At the start of her filmmaking career, Abenaki artist Alanis Obomsawin created educational filmstrips for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), amplifying Indigenous voices and histories. This selection features three short films from her 1970s series L’íl’wata and Manawan, documenting traditional canoe building, snowshoe making, and basket weaving—challenging colonial narratives and highlighting Indigenous knowledge through classroom-based media.

Every time I make a film, I’m always thinking about education. It is important because this is where the power is, that’s how you get people to know what the true story is of our people. Our history and teaching have a lot of power. 

— Alanis Obomsawin, 2023

At the outset of her career with the NFB—Canada’s leading public film producer and distributor—Obomsawin began a series of film shorts aimed at students. They featured the personal narratives, voices, and history of members of the Líl’wat Nation in British Columbia, and the Atikamekw Nation in Manwan, Quebec. An established singer and storyteller but a relative newcomer to the world of cinema, Obomsawin conceived the series L’íl’wata (1972) and Manawan (1975) as filmstrips, a visual format widely distributed in Canadian educational settings in the early 1970s. Presented in classrooms, her short reels of still images quietly contradicted established, discriminatory colonial representations to highlight Indigenous culture and knowledge.

All works are single-channel videos presented by The Image Centre in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada.

Curated by Gaëlle Morel

• Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki, b. 1932), renowned Indigenous rights advocate and documentary filmmaker, came to cinema from an earlier background in singing, performance, and storytelling. First hired by the National Film Board of Canada as a consultant in 1967, her body of films numbers more than sixty productions, including the landmark documentaries Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Obomsawin has consistently used public platforms to advance Indigenous concerns, struggles, and rights in Canada, creating a model of cinema that privileges the voices and perspectives of the communities she depicts.

• Gaëlle Morel (French/Canadian, b. 1976), PhD, has been the Curator, Exhibitions and Public Engagement at The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, since 2010. Based on extensive archival research, her most recent exhibitions include Lee Miller, A Photographer at Work, 1932–1945 (2024); Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. & The Canadian Press (2023); and Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 (with accompanying catalogue, 2023). In 2009, Morel was the guest curator of the photography biennial Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal. She is currently an instructor in the Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Toronto Metropolitan University.