For the first time ever, Cranbrook History Centre is hosting a month-long event dedicated solely to the screening of Indigenous documentaries.
Reel Injun and Inconvenient Indian, will be screened daily at the museum until April 1. The films, selected by the National Film Board of Canada, explore themes related to cultural appropriation and historical accuracy in Hollywood, and the ongoing struggle to preserve First Nations culture and tradition.
Museum manager Jared Teneese said he would like to create a public dialogue on Indigenous issues through these films, and teach people something new.
“My hope is to give people a really good understanding, have people see these videos in different ways and be able to a talk about it and hopefully take something away. That’s the goal,” he said.
Reel Injun (2010), produced by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, explores the historic representation of Indigenous people in Hollywood, from the early 20th century to present day. It features clips from western classics and interviews with famous directors like Clint Eastwood, Robbie Robertson and Jim Jarmusch.
It covers many topics, like non-Indigenous people who take Indigenous roles and Indigenous actors who want to discover more about their ancestry, and it covers Hollywood classics that have left a mark on the film industry and positively changed the way Indigenous people are represented in film, like Dances With Wolves.
Teneese said Dances With Wolves was one of the first films to cast Indigenous people as Indigenous characters, and feature dialogue in Indigenous language.
“If it wasn’t for Kevin Costner introducing real First Nations or using First Nations language on screen, it wouldn’t have been known,” Teneese explained.
“Graham Greene is actually in this documentary talking about how he can speak the language that he was taught in Dances With Wolves better than his own language. That’s the impact that this type of stuff has on new generations. To have dying languages stored and saved on screen is really important.”
Inconvenient Indian (2020), directed by Michelle Latimer and based upon the award winning book by Thomas King, shows how Indigenous people have been forgotten by time and pushed aside; their history rewritten to serve the ideas and beliefs of the collective majority, and their culture and language deemed a relic of the past.
A passage from King’s book aptly sums up the film.
“Indians didn’t die out. They were supposed to, but they didn’t,” King wrote.
“Since North America already had the Dead Indian, Live Indians were neither needed nor wanted. They were irrelevant, and as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth century, Live Indians were forgotten, safely stored away on reservations and reserves or scattered in the rural backwaters and cityscapes of Canada and the United States. Out of sight, out of mind.”
Teneese, a member of Ktunaxa First Nation, said the film speaks to the modern Indigenous experience, of being controlled by the Indian Act and of living within a system that uses blood quantum to decide who is Indigenous.
“All First Nations across North America have been inconvenient in different ways. It’s a long road. We are still governed by the Indian Act and it’s super hard to get past that,” he said.
“There might not be a lot of First Nations left with the way we’re still governed. If we’re not over X amount of First Nations blood, we’re no longer Indians. We lose our status and who we are. We’re forced to stay on reserves or lose it down the road.”
The director’s Indigenous heritage was called into question in a CBC investigation and Inconvenient Indian was actually temporarily withdrawn from distribution because of this, but Teneese said he thinks the film still has value.
“It’s still a very important story. It didn’t take away from what is being told,” he said.
“I hope people will learn something new,” he added.
The films are screened daily at 10:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., but the times are flexible and can be changed to accommodate viewers.