals. I remember this one in the beach area, there was this crocodile that had to famously sort of be avoided. People were having an experience with each other, that renewing of relations and colleagues. And there's awards that are acknowledging people's work, but very much not about the reach and popularity, but much more about the process and relationships they fostered in the meaning of their work. And then there's strategy sessions of people navigating the complexities of funding and sharing those things.
Willi Lempert:So it felt so much more than the film festival in a way was the smallest part of it. People were excited to have their films in, but it had so many layers. But in Australia, so Jawajawal went to the Sydney International Film Festival, and that was much more felt like a prestige international circuit component, which was important because it sort of legitimized the song lines on screens series that Jawa Jawa was a part of. And there was red carpet, wine and cheese kind of things. But Imaginative feels like it's doing some of both of those things that would happen at a community festival and at a very prestigious international festival.
Willi Lempert:I sort of left before I got to see it in its fullest form, but the Winda Film Festival was assisted by Imaginative in Sydney to be developed as something that could be at that larger scale, but have those fundamental sort of values and way of thinking about the festival as relational and connective. I think that film festivals are the fundamental events and driving forces and engines, as you put it, of a lot of these sort of arenas. And I'm excited for that project that you're going to be engaging those types of events.
Karrmen Crey:Yeah. This is it's I think it's something unique. You know, it's good to hear about the work being done at festivals in Australia. Again, going to the ethics kind of perspective, the kind of idea of, like, how do we support one another? How do we come together?
Karrmen Crey:How do we help provide support and direction and help a project come into being and, you know, support the creatives in doing so? I think those are different ethical questions than a lot of mainstream festivals that are really oriented toward mainstream opportunities. Not to say that indigenous film festivals also don't have an eye to other screens that have wider audiences. I mean, a lot of people are oriented that way. But the idea of, like, the way that communities form around and through these festivals are able to come together is something you've talked about.
Karrmen Crey:Kirsten Dowell has talked about, I think Amalia Cordova. You know, there are people who've, like, looked at these sites of community and production communities that are really enabled by these festivals that are really important to understand. You know, the reason I started going is, like, one, I got to see productions I would never see otherwise. This might be your only chance in the year to see work you'll never know about otherwise. Being able to meet up with people I know and, you know, see these filmmakers I know really well and maybe have known for years.
Karrmen Crey:But, again, it's really facilitating, like, these ongoing relationships, and that's really important to me as well. I'm really glad, like, Imaginative has continued with this idea. They even shifted their screenings, like, schedules to help support indigenous filmmakers to go to industry sessions so that the filmmakers could go to these sessions, but also go into the screenings. And so making those kinds of adjustments, like, do we support these creatives through the festival's operations is, again, something that not a lot of festivals, I think, are going to be thinking about or thinking through in an ongoing ethical way. So that just really makes them unique in their orientation to the media worlds.
Karrmen Crey:It's something very important to acknowledge and understand.
Willi Lempert:Whenever I'm trying to think about how to convey the festival meaning, there's an annual conference for anthropologists called the AAAs, the American anthropology, you know, like SCMS for media studies, or NAISA in indigenous studies. And to me, it's kind of like that. There are panels and there are papers, but that's not the deeper, exciting thing about them. You know, it's making those connections and laying the seeds for future projects and renewing relationships. I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this sort of tensions between the thriving indigenous media world, which you talk about, especially in relation to the nineties.
Willi Lempert:But Canada is often looked to perhaps overly idealistically as a real bastion for thriving indigenous media. But I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the sort of tension between that thriving and state power. And you note on page 29 that on one level, there is this sort of dynamic where the state can kind of try to control through governmentality or other ways of thinking about it, a sort of controlled expression of resistance and representation. But of course, there's many layers to it. And I sort of landed in the particular Australian context around this visibility paradox way of thinking about it.
Willi Lempert:I'd love to hear a little bit about how you think of this tension between state sponsored media that they know on some level is going to be critical or promote sovereign movements that would undermine settler colonial power. And there's many people involved in these circuits who have probably different feelings, but anything in that realm, I'd love to hear how you've thought about that over time.
Karrmen Crey:Yeah. That if this is analogous to the visibility paradox that you're talking about, it's sort of like, why would a state, a liberal democratic state, fund and support perspectives that are expressly meant to delegitimize and, ultimately dismantle? Be like, it's critical of the state. So why would the state fund and support that? And the way I talked about it was through, Foucault's concept of governmentality, and other people have articulated this in different ways.
Karrmen Crey:Indigenous scholars have thought about this in different ways, but it's fundamentally a technique. You know? Foucault goes into it and talks about, you know, it the state shifts its identity. It's a way of managing discontent by giving a platform for it. So the state really manages discontent by accommodating it.
Karrmen Crey:I think we think about state power as often top down. That's not actually how power works. Right? It it works by appearing to accommodate dissenting perspectives without delegitimizing the state. So the state will shift its identity to accommodate critique of itself by, for instance, making its poll a policy around multiculturalism, the idea that you can have a culturally variegated landscape in order to accommodate, to kind of, shore up its own legitimacy by accommodating difference.
Karrmen Crey:And that's an old technique. Right? Like, it's it's it's done all over the place. We see reconciliation, we can place within as a form of governmentality. It's a way of creating a kind of, like, formal transition point out of indigenous discontent into a kind of we see you.
Karrmen Crey:We recognize you. Yeah. Let's transform our relationship, indigenous state relations. Let's transform that. And so it inaugurates a transition between a presumably more colonial past into a more accommodationist presence.
Karrmen Crey:But, you know, Glenn Coulthard and others have critiqued that. It's like, you can't artificially construct a transition point and, like, pretend as though colonization is something that happened, but we're in a different place now. It's like, no. You just switched your language up. Like, you changed your technique.
Karrmen Crey:You're still colonial, but you're just using a rhetoric and approach to quell dissent, to try to appear as though it's over. Like, we've moved past the, you know, unpleasantness, the troubles. You know? So this is, you know, very common. And so it becomes a question, well, why are indigenous people taking up, you know, in a sense, seeming to accept the bargain?
Karrmen Crey:But that's not what's really happening. Right? This goes back to indigenous nationalism. It has always been about, like, the state has an obligation to indigenous nations. So the state setting aside these programs and resources is actually meeting is is a part of its obligations.
Karrmen Crey:So indigenous people aren't conceding and being absorbed into the body politic or into these institutions. They're going in and creating space to you know, for the articulation of indigenous perspectives and to transform the way that institution operates, in recognition of indigenous right to those resources, to those programs, to participating in whatever way they see fit. So on the one hand, I think the self defeating perspective is to see what indigenous people are doing as giving into governmentality. If we shift our perspective to what indigenous people are doing, we can see it as a form of negotiating what Audra Simpson, Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, calls, like, the strangulation of colonial society. How do indigenous people still stay together under this strangulating order?
Karrmen Crey:And it's she talks about how Mohawk people have maintained their poll themselves as a political entity despite it appearing as though a lot of Mohawk society looks like it mirrors or mimics the colonial state apparatuses. She's like, well, they did it to throw up a veil, to say, we don't need you to come in here and manage in our everyday lives. Look. We have passports. We have a band office.
Karrmen Crey:We have a council. You know, we're governing ourselves, and look. We have what you have, so stay out of our business. It's a it's a very sophisticated way of navigating the strangulating constraints of colonization to stay together as Mohawk people, and that's what native nationalists do. It's, it looks one way when you're looking at it from the colonizer's perspective.
Karrmen Crey:It looks like assimilation, but that's not what native people are doing. They're using every apparatus, every technique within their control, to hold together as people. So this is you know, we could expand into talking about, you know, why indigenous people take up capitalism, you know, like, say, casino capitalism like we see in Rutherford Falls. Like, why? The isn't that a watering down?
Karrmen Crey:It's like, no. It's not not at all. They're using capital to facilitate different principles of being together, of getting back what was stolen. This is articulated in Rutherford Falls, which is an amazing series and I could talk about for another hour. But I think we really need to shift perspective.
Karrmen Crey:Like, the moment you think indigenous people are being assimilated, you need to really reorient your perspective and think about how are indigenous people engaging with these apparatuses to shore up and protect and operate within principles that have never been extinguished of holding together as political entities like nations.
Willi Lempert:Absolutely. I I really appreciate all that nuance, and I don't want to forget to advertise in the book that you all have coming out soon. The one thing I would add is I really appreciated your use of Barry Barclay, his idea of the view from the ship and the view from the shore. And one of the things that I was thinking about in relation to this is that amidst all the things you're saying, think there is a sense from state settler states such as Australia and Canada that the project of settler colonization is so overwhelmingly successful and on some levels complete that there's a sort of dismissal of media as having the impact that they actually do. And people are able to wield that misunderstanding in ways that power movements from Standing Rock to the referendum in Australia and many other places.
Willi Lempert:But I thought you put that really well in those subtle dynamics and the sort of cynical position people could fall in around these topics but shouldn't. But I would love to, you know, for the title or maybe a short description of your book to be part of this production if you have that on hand.
Karrmen Crey:Sure. Yeah. I will say by wrapping this up that, the by plugging the book, the coming out, University of Minnesota Press, I coedited with Joanna Hearn. That is called By Their Work, Indigenous Women's Digital Media in North America. It is a big one in the sense that it is actually pretty voluminous, and it really looks at the history of indigenous women and women identified and queer folks, their contributions to shaping the indigenous digital landscape historically and the people who are working today.
Karrmen Crey:So we're really excited about it, and looking forward to seeing it released. And thank you for bringing that up, Willie, and for this conversation today. We could keep going, but I think we covered a lot of good ground today.
Willi Lempert:It was a real pleasure.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. Willi Lempert's book Dreaming Down the Track, Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema, and Carmen Cray's books Producing Sovereignty The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and more recently by their work Indigenous Women's Digital Media in North America co edited by Joanna Hearne are all available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.