“Indigenous Cinema: Decolonizing the Screen”: On Keeping the Fire Burning

Introduction

Indigenous peoples and indigeneity in The University are political.1 Furthermore, these politics shift throughout history. In both Canada and the United States, universities were built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and from the wealth generated from the appropriation of these lands, as well as from Indigenous and enslaved labor. Indigenous peoples were excluded from the visions of settler societal futurity intended in the creation of various societal institutions, such as universities. Additionally, in Canada, “Indians” who wanted to enfranchise—that is, give up “Indian status” ascribed through the imposed Indian Act in order to become Canadian citizens—were provided options to do so; one of these was to attend university. More specifically, the colonially patriarchal, gendered nature of the category “Indian” meant only Indigenous males could independently hold this ascribed status and access associated rights; both Indigenous and non-Indigenous females were ascribed this status and its associated rights only by marriage to, or patrilineage through, Indigenous men recognized as “Indian.” Research about the way the Indian Act, Indian status and its associated rights, and attending university have intersected to shape Indigenous womxn’s experience throughout various reform periods of the Indian Act is needed.2 As noted, the politics of Indigenous peoples and indigeneity in The University are made more complex when refracted through the lens of gender, sexuality, and relationality. With this in mind and heart, I leverage the space afforded by the call for the special feature “Indigenous Voices in Film and Video” to document and amplify a course on Indigenous cinema that I inherited from my academic predecessor, Christine Welsh, when she retired. My intent is also to acknowledge the institutional support in gender studies at the University of Victoria through the budgeting of a faculty line for Indigenous scholars/artists. This enables the creation and delivery of such courses.

During her tenure at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, in the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, Métis filmmaker and research faculty, Christine Welsh, designed and taught several courses.3 The majority of these courses focused on Indigenous womxn in various ways. However, one of the courses, GNDR 340: Indigenous Cinema: Decolonizing the Screen, focused specifically on Indigenous films created by, for, and about Indigenous peoples. While neither gender nor feminism were explicit focuses of the course, Indigenous womxn—both as filmmakers and cultural/film theorists, as well as in representation within the films and videos—figured prominently. Gender was also amplified in various analyses offered by Christine in her lectures.

As one of the first Indigenous faculty hired at the University of Victoria in 1996, and the first Indigenous faculty in humanities, Christine created and taught this course in what was then called “women’s studies” from 1996 to 2015.4 I have been teaching it since 2017 and have delivered the course five times. It remains highly popular with undergraduate students from across different faculties. Building from the political, metaphoric, and relational ethos of keeping the fire of Indigenous womxn’s thought, creation, and expertise burning within and despite the settler colonial educational institution, this essay documents this historically significant and persistently relevant course. I provide an overview of the course that includes its themes and the films and videos that are taught therein. I then discuss in more detail the films and videos that align most with an Indigenous feminist, womanist, and/or Indigenous sexuality or Indigiqueer framework. A brief discussion of changes to the course is also offered, followed by explaining the meaning of my essay’s titular clause, “Keeping the Fire Burning.”

Course Overview

Theme 1: The Evolution of Cinematic Images of Native Americans

• Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, directed by Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes (2009)

Theme 2: The Documentary Practice of Alanis Obomsawin

• Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, directed by Alanis Obomsawin (1986)
• Incident at Restigouche, directed by Alanis Obomsawin (1984)

Theme 3: The Ethics of Image Making

• Deep Inside Clint Star, directed by Clint Alberta (1998)
• Navajo Talking Picture, directed by Arlene Bowman (1985)

Theme 4: Experimental Film and Video

• High Horse, directed by Randy Red Road (1995)
• I Want to Know Why, directed by Dana Claxton (1994)
• Buffalo Bone China, directed by Dana Claxton (1997)
• Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory, directed by Theo Jean Cuthand (1995)
• Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement, directed by Theo Jean Cuthand (1999)
• Suckerfish, directed by Lisa Jackson (2004)
• Savage, directed by Lisa Jackson (2009)
• ?E?Anx/The Cave, directed by Helen Haig-Brown (2009)
• A Red Girl’s Reasoning, directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (2012)
• Snare, directed by Lisa Jackson (2013)

Theme 5: Inuit Cinema

• Starting Fire with Gunpowder, directed by David Poisey and William Hansen (1991)5
• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk (2001)

Theme 6: Feature Film

• Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre (1998)

Theme 7: Indigenous Women6

• Keepers of the Fire, directed by Christine Welsh (1994)

Indigenous Feminist+ Representation

Indigenous theories emerging from feminist, womanist, and queer perspectives challenge the legitimacy and naturalization of colonization and colonialism of Indigenous lands and waters. Feminism simultaneously addresses the impact of colonial heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and the sexist, misogynist ideologies that harm Indigenous womxn and girls—both within colonial society and as they are reproduced within our own nations. It upholds, justifies, and amplifies Indigenous womxn’s navigation of these forces, be it through resistance, subversion, or strategic acquiescence. Indigenous feminist theories additionally rely on Indigenous womxn’s endurance, reclamation, perseverance, regeneration, and/or re-creation of indigeneity—despite these forces of domination (Altamirano-Jiménez et al. 2025). Indigenous womanism, which is informed by Alice Walker's “womanism” (1983), also takes seriously the need to recognize the political necessity of recentering Indigenous womxn’s points of view because of their historical erasure, devaluation, or marginalization. An Indigenous womanist point of view, however, does not necessarily center gender, sexuality, or relationality, or the impact of ideologies, structures, or systems of domination on Indigenous womxn specifically. Still, it does interrogate and hold to account the impacts that colonial forces had, and have, on Indigenous peoples’ nations and draws attention specifically to the more-than-human world. Indigenous sexuality, for the purposes of this essay, is self-explanatory. Indigiqueerness is a contemporary, pan-Indigenous term that encapsulates a broad range of considerations regarding gender, sexuality, and relationality, as well as performativity and subjectivity. It emerges from a desire to expand on the idea of Two Spirit that was identified and popularized in the 1990s (Cuthand 2017; Filice 2015; de Groot 2024).

Indigenous Feminist Films

Dana Claxton’s (Hunkpapa Lakota) I Want to Know Why is an experimental short that repeatedly and loudly demands that “colonization” account for why it made the womxn in Claxton’s family suffer. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s (Blackfoot, Sámi) A Red Girl’s Reasoning is a fictional revenge narrative whose Indigenous womxn heroine enacts vigilante justice in the face of the colonial legal system’s repeated failures to bring to justice men who sexually assault Indigenous womxn. In this experimental short, the male offender is a white, able-bodied, professional settler who is a repeat sexual offender. The narrative arc highlights Indigenous womxn seeking each other out for help and working together discreetly to achieve justice. Lisa Jackson’s (Anishinaabe) short experimental film, Suckerfish, is an autobiographical story about her relationship with her mother, the reclamation of Anishinaabe belonging through names, and the ruptures and efforts to heal in individual journeys as well as in relationships between mother and daughter. Similarly exploring this familial relationship, Savage is a short experimental film that artistically mobilizes instrumental music to portray the devastating impacts of residential schools on a mother and her daughter, showing that they, too, collectively resisted inside these “schools” in their own way. Snare (dir. Lisa Jackson) is a short experimental and artistic conceptual consideration of violence against Indigenous womxn and their negotiation of it. Lastly, Christine Welsh’s (Métis) documentary, Keepers of the Fire, portrays four vignettes, each depicting a “warrior” womxn from, respectively, Mohawk, Haida, and Mi’kmaw nations, as well as someone from an urban Indigenous womxn’s shelter community. The womxn collectively resist colonial encroachment on their lands and waters, internalized colonialism reproduced within their communities and enacted by Indigenous male leaders against Indigenous womxn, and the erosion or attenuation of their own sense of self-worth and self-determination as a result of domestic violence. 

Indigenous Womanist Films

Alanis Obomsawin’s (Abenaki) Richard Cardinal: The Diary of a Métis Child illuminates the devastating impact colonialism has on Indigenous families and children, amplifying this through revealing the neglect and inadequacies of the child welfare system and how it led to the death of Richard Cardinal, a 17-year-old who died by suicide while in care. Incident at Restigouche (dir. Alanis Obomsawin) historicizes and amplifies the Mi’kmaw peoples’ ongoing resistance against government and settler encroachment on their inherent and federally recognized rights to fish. Arlene Bowman’s (Navajo) Navajo Talking Pictures is an autobiographical portrayal of Bowman’s persistent attempts to reconnect with her Navajo grandmother and document this on film despite her grandmother’s repeated refusal to be filmed. Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China is a short experimental film that reveals the historical colonial violence enacted upon the Buffalo, the connection between Buffalo bones and chinaware, and that this genocide against the Buffalo impacted the Indigenous nations who see Buffalo as kin and rely on it. Helen Haig-Brown’s (Tsilhqot’in) ?E?Anx/The Cave is a short film that centers and upholds Tsilhqot’in lifeways, knowledges, and epistemologies vis-à-vis orally transmitted familial story, language, and understandings of temporality, travel, ancestral presence, and place.

Indigenous Sexuality and Indigiqueer-ness in Indigenous Films

Clint Alberta’s (Métis) Deep Inside Clint Star innovatively documents, and in many ways controversially queries, Indigenous identity and sexuality amongst several of his heterosexual and queer friends. Alberta also addresses homophobic violence, sexual assault, mental health, addictions, and sexual intimacy across social-political differences. Theo Jean Cuthand’s (Plains Cree and Scots descent) Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory utilizes video to portray the experience of lesbian invisibility and loneliness in high school as a 16-year-old, when the director identified as a lesbian. In Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement, Cuthand argues the sexualized nature of a children’s cartoon film and openly expresses discontent with the implied S/M relationship between the film’s speaker and a cartoon character on screen.

On Keeping the Fire Burning

Since 2017, I’ve taught Decolonizing the Screen: Indigenous Cinema mostly in its original form, making only minor changes. For example, it became public knowledge that someone whose writing was the basis of a film shown in this class and who also narrated one of the films on the syllabus had sexually harassed Indigenous and non-Indigenous womxn writers. These sources were replaced with related and relevant content that includes references to this person’s problematic behaviours with womxn. Students can be informed and also self-determine how and if they engage with this creator’s cultural productions. Additionally, I’ve updated lectures to be historically correct or to employ updated discourse about certain topics. One major change that I’ve been trying to incorporate is how to adjust for one filmmaker’s transition from she/they to he/him. Removing the term “women” from the theme that encompasses his films does not suffice, per feedback received from a student. Indeed, more in-depth redesign is necessary, and perhaps the development of the class Decolonizing the Screen: Indigenous Cinema II is needed. Finally, with the ongoing increase in public revelations of fraudulent claims to Indigeneity, I wonder—particularly with at least one filmmaker—how past claims to being Indigenous might stand up to presently developing methods for affirming citizenship amongst an Indigenous nation.

In closing, this essay calls on the spirit of Keepers of the Fire, the title of one of Christine Welsh’s documentaries, not only to invoke the film itself or the films and videos in this course, but also as an act of tethering myself, in some small way, to the work of my predecessor as well as our Indigenous ancestors and descendants. Keeping the fire, in this context, means revealing, amplifying, affirming, and documenting the politicized nature of faculty lines in universities that make space for Indigenous scholars who are womxn, and doing what can be done to ensure continuity of our physical, scholarly, and creative presence across generations of scholars. Keepers of the Fire opens with drumming and Indigenous womxn singing, a series of archival black and white photos of Indigenous womxn from different nations, and Christine providing a voice-over. It is fitting that this essay closes with an invocation of these womxn’s sounds and images and an echoing of her words:

The old ones have a proverb, and it goes something like this: No people is broken until the hearts of its women are on the ground; only then are they broken. Only then will they die.

For five hundred years, our mothers and grandmothers have kept the fires burning in the hearts and minds of our people. They were warrior women, storytellers, dreamers, healers, fighters. . . and through them, we survived. It is our time now. The fire is ours to keep. And I find myself wondering, “What kind of warriors are we?” (0:16).

1I capitalize “The University” to emphasize its function as a colonial institution that exerts systemic power and reproduces dominant forms of knowledge. This usage is intentional and meant to signal its institutional authority.

2The “x” in womxn labors in a) conveying the diversity among and heterogeneity between Indigenous womxn within and across their nations, b) inspiring an understanding that Indigenous womxn may transform within their lifetime or in response to contexts they are navigating, c) impelling readers to consider Indigenous womxn’s own subjectivity and meaning making regarding who and how they are, d) disrupting popular and often colonially constructed ideas about Indigenous womxn and womxnhood, and d) prompting recognition that Indigenous nations and Indigenous peoples have understandings, practices around, and prioritizations of gender, sexuality, and relationality that historically differ from colonially imposed constructions.

3Despite being retired, Christine was a mentor to me in many ways when I started this job. She has since become my friend, and so I refer to her by first name in this essay.

4Personal communication, February 15, 2025. The department was renamed “gender studies” in 2016.

5This documentary portrays the beginning of Inuit media and broadcasting. The directors are not Indigenous.

6“Women” is spelled in keeping with Christine Welsh’s spelling.

waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy (Ojibwe, Lac Seul FN) is a poet, mother to a young adult bear, Indigenous studies scholar, and associate professor in gender studies at the University of Victoria (lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories). She teaches courses developed by her predecessor, Christine Welsh, and her own, which include “Indigenous Feminisms” and “Indigeneity, Gender, Land.” She is the editor of, and a contributor to, See Us Fly by the Point of the Arrow: Indigenous Womxn On Our Lands, Waters, and Relations (Wolsak and Wynn, May 2026), an anthology of creative non-fiction essays and stories.