In 1964, Radio-Canada invited a young Alanis Obomsawin to appear in an interview with journalist Jean Ducharme on the television program Aujourd’hui to discuss Indigenous cultures and traditions and her experience growing up as an Indigenous woman. Over the course of the interview, Ducharme’s line of questioning grew more and more contentious. He asked, for instance, whether Obomsawin agreed that living among white people was harmless for Indigenous culture. She responded, Her response to Ducharme foregrounded a core concern in her career as a singer-songwriter, one she would carry into her filmmaking over the years to come. Obomsawin began working as a consultant for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in 1969, five years after the interview, and later became one of the most influential Indigenous filmmakers in the world. Known for landmark documentaries such as Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), Obomsawin succeeded in subverting the anthropological gaze of the camera and, in the process, defined a new genre of Indigenous documentary film. She has produced more than 50 films over the last six decades. In September 2024, the travelling retrospective exhibition Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story opened at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, where it was curated by Lesley Johnstone and Marjolaine Labelle. Originally curated and organized by Richard Hill (Vancouver Art Gallery) and Hila Peleg (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), it presents a selection of Obomsawin’s feature-length films, short films, and drawings alongside archival documents and objects and aims to mediate her monumental career, her lifelong motivations, and her impact to the public. Echoing her interview from 1964, the exhibition highlights a story that challenges the political and ontological systems created and maintained by settler colonialism and calls attention to her lifelong dedication to the transformative power of storytelling and education, or “the things we’re taught as kids.” The Children Have to Hear Another Story positions her lived experience as the generative force behind her practice and introduces an aspect of her creative process available only in the archive. The exhibition opens with Obomsawin’s first film, the lyrical short Christmas at Moose Factory (1971). In a letter to the NFB, displayed alongside the film, she writes, “In the past there has been no effort made to tell children in school what the history of Indian people of this country really is. . . . We Indian people want very much to tell it ourselves – We don’t want anyone to speak on our behalf anymore.” Christmas at Moose Factory does exactly that: the story is narrated by Cree children at a northern Ontario residential school, the same children whose illustrations animate the film. Significantly, the film created a space where Indigenous children could speak for themselves at a time when they were systematically silenced by the government. The museum visitor, listening to the children’s voices, can choose to either watch the film on screen or to listen to it while looking at the drawings displayed alongside it, which powerfully recalls something Obomsawin once wrote: “In making films, for me, the word is the most important thing – to hear and to listen. I listen for hours to the stories people tell me, and I am always fascinated to hear how they survive in such an unfriendly world. For me, to hear is to see.” After the release of Christmas at Moose Factory, Obomsawin produced two series of short films, History of Manawan (1972) and L’il’wata (1975), which were distributed in schools with accompanying educational kits including slides, colouring books, and toys. These kits, presented to …
