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Recycling Indigenous Images: Archiveology and the National Film Board of Canada

image of Recycling Indigenous Images: Archiveology and the National Film Board of Canada

In 2015 The National Film Board (NFB) commissioned the Souvenir Project, a suite of four short films made by artists who were invited to remix NFB footage with soundtracks by contemporary Indigenous musicians. The Project was commissioned to screen at the Aboriginal Pavilion at the Panam games hosted in Toronto. Each film takes a slightly different approach to the settler-colonial archive, offering expressive, critical, and affective re-appropriation of the footage that the NFB provided access to. My approach to the Souvenir Project emerges from my work on ‘archiveology’ or the potential of archival film practices to reconstruct public memory. While Indigenous filmmakers have repurposed NFB materials for decides, it is rare that they ‘speak back’ to the archive. Is it even possible to evoke Indigenous Heritage using NFB materials, or does it exist only outside the colonial gaze? In these four NFB-produced remix films, appropriation as a mode of borrowing is designed as a strategy of reconciliation within the framework of cultural heritage, but does that strategy then become reified as a sign and a badge of a reconciliation process that remains radically incomplete? Or do these examples of remix and recycling enable a different conception of the future by re-visioning the past through audio-visual materials?

Keywords: Aboriginal ; Canada ; colonialism ; National Film Board ; remix ; Souvenir Project

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References

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  2. Baron, J. (2021), Reuse, Misuse, Abuse : The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Benjamin, Walter ([1932] 1999), ‘Excavation and memory’, in M. J. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds), Selected Works (trans. J. Livingstone et al.), vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 576.
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  4. Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project (trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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  5. Chartrand, Rheanne (2015), Curatorial Proposal for and Art Exhibition, Aboriginal Pavilion Proposal, NFB archive.
  6. Cocker, Emma (2009), ‘Ethical possession: Borrowing from the archives’, in I. Robert Smith (ed.), Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, Nottingham: Scope, pp. 92–110.
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  7. Couchi, Aylan, Davis, Raven and Chief, Lady Bird (2018), ‘Dirty words: Appropriation’, Canadian Art, 15 May, https://canadianart.ca/features/dirty-words-appropriation/. Accessed 19 November 2023.
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  17. Schweitzer, Ivy and Henry, Gordon Jr (2019), ‘The afterlives of Indigenous archives: Essays in honour of the Occom Circle’, Open Dartmouth: Faculty Open Access Scholarship, https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/3983. Accessed 19 November 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Smith, Sarah E. K. and Taunton, Carla (2018), ‘Unsettling Canadian heritage: Decolonial aesthetics in Canadian video and performance art’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 52, pp. 306–41.
     [Google Scholar]
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