When I met Alanis Obomsawin I was first struck by her eyes. There’s a warmth in her inquisitive gaze that immediately makes you feel calm and open. Obomsawin is a member of the Abenaki Nation of Turtle Island (so-called Canada). She is petite, but you don’t immediately notice that because of the strength of her mana and the way she holds herself. Her voice, an essential part of her work, has a pace and a rhythm like a waka rocking gently to the shore. It fills your wairua.

During the day I spent with Obomsawin, alongside a group of other artists and filmmakers, I repeatedly wrote down the phrases “the voice is sacred,” “everyone is important” and “everyone has a story to tell.” Obomsawin treats every word with so much respect, even if your voice is fluttering from nerves at being in conversation with one of the most important Indigenous directors of our time, and certainly one of the world’s greatest documentarians. When asked about her filmmaking process, she remarked that she makes her films ‘with’ rather than ‘of’ people, and that the most important step in this was simply to listen. She said she always listens to her interviewees without a camera first, building a relationship so that people can share their stories.

Her first documentary, Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), was shot at a residential school in the Cree community of Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. She has followed this with forty-nine more films that centre Indigenous voices and stories. To move between: Healing and Resistance, at Artspace Aotearoa, screened a selection of those films, including Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987), Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), Sigwan (2005) and We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice (2016). The exhibition also included a screening of Our People Will Be Healed (2017), selected film ephemera and a series of drypoint etchings.

The exhibition is laid out so that a visitor can move across the space, encountering different films and artworks from throughout Obomsawin’s extensive catalogue. The films shown varied in length, with We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice being almost three hours long, while Sigwan spans only twelve minutes. Watching requires a level of care and focus that Artspace’s open galleries inhibit. But To move between does enable visitors to meditate over the connections between these films, before spending more time with them later, given that all of Obomsawin’s films are free to watch online via the Canadian Film Board.

The exhibition gives an outline of Obomsawin’s body of work, which in turn details the tremendous changes in the way Indigenous people globally are treated, but specifically nations in Canada.[01] Obomsawin was a part of those changes. Whether this was through her ability to tell truth to power, to create space for other Indigenous filmmakers, or the fact that her films fundamentally impacted the way people in Canada, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, saw themselves and understood their histories. One of Obomsawin’s films (not shown at Artspace), Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986), even instigated legislative change in Alberta.[02] The film focused on the suicide of Métis youth Richard Stanley Cardinal, who killed himself in 1984 at the age of seventeen after being placed in twenty-eight different homes during his fourteen years in Alberta’s child welfare system. Following the film and the public outcry that emerged through his foster parents’ advocacy, a public inquiry was held into Richard’s death and child welfare services for Indigenous young people, leading to their reform.[03]

Obomsawin has always recognised the way history shapes the present, as well as the way resistance creates the capacity for healing. Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987), centres on an addiction and mental health facility that specialises in treatment for and by Indigenous people, with programmes designed using Indigenous healing and recovery techniques. “We will come through this as we have through other troubles. There is a strength in us that we ourselves have not yet recognised. And one day, we will find a place in the world for our people again,” we hear at the beginning of this unsparingly frank documentary. They are the words of the lodge’s namesake, Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker), a Cree chief whose legacy stands today as a peacemaker dedicated to the protection and empowerment of his people and the land. Obomsawin thinks through the root causes of substance abuse in Indigenous communities, naming them plainly through interviews with a number of patients, who all speak to how the absence of love and support, alongside the ongoing impacts of colonialism and systemic racism, lead to cycles of alcoholism and other addictions. The film ends as it begins, with the words of Pitikwahanapiwiyin: “But you are going to have to fight again. The hardest kind of fight. You must fight yourselves and this new way of thinking that we are less than they are, because it is not true.” Poundmaker’s Lodge weaves together the past with the present and the ongoing effects of colonialism, but shows the ways in which native people continue to fight for sovereignty, and for understanding of themselves and history, through reclamation of their whakapapa, ceremonies and other traditions. It is not a film that treats those interviewed as victims, but rather as people shaped by their circumstances who are trying to better understand themselves and, ultimately, heal through reconnection to their identity.

Perhaps Obomsawin’s best known film is Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which thirty years later continues to be a landmark of international Indigenous filmmaking. Kanehsatake was filmed in 1990, during the standoff between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Quebec Police, the Canadian Army and Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) resistance fighters in the community of Kanehsatake, near the town of Oka. The crisis erupted following a development proposal for a golf course and townhouses set to be built on stolen land in Kanehsatake that included a Kanien’kéhaka urupā. Tensions had been bubbling since the appropriation of Mohawk land in the eighteenth century and the failure of the Canadian state to recognise the sovereignty of the Mohawk people. The occupation in Oka lasted seventy-eight days and saw the largest deployment of armed troops in Indigenous–settler conflicts to date.[04] Obomsawin managed to film 250 hours of footage from the Indigenous side of the barricade and had to smuggle some of her film out of the camp in order for it not to be confiscated by authorities.

The use of force was excessive and at times brutal, and Obomsawin managed to capture it all in what was a dangerous situation. The film itself uses archival sources as well as the footage Obomsawin obtained. Her footage captured both the daily threat of violence by the Canadian settler forces, and the daily lives of Mohawk resistance fighters. One such moment is a night scene, where the camera shows a mother with a frightened child on her lap inside the Mohawk encampment. The mother gently sings the child a lullaby in her native language. This is juxtaposed with an image of a military helicopter inspecting what appears to be a bomb. The second moment that lingers in my memory is the final scene of Kanehsatake, where the Mohawks are shown not surrendering but peacefully leaving their front of resistance, before being subjected to excessive force by Canadian soldiers. Kanehsatake, like all of Obomsawin’s films, utilises the Indigenous tradition of orality to unfurl the official histories of the area’s two dominant settler cultures, French and English, and the number of fraudulent treaties and deals carried out by both groups in order to obtain more land and resources.[5] The film links the past and the present, with Obomsawin’s narration as a guide or ally that helps the viewer understand the context of what they are seeing.[06] After watching Kanehsatake at Artspace, I felt compelled to rewatch Merata Mita’s Bastion Point: Day 507 (1978) and Patu (1983). It was unsurprising to learn that Obomsawin and Mita were friends.

What comes through strongest in To move between was Obomsawin’s fierce concern for the lives of Indigenous children, and also the ways in which her voice has made an uncompromising space for the representation of many lives, histories, perspectives and aspirations for Indigenous people. Obomsawin’s love for her people and belief in their ability to resist, to love and to heal is what makes her work so compelling. To move between centred her mana as an artist and storyteller, and how her films reveal the realities of Indigenous life and struggle, rupturing the way Canada and the world viewed Indigenous people. There are a number of moments across her work where I can see profound similarities between the treatment of Māori and the treatment of Indigenous people in Obomsawin’s native Canada, particularly the removal of children from their families and how those assimilationist strategies created deep fractures across Indigenous societies. Seeing the ripples of colonisation caused by the displacement of native children, from being isolated from one’s land, family, cultural and spiritual Indigenous practices, combined with the violent and traumatic abuse experienced by children in state care, affected me deeply. I was moved to tears during the opening legal monologue of We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice, and reflected on the ways, across the world, that Indigenous children deal with the decisions of governments that don’t care about them, from Canada to Palestine to Aotearoa.

Obomsawin is a generous storyteller who never allows the subjects of her films to be seen as victims or as objects. There’s always a relation, and although many of these stories recount the ongoing impact of colonialism in Turtle Island, we mostly witness the strength, the dignity and the love that these subjects hold for themselves, and for a future where they can stand in the strength of their ancestors.