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When Trent University presented Alanis Obomsawin with an honorary doctorate in 2000, cultural studies professor Suzie Young told the convocation ceremony that the internationally-renowned veteran documentary filmmaker "defies established power not with hostility but with compassion."
 
Rather than inviting us "to live in the past or to dwell upon the infinitude of injustice," Obomsawin's films, said Young, "insist upon justice now and on hope for the future."
 
In a forty-year career that has spawned 23 National Film Board films in which she has served as producer, director and writer, Montreal-based Obomsawin has provided an uncompromising and unflinching view of the social realities facing Canada's First Nations.
 
In a point-of-view style reminiscent of Michael Moore's wildly successful documentaries, Obomsawin has received worldwide critical acclaim for her unapologetically subjective approach in showing injustice from the perspective of her subjects - a view not previously depicted on film. According to film critic Paul Williams, her films "are not only about her people but by and for them as well."
 
A member of the Abenaki Nation, she was born in New Hampshire on Aug. 31, 1932 but spent her early childhood on the Odanak reserve northeast of Montreal, where her mother was raised and where Obomsawin learned the storytelling tradition of her people.
 
Through film, she has told many compelling stories of Canada's First Nations, struggling to retain both their identity and dignity.
 
"Incident in Restigouche" (1984) and the 2003 film, "Our Nationhood" look at the Listuguj, Quebec's largest Mi'gmaq community, in their fight to preserve their traditional salmon fishing rights and protect their ancestral land against commercial logging operations.
 
In "Is the Crown at War with Us?" (2002) Obomsawin shifts her focus to the Mi'gmaq of Esgenoôpetitj (also known as Burnt Church) in New Brunswick, who were under siege in the summer of 2000 when federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials prevented them from setting lobster traps off the shore of Miramichi Bay - a right the Mi'gmaq had been guaranteed just seven years earlier by the Supreme Court of Canada.
 
Obomsawin's most famous work to date involves the extraordinary 78-day standoff between the Mohawk of Kanehsatake and the Canadian Armed Forces in 1990 and the aftermath. She bears witness to this tumultuous period in Canadian history through a quartet of provocative films made over nearly a decade.
 
The first, "Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance" (1993), provides a behind-the-barricades look at the height of tensions during the so-called Oka Crisis. It garnered 18 international awards. Obomsawin continued the series with "My Name is Kahentiiosta" (1995), "Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man" (1997) and "Rocks at Whiskey Trench" (2000), which shows startling footage of a convoy of Mohawk women, children and elders - fearing the arrival of the Canadian army - fleeing their homes at the Kahnawake reserve south of Montreal as they were pelted with rocks hurled by angry white Quebecers while the police stood by.
 
Stirring thought and emotion from her audiences, Obomsawin's determination to expose socio-political wounds to affect change has been unshakeable. As John Medicine Horse Kelly, coordinator of the Centre for Aboriginal Culture and Education, Research and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa has said: "Healers like Alanis know that we need rage and love to move forward."
 
Obomsawin was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1983 and promoted to the rank of Officer in 2001, the year she also received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (administered by the Canada Council). An annual documentary award has also been created in her name by Toronto's imagineNATIVE International Media Arts Festival.
 
She is, as her 1995 poem, "Honor the Artist," begins, an important "voice of the country."
 
- Christopher Guly