The After-Life of Documentary-Ginsburg

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Fig. 1. You Are On Indian Land. Production still. (GSPC)


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The After-Life of

Documentary:The Impact of

You Are on Indian Land

by Faye Ginsburg

George Stoneys documentaries have moved generations of audiences, students,

and communities because of their consistent, clear-eyed engagement with rep-

resenting what Bill Nichols calls the historically real. But the attraction to

his work has always been based on more than the insights he offers by moving

from worldly stories to their screen representations. Stoneys work always takes

the next step in an expanding spiral of social imagination, moving from the

documentary text back into the world, to see what it might accomplish, imag-

ining how the rhetorical force of the stories he tells can enter back into history.

Never satisfied with only engendering epistephiliaa pleasure in knowing that

DOCUMENTARYREALISMALIGNSITSELFWITHANEPISTEPHILIA, SOTO

SPEAK, APLEASUREINKNOWING, THATMARKSOUTADISTINCTIVEFORM

OFSOCIALENGAGEMENT. THEENGAGEMENTSTEMSFROMTHERHETORICAL

FORCEOFANARGUMENTABOUTTHEVERYWORLDWEINHABIT. WEARE

MOVEDTOCONFRONTATOPIC, ISSUE, SITUATIONOREVENTTHATBEARS

THEMARKOFTHEHISTORICALLYREAL. INIGNITINGOURINTEREST, A

DOCUMENTARYHASALESSINCENDIARYEFFECTONOUREROTICFANTASIES

ANDSENSEOFSEXUALIDENTITY, BUTASTRONGEREFFECTONOURSOCIAL

IMAGINATIONANDSENSEOFCULTURALIDENTITY.1

Faye Ginsburg is David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center

for Media, Culture and History at New York University.

WIDE ANGLE NO. 2 (MARCH 1999), pp. 60-67.V O L . 2 1

OHIOUNIVERSITYSCHOOLOFFILM


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Nichols argues is the attraction of documentary for its audiencesStoneys

concern has always been to see how his work can create new dialogues and

possibilities for change in circumstances shaped by injustice and inequality, far

beyond the frame of the film and its screening. Indeed, it is hard to think of

Stoneys work as ever being confined to a film text itself, as he carefully

steers his documentaries back out into the world, to see what kinds of action

they might instigate to remediate conditions addressed in the text.

This kind of media practice depends on yet another trademark of Stoneys

work, one that is not always visible in the text itself: the involvement of the

subjects of his film in its production and distribution is the trademark of all his

work, a commitment that became particularly clear when he moved to Canada

in 1968 to direct the newly instituted Challenge for Change/Societ Nouvelle

program in Canada. Indeed, he was the perfect person to step into that position,

as few in documentary were as clear (and as legendary) as Stoney was about

the importance of people being in control of the media being made about them.

In his words: People should do their own filming, or at least feel they control

the content. Ive spent much of my life making films about teachers or preachers

that these people ought to have made themselves.2

His film, You Are on Indian Land, the landmark documentary he produced for

Challenge for Change during the two years he ran that groundbreaking Canadian

program, is exemplary of the approach that Stoney developed and refined over the

course of his career, reaching extraordinary catalytic potential in The Uprising of 34.

Remarkably, the production and circulation of Uprisingwoke a southern commu-

nity from its amnesia about its own violent past, when mill owners attacked their

own workers who had dared to try and unionize, and helped bring about self-con-

scious processes of reconciliation in the present that were long overdue. But this

did not happen by accident, or because of a single, hopeful television screening.The confrontation with their own repressed past was created through a long, care-

ful process of community screenings that George and his colleague, filmmaker

Judith Helfand, orchestrated as carefully as the shooting of the film itself.

The roots of that method were firmly planted thirty years earlier, when Stoney

used his position as Executive Producer of Challenge for Change to push the


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National Film Board of Canada to make good on their call to promote citizen

participation in the solution of social problems, insisting that under his leader-

ship, a program entitled Challenge for Change is to be more than a public

relations gimmick to make the establishment seem more in tune with the times.3

The initial model for Challenge for Change had been an unprecedented effort

to use media in a process of community redefinition that came to be known as

the Fogo Island experiment, the first big project to be done for the Challenge

program by Colin Low, on a remote island off of Newfoundland where the de-

cline of the fishing industry had created a communityover three hundred

years in residencealmost entirely dependent on welfare services. While the

government was hoping that the filming process might persuade people to

move, the films in fact became a vehicle for dialogue between a community

unwilling to be relocated and government officials. Through the film-dialogue,

the Islanders successfully persuaded the government to underwrite a boat-

building cooperative, and then a high school. Within ten years, Fogo became a

model of successful community revitalization.4

The process was deployed again, successfully, when filmmakers entered into aconflict over the management of Arctic caribou herds between Inuit hunters

and government game managers, providing a critical juxtaposition of their dif-

ferent modes of understanding, ultimately strengthening the legitimacy of tra-

ditional knowledge systems.5 The Fogo model was then generalized. As

Stoney described it: We wanted to film ordinary people and get them to state

their positions. Then we wanted them to reexamine their positions as they play

the films back, so strengthening themselves in talking with officials. You

usually go through this and then the officials and the people get together. 6

When Stoney came on board, the program was supported by the Film Boardand eight government departments as a creative way to rethink public dilemmas

in housing, health, welfare, education, and Indian affairs. As is the case any

time such ideas become bureaucratized, their rules created their own problems.

The Department of Indian Affairs, for example, required that all members of

their crew come from different tribal backgrounds in order to be representative,

then subjected a group that had never worked together to arduous training


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that was more than many of them

could handle.7

Mike Mitchell, a young Mohawk

leader, was the exception, in part due

to the fact that he could commute

to Montreal from the St. Regis Re-

serve on Cornwall Island in the St.

Lawrence River, remaining rooted

in the ongoing life of his community. A social drama was escalating over the

fact that native people were being charged duty for bringing groceries and other

everyday goods across the U.S.-Canada border contained in the boundary of

their reserve, despite the 1794 Jay Treaty guaranteeing them duty-free passage.

Prior to departing with a delegation to Ottawa to protest the violation of the

treaty, Mike Mitchell contacted George to explain his involvement: If we

dont get satisfaction, which I doubt, were coming back and were going to

block the international bridge. If we block the bridge I want a film crew

down there.8

Unsurprisingly, government officials in Ottawa took little notice of the delega-

tion, and a protest was mobilized to block the international bridge, with Mitchell

anticipating the participation by Challenge for Change in his orchestration of the

event. George managed to get a crew down to film the face-off and arrest of In-

dian leaders that occurred, and sent it off to the labs to be synched. In keeping

with the strategy of using film as a tool for community building, the protestors

asked for footage right away, as tension was building between those who had been

arrested on the front lines, and those who came along after them. They man-

aged to get the film out of the lab and into the community, showing it all over

the reserve. Stoney then insisted on showing it to the Royal Canadian MountedPolice and other white officials, in keeping with the Fogo Island protocol.

While Stoney suffered some criticism for his involvement in the protest, the

resulting film was an extraordinary document, allowing the audience to watch

the building tension between local police and protestors in the midst of a freezing

snowstorm. The film reveals a process in which the Mohawk activists become

Fig. 2. Video frame from You Are On Indian

Land. (GSPC)


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Fig. 3. Mike Mitchell, a Mohawk chief from St. Regis reservation confronts a truck

driver from Montreal, from God Help the Man Who Would Part With His Land(dir.

George Stoney, 1970), a Challenge for Change production of the National Film

Board of Canada. (GSPC)

evermore committed to insisting on their own rights, eventually getting arrested.

It ends with a vague promise on the part of a government spokesperson to try

and find a solution. After the fact, the film enabled the protestors to finally

get the hearing they had petitioned for in Ottawa9

The immediate concern at the time was to bring the native point of view to the

fore and to shift coverage of political events from a focus on violent confronta-

tion with the forces of the state by shifting the frame, showing instead the long

processes of negotiation that lead up to certain violent actions. Of equal im-

portance was the use of the footage as the events were unfolding, to provide

an opportunity for reflection on the situation, on the part of the protestors as

well as the police who were confronting them. As Alan Rosenthal commented

in assessing the significance of You are on Indian Land: [This is] at the core of

Stoneys thinking: that film should be used by different social groups to examine

their stands, their actions, and their images. This kind of film making, accord-

ing to Stoney, is as necessary as ordinary film making for the general public.10


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This steadfast refusal to engage film and video as mass media, by insisting first

and foremost that they circulate locally, back into the communities which they

are documenting, as vehicles for collective self-examination is central to Stoneys

distinctive approach. While his method continues to be a minority position in

terms of the circulation of work, the steady growth of media makers in minority

communities (heretofore the objects rather than the subjects of the documen-

tary gaze) is part of a trajectory strongly associated with Stoneys visionary (yet

profoundly practical) method.

The Ongoing Challenge

Taking a longer view, You Are on Indian Landsignaled a crucial shift in assump-

tions about who should be behind the documentary camera, one that has had a

lasting effect on First Nations film and video production in Canada. Stoneys

strong support at the time for the training and equipping of Canadas first Na-

tive film crew, under the leadership of Mohawk activist Mike Mitchell, was a

catalytic message to Canadas First Nations communities, underscoring their

concern to represent themselves both politically and in the media.

How significant is this film now, thirty-five years later, for Canadas indigenous

Canadian film and video makers? Did the film, in addition to its impact on

events at the time, have a lasting effect on them? When I made a query about

this to Carol Geddes, the aboriginal filmmaker who headed Studio One, the

Film Boards First Nations film unit, she was unambiguous.

I am a huge fan of the Challenge for Change program and wish it existed yet.

[You Are on Indian Land] and others acted as catalysts in the community for

development. The most fascinating thing about these warriors is how they

improvised their political lives through urgent necessity and their experiences

of both heady victory and deep despair in those days of the creation of what

seemed like almost daily political milestones11

It is significant that the timing of the film coincided with the first wave of the

modern movement for Aboriginal political rights in Canada and clearly helped

to make those efforts visible. The year thatYou Are on Indian Landcame out,


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Geddes writes, was

only five years after Canada recognized Aboriginals as persons and as

Canadian citizens. Harold Cardinal wrote his landmark book, The Unjust

Society, in 1969, the first public recording of note to address aboriginal issues

in Canada. It followed the tremendous and exciting promise of the election

of Pierre Eliot Trudeau in 1968 and the stunned disappointment of Aboriginals

about the new assimilationist Indian policy that began Trudeaus era in

Canadian politics, a policy authored by his ambitious young Indian Affairs

Minister, Jean Chrtien. As offensive as this policy of termination was, it

was to provide an incredible impetus to the very Indian people it was meantto eliminate12

As testimony to the ongoing power of the counter-discursive work that the

filming of the Mohawk protests represented, Geddes is planning to use excerpts

from You Are on Indian Land for her current film project,All Our Roads Were Red,

which examines the beginnings of the Aboriginal political movement in Canada.

The legacy of You Are on Indian Landwas not only in the impact of the docu-

mentary process at the time. It catalyzed peoplethen and nowto think

about their history and about their need to represent their claims and to take

up cameras themselves in order to tell stories that can make a difference. This

is the kind of outcome for his work that George Stoney intended.

Footnotes

1 . Bill Nichols,Representing Reality(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 178.

2 . George Stoney, You Are on Indian Land, in The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook

in Film Making, Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 346.

3 . Erik Barnouw,Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film(New York: Oxford

University Press, 1993), 248.

4 . Dorothy Hnaut, Visual Stories from the Dawn of Time, Visual Anthropology Re-

view7, no. 2 (1991): 86.

5 . J. Stephen Lansing, The Decolonization of Ethnographic Film,Society for VisualAnthropology(1990): 14.

6 . Stoney, 349.

7 . Ibid.

8 . Ibid.

9 . Barnouw, 259.

10 . Stoney, 347.

11 . Carol Geddes, letter to author, 23 January 2001.

12 . Ibid.

Documents

The After-Life of Documentary-Ginsburg