Alanis Obomsawin

It was July 1990, in Quebec.

A fifty-seven-year-old woman was listening to the radio. There was news of gunfire at Kanehsatà:ke, near Oka.

That day, she did not go to work. She got in her car and drove to Kanehsatà:ke.

Her name was Alanis Obomsawin. She was a filmmaker.

She was born on August 31, 1932, near Lebanon, New Hampshire, during a solar eclipse.

She grew up in Odanak, an Abenaki community near Sorel. There, she spoke Abenaki. A cousin of her mother's taught her stories and legends.

At about nine, she moved with her parents to Trois-Rivières. At school, she was the only Indigenous child. She was bullied.

At twelve, she lost her father to tuberculosis.

Later, in Montreal, she became a singer and storyteller. In 1960, she sang at New York's Town Hall. She went on tour with songs she had learned as a child.

In 1966, a CBC program featured her. In Odanak, she was leading a project: building a swimming pool.

In 1967, producers from the National Film Board, Wolf Koenig and Bob Verrall, invited her to advise on a film about Indigenous peoples.

She joined the NFB.

In 1971, she directed her first documentary, Christmas at Moose Factory. After that, almost one film a year.

In 1984, she showed the Sûreté du Québec raid on the Mi'gmaq of Listuguj, in Incident at Restigouche.

Then came the summer of 1990.

At Kanehsatà:ke, the Kanien'kehá:ka, the Mohawks, were opposing a golf course on their land. The dispute became an armed standoff. On one side, the Quebec police and the Canadian army. On the other, the Kanien'kehá:ka.

Alanis Obomsawin went behind the Kanien'kehá:ka lines. She stayed seventy-eight days. Sometimes with a small crew. Sometimes alone.

"It was a war zone," she would say.

In September, the day before the Kanien'kehá:ka warriors walked out, she left the Pines. She had to get her film reels past the soldiers.

In 1993, she released Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, drawn from more than 250 hours of film. The film won more than a dozen awards. It was the first documentary to be named best Canadian feature at the Toronto festival.

Jesse Wente called it a watershed film in the history of First Peoples cinema.

She never claimed to be neutral. She said she could not hide the fact that she had a point of view. But she also said:

In 2010, she returned to her own childhood with When All the Leaves Are Gone, a partly autobiographical film about Trois-Rivières.

She also served as president of a shelter for Indigenous women in Montreal.

The honours came: the Governor General's Award in 2001, Companion of the Order of Canada in 2019, the Glenn Gould Prize in 2020.

In 2023, at ninety-one, she had completed 56 films and was working on two more. In 2025, she released My Friend the Green Horse.

Her way of filming rests on listening to each community, each Nation, Abenaki, Mi'gmaq, Kanien'kehá:ka. It echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing: a story only truly exists when it is given back to those who lived it.

In September 1990, a woman left the Pines with her film reels.

Inside them were the voices of others.