Reading Nanook's Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

Abstract

"Reading Nanook's Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)" puts ethnography and cinematic representations of Native Americans in crucial dialogue with the work of contemporary indigenous filmmakers. The author explores what it means for indigenous people "to laugh at the camera" as a tactic of what she calls "visual sovereignty," to confront the spectator with the often absurd assumptions that circulate around visual representations of Native Americans, while also flagging their involvement and, to some degree, complicity in these often disempowering structures of cinematic dominance and stereotype. She employs Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2000), the first full-length feature film directed by an Inuit, Zacharias Kunuk, and produced by Igloolik Isuma Productions, Inc., a collaborative, majority Inuit production company, as her primary context for analysis to examine the ways this film is embedded within discourses about Arctic peoples that cannot be severed from the larger web of hegemonic discourses of ethnography. She does this first by discussing the pervasive images of Native Americans in ethnographic films and then by theorizing the ways that Atanarjuat intervenes into visual sovereignty as a film that successfully addresses a dual Inuit and non-Inuit audience for two different aims. More specifically, she interrogates how the Atanarjuat filmmakers strategically adjust and reframe the registers on which Inuit epistemes are considered with the twin, but not necessarily conflicting, aims of operating in the service of their home communities and forcing viewers to reconsider mass-mediated images of the Arctic.

If this is your land, where is your camera?: Atanarjuat, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and post-cinematic adaptation

“…According to anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, films such as Atanarjuat 'are key sites for contemporary Aboriginal "culture-making" in a number of arenas … reimagining the space of indigeneity by creating what some have called "visual sovereignty"' (Ginsburg 2003a: 827). Joanna Hearne's term 'indigenous repurposing' (2006: 308), however, is even more accurate, as it aligns these 'Fourth-world' (see Raheja 2007Raheja : 1167 Inuit film-makers with Guy Debord's situationist notion of detournement and the counterhegemonic avant-garde impulse in twentieth-century modernism, more broadly (see e.g. Debord 1967).…”

“…This is after all not simply a matter of indigenous filmmakers adapting non-indigenous technologies to tell their own stories, but rather of certain received cinematic, or digital video, story-telling techniques being repurposed by the demands of indigenous narratives (see Hearne 2006: 308). In The Journals we see the clearest example of the ironic self-reflexivity 8 produced by and through the auto-ethnographic gaze 9 mobilized by the Isuma team (see Raheja 2007Raheja : 1166. As suggested above, the self-reflexive or hypermediate tendency in the history of the art film can be understood in terms of what the Russian Formalists in literature (see Lemon and Reis 1965) and Brecht in theatre theorized as defamiliarization, estrangement (ostranenije) or alienation (Verfremdung).…”

Young People and Audiovisual Technologies in Rural Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe: A Personal Path toward a Decolonizing Doing

“…Some authors propose "visual sovereignty" as an indigenous methodology pointing toward the decolonization of knowledge (Raheja 2007). Others, points to the "inutility" of words and (sociological) writing which can easily graft in the legitimation of power.…”

Toward Representational Sovereignty: Rewards and Challenges of Indigenous Media in the A’uwẽ-Xavante Communities of Eténhiritipa-Pimentel Barbosa

“…The idea of representational sovereignty builds on and expands Michelle Raheja's (2007Raheja's ( , 2010 notion of "visual sovereignty," defined as acts of selfrepresentation by Indigenous media makers that destabilize hegemonic stereotypes, ideologies and media practices (Peterson, 2013;also Dowell, 2013). Broadening Raheja's notion to "representational sovereignty" avoids privileging the visual mode and honors the importance of sound in Native ideology and practice.…”

“…While many authors, often in passing, note struggles, challenges and dilemmas that Indigenous media makers face-such as chronic lack of funds and shoestring budgets (Raheja, 2007(Raheja, , p. 1167, historic lack of control over distribution (Prins, 2002), necessary reliance on outsiders, presence or absence of key individuals and the often precarious nature of partnerships (e.g. Ginsburg, 2002, p. 45;Prins, 2002, p. 68) 3 -most scholarship on Indigenous media to date is positive, with good reason given all of new media's demonstrated positive contributions.…”