Indigenous media in North America have rapidly expanded over the last 30 years with Indigenous media makers gaining greater control of their own narratives, including the ability to subvert colonial representations.
Over the last 30 years, there has been an exponential growth of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, especially here in Canada which has one of the largest repositories of Indigenous media. However, the road to get here hasn’t been easy. Indigenous filmmakers, producers, and artists have had to navigate the complex and often unfriendly terrain of Canadian media institutions and media production companies. Their negotiations -- and struggles -- have helped make space for a generation of Indigenous media-makers who are increasingly making shows and films on their terms, with their ideas.
Karrmen Crey who is Stó:lō from Cheam First Nation, is an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and the author of “Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada.” In this special episode, recorded on-site with an audience in Vancouver at Iron Dog books, Karrmen speaks with Vinita about the ways Indigenous creators are using humour along with a sharp critique of pop culture to show just how different the world looks when decision-making power over how stories get told shifts and Indigenous media makers take control.
This episode was produced in front of a live audience at Iron Dog Books in Vancouver, in partnership with Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology and the Amplify Podcast Network. Simon Fraser student, Natalie Dusek performed tech duties. Theme music by Zaki Ibrahim, Something in the Water.
Image credit: Jana Schmieding plays Reagan, a member of the fictional Minishonka nation, on the sitcom, Rutherford Falls. (Evans Vestal Ward/Peacock)
THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT
PULL QUOTE
Karrmen Crey: I'm hoping that non Indigenous people are seeing this and not only registering it as being funny, but just how sharp and smart it is. And I'm hoping it's priming them to be more receptive and thoughtful about looking at things from Indigenous perspectives.
INTRO
Vinita Srivastava: Over the last 30 years, there's been a huge explosion and an exponential growth in Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers here in Canada especially, and actually we have one of the largest repositories of Indigenous media in the world. TV shows, films, documentaries, even reality TV, but it's not been an easy road to get there. And that's because all of these filmmakers, producers, Indigenous artists have had to navigate this really difficult, challenging, sometimes unfriendly, pretty complex terrain of Canadian media systems and Canadian production companies. What we've seen is in the last 30 years, a lot of Indigenous media makers have made these incredible complex negotiations with these media organizations. And they've helped to make space for a whole new generation of Indigenous media makers. And these media makers are now making stories and documentaries and films on their own terms, and really telling their own stories. Instead of being told what to do, how to do it, how to say it, these indigenous creators are making really powerful products. But they are taking control over how their stories get told. And they've even had a chance to subvert some really old colonial stereotypes.
So here with me today is someone who is, I was gonna say obsessed with, but who is an expert on and also obsessed with Indigenous media and in the Indigenous media world, it's Karrmen Crey. Karrmen Crey is Stó:lō from Cheam First Nation. She is an associate professor at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser in Burnaby, here in British Columbia. And her research focuses on Indigenously produced and created media in Canada. And also the media institutions. and the Indigenous people that have had to navigate those institutions to produce their work. She's also the author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada.
So thank you so much for being here.
INTERVIEW
Karrmen Crey: Thank you for having me.
Vinita Srivastava: And also, just in case you missed it, we're here in Vancouver. We're at the Iron Dog Bookstore. And we've also got an amazing live audience with us this evening, many of whom are participating in the Amplify Podcast School at Simon Fraser University. So welcome to the audience too.
So, Karrmen I just want to start with the ending of your book, if I may. At the very end, you mentioned in the afterward, you talk about a television series and that is Rutherford Falls. And thank you, by the way, for introducing me to Rutherford Falls because I loved it. I kind of binge watched it in the last like two weeks. It's a really fantastic comedy series. It premiered April 2021. And the main character of the show starts off like she's rehearsing this speech that she wants to give, and she starts off with this line, "Indigenous history is the greatest story never told." For those people who don't know the show, I'm wondering if you can set the, set that scene up a little bit, or can you maybe just set the show up a little bit?
Karrmen Crey: I can, a little bit. And I'll try to avoid too many details. It was a program that aired on Peacock. Um, it has two seasons. It was the creation, largely helmed by Sierra Teller Ornelas, who's a Navajo, um, showrunner. She's one of the co creators along with I want to say Mike Schur, creator of The Office, if I'm remembering that correctly, and Ed Helms, who we all remember as Andy in The Office.
So it really was a collaborative kind of project. It takes place in the middle in the fictional Rutherford Falls, which is located on the traditional territory of the fictional tribe, the Minishonka and the protagonist, Reagan is she's a person at the crossroads trying to reintegrate or work closer with her home community, as well as she's the best friend of Nathan Rutherford, the descendant of the founder of Rutherford Falls, who is extremely proud of his almost Mayflower esque heritage. And she's having to navigate the geographic political reality of being in a town that is on a stolen Minishonka land, while also having this really, this orientation toward helping her community, being a part of it, helping develop a cultural center in the tribal casino to really start foregrounding and making visible the Minishonka history.
Vinita Srivastava: She's just come back from doing like a degree in museum studies or something like that.
Karrmen Crey: Yeah, at Northwestern.
Vinita Srivastava: Um, she's got a master's degree. She's got kind of a,
Karrmen Crey: So close to Ivy that you can taste it. She's very much, I think, a product of a lot of what Indigenous youth experience right now, which is moving around a lot, but also being very much drawn to going home and finding a way to be yourself while doing something for your community at the same time. And that takes a lot of work and there's a lot of pitfalls in the process and stumbling blocks and she kind of feels her way through that through the show.
Ed Helms, of course, plays Nathan and he's pretty flawless in the bumbling kind of puffed up white guy role. He's, he's pretty perfect and does a great job.
Vinita Srivastava: So the whole, and the whole thing about the statue of him, right? It's like there's a statue of him in the town and. he wants to keep the statue and it becomes this controversy, right?
Karrmen Crey: It's this beautiful metaphor. His ancestor's statue is located at the intersection of the main streets and everybody keeps driving into it and crashing their cars. So the town wants to move the statue and Nathan, of course, is outraged. He sees that as a kind of desecration and Reagan meanwhile, is kind of standing by his shoulder like, "Yeah. It is a desecration when people move your ancestors off of their territory," you know, trying to coach him along and he's oblivious and so yeah, so lots of built in wonderful narrative tension there.
Vinita Srivastava: Beautiful show, right? Really great. So what, what, what was so important about that show for you?
Karrmen Crey: I think because, in a, in a sense, Reagan is not a kind, an Indigenous woman who resolves into a particular type that is recognizable, say, in film history terms, which is often very much people are oriented towards a more Pocahontas image. It gets called the kind of, there's a dualism that's been theorized and talked by Rayna Green, for instance. The, um, kind of Pocahontas squaw dualism that Indigenous women tend to get grafted onto. So, as either that's, um, It's pure virtuous spiritual woman or the degraded more sexualized savage woman figure quote unquote.
Vinita Srivastava: So she really breaks all of those stereotypes as a character.
Karrmen Crey: Yeah, I think she defies them in terms of her physicality in terms of her humor, her delivery. She's Jana Schmieding is a stand up comedian and I think you really get that through her performance.
Vinita Srivastava: She's so funny.
Karrmen Crey: Her timing. Yeah.
Vinita Srivastava: Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful.
Karrmen Crey: And, and she's very much wears contemporary, Indigenous, like beadwork, clothing. So there's a kind of visibility. If you recognize the beading industry on Instagram, for instance, you start to recognize those artists that they are actually inserting into the show.
Vinita Srivastava: Okay.
Karrmen Crey: Which is also fun.
Vinita Srivastava: So you talked about the stereotypes, like the sort of archetypes that have been there for Indigenous women. How different is that from what you experienced growing up?
Karrmen Crey: I often tell this story that it took me until I got to university to encounter Indigenous film at all. I did my first undergrad degree at Simon Fraser University. I was in my, I think I was just 20 at the time, and could not believe that in one of my classes the teacher showed us It's Alanis OObomsawin's Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, which is this world famous documentary about the Oka Crisis. And I left that classroom being just stunned that there was such thing as Indigenous film. Up until that point, I'm dating myself, this is 25 years ago, but to that point, I had never, it had never crossed my mind that this existed because I had never seen it on anything I was watching, which was at that time before the internet was going to be broadcast television or the CBC.
When I mention what I do, like examining, researching Indigenous media, now from younger people, I'm getting more of a response of like, oh, reservation docs. Like, they know it, so they've seen it, and they know to reference it. So there's a lot to be said there about the transition of media ecosystems to streamers and their impact on what's accessible to us. ,But also that they're, the fact that Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs even exist is something I wouldn't have really thought about. imagined back when I was coming up.
Vinita Srivastava: So how did that impact you when you saw it?
Karrmen Crey: It triggered a memory, like when I was a teen, the Oka Crisis, we weren't really aware out west, aware of it to the extent that I think people living further east would have been. I remember it kind of being something that, you know, was probably an elliptical presence in my household, but we didn't like talk about as a family. So seeing that and actually having a fuller understanding of not just what it was but of the Mohawk perspective of the crisis of what that was like within the community pushing back against thousands of Canadian military was mind blowing, because I mean on one hand I think I was innocent in a way like kind of naive of like, the Canadian government deployed the Canadian military against its own people quote unquote like astonishing and but realizing like no this is Indigenous people that this is happening to, and that you know me being a teenager that this this can happen, this is happening um, and when I was in my 20s seeing the film like "oh my god this is what the stakes are."
Vinita Srivastava: Right. Stakes are life and death actually.
Karrmen Crey: Really. And like this is what the relationship between Canada and Indigenous people looks like. This is what it looks like now. Like this is not so far out of, you know, it was probably just over a decade out of that conflict.
Vinita Srivastava: It's not a hundred years ago. It's a few years ago.
Karrmen Crey: 1990. It was like, yeah, it was, it was happening and a full on armed conflict of astonishing imbalance that that was-
Vinita Srivastava: Amazing portrayal of women too. Beautiful.
Karrmen Crey: Yeah. And it was, I think that's a really important detail that a Obomsawin insists on leading that film with Mohawk women's interviews, because that's how it would have been done. A Mohawk people would have engaged. It's like the women go first. So she kind of structured the film to resonate or echo the political structure.
Vinita Srivastava: Yeah, that's beautiful. So, okay, the Oka Crisis, more than 34 years ago. Now we're just thinking about your book too and your work. Can you tell us what's changed in the in the What's changed in the media landscape from 34 years ago?
Karrmen Crey: Well I mean, I think the The relationship between the state and Indigenous people has, of course, evolved. After the Oka Crisis, there was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which the government set out to investigate the relationship between Indigenous people and Canada.
Vinita Srivastava: Like you need to investigate it.
Karrmen Crey: So yeah, let's spend another, like, five years and millions of dollars telling us what we already know. But, you know, in terms of documenting from Indigenous people people what the main issues were in thousands of pages of documents, it did provide directions and identified the media specifically as a problem because of how, and this is in no small part due to how the Mohawk warriors were being represented by the mainstream media during the Oka Crisis.
Vinita Srivastava: Like news media.
Karrmen Crey: Yeah. News media. So there were directions being given. There was the Oka Crisis certainly had in, I don't want to make it sole and only kind of political conflict that triggered this kind of shift in the media landscape. But it was kind of a culmination and a part of a number of political actions that were happening through the 80s, 70s, 80s and 90s demanding that Canada own up to its obligations to Indigenous people, and it agreed to it in our constitution, section thirty five.
Vinita Srivastava: '82.
Karrmen Crey: In '82. So it had to repair its image, and part of the way that it did so was to, it's like, yes, let's improve this relationship, and let's start allocating federal resources to supporting Indigenous representation in many different areas around the country, but the cultural arts and cultural sphere in particular was one area that saw allocations of funding and the formation of programs and resources designed to support Indigenous artists and creatives. So, this is where we see it, these federally funded or supported institutions, but also things like galleries and museums start to reflect on their own programming, their own identities. And question the extent to which they reflect Indigenous peoples. So we start to see Indigenous people engaging with these institutions, with these programs, accessing these services to create space for their perspectives and work.
Vinita Srivastava: So you're talking about services like NFB and things like that? Is that the era that we saw like APTN and things like that starting to come up?
Karrmen Crey: Yes. Studio One at the NFB gets founded. It's the Aboriginal Film Unit. So that's specifically for Aboriginal or Indigenous documentary film. So that comes out of the 90s. APTN comes a bit later, but setting up a national indigenous broadcaster takes a while. So for 30 years there had been discussions about a national broadcaster, and that eventually happened in 1999. So it was absolutely a part of that era. It just took, you know, a while to work out the kinks there.
Vinita Srivastava: But in your book, you talk about how Indigenous media makers approach, how, media is made and how they approach it differently from, say, you know, a Canadian Western kind of approach. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Karrmen Crey: So I'm going to try to talk about this through a more recent framework. It was given through the Indigenous Screen Office, which we have here in Canada, which is a major advocate and resource for Indigenous filmmakers and media makers. And they released a report, Onscreen Pathways and Protocols, that is one of the places where they talk about narrative sovereignty and Indigenous right to narrative sovereignty and that that's the intent of the office.
It is capturing something that has been happening obviously for decades and been theorized in a lot of different ways, a lot of different terms used to talk about what narrative sovereignty means. And it means that Indigenous people need to have the right and the ability and means to shape a production based on a worldview, philosophy, way of doing things that is meaningful to them and where they are culturally located and that the production needs to be more value directed rather than cost directed. So, where Western productions, um, are extremely hierarchical and very regimented in how they go about producing. a production, a different approach. Indigenous people don't approach production that way, always, and have actually been pushing back against that way of production because the hierarchy of a traditional production will not be the political order of a community that may be, a film is being made about. And the film production, it has to reflect the values and of the people that, or community it's working with, and the Indigenous people who are on the crew.
Vinita Srivastava: So you're talking about two things, because one is money, right? I think one is you're saying, well, money is not the priority. The priority is the story.
Karrmen Crey: Well, I mean, money's always important. I mean, at the end, we got, we got to say it's like, because if I, I'm kind of like following Kim TallBear and others who have kind of positioned ourselves as like materialist about production in that you put your money where your mouth is. So there's no lip service to centering Indigenous perspectives and ways of doing things behind the camera, it's actually happening. And so there are, for instance, Sterlin Harjo in talking about the production of Reservation Dogs, and as well, cast and crew, who I just saw on a panel in Oklahoma, talk about how night and day different that production experience was for them versus working on a mainstream production. And it had to do with the people and the values that were shaping the culture behind the camera. So, Indigenous production cultures are going to be different. And it also, ultimately that is going to shape what ends up on screen, right? Like it's, it's the means of representation, the means of production.
So narrative sovereignty is meant to capture what happens in the development concept phase and the organization of the cast and crew and their dynamics and who is on set, as well as what ends up on screen. So it's not purely aesthetics, right? Like we're not asking, we're not looking to distill what is Indigenous on screen. We are talking about doing something profoundly different that is much more meaningful and reflects Indigenous values. However, the process of getting there. The process of getting there it is not the deliverable that matters here. It is the process. Have you set up the process so that those who need to be a part of the conversation are a part of the conversation. They consent to the conversation. They consent to participate. They are meaningfully engaged in, say, the development of a project. That, that relationship is initiated and then taken care of through the project, whatever that looks like. Process is critical here, especially with that stereotyping coverage of Indigenous people in the news media. There was a huge incentive for Indigenous people to represent themselves, to confront the problem that was behind the camera and what was ending up on screen, and this became a major rallying call from the 1990s onward that it mattered so much. It, it mattered both who was behind the camera and then as well as who was in front of it and how they were represented. And this has been a major orientation and driver for Indigenous media in Canada since.
Vinita Srivastava: I remember I saw an interview with the cast of Reservation Dogs and one of the young actors, I think she's 15. And she's talking about how she was given the power to like, make up her own lines. She was given the script, but they were like, "You can do whatever you want. Say whatever you want." And she was like, "I would end up doing that all the time. Like, I would just tell my story in the way that I would tell my story." It was just an amazing thing to hear. When do you hear a 15 year old, you know, young woman being able to say, I get to tell my story in the way that I want to tell my story. It's pretty incredible.
Karrmen Crey: Yeah, that they could be, that Indigenous performers can be empowered on a set rather than profoundly alienated or devalued is remarkable. Sterlin Harjo also has spoken about things like there is often a necessity for a ceremony on set. depending on the subject matter. So that is also a part where there is time and space given to that these kinds of really important practices that are innately tied to the production itself. But a Western model of film production, say, I think that would be highly alien to Western production to think we have to stop for a ceremony. I think that would be just head spinning.
Vinita Srivastava: So we've sort of talked about this a little bit. What happened with Rutherford Falls, for example, is that the show got cancelled. What happened with Reservation Dogs is the show's ended. So, what I really wanted to ask you about is, why is it so important that we have these, this space for, first of all, non Indigenous audiences to participate and watch these shows? I guess that's, that's my question. Why is it so important for non Indigenous people to watch these shows?
Karrmen Crey: Well, and I think, I think at one level it's kind of what you've pointed to throughout, which is that they are going to be confronted with representations, like Indigenous characters, stories, scenarios, uh, communities, like spaces, like homes, communities, that they've never seen before. That they have no ability to imagine beyond what has already been embedded in their imagination. And that's often disorienting. The tactic of using humor is a way of mediating this discomfort with encountering the unfamiliar. And so I think Indigenous people, I mean, are really funny. I mean, that is a bottom line. I think many people will say this Native humor is some of the funniest deadpan dry humor. And that comes out of these productions. I think there's a confrontation with preconceived ideas of how Indigenous people live or what Indigenous reservation looks like. But also how Indigenous people engage with settler colonial culture.
Like, there's so much pop culture imagery that comes through, say, Reservation Dogs. One of the characters, like, Willie Jack is this amazing, I love her character, but she's clearly a reference to Billy Jack, a 1970s movie that we came up with, right? Like, that our generation, so that would, I'm, again, aging myself, I'm of Sterlin Harjo's age, his generation. And so it's like recognizing or Elora? Is that her name? Yes, that's a character from Willow, the movie Willow from the 80s, which again, like that is a movie I grew up with. And it's so there's ways that it shows a kind of engagement and knowledge and actually deep expertise with, of navigating settler colonial culture, incorporating it and repurposing it to mean something different and make it, show that it's a part of Indigenous people's lives, lived reality. But Indigenous people are constantly working that over and reframing pop culture, mainstream culture, to make it meaningful for Indigenous people. I'm hoping that non Indigenous people are seeing this and not only registering it as being funny, but registering it just how sharp and smart it is. And I'm hoping it's priming them to be more receptive and thoughtful about looking at things from Indigenous perspectives.
Vinita Srivastava: If you watch it, I don't see how you can't respond differently.
Karrmen Crey: Who would have thought Ed Helms? Would be a- like, the fact that I have to think about him now as a, as a ally, an Indigenous ally, and I do, I really respect the hell out of him, like, that, you know, that, that's a head turner for me as well, but I, I'm like, wow, now Indigenous media history has a place for, like, Ed Helms, and as a major, as a, as a kind of little, you know, pin in the map, we're like, "Thanks, man."
So I'm hope- and I think the fact that what people are seeing is that Indigenous people are operating at the level, high production value, prestige level, and are not just doing it, but killing it, like knocking it out of the park and getting awards. That I think is astonishing for people, but Indigenous artists, you know, people like me have known this forever. It's like, you just had to give us a chance. You just had to give them the chance. Gamble and you can win. Like, you know, as far as producers go, I'm like, if you make the gamble, look at what can come out of that.
As sad as I am that they had such brief lives, two seasons for Rutherford Falls and three for Reservation Dogs, Looking at the big picture of the strides that Indigenous people are making to reach into mainstream media industries and access those resources, I really see these as they were, in a way, tests and then proof that Indigenous people can do this, uh, and they are a gamble you can make. They're a proven quantity, and there's no reason to close the door on them anymore.
Vinita Srivastava: We talked about the three decades of Indigenous media growing in popularity and in production. We still have a ways to go. What are your hopes for the future of Indigenous media in Canada?
Karrmen Crey: What Indigenous creatives have always needed was stable, committed funding, resources, something over time that won't leave them having to do what they always do, which is enter into a one or two year grant cycles of just looking for money. And I think most people here are kind of, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. That just like writing those. Just writing those applications, applications, applications, and also having to enter co production agreements with non Indigenous production companies that often exploit their expertise in their labor and poison the production. Offending, insulting, degrading, the Indigenous participants in that production. And I've heard for over 20 years from Indigenous filmmakers and artists who were saying, who were traumatized by being brought on as an advisor to a production, an Indigenous production by a non Indigenous crew, and they were just so sidelined and their input was just thrown out the window. They were there to, you know, tick a box. So what I really would love is like, is what they are calling for, which is more of a stable sources for productions that would allow them to continue to develop their experience and their skills and their ability and tell more stories involving many more Indigenous people who are dying for the opportunity to participate and learn and develop their skills on set and are not being given the chance to do so. So I would love to see something stabilized. Thinking more in terms of like decades. It's like we are looking to encourage and build the next generation of filmmakers. So what do we need to do that? We need to put our money where our mouth is.
Vinita Srivastava: Thank you so much for your time today.
Karrmen Crey: Thank you for having me.
OUTRO
Vinita Srivastava: So that's all the time that we have for today. Thank you to Hilary Atleo, who is the owner of Iron Dog Books. And thank you to SFU Faculty of Communication Arts and Technology. Thank you to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland, the Amplify Podcast Network. Thank you so much. Thank you. And to Natalie.
We really wanted to invite the audience to participate. Oh, the questions are already starting.
AUDIENCE Q&A
Audience: Tanshi! It's so nice to meet, like, to listen and it's just been such a beautiful experience. For me in the field that I work in, pretendianism is a big issue and it's everywhere. Like, say, Michelle Latimer, for example, too, that was actually very triggering. Um, so I'm curious about in the field that you work in, how was your industry combating against pretendianism?
Karrmen Crey: I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm like in, like, the film industry. I'm much, I'm an academic, but this cuts across, right? So, I think Kim TallBear once said she estimated 25 to 30 percent of academics who claim to be indigenous are pretendians. I will say, that's accurate. It is a constant, constant thing, and it is a time eater, and an energy eater, and an emotion eater. I am so appreciative of the people who have come forward to identify or help, there's a network, a good, like, not a conspiratorial network, I mean, like, we have, like, strong personal and professional networks that we have a way to talk about that. It is absolutely a situation we are constantly grappling with and trying to work together to figure out ways to address, you know, without, you know, in a way that won't burn us down or anybody else. And I know just from having friendships and relationships with people, Indigenous artists and filmmakers, they are encountering the same numbers as we are, if not more. And it is 100 percent right at the front of the conversation right now. Like, how do we deal with this? We're figuring out how to address people who may be doing this. And still coming up with the language to do so because there's a whole legal dimension here we have to be careful about.
Audience: Tanshi, Karrmen um, thanks so much for being here and for sharing your thoughts. Um, it's really lovely to get to, to hear from you. You mentioned a little bit about reconciliation in your conversation, and, um, one film that I was thinking about is Bones of Crows, and I'm wondering if you can speak a bit to how you see a film like Bones of Crows coming out and really affecting this era of reconciliation in Canada.
Karrmen Crey: I will own that I have not seen it yet. So I'm not really familiar. Can you talk a little bit more about Bones of Crows? I'm curious about, to know more about it.
Audience: Sure. Um, it's a, it's a, it's a film that spans, I think, three generations total. And it's really, um, going through one particular family's experience with residential schools. So, um, I don't know exactly the time period when it begins. I want to say, like, 19, like, 30s or 40s and it goes, um, right up until more or less present day. Uh, when it came out I think last spring? Um, yeah. And I don't have, I don't have a whole lot of names in my head about it. It was-
Karrmen Crey: Genre wise, does it kind of, um, like drama, horror, um, I, you know, I think about a lot of reconciliation era films, um, and this is what you were saying was triggering, um, my thinking about like Jeff Barnaby's work, um, and how he uses, um, the horror genre now to talk about the experience of, uh, residential schools and that kind of thing.
I feel like there, there's a reason why these, um, kinds of genres and films are coming up now as a way of critiquing Reconciliation Era politics. The Reconciliation Era was, like, initiated to construct a false end point to Indigenous trauma and the, uh, the state's role and responsibility for that. The colonial agenda is about dispossession and erasure of Indigenous people and residential schools is just one small part of that. So the way that the Canadian state framed reconciliation in terms of constructing that endpoint and foregrounding residential schools as the problem is some of the like most like the- that level of fan dancing on the part of the state is just remarkable.
So I think these movies that are coming out that are like zombie movies. Um, that are, um, using horror of like, no, no, the, it's unsettled. They're coming out of the earth, like it's, it's the earth you stand on and they're coming out of it. It's a way of critiquing reconciliation politics and the way it's been undertaken. And it will use that kind of like guise of the residential school to say, it is not over because you think it, you say it's over, it's under your feet, like, because you're here at all. Like, it's the, the reason you're here is, all of us are here is because of colonization, right? Like, it is under our feet. So, it sounds a little bit like Bones of Crows is saying, well, one, there's a longer, a long intergenerational history here that has brought us where we are. But, that it has not ended.
Audience: Chi-miigwech, Karrmen, for your amazing talk tonight. I was thinking about Sterlin Harjo and the kind of wide range of non actors that Sterlin Harjo uses in his productions in Mekko or, um, all of the young people who did not necessarily come from an acting background. Um, and I wonder about their futures in that film industry that um, one of the things I'm concerned about is that a white audience still has a narrow idea. So we want more, we want more Reservation Dogs. We want more of that humor and then forget about all the, or don't want that, the kind of stories that are much fuller, richer, uh, use the community in ways like Mekko used unhoused Oklahoma indigenous community in beautiful, important ways. And I'm, I'm wondering if, if there's a, if you have a concern about how young actors or actors who are just getting popular, like in Reservation Dogs, may be exploited in the future by a very white centric, still very white centric, movie community.
Karrmen Crey: I think that is very real. And I think that, I think that the way that my, my sense from going to several panels at imagineNATIVE and then at IndigiPop, which was held in Oklahoma City this year, was that there was a tremendous amount of mentorship going on, on those sets. And like IndigiPop had panels where industry experts would come in and talk about what does it mean to get a talent agent? What's a manager? What's their jobs? Not just giving them like, interface time with professionals, but to gain an understanding of the system and how it works. And so, my sense is what's happening is that they are getting mentorship from people who've had to do a lot of the hard work of having to, having been exploited or attempted to be exploited by these industries, which are just by their nature, they're some of the most horrendously exploitative. And that they're getting some backup, like some support and benefiting from the experience of the generation that was before them to help guide them. So, I think that there's really something happening on these sets, on these productions, that is doing a major service to help address the inherent exploitation of these industries. And I'm hoping that these are kinds of relationships that will follow, if not familial and community, but like formed in the process of the production, that they can draw upon to help them navigate these mainstream industries.
I, I think, so, just so everybody knows, Alanis Obomsawin has made over 70 documentaries, which is like, unheard of in any industry, anywhere ever, except for maybe Bollywood, you know, like in terms of just volume, like, um, you know, I honestly, I have to keep going back to Kanehsatake. And I think because this was, she, she made, um, she had hundreds of hours of film. Hundreds. And so she ended up cutting it down to, uh, Kanehsatake was one documentary, but there was really, it's a set of four. Um, they're called the Oka Films and they each have a different sort of thematic or kind of lens onto the crisis, either when it's happening or afterwards in terms of its impact on the community afterward, which was like obviously tremendous. Um, but I go to Kanehsatake because, you know, she grabbed her film crew and were like "they're gonna close those roads we have to get in there right now" and did it pulled it off got behind got in it stayed in it for the whole time um and participated in it was not like a disinterested sort of like objective viewer but was like straight like a part of that protest as well, um there's something just flash in the pan unique about the circumstances that came together to make that happen, about her drive and determination, level of access, you know, there's all these things converged in the right moment to make this remarkable thing happen. Um, and so that's kind of where my mind always goes to. It's just like, it is a mind blowing kind of documentary that should be, you know, on par with anything, by any documentary filmmaker in the world.
Vinita Srivastava: Thank you.
Karrmen Crey: Thank you.