Film-maker wants to bury the stereotypes

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Growing up in Northern Alberta, film-maker Loretta Todd remembers going to school and watching documentaries from the National Film Board of Canada about Native communities. She remembers the way Aboriginal people were depicted in these documentaries-demeaning and cliched representations that made other people in her class laugh. As a film-maker, Todd, who is Metis/Cree, has spent the last 15 years of her life challenging the stereotypes she believes are still deeply entrenched in today's media.

The award-winning director, writer and producer has partnered up with the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) to examine representations of Aboriginal people in media more thoroughly, in a three-year project titled the Aboriginal History Media Arts Lab.

With a $210,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the federal granting body, Todd will work with students and scholars of UBC First Nations Studies, as well as members of the community, to explore ways of enhancing the quality and quantity of Aboriginal media.

"It's too obvious to say that current representations are damaging," said Todd, whose films have been screened worldwide, including at the Sundance Film Festival, New York University and the Museum of Modern Art.

"There is a legacy of misrepresentation-and of Native people playing certain roles in the Western imagination."

Todd, who has written and lectured extensively on Aboriginal media, believes that current public imagery of Aboriginal people sees them being stuck in the past, rather than as part of the present. It also tends to portray Aboriginal peoples as one-dimensional-acting either as positive or negative role models.

"The usual task of these representations is to cast us as part of a distant past, rather than a dynamic present," Todd said. "Or, if we are in the present, then it is only if we are good or bad role models-rather than human beings."

For the first meeting of the media lab, participants gathered to watch the first episode of the 17-part CBC series Canada: A People's History, which chronicles the story of Canada. The series initially aired in 2000, and has since been awarded three Gemini Awards and multiple international honors. The group also visited Storyeum, the new $22 million tourist attraction in Gastown that is designed to educate visitors on Canadian history through a series of historical vignettes.

After the visits, the group critiqued the two productions in free-flowing conversation.

Todd believed the representations of Aboriginal people in the series and Storyeum are guilty of replicating the same traditional stereotypes of Aboriginal people that have been projected for decades.

"If there are any illusions about the legacy of colonialism on the representation of Aboriginal people, then those two are perfect illustrations," said Todd, who studied film at Simon Fraser University and was instrumental in founding the Aboriginal Arts Program at the Banff Centre.

"I know the prevailing attitude is to say, 'Well that was then and this is now.' Well this is now, and the imagery hasn't really changed, though it may hide behind a degree of political correctness."

Professor Linc Kesler, director of the First Nations Studies Program, agreed.

"You can see that the tactic is to pull out these little moments of B.C. history and make the moments stand for the bigger picture," said Kesler, referring to the historical vignettes in Storyeum.

"But their way of doing that with Aboriginal representation, it was like being stuck in The Last of the Mohicans or something. It was a little romanticized and stereotypical in a way that made people laugh. It was a little alienating. Well, more than a little alienating, it was quite alienating. Not complimentary."

Kesler, whose research focuses on the relationship between technological change and representation of knowledge, said it's important to thnk about these current representations to come up with a sense of what should happen next in the development of Aboriginal media productions. For instance, the trip to Storyeum prompted a lot of questions about different ways to present Aboriginal histories.

"Is the basic format itself a problem?" Kesler asks. "This little historical enacted vignette, is that viable, or is that in itself a problem? If the idea has validity, how would it need to work in a way that we find has more integrity from the Aboriginal point of view? How would we like to represent Aboriginals so that non-Aboriginal communities can understand better?"

He said these are the types of questions Todd has been asking. These are questions that will be addressed in the media lab. Kesler and Todd have been discussing the need to create an interface between the UBC First Nations Studies Program and the film community for a number of years now, which is why one of the lab's principal aims is to create a place of exchange between Aboriginal media makers-filmmakers and writers-scholars, Aboriginal students, and other members of the Aboriginal community.

Through a series of discussions, the lab will explore ways to improve the quality and quantity of Aboriginal history in the media. Students from the First Nations Studies Program will play a part in the lab by preparing research papers related to each discussion theme, which are intended to spark reactions and engage debate.

Kesler said that one of the purposes is to sort through some of these issues in an intellectual and organized way.

"People talk about those issues informally, but they don't have as much effect as if they were more organized into a body of discussion which is the way everything else happens in the academic world," he said.

Once this body of discussion has been organized, it will be easier to approach school boards about the issue of what kinds of educational media are being shown in classes.

"I think it's fairly sfe to say that Aboriginal issues and Aboriginal histories are rather seriously underrepresented in Canadian school systems," said Kesler. "So how do we create materials that give broader accessibility to perspectives and histories that students aren't already getting?

Someone needs to ask this, and ask it in a way that has force, raising it with school boards and educational decision makers. That's happened to some extent, but it would be more effective if we had the intellectual infrastructure. That's what the lab has to think about; how to give more profile to how the history is being represented, and to what end."

He said many students in the program are excited about the chance to work with Todd, whose films reflect many issues that are not addressed in mainstream media.

Kesler believes that what characterizes Todd's work is her ability to cover stories that would not be picked up by film-makers from outside the community. Her films promote a different way of looking at and thinking about certain issues within her community, he said. "People are aware of what she has done and are aware of what that represents, doing that kind of film-making."

In an essay that originally appeared in North Of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980 (University of Alberta Press, 2002), Todd said her inspiration to pursue film came at an early age, on one snowy night when she turned on the television to watch the horror classic Nosferatu. She recalls being too terrified to even change the channel, but also being drawn to the film because it was so beautiful.

"I began to understand that film-makers used the tools of storytellers, which appealed to my Cree love of craft. And I also realized that film-makers can make people feel things," she said.

Story originally published in artsBeat,the news bulletin of the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.