Going Inuit

Canada's ongoing attempts to go native have recently culminated in Ilanaaq,¹ the official emblem of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to take place in Vancouver, British Columbia. A contemporary rendition of a traditional Inuit stone marker called inukshuk, Ilanaaq is meant to represent "hope and friendship…the hospitality of a nation that warmly welcomes the people of the world with open arms" (VANOC). Nothing to argue with, really, and yet the emblem has already proven controversial. Disagreement concerns two issues: Ilanaaq's ability to represent all of Canada (the facility with which it replaces the maple leaf has proven irksome to some constituencies) and its relationship to other First Nations (the Squamish have charged that Ilanaaq exemplifies a partic- ularly egregious instance of symbolic favoritism, as it replaces abundantly avail- able representations of West Coast indigeneity with an emblem imported from the Arctic North).² The Vancouver Organizing Committee has come to the eloquent defense of Ilanaaq by invoking its symbolic integrationist potential: "Ilanaaq's strength comes from the teamwork and collaboration of many. Each stone relies on the others to support the whole, but the unified balance is strong and unwavering" (VANOC). The Inuit have become Canada's favorite indigenes because their political history and their cultural symbols lend themselves so well to Canada's ongoing federalist project.

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of "playing Indian" (Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With Ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art, and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with earlier histories characterized by the expropriation and displacement of indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period in which respect for difference becomes the dominant logic of social and cultural relations. But this new historical period comes with a price of its own. Multiculturalism effectively demands that American Indians put their indigeneity on display. While it prohibits Euro-Americans from playing Indian (all such attempts are quickly denounced as cultural appropriation, and ethnic frauds are regularly and ritually exposed these days), it requires that the Indians themselves play Indian to help legitimate the multiculturalist democracies they cannot help but inhabit.

But how does an Indian play Indian? Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Zacharias Kunuk's feature film debut, provides an intriguing opportunity to investigate this question. Despite the widespread critical acclaim it has garnered since its showing at Cannes in 2000, where it won the Camera d'Or, Kunuk's film continues to pose somewhat of a puzzle. Unique among contemporary North American indigenous cinema, both in terms of its subject matter and its formal solutions, the film raises important questions about the possibilities of indigenous self-representation in contemporary multicultural democracies without offering easy answers. In fact, the ideological investments of the film are themselves contradictory. This contradiction is embodied most vividly in the juxtaposition of the main narrative, which depicts a precontact nomadic band of the Inuit, with the film's outtakes, which chronicle the making of the feature itself. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, as the title hints, participates in two separate traditions of representing the indigenous. It flees modernity into a mythic indigenous past and yet unabashedly claims modernity in the outtakes concluding the feature. Kunuk's film urgently poses questions about representing indigeneity in multiculturalist democracies that grant recognition for the sake of national cohesion rather than for the cultural and political autonomy of indigenous nations.

A creation of Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada's first independent Inuit production company,3 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner has been marketed as the "first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit" (IIP). A cinematographic reprise of a traditional Inuit morality tale that has been passed down orally over many generations, the film has been billed as "part of this continuous stream of oral history carried forward into the new millennium through a marriage of Inuit storytelling skills and new technology" (IIP). "An exciting action-thriller set in ancient Igloolik," it has promised "international audiences a more authentic view of Inuit culture and oral tradition than ever before, from the inside and through Inuit eyes" (IIP). Atanarjuat tells the story of a feud between two families that is precipitated by an evil curse and a dispute over a woman. Its storyline, evocative of the classical epics and their preoccupation with governable communities, allows viewers to juxtapose claims of exotic authenticity with assurances about the universal qualities of the tale. But it is the film's ability to create and sustain a believable precontact Inuit world that is typically singled out as its greatest achievement.