Home Washington Secretariat First Nations

Notes: ‘First Nations, First Film Festival’ Opening

Colin Robertson
Minister Advocacy and Head, Washington Advocacy Secretariat, Canadian Embassy
May 18, 2005

Tonight, in collaboration with our partners at the National Museum of the American Indian, and with the involvement of Canada’s National Film Board, we celebrate the launch in Washington (this is also taking place in New York) of the First Nations First Features festival. I will say a word about tonight’s feature ‘Atanarjuat’ but first let me first welcome our filmmakers:

• ALANIS OBOMSAWIN. Her film KANEHSATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE will be presented Friday evening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
• SHIRLEY CHEECHOO. Her film SILENT TEARS will be presented at the National Gallery of Art on Saturday and
• SHELLEY NIRO. Her films HONEY MOCASSIN and THE SHIRT will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday.

We are delighted, once again, to partner with NMAI and I welcome both Doug Evelyn, NMAI Deputy Director and Elizabeth Weatherford, Head of the NMAI Film and Video Centre.

I’d like to acknowledge Gerald McMaster who played and continues to play a central role at the National Museum of the American Indian. Gerald we also honour you for your receipt of the National Aboriginal Achievement Award earlier this year

As I said, this is not our first, nor will it be our last, partnership with the latest jewel in the Smithonsian Mall complex of museums and galleries. At the opening in September we hosted, on our sixth floor dining room overlooking the Capitol, Director Richard West and Susan Point.

As you know, or should know, Susan’s sculpture The Beaver and the Mink is a centerpiece as you enter on the ground floor of the Museum.

Members of the St. Laurent Metis, led by Manitoba Minister Eric Robinson, were here for the opening. They performed on the Embassy terrace by Bill Reid’s magnificent sculpture ‘Spirit of the Haida Gwaii’. That same sculpture is now adorning the Canadian ten dollar bill.

Recently I took Grand Chief Phil Fontaine and Chief Barry Nelson to visit the Museum and on the Second Floor of the Museum both Barry and Phil found pictures and even a recording featuring family members. We are delighted that the Museum has a distinctly Canadian flavour in its exhibitions, including the giant boulders from Quebec that protect the outside of the museum.

On your way downstairs you will have passed our Inukshuk and if you went to our Sixth Floor you’d find a series of Cape Dorset prints. These are daily reminders that Canada is a northern nation.

The Far North, that we will see tonight, is our frontier, and we view it similar to the way the West had been seen in the United States.

Our ‘vision of the imagination’ includes our North, even if we have never gone there. We know the North is there, just above our heads on the map. It is also in our heads imaginatively.

Our encounter with First Nations culture and art, it seems to me, has broadened our own understanding as a people of the north.

This is especially so in the context of what space means to us and how we share it, how we have to share it, with nature.

As you will see in tonight’s film space and light come together and are so expressed by the outlook, the life, the natural artistic temperament and skills of the people of the north.

And there is no better way to get a sense of north than through tonight’s film.

‘Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner’ won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and it was Canada’s nominee for foreign language film in 2003.

The New York Times' A. O. Scott described it as a ‘masterpiece’ saying it has “clarity and the power common to epics from the sagas of ancient Scandinavia to the westerns of the old Hollywood. Austere and violent, the movie is also touched by humor and sensuality, and full of unforgettable images of the blinding Arctic landscape.”

It is an important film and it goes some distance to realizing what former Assembly of First Nations Chief George Erasmus meant in his LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture when he said: "Creating and sustaining a national community is an ongoing act of the imagination, fuelled by stories of what we are. The narratives of how Canada came to be are only now beginning to acknowledge the fundamental contributions that Aboriginal people have made to the foundation of Canada as we know it."

Atanarjuat, like most of Canadian films, benefited from the work of our National Film Board.

With 68 Academy award nominations and eleven Oscars, the NFB is Canada’s premier studio. For over half a century, through the work of the National Film Board, we have been being able to experience the range and the power, the expressiveness and the voice, of our North and the art of our First Nations – seen in their carvings, their paintings and symbols and heard through their stories.

And now I would like to invite Doug and Elizabeth to come up.

On behalf of the Government of Canada and the National Film Board of Canada, I’d like to present you: "VISUAL VOICES", a collection of 13 films, made by aboriginal film-makers from the holdings of the NFB. It is a public diplomacy initiative of Foreign Affairs Canada and the NFB. It includes Alanis’ KANEHSATAKE.

There is also a learner’s guide (for people like me).

I note that a recurring theme of these films is the ‘presence of strong women’. I can certainly relate to that, especially when I look at the films we are showing over the next few days, and the art that we have talked about, and the filmmakers we are celebrating tonight.