Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin will be at Peterborough’s MacDowell artist residency on Sunday, July 23, to accept this year’s Edward MacDowell Medal during a free public celebration.
Obomsawin will be the 63rd person to win the award, the fifth filmmaker and the first woman filmmaker. She’s also the first Indigenous artist to receive the prestigious medal.
Though she has made 56 films, including “Incident at Restigouche” and “Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance,” and at 90, continues to produce films for the National Film Board of Canada (FNB), Obomsawin started her artistic vocation as a singer in New York City in 1960.
Seven years into a successful career as a vocalist and musician, she received an invitation from the FNB to consult on a film about Indigenous people. After that, she soon started directing films for the national organization, and premiered her first film, “Christmas at Moose Factory,” in 1971.
Revered among documentary filmmakers in both the United States and Canada, Obomsawin has been long sought-after at numerous film festivals for both her work and film commentary. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1983, promoted to Officer in 2001 and again to Companion (Canada’s highest civilian honor) in 2019.
Her artistic accomplishments, her work with young Indigenous people and her activism on behalf of the rights of Indigenous peoples have earned her the Governor General’s Award (1983), a National Aboriginal Achievement Award (1994) and more than a dozen honorary degrees. In fact, two prestigious awards have been named for her – the Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance created by Cinema Politica and The Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Award, an annual award given by Toronto’s ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Peterborough Community Theater will offer a free screening of Obomsawin’s “Mother of Many Children” (1977, 58 minutes) Friday, July 14, at 7 p.m. The film is “an album of Native womanhood, portraying a proud matriarchal society that for centuries has been pressured to adopt different standards and customs.”
Obomsawin was born in Lebanon, N.H., but an early move with her family resulted in her growing up on the Odanak First Nations reserve, an Abenaki community east of Montreal, where she absorbed the culture and language of her Indigenous neighbors.
A later move to the town of Trois-Rivières reinforced in her the importance of her Indigenous culture, especially as she spoke little French and no English, and experienced the ugly prejudice that the ignorant factions of a community might direct at the only Indigenous family in town.
As a result, she’s kept her Abenaki culture at the center of her filmmaking, keen to give Indigenous peoples a voice through her art. Since she began working in film in the 1960s, Obomsawin says she has witnessed a long-overdue shift in the way Indigenous people are portrayed in media.
While those portrayals are improving, making sure historically denigrating depictions of Indigenous people are exposed and corrected is at the heart of Medal Day guest speaker Jesse Wente’s work. Wente, an award-winning speaker and bestselling author, will speak of Obomsawin’s impact on documentary filmmaking, as well as how her six-decade career chronicling the lives and concerns of First Nations people has informed American and Canadian culture.
Wente, an off-reserve member of the Serpent River First Nation, is board chair of Canada’s Council for the Arts and a former co-executive director of the country’s Indigenous Screen Office.
“Alanis is the matriarch of Indigenous cinema, the grand dame of documentaries. She is one of the most-important filmmakers to ever work in what is currently called Canada,” says Wente. “Her work has transformed a nation’s understanding of itself and she has inspired generations of Indigenous people to pursue telling our stories.”
A return to traditional western Abenaki homelands
“Alanis Obomsawin’s exemplary 52-year body of work uplifting Indigenous stories and triumph inspired us with compelling and unequivocal enthusiasm to award her with the 2023 Edward MacDowell Medal,” said Bird Runningwater, a member of the committee of luminaries who selected Obomsawin for the medal and who guided the Sundance Institute’s investment in Native American and Indigenous filmmakers for two decades. “Even more special is that Alanis Obomsawin descends from the Abenaki People, and MacDowell’s residency program takes place in Wabanaki, the Dawnland, on the traditional homelands of the western Abenaki. This marks the first time MacDowell honors someone from the Indigenous lands where the residency has historically taken place.”
Joining Runningwater on the selection panel were Tabitha Jackson, the former head of the Sundance Film Festival and chair of the panel; filmmakers Natalia Almada, Rodney Evans, So Yong Kim and Julia Solomonoff, who have all been awarded MacDowell Fellowships; and Josh Siegel, a film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who, like Solomonoff, is a MacDowell board member.
Obomsawin will receive the Edward MacDowell Medal from best-selling author Nell Painter, a MacDowell Fellow and chairman of the organization’s board, during a free, public event that begins at noon. Afterward, all attendees are invited to picnic on the MacDowell grounds before the organization’s artists-in-residence open their studios to the public.
There will also be a printmaking station set up in the lilac garden adjacent to MacDowell’s main hall, celebrating Obomsawin’s career as a visual artist.
An accomplished filmmaker
Among her landmark documentaries, Obamsawin’s “Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance” (1993), documenting the 1990 Mohawk uprising in the villages of Kanehsatake and Oka, Quebec, and the groundbreaking “Incident at Restigouche” (1984), a behind-the-scenes look at Quebec police raids on a Mi’kmaq reserve, are possibly her most celebrated. Obomsawin’s 2019 production “Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger” completed a seven-film cycle devoted to the rights of Indigenous children and peoples, which began in 2011 when she conducted her first interviews for “The People of the Kattawapiskak River.”
Her latest film, “Wabano: The Light of Day,” is expected to be released later this year and is an intimate look at the first Indigenous wellness center built by and for Indigenous people in Canada. Her 2022 film “Bill Reid Remembers” was recently named to the short film program of Canada’s Top Ten, honoring the best in Canadian cinema.
