The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat

Chapter Eight: Local and Global Environments

chaPteR eIght Local and Global Environments As Zacharias Kunuk was enduring my endless string of questions throughout my nine-month research project in Igloolik, he made it clear to me that although Isuma was carrying out a visionary program of cultural communication in video, other organizations were pursuing similar paths in different parts of the world. He strongly suggested that I also spend time in the Australian outback, learning what I could about Aboriginal videography. I took his advice and spent three months in and around Alice Springs, in the heart of the outback, working with Aboriginal video organizations. The situation there is eerily similar to the one I found in the Arctic. One large central organization, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (caama, pronounced “comma”), functions in the Outback in much the same way that the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation does in the Arctic. Both organizations receive the bulk of their funding from their respective federal governments, and both are dedicated to sharing aspects of their particular cultures with the larger European colonial societies that have engulfed them. caama is working to wean itself from its dependence on funding from Canberra while at the same time overseeing a television network called Imparja and also producing an extensive array of videos, cds, and other items that share and celebrate Aboriginal culture. Both the Arctic and the Australian outback also have smaller, independent media organizations that are trying to advance their cultures without becoming so fully beholden to their federal governments . In the outback, one parallel to Isuma is a video organization called the Warlpiri Media Association, located in the small Aboriginal town of Yuendumu. I drove the beautiful but treacherous Tanami Track out to Yuendumu during my stay in Alice Springs 121 and worked for a week with the Warlpiri Media Association, following Kunuk’s advice and learning as much as I could about this organization as well. The Warlpiri group produces interesting and sometimes controversial videos on a broad spectrum of subjects; the videos range from an unblinking look at the struggle with alcoholism in Yuendumu (and the domestic violence that goes with it) to humorous depictions of the creativity required to maintain a car in the Outback. And much like Isuma, the wma sees itself as a subversive organization dedicated to resisting the colonial enterprises around it. Several scholars have studied and written about Aboriginal video efforts, most notably Faye Ginsburg and the late Eric Michaels. Ginsburg has explored the intersection of media and Aboriginal culture, focusing primarily on the effect the incorporation of non-indigenous media forms has on the society that adopts them. Michaels focused more fully on the audience end, exploring the ways in which Aboriginal audiences use media—particularly television —in ways that are unique to their own social structures and expectations.1 Both the Aboriginal media organizations and their Inuit counterparts work to find ways to use the newly affordable and widespread medium of video to record, share, preserve, and advance knowledge about their cultures and languages. And they do their work in an environment that is changing with breathtaking swiftness. One of the most significant changes to the Arctic in recent years was the formation of the territory of Nunavut. Until 1999, Canada had two territories, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The Yukon is a relatively small wedge of land just east of Alaska; it was in this region that gold rush fever brought thousands of would-be miners to the Arctic in the late nineteenth century. The Northwest Territories occupied the largest parcel of the Canadian Arctic, stretching from the Davis Strait on the east, which separates Canada from Greenland, to the Yukon on the west. In the opposite plane, it began at the northern ends of the provinces 122 | chApter eight and continued northward until the land gave way to the Arctic Ocean. The Northwest Territories, like Puerto Rico or Guam in the United States, functions as a division of the overall Canadian governmental hierarchy. Given its population patterns and its history of voting trends, its government has been largely white and Southern in composition. Beginning in the 1980s, a group of Inuit leaders began discussions about breaking away from the Northwest Territories and forming a new territory. This new territory would encompass a large region of the Canadian Arctic primarily occupied by the Inuit, and it would therefore be run primarily by Inuit leaders. A coalition of...