Alanis Obomsawin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
In “The Kids Need to Hear One other Story,” celebrated Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin reveals documentary movies, recordings, and ephemera that survey the historical past of Indigenous resistance in Canada. Working for greater than half a century, the artist has seen all of it—and greater than as soon as. The exhibition’s bodily construction leads the viewer chronologically in a circle that begins and ends with kids, underscoring the cyclical nature of systematic oppression. Obomsawin’s attentive lens captures a few of the most revealingly recurring situations of colonial violence throughout Canada. As an illustration, the land-usage debates on the coronary heart of Kanhesatake: 270 years of resistance, 1993, and Incident at Restigouche, 1984, discover an echo in present-day altercations between land defenders and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Moist’suwet’en territory.
Considerably, Obomsawin speaks to the generational traumas of the residential-school system, a horrific colonial apply of separating Indigenous kids from their households and putting them with strangers beneath the pretext of reeducation. Many kids had been abused and killed, and in recent times, hundreds of their stays have been present in unmarked graves throughout Canada.
There is no such thing as a accountability in a construction primarily based in genocide, and but it calls for in depth proof of compliance from its victims. All through the exhibition, grant studies, letters, and mission proposals line the partitions. It’s unnerving that one should take part in such an elaborate train of justification if they’re to be heard, particularly when the artist is sincerely pushed by the unconventional pursuit of care and dignity. Obomsawin’s movies, from Christmas at Moose manufacturing facility, 1971, to the heartbreaking Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Baby, 1986, and We Can’t make the Identical Mistake Twice, 2016, middle actual kids and their welfare—a startling distinction to Canada’s nationalistic issues.
