Book / video reviews
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Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmm aker. Randolph Lewis. Lincoln &amp; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006; illustrations; xxvi + 260 pages; ISBN 0-8032-8045-9; $21.95US (paper)
Alanis Obomsawin has carved out a significant place for herself in Canadian cinema, from her early days as a consultant and director of short films to her current position as director of major docum entary works, notably Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). A behind-the-barricades account of the Oka crisis of 1989-90, in which Mohawk warriors stood off the Canadian military over a land-rights dispute, the feature-length documentary garnered awards in film festivals around the world and is now a canonical text in studies of Canadian cinema.
Obomsawin was raised in an Abenaki village near Montreal. She knew anti-Native prejudice as well as her own traditions from early on and as a beautiful and talented young wom an she began a career as a folk-singer and story-teller. She soon became ensconced in the 1960s Montreal art scene, where Leonard Cohen's revolutionary novel, Beautiful Losers (1966), m odeled the motif of Mohawk Saint Takawitha on Obomsawin's childhood m em ories and adult personality. W hen the National Film Board (NFB) embarked on a documentary to be film ed on a remote native reserve, they called her in as consultant. As the first Native person on staff at the NFB, it was a while before she got to move behind the camera. W hen she did, it was for a short film , Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), an animated short based on children's drawings of reservation life. Obom sawin never looked back.
Lewis's book offers useful biographical details as well as historical and political contextualisations of Obom sawin's films. His writing in these accounts is journalistic and compelling, pulling no

punches about either Obomsawin's or his own political perspective. The chapter on Kanehsatake is especially lively and replete with well-researched inform ation about the historical background of the dispute, analysis of media coverage, details of the Mohawk arsenal, production inform ation about Obomsawin's institutional struggles with the NFB and her acts of courage (she endured near-battle conditions for seventyeight days behind the lines). The chapter also offers a detailed reading of the film that acknowledges previous scholarship and assesses subsequent reception.
W here the book falls apart is in Lewis's forays into theoretical analysis. His chapter on "A Gendered Gaze?" examines the few films Obomsawin directed in which she dealt specifically with women as subjects (Mother of Many Children, 1977; My Name is Kahentiiosta, 1996) and he deals only in the antiquated discourse of sim ple stereotypes. W hy is the masculine subject not examined? W hy is gender not brought to bear on all of her work? Or why at all? If she were male, would this be an issue?
Nevertheless, this is a work of located scholarship, and - more crucially the first book-length study of the work of a pre-em inent Canadian film m aker.
Kay Armatage University of Toronto