Free the Land, Free the People: Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) is an unparalleled voice in documentary filmmaking. Her radical, lifelong career spans more than five decades and centers the lives and voices of Indigenous communities. Her more than 50 films lay bare the ongoing challenges faced by Indigenous people under settler colonialism. Expressing oral traditions through filmmaking, Obomsawin’s collective body of work has transformed documentary cinema by making Indigenous stories visible and creating new Indigenous futures
Responding to the Walker's series Alanis Obomsawin: A Lifetime of Insistence, writer and researcher Yasmina Price explores Obomsawin’s 1993 film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance through this new essay commissioned by the Walker.
The liberation of land and the liberation of people are one. A fight to recover relations of caretaking and kinship from the settler colonial imposition of ownership and borders is at the heart of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Through this documentary, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s camera records and remembers the 1990 standoff between the Mohawk Nation and the Canadian state. A foundational contribution to First Nations cinema and Indigenous documentary filmmaking, Kanehsatake is a chronicle of the so-called “Oka Crisis,” during which Mohawk warriors set up a barricade against the Quebec provincial police and Canadian army to protect their home and burial grounds from the mercenary development of a golf course. The documentary was shot on 16mm during the seventy-eight-day deadlock, which Obomsawin herself spent behind the barricades in guerilla conditions, committing to the same unguaranteed survival as the land defenders.
The breathtaking amount of footage gathered by the filmmaker and her crew produced a total of four films. Although Kanehsatake, deftly edited by Yurij Luhovy, has unquestionably left the strongest mark, the prolonged chronicling in the subsequent My Name is Kanehtiisota (1995), Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man (1997) and Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000) is a telling aspect of her expansive filmmaking. The documentary exemplifies how the filmmaker’s cinematic social practice combines the qualities of direct, observational recordkeeping with a participatory method. Narrated by Obomsawin and bookended by the voice and appearance of two Indigenous women, it also models a gendered storytelling. Her approach has an affinity with a longer lineage of militant women filmmakers such as Sarah Maldoror, Sara Gómez, and Heiny Srour in their shared attention to minimized forms of resistance. Viewing Kanehsatake’s use of the camera as a political weapon through an Indigenous Feminist perspective reveals a formally dynamic challenge to ongoing structures of colonial domination. Obomsawin shows how claims on autonomy, self-determination, education, and sovereignty can be made on the cinematic terrain and carry liberatory material force.
Kanehsatake opens with sound, storytelling, and land. Drumming precedes the first image. A map cast in primary-school blue and green is accompanied by Obomsawin’s voice setting up the stakes of the narrative. She reads out the locations around the disputed map area—Montreal, Kanehsatà:ke, Oka, the Mercier bridge—and decisively declares it “the Mohawk Nation’s land.” Land has a prominent presence in Indigenous documentary filmmaking, and Obomsawin situates hers in terms of territory, cartography, and sovereignty. Referring to Algeria under French domination, the militant political thinker and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote extensively about the territorial operations of colonialism. His diagnosis of how colonial mechanisms worked through the creation of controlled, regulated space to capture the land and the minds and bodies of the colonized is reflected in Obomsawin’s documentary. Through the visualization and quantification of space, Kanehsatake emphasizes the indissoluble ties of human and other-than-human kinships, materializing Chickasaw writer and storyteller Linda Hogan’s assertion that “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing.”
Two decades prior to Obomsawin making her documentary, Native media production had started to increase in conjunction with 1970s struggles for self-determination in North America. Kanehsatake has a place in both the revolutionary cultural production which began in the 1960s under the banner of “Third Cinema,” and the framework of “Fourth Cinema,” which identifies the specificities of Indigenous audiovisual storytelling. Fourth Cinema was introduced by Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay as an extension of the First, Second, and Third Cinema taxonomy designated by the Argentine duo Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969 to categorize the development of militant filmmaking across Latin America. Third Cinema reflected the liberatory national struggles for decolonization across the Global South, while Fourth Cinema centralizes autonomous production by Indigenous filmmakers. Although Third Cinema was not exclusionary of Native peoples and struggles—take, for example the work of the Bolivian Grupo Ukamau and Jorge Sanjinés—it did tend towards a prioritization of nationalism. Scholar Michelle H. Raheja’s has used “visual sovereignty” to name the process of the self-authorization by Indigenous filmmakers at the core of Fourth Cinema. The term refers to filmmaking anchored in cultural practices that preceded cinema and extends itself into a broader terrain of autonomy; precisely the open elasticity which characterizes Obomsawin’s filmmaking.
Taken as a materialization of Fourth Cinema and documentary militancy, Kanehsatake carries forward a tradition of using the camera as an emancipatory weapon. Obomsawin was in the middle of another project (what turned into the 1990 film Le Patro Le Prévost 80 Years Later) when the “crisis” broke out. Placing her community commitments ahead of institutions and regulations, she refused to even engage the expected bureaucratic obstacle course to obtain a green light from National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Obomsawin changed course and headed to Oka and clandestine stealth was written into the conditions of production from the start. At the formal level, Kanehsatake’s militancy can be gleaned from the guerilla camera placements, immersive participation of the filmmaker and crew in the action, and a revolutionary aesthetics of permeability.
In his Fanon-inspired retooling of the original Latin American formulation of Third Cinema to apply it to the Third World more broadly, the Ethiopian film scholar Teshome Gabriel indicated the importance of memory in anticolonial liberation. Kanehsatake serves as a repository for the Mohawk perspective, using the documentary as a form of counter-visuality and counter-speech that contests the narrative of the Canadian settler colonial state. Against denialism and historical amnesia, the film illustrates what Gabriel presents as the function of popular memory for the colonized. The militant tactics of Obomsawin’s film and their defiance of temporal divisions are an insurgent gesture of testimony against the state’s monopoly on a mediatized historical narrative—embodying what Gabriel elaborated on as the capacity of liberatory filmmaking to “not only to rescue memories, but rather, and more significantly, to give history a push and popular memory a future.” Even as a counter-narrative, Kanehsatake points not only to the oppositional tensions between Third/Fourth Cinemas and white, Western, colonialist cinema, but also to their enmeshments. Obomsawin has had a careerlong involvement with the NFB, which certainty played a key role in the distribution and wide circulation of Kanehsatake. Along with these material and ideological considerations, Obomsawin has articulated her own commitment to a dialogic, cross-cultural practice, reflected in films that frequently focus on points of encounter with the settler world, even as they unquestionably center Indigenous peoples.
With Obomsawin as an Abenaki woman documenting Mohawk resistance, Kanehsatake inscribes itself through multiple Indigenous nations and peoples, touching on the global scale of Fourth Cinema. Close to the beginning of the documentary, Ellen Gabriel, a Mohawk woman who continues to be a prominent activist, says “The first stand is made in the pines by the Longhouse people. The Mohawks now present a united front, in spite of tensions among different factions in Kanehsatà:ke. […] Warriors from other communities come to support their brothers and sisters in the pines.” This solidarity is extended beyond Turtle Island when Obomsawin’s voiceover describes how “a group of spiritual leaders from Mexico have come to support the Mohawks,” accompanied by a shot of one of them drumming. This pan-Indigenous perspective finds its most hopeful expression when one of the Mohawk warriors, Ronnie Cross—“Lasagna”—offers: “If we’re not recognized as a nation, it’s brought all Indian nations together, this fight. So in a way, our battle is won.” Kanehsatake is grounded in a capacious commitment to Indigenous liberation which recognizes its geographic breadth and historical endurance.
Take the full title of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Obomsawin’s pedagogical extension of the narrative frame to include a fuller chronicle than the seventy-eight days of the blockade rejects the “eventification” of history into isolated crises and incidents. Given the damaging effects of erasing lineages of resistance, this spectacularized approach is often employed by dominant powers. Kanehsatake unfolds as a cinematic echo of a characterization made by scholar Patrick Wolfe, who describes settler colonial invasion as “a structure not an event.” The film’s most assertive history lesson is held in a 10-minute capsule, shifting from direct footage to a mediascape of paintings, etchings, maps, drawings, and photographs. This segment is introduced by Obomsawin’s voice noting, “The irony is that the army helicopters are landing behind the Sulpicians’ church where the trouble all began 270 years ago,” effectively demonstrating the continuity between the golf course expansion which provoked the “crisis” and earlier settler invasions in the nineteenth century.
Obomsawin’s insistence on connecting the uprising to this longer history reveals a pattern of bad faith treaties, betrayed agreements, and continuing land theft. Her film functions as a corrective to the settler logic of disappearance—the myth of the “the Vanishing Indian”—that would lock Indigenous peoples into a romanticized parochial past, while concealing a still-active project of elimination. The documentary’s multimedia historical interlude critically carries an educational function as a counter-narrative through an Indigenous lens, while also exemplifying the film’s formal frictions, as it shifts in tone, texture, and tempo. There are other moments where Obomsawin’s stylistic mark emerges, veering away from any expectations of cold, impartial realism. Kanehsatake’s documentation of the final standoff is keyed into a nightmarish, visceral visual language, atmospherically laden with smoky shadows and the sinister glow of fire. A scene of darkness, chaos, and tumbling bodies, it has the feel of a different genre, powerfully transmitting the terror and horror of Indigenous life under the boot of a militarized settler colony.
The multiple representational forms at work in Kanehsatake accent the status of the “Oka Crisis” as a flashpoint in the long history of Indigenous resistance that coincided with modern technologies of seeing. Given the situation was initially manically documented by mainstream Canadian news outlets, the film also functions as a counter-documentation of the media spectacle itself. Obomsawin plays with surveillance and counter-surveillance, which are further highlighted by the presence of TV monitors and news segments toward the end of the documentary. She includes footage of white journalists expressing their frustration at being censored by the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) provincial police. This meta-mediatic documentation is critical in illustrating the film’s material intervention. Throughout, both Mohawk land defenders and white journalists express a consensus regarding the violence being dampened and complicated by the presence of cameras. They emphasize how the documentary—as the only recorded media present for the entire duration of the standoff—was used to act on the field of power relations by creating a check on the police and army’s violence. Yet this was still only an interference with a limiting and not a preventative function, and what was captured on film remains an appalling display of settler brutality.
Obomsawin’s position as an Indigenous woman is formative to her cinema. While contemporaries—such as Loretta Todd (Métis Cree) and Sandra Osawa (Makah)—are not large in number, they are being joined by an increasing number of Indigenous women filmmakers. Kanehsatake places Obomsawin among women filmmakers who have contributed to an international scope of cinematic militancy. Beginning her trajectory in the 1970s with Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), she was a contemporary to Sarah Maldoror, Sara Gómez, and Heiny Srour—women filmmakers rooted in a tradition of liberatory anti-colonial and anti-imperial cultural production. Formed around variously interrelated movements for liberation, their works have deeply-rooted points of convergence. Foregrounding women fighters and women’s popular memory, Srour’s attention to the Palestinian national struggle intersects with Kanehsatake in upholding the rights of a people to reclaim their home from a settler state. Their gendered perspective, while by no means universalizable, often resulted in films that were more attentive to dismissed forms of struggle: the domestic arena, childrearing and caretaking, the role of the elderly, and the incalculable daily labors of holding a community together. In Obomsawin’s documentary, this sensibility seems to also inform the way she sketched a fuller portrait of the men amongst the Mohawk warriors, rather than show them only as flattened symbols of armed masculinity. Another trait in the tapestry of militant women filmmakers which is shared by her and Maldoror is a prioritization of education and the sharing of knowledge. In a scene of kids being taught about trees, the filmmaker’s narrative voiceover emphasizes how “Loran Thompson takes the time to pass on the stories and the language to the children.” Throughout Kanehsatake, there are numerous references to how ongoing resistance must be passed down to children and grandchildren as part of communal pedagogy, transmitting a continuum of Indigenous lifeways.
Kanehsatake honors combative care and the plural parameters of women’s participation in the standoff. The documentary is bookended by two Mohawk women, Kahentiiosta (the primary subject of another of the Oka quartet of films, My Name Is Kahentiiosta, 1995) and Ellen Gabriel. Given the importance of storytelling to the film’s political, cultural, and spiritual claim on representational sovereignty, Obomsawin’s decision to foreground these two women as the opening and closing voices is significant. In Gabriel’s first appearance, she describes the menacing approach of Tilden trucks and SWAT teams: “Our instincts kicked in and we said the women have to go to the front, because it’s our obligation to do that, to protect the land, to protect our mother.” Without the romanticized paternalism that could easily accompany such a claim from an outsider, Gabriel asserts a gendered responsibility, a militancy in a maternal key. Numerous interviews with women of various ages, and notably with elders, also emphasize the gendered labors of sustenance crucial to communal survival. The documentary makes clear that women are essential to the Mohawk’s protection of their land. Obomsawin’s narrative voiceover, Kahentiiosta’s and Gabriel’s contributions, as well as other interviews weave together a polyvocal, choral perspective, a commonality across women’s militant cinema.
Kanehsatake counters the ways Native women have been not only been cinematically erased, but also exoticized, displayed, and stereotyped. The capacities of photographic and cinematic technologies as an avenue for cultural self-determination always carry a legacy of violence, one which is racialized as well as gendered. In addition to her role as Indigenous witness, Obomsawin includes herself in the visual field several times, such as when she is speaking with a masked Mohawk warrior identified as “Wizard” and at other points seen from a distance through the barbed wire enclosure. Her appearance is itself a subtle challenge to the power differential between the seeing subject and the people seen. The efforts towards reparative visibility in Kanehsatake are also contained in the way she tempers the primacy of the visual and leans on the aural. Obomsawin has been clear that her practice of filmmaking is a practice of listening, specifying the comfort and sense of protection that has come from her recording people’s voices without an expectation to also be on camera.
Obomsawin’s approach accents the way cinema can be seen as a reconfigured, technologized form of storytelling and in this documentary, a way of cementing an Indigenous account of the “Oka Crisis.” The words of the Mohawk warriors who upheld the blockade are an essential component of the film as a narrative vehicle. The armed men who appear fully masked participate in co-constructed narrative through their speech, alongside Kahentiiosta’s, Gabriel’s, and Obomsawin’s own narrative voiceover. Antithetical to the cold, authoritative remove of a traditional cinematic narrator, her own vocal presence creates the intimate relationality. Expository without being distant, Obomsawin’s narration reflects her uncompromising alignment with her subjects and their fight.
Considering the writing of Indigenous Feminist scholars as Joanne Barker (Lenape) and Mishuana R. Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) illuminates the scope of Kanehsatake. The documentary reflects on the conjunctions of colonialism, capitalism, militarism, gendered violence, and ecological devastation. Barker has written about water as a source of guidance in a way that also returns to the significance of land. Addressing a foundation of right relations between human and other-than-human kinships, Barker beautifully illustrates how the fluidities of water are instructive towards mobilizing the boundless reciprocal interdependence which animates Obomsawin’s practice. Carried by the relentless optimism which shapes her filmography, the documentary translates and preserves the animating force of an ongoing inheritance of resistance to domination. The militant Indigenous poetics of Kanehsatake express the collective authorization of a history which reaches back further than the incursions of colonization, while clarifying its contemporary continuities.
Through this film, Obomsawin honors the Mohawk uprising as a sphere of learning, deep care, shared survival, despair, rage, and steadfastness. Exemplifying how the documentary form can be used in the service of interrupting and rupturing the self-serving amnesia and calculated misrepresentations of settler-state narratives, it acts as a form of witnessing and rewriting. Goeman’s attention to multiscalar bodies, geography, and space points to Kanehsatake’s capacity to remap the space and time of the “Oka Crisis” at the audiovisual level—reconfiguring a seemingly singular spectacle to plot it back onto an Indigenous narrative of contested but never forsaken struggles for self-determination. Obomsawin’s storytelling operates spatially, weaving through a long history of defiance which cannot be contained by either imperial imaginaries nor colonial territories. Even as it chronicles the standoff from what appears to be start to finish, the filmic text is open, casting itself onto the long history into which this uprising was written. This refusal of closure has an embedded past, present, and future: what is inadequately called the 1990 “Oka Crisis” began when settlers landed on Turtle Island 270 years before, and it will not end until the land is freed from those who claim to own it and returned to those who are its caretakers.▪︎
Yasmina Price is a writer and programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming includes In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema 1959-1992 (BAM, May 2022) and Wayward Waters: Black Cinema and The Atlantic (LACMA and Pan African Film & Arts Festival, February 2023). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, Lux Magazine, Criterion, Film Quarterly and The Nation.
Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance screens at the Walker on October 20 and 21, 2023 as part of Alanis Obomsawin: A Lifetime of Insistence.
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