Atanarjuat and the Ideological Work of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking

Monika Siebert

Going Inuit

Canada’s ongoing attempts to go native have recently culminated in Ilanaaq,1 the official emblem of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to take place in Vancouver, British Columbia. A contemporary rendition of a traditional Inuit stone marker called inukshuk, Ilanaaq is meant to represent “hope and friendship . . . the hospitality of a nation that warmly welcomes the people of the world with open arms” ( VANOC). Nothing to argue with, really, and yet the emblem has already proven controversial. Disagreement concerns two issues: Ilanaaq’s ability to represent all of Canada (the facility with which it replaces the maple leaf has proven irksome to some constituencies) and its relationship to other First Nations (the Squamish have charged that Ilanaaq exemplifies a particularly egregious instance of symbolic favoritism, as it replaces abundantly available representations of West Coast indigeneity with an emblem imported from the Arctic North).2 The Vancouver Organizing Committee has come to the eloquent defense of Ilanaaq by invoking its symbolic integrationist potential: “Ilanaaq’s strength comes from the teamwork and collaboration of many. Each stone relies on the others to support the whole, but the unified balance is strong and unwavering” ( VANOC). The Inuit have become Canada’s favorite indigenes because their political history and their cultural symbols lend themselves so well to Canada’s ongoing federalist project.

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” ( Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With Ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art, and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with earlier histories characterized by the expropriation and displacement of indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period in which respect for difference becomes the dominant logic of social and cultural relations. But this new historical period comes with a price of its own. Multiculturalism effectively demands that American Indians put their indigeneity on display. While it prohibits Euro-Americans from playing Indian (all such attempts are quickly denounced as cultural appropriation, and ethnic frauds are regularly and ritually exposed these days), it requires that the Indians themselves play Indian to help legitimate the multiculturalist democracies they cannot help but inhabit.

But how does an Indian play Indian? Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Zacharias Kunuk’s feature film debut, provides an intriguing opportunity to investigate this question. Despite the widespread critical acclaim it has garnered since its showing at Cannes in 2000, where it won the Camera d’Or, Kunuk’s film continues to pose somewhat of a puzzle. Unique among contemporary North American indigenous cinema, both in terms of its subject matter and its formal solutions, the film raises important questions about the possibilities of indigenous self-representation in contemporary multicultural democracies without offering easy answers. In fact, the ideological investments of the film are themselves contradictory. This contradiction is embodied most vividly in the juxtaposition of the main narrative, which depicts a precontact nomadic band of the Inuit, with the film’s outtakes, which chronicle the making of the feature itself. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, as the title hints, participates in two separate traditions of representing the indigenous. It flees modernity into a mythic indigenous past and yet unabashedly claims modernity in the outtakes concluding the feature. Kunuk’s film urgently poses questions about representing indigeneity in multiculturalist democracies that grant recognition for the sake of national cohesion rather than for the cultural and political autonomy of indigenous nations.

A creation of Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada’s first independent Inuit production company,3 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner has been marketed as the “first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit” ( IIP). A cinematographic reprise of a traditional Inuit morality tale that has been passed down orally over many generations, the film has been billed as “part of this continuous stream of oral history carried forward into the new millennium through a marriage of Inuit storytelling skills and new technology” ( IIP). “An exciting action-thriller set in ancient Igloolik,” it has promised “international audiences a more authentic view of Inuit culture and oral tradition than ever before, from the inside and through Inuit eyes” ( IIP). Atanarjuat tells the story of a feud between two families that is precipitated by an evil curse and a dispute over a woman. Its storyline, evocative of the classical epics and their preoccupation with governable communities, allows viewers to juxtapose claims of exotic authenticity with assurances about the universal qualities of the tale. But it is the film’s ability to create and sustain a believable precontact Inuit world that is typically singled out as its greatest achievement.

It accomplishes this goal by throwing non-Inuit and non-Inuktitut-speaking viewers into a world that does not offer them any recognizable parameters for orientation: there is no native informant here.4 The promise of understanding held out by the English subtitles shatters with the first translated message: a declaration by an elder storyteller that she can tell this story only to those who already understand it, and to no others. The disjointed editing of the opening sequences augments the impression of being at a loss in an unknown world, as the Southern5 viewer struggles to trace plots through the offered fragments.6

The precontact illusion is sustained by the film’s faithful representation of the ancient material world, recreated with meticulous attention by contemporary Igloolik craftsmen and celebrated by the camera’s loving, ethnographically attentive lingering over the details of everyday objects. Sealskin and polar bear skin clothing adorned with intricate embroidery; sleds and kayaks fashioned from caribou bone, skin, and ligament; and snow-block igloos were all reconstructed in the traditional manner. These objects, along with the film’s attention to details large and small — from the landscapes of women’s tattooed faces to the physiognomy of an eastern Arctic uninterrupted by any signs of alternate economies — help the feature succeed as a premodern Inuit epic.

The Formal Puzzle of Atanarjuat

With its plot unfolding in this premodern past, Atanarjuat is unique among contemporary indigenous films in North America. Other works directed by indigenous filmmakers or based on texts by American Indian writers situate their plots in the present and depict indigenous people and communities negotiating the material and cultural legacies of American imperialism.7 Their ideological work is plain to see. In the wake of a long history in which indigenous peoples were represented as vanishing emblems of a premodern past (think of such historical dramas as Dances with Wolves [1990] or Black Robe [1991], the entire U.S. Western tradition, or early ethnographic film), these films insist that Native American peoples are here still. In their uncompromising portrayals of reservation or urban realities — of communities and individuals suffering from unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and alienation — alongside stories of physical survival and cultural resistance, Native American film has aimed to reinsert indigenous people into the material realities and historical time of North America. Yet because of the unvarnished treatment of these subjects, such films are often met with sharp critique by Native American intellectuals, either for serving up negative stereotypes of American Indians or for their inability to narrate the Native American present from an uncompromisingly Native American point of view.

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Notes

I would like to thank Arnold Krupat for sparking my interest in Kunuk’s film and for offering invaluable comments on a draft of the essay; Sal Miano, for bearing with me during the first of many viewings of the film; Christian Thorne, for his enthusiastic interest in the project and inspiring conversation; Roger Hallas, for his guidance into the complexities of Canadian cinema; members of the Syracuse University English department’s work-in-progress group — Crystal Bartolovich, Steven Cohan, Susan Edmunds, Bob Gates, and Claudia Klaver — for their attentive discussion of an early version of the essay; and Craig Zheng, for his meticulous and loving attention to the manuscript.

1. Ilanaaq is the Inuit word for “friend.”
2. The Squamish are the original owners of the land on which the 2010 Olympic Games will take place.
3. Igloolik Isuma Productions was incorporated in 1990 and is based in Igloolik, a community of 1,200 people on a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic.
4. Inuktitut is the mother tongue of Canada’s eastern Arctic Inuit.
5. Southern is typically used by the Inuit to mean Canadian or, more broadly, American peoples living south of the Canadian eastern Arctic. But it also can be taken to refer to the specific (though broad) cultural formation that we call, in other contexts, the West or Europe.
6. This reading presumes a Southern, non-Inuit, non-Inuktitut-speaking viewer. Anecdotal evidence I was able to gather about Inuit reception of the film emphasized recognition rather than disorientation.
7. Examples include Greg Sarris and Daniel Sackheim’s Grand Avenue (1996); Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing (2002); Chris Eyre’s Skins (2002), adapted from Adrian C. Louis’s 1995 novel of the same name; Alexie and Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998); Valerie Red-Horse and Jennifer Wynne Farmer’s Naturally Native (1998); Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasin (1998); Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001); and Blackhorse Lowe’s 5th World (2005).