There are no four words more terrifying, more insidious, more infuriating, than:

“I’m just following orders.”

Heard a lot of that at Nuremberg…

The first shot tells it all. We see a few old genteel men golfing. All of a sudden the camera pans out and we see the native burial ground right next to them, as the narrator informs us of eminent plans to encroach (even further) on that land to expand a nine hole course into an eighteen.

Golf is not simply a sport; it is a symbol signifying capitalism, wealth, elitism, militarism, subjugation and, ultimately, fascism, for all of the listed former are inseparable from the latter. But fascism is not just some remote terror that arose…

In a perfect world, this would be mandatory viewing in grade seven at schools all across Canada.

An incendiary and rare purview into the hostile acts of settlers, highlighted in an incident that took place in Oka in 1991 but which stands as a microcosm for a forever fractured relationship.

The room for sympathy for settlers is the size of a thimble unless you’re historically illiterate.

Obomsawin uses the documentary genre as extension of the Aboriginal oral tradition, lending  her voiceover throughout the confrontation. There is no peace found amongst the warriors who protect the land.

Why do the settlers impose? They want an extra 9 holes for their golf course. It’s some perverse joke. 

Despite the ugliness of the…

This is a documentary on a conflict over land rights between the Canadian (Quebec, specifically) government and the indigenous people living on that land. Of course, "conflict over land rights" is the sort of neutral phrasing that would be employed in what is, objectively, an encroaching force deciding to displace rightful inhabitants from their already diminished land, citing justifications (when they can be bothered) that they, as the current ruling body, literally just made up. It's just as frustrating as I expected it to be, in many of the same ways I expected... and still, so hard to watch and exhausting to get through.

I don't know how Canadians think about their own country, but here in America, their PR…

“Somebody had asked me, “how far are you willing to go?” I said “six feet under”, and I think that’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna see a death feast. You’re not gonna see land claims. And they’re proving it. That’s what they want, huh? Shut up the Indian, keep the Indian nation down where they had them for so many years. I go to jail, I’m gonna walk through those doors in honour. I’m not going in as a junkie. Nothing to be ashamed of. And when I come out, I’ll teach my children and my grandchildren to fight. No more compassion, I’ve had it. I was raised as a pacifist, I was raised that if you don’t want to…

Obomsawin acts as nothing less than a war journalist, embedding in the midst of the Oka Crisis and capturing first-hand a story being obscured in real time by a mainstream Canadian media who has only passing interest in the Mohawk side of the conflict and who casually goads the increasingly extreme reaction of white Quebecois who cheer on the state's brutal crackdowns and themselves engage in riots and racist displays over the simple inconvenience of a barricaded bridge. She also captures just how many times the Mohawk made concessions (sometimes to the rage of their fellow community members) to bring about peace, only for the government to find some way to keep escalating violence.

As many Mohawk are heard saying…

March Around the World 2019

3/30: Canada

Alanis Obomsawin had already proven her skills as a documentarian long before Kanehsatake, with films like Incident at Restigouche and Richard Cardinal. So many of her films both prior and after to this one deal with the conditions of Indigenous populations in Canada, whether that be through individuals and their expressions, or through how they are treated by the government. Kanehsatake remains her most popular film and was in many ways her breakthrough, being her first film over an hour long and making rounds throughout a few international festivals. This was a big news story, and had you wanted an Indigenous perspective, this was the film that best provided that at the time…

Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants are things of the distant past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries. And this “booty” is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth, who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.

The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division…