Projections of race, nature, and ethnographic childhood in early educational cinema at the national museum of canada

Abstract

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.

Remixed methodologies in community‐based film research

“…A staff archaeologist at the museum, Smith was an early innovator in the field of museum education, producing a series of ethnodocumentary films to accompany a children's lecture series in the 1920s (Zimmerly 1974; McCreary and Murnaghan 2019). Screening ethnographic portraits of Indigenous peoples at the museum, Smith sought to immerse child audiences in representations of Indigeneity as part of their national patrimony (Murnaghan and McCreary 2016). As described in museum publications, the films “illustrate the customs, the ceremonials, the home life, the industries, and the art of the Indians” (NMC 1930, 4).…”

“…Immersing the archival films in the vital, living Witsuwit'en culture, hereditary chiefs and elders made the original films meaningful in new ways. Smith followed a formulaic structure in editing his ethnographic documentaries: positioning the Indigenous community on the Canadian map, constructing a racial archetype of the people, depicting traditional housing, describing traditional foods, illustrating traditional clothing and craft production, and concluding with an examination of cultural traditions in the midst of change (Murnaghan and McCreary 2016). Remixing Smith's footage with new material, Witsuwit'en Het'en resituated an understanding of Witsuwit'en culture and history with reference to enduring Indigenous relationships to territory.…”

“…Developed for use in 1920s museum education, the original films erase the impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities and instead normalize processes of Indigenous community change as progress. Smith's films were shaped by a tradition of museological research in which collectors sought to salvage remnants of what they perceived to be vanishing Indigenous traditions (Murnaghan and McCreary 2016). The Carrier Indians and The Tsimshian Indians both repeat the then dominant narrative that Indigenous traditions were disappearing and could only be effectively preserved through the work of government-employed (white) anthropologists and archaeologists.…”

“…A chance encounter in the archives introduced Smith's films to us and we subsequently shared them with the Witsuwit'en community. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Smith produced more than two‐dozen silent documentary films for his museum lecture series (Zimmerly 1974; Murnaghan and McCreary 2016). While many of these films were destroyed in a fire at the National Film Board, nine of the films on Indigenous peoples in Western Canada remain in the archives.…”

The hybrid exhibits of the story museum: The child as creative artist and the limits to hands-on participation

“…A range of cross-disciplinary research base concentrates on the role of media in museum education and curatorial practices designed for young people (Aarvanitis 2010; Chan and Cope 2015;Henning 2006;Light et. al 2016;Murnaghan and McCreary 2016;Nancarrow 2016;Pallud 2016;Ruberg 2015;Roussou 2004). There is also a body of work on collaborative museum projects with young people for urban revitalization and outreach (Dockett et.…”