Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast

1. The Indigenous Media Arts Group

21 C H A P T E R ON E The Indigenous Media Arts Group imag office—vancouver, coast salish territory, october 2003 On a crisp, sunny October afternoon the Indigenous Media Arts Group (imag) office bustles with activity. Cleo Reece, imag director , talks on the phone with a funding agency about a grant, her daughter Honey stops by with her two children, Ohkuu and Musky, Leonard edits a student video about his drum group, and Mary drops in to make copies of her video, a clip of which will be aired on The New Canoe, a local Aboriginal arts television show. The noise level rises as Musky plays a computer game on Cleo’s computer with its electronic sci-fi audio effects, punctuating the sounds of the powwow drum from the computer where Leonard sits editing. Honey leaves to run a few errands, so I offer to hold the baby, Ohkuu, while trying to help Mary figure out how to make a mini-dv copy of her video. Musky, frustrated with the computer game, calls out, “Kookum !1 Kookum! How do you get this game to work?” Meanwhile the high-pitched refrain of powwow singing permeates the office from Leonard’s computer as he looks at the same clip over and over to choose where to make his edit. I’m searching for the cable we need to hook the video camera up to the monitor while trying to manage Ohkuu as he plays with my hair. “I’m not sure this cable will work,” I say to Mary while trying an A/V cable in various combinations 22 The Indigenous Media Arts Group between the camera and the monitor. Within this buzz of activity in the office, I realize for the first time that imag functions as more than a media resource center. Beyond the media produced in the social space of imag, invaluable kinship, community, and cultural ties are forged here as well. Introduction While Aboriginal media have made an impact on-screen within the Canadian mediascape, they have also made a tremendous off-screen impact in the social life of Aboriginal communities. For anthropologists of media, the social life behind media production is a testament to the power of media to alter and strengthen social ties. Drawing upon my access to the “behind the scenes” life of media production as an IMAG volunteer, I highlight how a sense of community is shaped, contested, and negotiated among urban Aboriginal filmmakers within the social spaces of media production. I locate Aboriginal visual sovereignty in the acts of media production; therefore, a site like IMAG is especially significant for analyzing the social spaces in which Aboriginal media is produced. What are the conditions of production for Aboriginal media makers working at IMAG? How do Aboriginal filmmakers mobilize resources and labor to produce their media? How does media production alter Aboriginal social relationships , cultural practices, and intergenerational ties? Within the diverse, intertribal urban Aboriginal community in Vancouver, how does media production affect practices and discourses of “community”? I depict daily life in the social space of IMAG, an important gathering place that helped build social relationships within Vancouver ’s urban Aboriginal community. My ethnography of IMAG reveals the important ways in which Aboriginal sociality and discourses of “community” are produced through media production, as well as the off-screen impact of this grassroots organization in the social life of Vancouver’s Aboriginal community. Additionally, The Indigenous Media Arts Group 23 this chapter focuses on the 2004 IMAGeNation Aboriginal Film and Video Festival, a film festival that was held annually by IMAG between 1998 and 2006. The IMAGeNation Festival provided a key screening venue that raised visibility for Aboriginal media, particularly in showcasing the work of emerging filmmakers. IMAGeNation was a central annual Aboriginal cultural event that brought the community together and created an Aboriginal social space in which to tell Aboriginal stories to Aboriginal audiences, while reflecting Aboriginal cultural values through its programming, planning, and enactment. The Avant-Garde Origins of the Indigenous Media Arts Group The Indigenous Media Arts Group was founded in 1998 as a collective of Aboriginal media artists that aimed to increase access to media equipment and Aboriginal representation in artist-run centers in Vancouver. Artist-run centers emerged in Canada in the 1970s as an alternative exhibition venue for artists seeking to exhibit their work in a noncommercial venue...