At 85, it’s 50 films and counting for Alanis Obomsawin,
Alanis Obomsawin sees her work telling Indigenous people’s stories not as a career, but as a mission
Alanis Obomsawin just turned 85, but the trauma of her education stays with her.
Born on Abenaki territory in New Hampshire and raised in her early years on the Odanak reserve near Montreal, the decorated filmmaker and singer then spent the rest of her formative years attending school in Trois-Rivières, where hers was the only Indigenous family. In class, the isolation was acute.
“I went through a very, very difficult time at school,” she recalled recently in a phone interview from Montreal.
“The stories we were being told about our people (were) horrifying. (The system) was really designed to get Canadians to hate First People, Métis people and Inuit people. It was very much built that way — telling us that our language was Satan’s language and we were savages. It was really awful.
“As a matter of fact, it’s the reason I’m in the business of making films and singing. Because of the horrible experience I had in school, this is how I started thinking I had to do something. I wanted the children to hear another story other than the ones they were being told.”
It seems appropriate then that with her 50th film — yes, 50th — the prolific documentarian has a complex but indeed triumphant story about a school in one of Manitoba’s biggest First Nations communities, where children are thriving within an environment that encourages knowledge of their language and history, self-sufficiency, and pride in their heritage.
Our People Will Be Healed, which premieres Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, focuses on the Helen Betty Osborne Ininiw Education Resource Centre, a technologically innovative school in the Cree community of Norway House, an 800-kilometre drive north of Winnipeg. With resources including an innovative science lab and a music program that turned out dozens of aspiring violin virtuosos, the school also teaches the kids Cree language, history and culture, and practical lessons about living off the land.
Obomsawin first visited the school in 2011. Having spent a half-century documenting Indigenous communities, she was struck that a new optimism existed in the young people she interviewed that she didn’t see even 15 years ago.
“We’ve had a lot of suicide and a lot of trouble with our young people who feel so unhappy with the educational system and with health services. People get discouraged,” she said. “Talking to (children) about how being healed is not from drinking or taking drugs or killing yourself; it’s about finding their tradition, their language, and going back to some of the tradition that their ancestors survived on.
“There’s something very spiritual and very beautiful that’s happening across the country.”
The school’s namesake, Helen Betty Osborne, was a Cree woman from Norway House who was abducted at 19 years old and murdered with a screwdriver by four white men in 1971. She was an aspiring teacher. Osborne’s granddaughter, Felicia Solomon, was murdered in 2003, and Solomon’s cousin Claudette Osborne is still considered missing after disappearing in 2008. Obomsawin has already begun work on her 51st film, a documentary with the working title Jordan’s Principle, about the death of Norway House child Jordan River Anderson, a topic she also explored in We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice.
Since initially releasing Christmas at Moose Factory with the National Film Board in 1971, Obomsawin has been tireless in artistry and activism alike. With 1993’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, she spent 78 tense nights shooting the armed standoff between the Mohawks and Canadian army. In 2002, she captured the federal government’s attack on the Esgenoopetitj Mi’kmaq First Nation’s fishing rights in Is the Crown at War with Us?
“(Obomsawin’s films) were the first time we’ve seen our people portrayed in a truthful light,” said filmmaker Michelle Latimer, director of the short film Nuuca screening at TIFF. “She’s influenced so many filmmakers, both documentary and narrative filmmakers.”
Well, Obomsawin actually tries to avoid using the word “career.”
“I just feel like it’s more of a mission than a career,” she says.