Spectacularization in Contemporary Aboriginal Art

In the Canadian documentary Reel Injun (2009), Innu filmmaker André Dudemaine states, “I think that the cinema was created to film First Nations.”1 1  - André Dudemaine, quoted in Neil Diamond, Reel Injun. On the trail of the Hollywood Indian. Montréal, Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 2009. DVD, 86 min.  What could be taken for a quip is, from a historical point of view, perfectly accurate. In September 1894, using a kinetograph, W.K.L. Dickson made Sioux Ghost Dance, Buffalo Dance, and Indian War Council — the very first films in the history of cinema — featuring Sioux Lakotas; in 1914, photographer Edward S. Curtis directed the first fiction feature film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, a sixty-five-minute cinematographic panorama with a plot involving the Kwakwaka’wakw before the first contact; in 1922, Robert Flaherty made Nanook of the North, the first movie documentary, a reconstruction of the life of an Inuk and his family in the Hudson Bay region. What these films from the early years of cinema show is that Aboriginals were not simply a subject of predilection for spectacles; they also generated their own form of spectacularization. Far from being a novelty, this fact dates from the first voyages of Christopher Columbus, who took Arawaks from the Bahamas back to Europe to present them at the Court of Spain. In the sixteenth century, Aboriginals were also exhibited in Europe in parades, processions, and tableaux vivants.2 2  - Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, “Des Amérindiens, premiers ‘sauvages exhibés’, aux collections de ‘monstres,’” in Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Beaux Arts éditions, 2011), 10 – 14. Spectacularization of Aboriginals only intensified with the forms of mass dissemination that were introduced during the nineteenth century in the United States and Europe, the two best examples of which were George Catlin’s Indian Gallery and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Many contemporary Aboriginal artists are ascribing increasing significance to the historical spectacularization of the Indian in order to lift the veil on what took place behind the scenes: large-scale spectacles (world fairs and colonial expositions, parades, circuses, early films, and so on) were being staged at the very time when extremely repressive assimilation and disappropriation policies were being instituted (the Indian Removal Act and the Indian Appropriation Act in the United States; the Indian Act in Canada). Thus, what was being put on display far and wide was precisely what was simultaneously being systematically wiped out using every means possible.