Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America (review)

Kerstin Knopf's book Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America focuses on Native American and First Nations films and filmmakers as they create what she calls an "answering discourse" to the media-validated colonial discourse. Knopf samples a variety of Native American filmmaking genres, including documentary, short films, and full-length narrative films, providing a detailed synopsis and content analysis of several films. Since its genesis in the early 1900s, film has been an effective colonizing tool, impacting Indigenous peoples around the globe. Films varied from ethnographic documentaries depicting "exotic" and "vanishing" tribes to Hollywood narrative cinema depicting Natives as a savage race that must be exterminated or subdued to make room for Christian civilization. Like many forms of media, film has been used by those with power to generate propaganda, manufacture stereotypes, foster racism, and create in the popular imagination widely accepted justifications for genocide, land theft, and other forms of oppression. Both Canada and the United States have used state-sponsored films to legitimate their settler governments and land claims within their borders. As filmmaking became an accessible visual art form for Native American and First Nations peoples, it became a medium and tool used to express creativity, educate, and advocate for change.

Decolonizing the Lens of Power is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter Knopf introduces the "lens of power," referring to the Foucauldian concept in which a collective group imbued with power directs an observing and objectifying "gaze" toward the oppressed, which the oppressed then internalize. Knopf draws parallels between Foucault's lens with the cinematic camera lens, using the concept to analyze the magnified gaze produced by colonial film discourse. Indigenous filmmakers and films answer back to the colonizing discourse by employing anticolonial strategies such as Gerald Vizenor's "trickster discourse," playing with popular culture Indian imagery while challenging these images in ways that give both the colonizer and the colonized the chance to be liberated and healed.

In chapter 2 Knopf constructs her postcolonial theoretical foundations and what she identifies as postcolonial conditions that Native American films and filmmakers respond to and contest. Despite the fact that Native peoples and nations have now used film as a decolonizing mechanism for several generations, Knopf continues to ground film as an essentially Western-colonial tool. Likewise, even though she acknowledges cultural transformation and continuance, Knopf argues that there cannot be any pure or authentic Native form of expression, by which she seems to mean that Native Americans today are not Native in the way their precontact ancestors were Native, situating Indigenous filmmakers and films in a hybrid space. Though Knopf shows awareness of critiques of postcolonial and hybridist theories, she continues with a line of argument that runs the danger of relegating Native filmmakers to mere crossbreeds of more authentic forms of creative expression. Knopf does not seem to acknowledge the difference between transculturation and hybridity or the transformative process by which all peoples change over time, responding creatively to new situations as they claim new tools, languages, and technologies as their own. To state it another way, we are all influenced by the cultures that surround us. The camera should be understood as an Indigenous tool and film as an Indigenous form of expression, not merely an appropriated medium that belongs to the West.

Knopf's theoretical framework misses some of the key concepts, texts, and scholars that constitute part of the decolonizing discourse in Native American/ Indigenous studies. Though Knopf briefly mentions Santa Clara Pueblo filmmaker Beverly Singer's book Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, she fails to engage with Muskogee/Creek artist and scholar Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's concept of visual sovereignty. Furthermore, Knopf's work would have benefited greatly by engaging with Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Smiths's concept of an "Indigenous Research Agenda" might have helped Knopf develop a research project in...