Alanis Obomsawin (born August 31, 1932 in New Hampshire) is an Abenaki First Nations filmmaker, director, producer, musician, storyteller, and engraver from the Odanak Reserve of Quebec. She is best known for her documentaries, directing and producing over 50 films with the National Film Board of Canada which mainly focus on Indigenous peoples across Canada in a career spanning over six decades.
Born in New Hampshire in traditional Abenaki territory, she grew up in her parents' home community of Odanak on the Canadian side of the border. At some point in her childhood, her family moved to Trois-Rivières where she was the only Indigenous child, an experience which greatly affected her worldview. In her teens, she was scouted as a model and she traveled across Canada, the United States, and Europe as a folk singer and storyteller of her Abenaki roots throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Venues ranged from the Town Hall in New York City and folk festivals to isolated residential schools and prisons.
A chance interview with the CBC documentary series Telescope in the 1960s about her work for her home community led to her interest in documentary filmmaking and a longstanding partnership with the NFB. Her first film was Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), which was made with No Budget. It was filmed at a residential school on the Moose Factory Cree Nation Reserve and is comprised of several stills of drawings by the schoolchildren narrating their drawings. A turning point for Obomsawin was filming Incident at Restigouche (1984), about the 1981 salmon raids on the Listuguj Mi'gmaq Reserve by the Sûreté du Québec. This led Obomsawin to making more activist-based documentaries, notably Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), a look at the Oka Crisis of 1990 during which she spent most of filming behind the barricades.
She has released just one album, Bush Lady (1988), which was self-released and which experimented with avant-garde and Indigenous music. A remastered version was released in 2018 by Constellation Records.
A number of her films have been made available for free viewing on the NFB website (English
and French) and on its YouTube channel (English and French).
Partial Filmography
- Christmas at Moose Factory (1971)
- History of Manawan, Parts One and Two (1972)
- Basket (Lhk'wál'us) (1975)
- Mount Currie Summer Camp (1975)
- Puberty, Parts One and Two (1975)
- Mother of Many Children (1977)
- Amisk (1977)
- June in Povungnituk (1980)
- Incident at Restigouche (1984)
- Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986)
- Poundmaker's Lodge: A Healing Place (1987)
- No Address (1988)
- Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993)
- My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995)
- Spudwrench - Kahnawake Man (1997)
- Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000)
- Is the Crown At War With Us? (2002)
- Our Nationhood (2003)
- Sigwan (2005)
- Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (2006)
- Gene Boy Came Home (2007)
- When All the Leaves Are Gone (2010)
- The People of the Kattawapiskak River (2012)
- Hi-Ho Mistahey! (2013)
- Trick or Treaty? (2014)
- We Can't Make the Same Mistake Twice (2016)
- Our People Will Be Healed (2017)
- Jordan River Anderson, the Messenger (2019)
- Honour to Senator Murray Sinclair (2021)
- Bill Reid Remembers (2022)
Discography
- Bush Lady (1988, remastered release 2018)
Tropes associated with Alanis Obomsawin and her work include:
- Bittersweet Ending: In the song "Bush Lady," the protagonist is exploited by White folks and rejected by her community - she ends up giving up her baby and drinking away her problems. She eventually dies on the streets of the city, but she is welcomed in death by her Nookum (grandmother) and relinquishes all her burdens.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: When the titular protagonist from "Bush Lady" is in the city, she ends up in an exploitative relationship with a White man that produces a child. While pregnant, the Bush Lady is told to go back to her home community. After she gives birth to her "blond baby," however, the Bush Lady and her child are rejected by her home community. She ends up leaving her baby in the care of a White woman.
- Narrator: Obomsawin provides narration for most of her documentaries, providing context and key historical facts and events for viewers. Her narrations are done both in French and English.
- No Budget: Alanis Obomsawin's earliest films relied on grants from the NFB as well as money she raised herself by putting up concerts and performances. This contributed to how these early films were structured - still photographs accompanied sound recordings of the interviews she conducted and incidental sounds. Obomsawin's early films often took years to complete (production for Christmas at Moose Factory started as early at 1967) because the budget ran out, so she would have to fly back from remote Indigenous communities to the NFB headquarters to begin another campaign for more funding.
- Oral Tradition: Obomsawin credits her Aunt Jessie and her mother's cousin Théophile Panadis for her incredible early upbringing in Odanak. The latter taught her the oral traditions of the Abenaki people, which is honored in the track "Théo." The track alludes specifically to the story of Rogers Raid on the St Francis mission (modern-day Odanak) during the Seven Years' War. Contrary to Major Rogers' own writings (in which he claims that he and his men snuck into the St Francis mission and slaughtered around 200 people in the village), the Abenaki in the village were warned by one of Rogers' own Mohican scouts and the actual casualties were much lower than Rogers indicated (though no less devastating). The memory of the event was kept alive by a survivor - a young girl called Malian - through song.
- Voiceover Translation: A good portion of Obomsawin's films up through the 1980s provide Voiceover Translation over the subjects into either French or English (depending on that language the film is produced in). If Obomsawin is ever speaking in the film herself, she would provide the Voiceover Translation for herself in the opposite language.
