(Re)Claiming cultural identity: Aboriginal animation from Cape Dorset to Quickdraw
- Submitting institution
-
Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Buchan4
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780190229108
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This invited, peer-reviewed research is an investigation into the National Film Board’s (NFB) 1970s engagement with animation and Indigenous populations: the Eskimo [sic] Legend films made by non-indigenous filmmakers, and a little-known Cape Dorset project initiated to engage Inuit youth in filmmaking processes. The initial aim was to evaluate the cultural and artistic value of the latter and locate the works in a wider cultural arts context. The research revealed social and political contexts of Indigenous handicraft and art as essential to understanding these films. Research methods included archival research on the NFB, documentaries on Inuit art and CBC broadcast footage of Inuit art promoted by Canadian governmental trade. An interrelating web of historical, political, broadcast and governmental policies, indigenous rights, cultural events, and institutional settler assimilationist activities between 1930 and 2015 establishes a context for linkages between the films and economic and sociopolitical institutions. These drove the development of Indigenous crafts and cooperative initiatives for a sedentary, formerly nomadic people as a method of income, to sell to a tourist market. These crafts bore no relation to the intangible culture of earlier artefacts created for survival, hunting and everyday life, or to the talismans and totems used to maintain oral histories and legends. The chapter fills a gap left by Lorna Roth and Jennifer Gaultier in their valuable discussions of Indigenous filmmaking. It has a special focus on animation and the appropriation of handcraft by NFB directors, correcting the invisibility of Indigenous people’s contribution to these films. It confirms the artistic value of the 17 Cape Dorset films as a move beyond the NFB’s incorporation of their art. Buchan shows that the films are a more effective aesthetic visual and aural expression of Inuit social and cultural experience – and of intangible culture – than the Eskimo Legend films.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
