Stephanie Foote’s Salvaging the Anthropocene series is one of our most active and provocative, offering scholarly but accessible books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation.
Introducing the concepts of d-ecocinema and d-ecocinema criticism, Salma Monani’s Indigenous Ecocinema expands the purview of ecocinema studies and not only brings attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive but also argues for a methodological approach that ushers Indigenous intellectual voices front and center in how we theorize this archive. Its case-study focus on Canada, particularly the work emanating from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto—a nationally and internationally recognized hub in Indigenous cinema networks—provides insights into pan-Indigenous and Nation-specific contexts of Indigenous ecocinema.
This absorbing text is the first book-length exploration foregrounding the environmental dimensions of cinema made by Indigenous peoples, including a particularly fascinating discussion on how Indigenous cinema’s ecological entanglements are a crucial and complementary aspect of its agenda of decolonialism.
What inspired you to explore the intersection of Indigenous cinema and ecological issues in this book?
When I was a PhD student examining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) controversy that had once again erupted in U.S. politics, I was struck by how little attention was being given to Indigenous voices and relatedly, film expressions, in mainstream media. Despite the fact that there were such vibrant and complex ways in which Indigenous communities were sharing their perspectives onscreen, I also noticed there was little ecocritical scholarship on Indigenous cinema. These early engagements with Indigenous cinema speaking to environmental concerns started my journey into Indigenous cinema’s intersections with ecological issues.
Early in this journey, I had the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth Weatherford, who was the Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Film and Media Festival. She opened my world up to the rich festival networks of Indigenous cinema. I visited the largest global Indigenous festival, the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Festival first in 2012, where my colleague Miranda Brady and I interviewed then Artistic Director Jason Ryle about Indigenous cinema’s intersections with environmental issues. That interaction as well as the chance to meet with filmmakers who illuminate a diversity of ways in which Indigenous peoples represent their environmental relations have inspired me ever since.
How do you define “d-ecocinema” and why is it an important framework for understanding Indigenous cinema?
D-ecocinema, as I define in the book, is cinema that can be understood as both decolonial and ecological in its on-screen messaging and off-screen practices of production, distribution, etc.
The term is a short-hand that productively joins two strands of cinema studies that have developed in parallel but not always in conversation with each other, ecocinema studies and Indigenous cinema studies. D-ecocinema criticism is the methodological framework that brings decolonial methodologies to ecocinema studies while at the same time bringing ecocinema studies’ attention to ecological entanglements and materialities into the foreground of Indigenous cinema studies.
Filmmakers, as Terril Calder said so eloquently to me once, send “their [film] babies into the world,” and these babies go out and do their thing. They invite conversations; they “make friends,” and sometimes they inspire books
The framework does two important things. First, it draws attention to how often ecological considerations are woven into the decolonial ethics of Indigenous film practices. Second, in turning to decolonial methodologies, the framework offers cinema scholars a model of research that resists an extractive attitude, as so often can be the case in academia. Instead, the framework is attuned to responsibility and reciprocity. I.e., this framework asks scholars to consider how the work they do is an ongoing conversation of value that doesn’t try to speak for the “research” communities they work with, but rather alongside and in consultation with them.
How does Indigenous cinema challenge mainstream narratives about environmentalism
and sustainability?
Indigenous cinema often challenges mainstream narratives about environmentalism and sustainability because it is based in Indigenous epistemologies and intellectual thought that don’t necessarily subscribe to Western sensibilities of ecological relations. For example, in the book section on cinematic place, I argue that imagineNATIVE as a film festival located in Toronto helps critique and re-orient mainstream environmental narratives that often neglect to recognize the vibrancy of “Nature” and “Native” presence in urban spaces. Or, for example, in the book section on feelings, I deliberately turn to humor as a generative emotion used by Indigenous filmmakers to engage ecological themes. As my colleague, Nicole Seymour has argued, so much of mainstream environmental discourse is gloom and doom, and yet, as I show, Indigenous cinema by Mohawk filmmakers Zoe Hopkins and Shelley Niro refuse the “suffocating atmospherics” of gloom and doom and instead actively invite a space of “laughter to breathe.”
In what ways do Indigenous filmmakers incorporate ecological sensibilities into the production and distribution of their films?
I’m so glad you asked this question as it points to how ecologies of cinema can and should be understood in relation to the “life-cycle” of cinema practices, not just in the context of on-screen messaging. As I discuss throughout the book, for many Indigenous filmmakers, ecological sensibilities are part and parcel of their production ethics. All the filmmakers I spotlight have a can-do attitude of responsibility to communities (of humans and more-than-human) when it comes to production. They rely on low-impact processes that are in stark contrast to mainstream practices of big cinema industries that often prioritize capital, not land or labor as their primary outcome.
In the book, for example, I show how a filmmaker like TJ Cuthand (Cree) uses existing archival footage in his film Reclamation to represent environmental destruction, instead of trying to recreate expensive and energy-intensive sets. Similarly, I describe how Terril Calder (Métis) works on animation as an art instead of ascribing to the “Ford model” of capitalist efficiency that studios like Disney often employ. I also discuss imagineNATIVE’s role in helping generate Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office’s On-Screen Protocols & Pathways document that advocates for best production practices that attend to communities and culture, which include responsibility to land and labor.
How can Indigenous ecocinema influence global discourses on climate change and
decolonization?
While various colleagues like Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Alexa Weik von Mossner turn to empirical ecocriticism to quantify the influence of cinema and other texts on environmental discourses, no such work has been done in the realm of Indigenous ecocinema, so on the one hand we might say we can’t point to quantifiable evidence to answer this question.
On the other hand, as I point to in the book, thanks to vibrant international networks of collaboration, Indigenous cinema practitioners are plugged into global discourses. Film festivals like imagineNATIVE actively work with festivals and other film agencies in various parts of the world to encourage transnational alliances between Indigenous film practitioners. In this cross- fertilization, it’s hard to imagine that generative influences are not rippling across the globe and influencing understandings of climate change and decolonization. I’m thinking, for example, about Cree/Métis filmmaker, Danis Goulet’s recent feature film, Night Raiders (2021). Set in a futuristic apocalyptic Canada, it nonetheless references histories and presents of settler colonial oppression (Boarding School systems of assimilation, resource scarcity-induced genocide, and even more specifically, the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was an international Indigenous response to illegal settler state land seizure). Goulet worked closely with Māori collaborators on this project (e.g., Taika Waititi was one of the Executive Producers) to craft a story that refuses environmental and social apocalypse as the end-game, and to argue for community versus individual responses to oppression (I have a forthcoming article on the film that gets a bit more into these themes). The film premiered at the Berlinale in Germany, screened at a number of film festivals, winning TIFF’s top ten Canada films of 2021, and today is available on streaming platforms like Amazon in some countries. In other words, films like Goulet’s, and the various ones I discuss in the book, often reach both local and global audiences.
All that to also say, I also like to think of cinema’s role as descriptive, not prescriptive, in its influences. Filmmakers, as Terril Calder said so eloquently to me once, send “their [film] babies into the world,” and these babies go out and do their thing. They invite conversations; they “make friends,” and sometimes they inspire books, which, like Indigenous Ecocinema hopefully add to the conversations, inviting audiences to re-calibrate how they think about environmental issues of climate change, how they might consider Indigenous practices of decolonization, and how they can work to tackle environmental issues in local and global contexts that are attentive to Indigenous histories, presents and futures.