Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast

Acknowledgments

xix Acknowledgments This book has been many years in the making and represents the culmination of a long journey to get here. There are many people to thank. I extend my deepest gratitude to all the filmmakers with whom I worked in Vancouver. It is a tremendous honor for me to be able to work within Vancouver’s Aboriginal media world. I thank you all for your encouragement and friendship throughout the research process. Your dedication to telling Aboriginal stories and commitment to using this technology to build community remain an inspiration. I extend a special thank you to those filmmakers who became like family to me as they generously welcomed me into their homes and lives. For wonderful conversation over countless dinners, trips to Granville Island, and sipping cups of tea late into the night, I thank Vera Wabegijig and her daughters Storm Standing on the Road and Grace Wabegijig, whose strength, creativity , humor, and kindness continue to be a blessing in my life. I thank Leena Minifie for her generosity of spirit and friendship, Odessa Shuquaya and her daughter Nakiah Shuquaya for their friendship, support, and encouragement. I thank Cleo Reece and her family, especially her daughter Skeena, for welcoming me xx Acknowledgments into their home, where I shared in delicious home-cooked meals and learned many new words while being defeated many times in our Scrabble games! I am deeply grateful to Loretta Todd, without whom this research simply would not have been possible . I thank the IMAG Board of Directors, which, at the time I did fieldwork, included Dana Claxton, Dorothy Christian, Zoe Hopkins, Cleo Reece, and Jackson Crick, for their permission and support to do research with IMAG. A special thank-you to Kevin Lee Burton and Helen Haig-Brown, who generously shared with me copies of their films and gave permission for me to screen these films in presentations and classroom settings. I thank the Indigenous Media Arts Group, the Museum of Anthropology, and the National Film Board of Canada, which provided letters of support for this research project and served as institutional hosts. I thank Jennifer Kramer, Michael Ames, and Jill Baird for hosting me as a Fulbright Scholar with a research affiliation at the Museum of Anthropology. I thank Bernard Lutz, archivist at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) for his help with my archival research at the NFB. I also thank George Johnson, formerly with the NFB’s Pacific Centre in Vancouver, who provided letters of support for my research project. Thank you to Glenn Alteen, Daina Warren, and Aiyyana Maracle at the grunt gallery for providing access to the gallery’s archives and for sharing their wealth of knowledge about the role of contemporary First Nations art in Vancouver’s artist-run centers. I also thank Video Out Distributors for making videotapes available for my research and to Wanda Vanderstoop at Vtape for her support in providing access to DVDs of several films featured in this book and for her assistance with film stills for the book. I also thank Ragnhild Milewski for his assistance with film stills from the NFB films included in this book. This research began while I was a graduate student at New York University, and I must offer my deepest thanks to my primary advisers Faye Ginsburg, Karen Blu, and Fred Myers, whose influence on this book is evident throughout. I cannot thank you Acknowledgments xxi enough for your mentorship and intellectual guidance as well as for the numerous research and academic opportunities you made available to me. It was a privilege to have been a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, whose preeminent faculty provided the intellectual environment in which my research project was nurtured and from whom I have learned so much. The training and skills that I acquired through the Culture and Media Program honed my understanding of media production, strengthening the theoretical framing of my research as well as providing skills that I could contribute to Aboriginal filmmakers in Vancouver. I am tremendously grateful for the generous financial and academic support NYU’s Department of Anthropology gave me, especially the opportunity to participate in the 2004–2005 Indigenous Cosmologies Working Group in the Center for Religion and Media and as a festival assistant for the First Nations\ First Features Film Festival. Working on the First Nations\First Features Festival was invaluable in shaping...