Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art

Condolence Tropes and Haudenosaunee Visuality: It Starts with a Whisper and Mohawk Girls

119 condolence tropes and Haudenosaunee Visuality: It Starts with a Whisper and Mohawk Girls PenelOPe mYrtle KelseY indigenous assertions of the equality and commensurability of tribal epistemologies and lifeways have occurred in the context of colonial relations since contact. One of the earliest examples of this indigenist discourseofequivalencesisthetworowWampumthatrecordsatreatybetween the dutch and the Five nations made in the seventeenth century.1 the belt is comprised of two purple stripes on a background of white beads, and the two stripes stand for the two ways of life of the dutch and the Haudenosaunee. the wampum records an agreement to live in relationship with one another as brothers, not parent and child, and to maintain each group’s way of life without demanding that the other group conform. this treaty forms the foundation of all Five (and later six) nations treaties with european nations, and the implication of this mutual understanding continues to inform much Haudenosaunee intellectual effort today. this belief in tribal ways of knowing and being as viable and vibrant sources of indigenous intellectual production also informs my own arguments about tribal theory. as legal scholar robert Odawi Porter notes, however, “the united states and canadian governments have not recognized the politically exclusive arrangements signified by the Guswentah and have, instead, tried to assimilate the Haudenosaunee as citizens. this has had a corrosive effect on the Haudenosaunee.”2 this essay considers how filmmakers shelley niro and tracey deer work against this “corrosive effect” by invoking 120| Penelope Myrtle Kelsey iroquois condolence practices via decolonizing tropes and processes as an expression of tribal theory. in Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Kanien’keha political scientist taiaiake alfred defines the iroquois condolence ceremony as a metaphor for decolonization. He observes that “the condolence ritual pacifies the minds and emboldens the hearts of the mourners by transforming loss into strength. in rotinohshonni culture, it is the essential means of recovering the wisdom seemingly lost with the passing of a respected leader. . . . the condolence ritual heals. it fends off destruction of the soul and restores hearts and minds. it revives the spirit of the people and brings forth new leaders embodying the ancient wisdom and new hope.”3 tuscarora literary critic Vera Palmer has further built upon alfred’s work by applying the Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony as a methodology for understanding the hagiographies of mohawk saint Kateri tekakwitha.4 like Palmer, i view Haudenosaunee cosmology and ceremonial cycles as forming the underpinning of much iroquoian writing and film, especially where writers and filmmakers are clearly invoking and deploying traditional knowledge systems. two signature examples of this condoling process at play are the filmic narratives Mohawk Girls, a 2005 documentary directed by tracey deer, and It Starts with a Whisper, codirected by mohawk shelley niro and non-native director anna Gronau in 1993. Both Kanien’kehaka directors invoke aspects of condolence in their films as either a diegetic process or visual grammar. michael doxtater has argued that indigenous scholars who coin neologisms (e.g., “indigenism ,” “americity”) in print forums “demonstrate that indigenous knowledge remains unsubjugated, sovereign, and ignored. . . . [Further,] this resistance tends to emancipate—or decolonize—indigenous knowledge.”5 ultimately, by invoking visual tropes and processes originating in the condolence ceremony, deer and niro affirm the unsubjugated nature of Haudenosaunee political and cultural thought and epistemology, while remaking those epistemic practices in the present. condolence as decolonizing diegesis plays a critical role in tracey deer’s 2005 documentary Mohawk Girls, which narrates the experiences of three teenage women from the Kahnawake mohawk reserve in Quebec and simultaneously tells deer’s own coming-of-age in the same community a decade earlier. deer portrays Felicia, lauren, and amy in their different environments and invites them to tell their own stories of how they relate to their community; she interpolates their stories with footage deer took of herself at the same age with a black-and-white video camera, positing a move across time and space and allowing for larger themes to emerge. deer’s professed objective is to find out “what girls these days [in Kahnawake] are Condolence Tropes and Haudenosaunee Visuality| 121 dealing with and how they manage to get through it.” she states that she discovered that she “wasn’t the only one who had a hard time growing up in Kahnawake.”6 For each of the young women interviewed by deer, there are losses that must be faced and condoled that exemplify...