Inuit Filmmaker Brings His People’s History to Light

Kunuk documents conversion of last great shaman

by Mari Sasano, Canada.com Friday, September 29, 2006

Though cinema has only been around for the last century or so, Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk takes a much longer view within the context of an unrecorded history. “We came in one lifetime from the Stone Age to digital technology. We Inuit adapt. We’re good at adapting. Filmmaking is just another way; it’s just like hunting, like soapstone carving.”

Likewise, the success of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner—which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and numerous other international and Canadian film awards—brought ancient Inuit life to a global audience. For Igloolik Isuma, the team behind that film, it meant bigger budgets and greater resources, but their mission to continue to create and share stories about Inuit people in the Inuit language hasn’t changed.

“The only difference was we had a lot more money with Telefilm requirements,” writer/director Kunuk says on the phone from Igloolik, Nunavut. “We had a bigger crew, but the style of filming is still the same. The only problem with the bigger crew was it was distracting for the actors.”

Looking for their next project, they turned to the records of a Danish anthropologist, Knud Rasmussen, who travelled from the Canadian Arctic to Greenland to Alaska. Using portions of his journals that dealt with Igloolik, they pieced together the story for The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, which centres around the life of Avva, the last Inuit shaman, and his family.

“I heard about it after Atanarjuat,” says Kunuk. “We wanted to do something about shamanism and Christianity. The journals were there, and so it was a good choice.”

Unlike Atanarjuat, which is based on an ancient legend, the story of Knud Rasmussen is historical, which had its advantages for the filmmakers.

“The journals come with photographs, we can see their faces and how they dressed. That was a lot easier for the costume department to make these clothes. And we could see the faces to closely match who should play the characters.”

Aside from studying the journals, Kunuk and co-writer/director/cinematographer Norman Cohn consulted Inuit elders for the other side of the story. “What we were researching was what was not written. Mainly what we were interested in was what happened here. We knew that there was a Christian movement happening, so we had to sit down with elders for two weeks talking about it, describing what happened to the people, what their characters are so our actors could get to know what they were like.”

It’s the introduction of Christianity that is the pivotal moment in the story, and for Kunuk, it was the beginning of the end of traditional ways.

“For our Inuit audience and for our young people, we’re showing that we survived 4,000 years under shamanism: Be kind to animals, use only what you need. We had everything—food, clothes. You had to be a good hunter to be rich. Christianity came, all that was put aside. Growing up, the minister was telling us don’t do drum dances, don’t tell legends because they’re the work of the devil. It’s brainwashing. It happened in New Zealand, Australia, Africa. It probably all happened the same.

“I wanted to put it down on record. For 4,000 years of our history, it is only the last 85 years that Christianity came. It doesn’t balance. We traded 100 taboos—laws of nature—for Ten Commandments, which now I don’t have any trust for after looking at where they came from. Love thy neighbour? They’re bombing the hell out of each other! But we had to throw away all these rules of the land, taboos we just dumped so we could go to heaven.”

Kunuk is humble about his role in Inuit culture (“I’m just a filmmaker”), but he does see a connection with telling these stories with a revival of traditional ways.

“Shamanism was here, and it’s going to be here, that’s what my elders tell me. After Atanarjuat, the elders started to talk about shamanism more. With this film, because their families are in this community, people learned about their namesakes. We live by namesakes. When I was born, I was given five names, but the government couldn’t pronounce them so we were given tags and family names.”

Paying to Teach and “Play Indian”

by Shadi Rahimi, Indian Country Today

SAN FRANCISCO—They climb mountains on a quest for a vision. They beat drums and shake rattles. They pray in sweat lodges. Some study for years and later teach others the spirituality they paid to learn.

They are a growing population. But they are not Native. And as self-proclaimed medicine men and women or shaman—referred to by some critics as “plastic medicine men” or “shake and bake shaman”—they often charge for spiritual services.

That, for many Natives here, is a big problem.

“Even if they’re not charging for money, they have no idea about our people’s ways, they have no idea what they’re doing and how catastrophic it can be,” said Jimmy Red Elk, 32, a traditional Oglala Lakota who lives in Los Angeles. “It’s really bad out here.”

The liberal-leaning state has always been abundant with New Age centers and people who advertise Native-themed services ranging from “Native healing and ceremonies” to “pilgrimages to sacred places.”

Over the past two decades, such centers and retreats run by non-Natives have spread across the state—and the country—sometimes with deadly results. In 2002, two people died after spending more than an hour in a sweat lodge in southern California run by the group the Shamanic Fellowship.

Traditional elders, activists and groups have written resolutions and held protests denouncing such services. Some have even forcibly shut down questionable practitioners by dissembling their sweat lodges.

But such practices have only increased. And, in recent years, even more groups have sprouted up online.

“Our ways are not for sale!” wrote D’Shane Barnett, 31, a member of the Mandan and Arikara tribes, in an e-mail sent recently to dozens. “People cannot claim to understand our ways with one breath and then offer to sell them with their next breath.”

Barnett, a special projects officer at the Native American Health Center in Oakland, was referring to an e-mail he received by mistake, intended for a company called Native American Nutritionals. From their site he had been lead to another, thenativehealer.com.

There, he found an offer of “spiritual adoption” for a $90 donation and $5 in monthly payments by the Nemenhah Band and Native American Traditional Organization (NAC) of the Oklevueha Native American Church of Sanpete.

The group is an “independent band” which offers enrollment in an online college where people can pay to qualify as medicine men or women, healers and Native practitioners, according to their Web site.

Courses range from online lessons in smudging to a six-hour “‘Unipi’ Ceremony Practicum,” which requires a mentor to “come to your lodge.”

Each member receives a “ministerial card” that is valid as long as they are progressing and “making regular offerings,” according to the Web site.

Similar Native-themed services are offered for a price across the country. In Washington, Tana “Blue Deer Woman” Hamiter offers vision quests for $300 on www.onwingsoflight.com. A “Southwest Spirit Quest Tour” offered by www.divinelightministries.com includes “a night spent in a traditional Navajo hogan” and “authentic Native ceremonies.”

“My first reaction was anger,” Barnett said. “But when I spoke with a couple of different medicine people, the way they explained it to me is that I need to pity these people. What they are doing is filling a void.”

Though it may not appear so, seekers of Native spirituality are often well-intentioned, said Ann Riley, a shamanic counselor in the East Bay.

“The yearning for a spiritual connection is common,” said Riley, 70. “Americans are very drawn to the Native American spirituality because it’s the indigenous spiritually of this continent.”

Riley is a white, retired schoolteacher who for 15 years has studied “shamanism”—which she defines as a technique for connecting with “spirits for healing and problem solving”—with a shamanic center in Marin.

Today, she charges $75 for a 1½–2 hour session, during which she uses a drum or rattle to help students “enter an altered state” from which they connect with spirits, she said. It usually takes four to five lessons, she explained.

At her El Cerrito office she holds drumming circles and long-distance group healing. Her students include teenagers and “lots of psychologists,” she said.

She has known self-proclaimed spiritual leaders who have gotten sick by taking hallucinogenic drugs from South America or Mexico in ceremony.

“Sometimes white Americans go to some other culture or read about something and think they know how to do it,” she said. “It’s really something that you have to immerse yourself in. I see it really as lack of respect.”

Philip Scott, 44, said he has immersed himself in “the Native Path for more than 25 years,” in an ad in the New Age magazine Open Exchange.

Today, as the founder of the Ancestral Voice—Center for Indigenous Lifeways in Novato, he offers services including “Rites of Passage” ceremonies and classes in “Native drum and flute.”

Scott said he is of European and Cherokee ancestry, though he isn’t sure how much. And, he is Lakota not “by blood ancestry, but by affiliation,” he said. After years of studying various spiritual practices, he had a dream about the Sun Dance, he said. He received permission to dance in South Dakota, he explained.

“During my third Sun Dance, the spirits came to me and said I need to create a center,” he said. Scott said he was “bonneted” at a Texas Sun Dance as a ceremonial leader.

Today, Scott holds Sweat Lodge ceremonies—some of which have included newborn babies, he said—and doctoring, birthing and death ceremonies in the Lakota tradition. He has taught “warriorship practices” to youth and has worked as a Native spiritual adviser at the Napa State Hospital in Marin.

And he takes people on vision quests. “I help people learn how to be human, responsible stewards of the Earth,” he said. “I listen to the directions the ancestors give me.”

Scott is earnest, saying he rarely receives criticism, and that people’s doubts quickly dissipate when they see him in action.

“There is a lot of appropriation of Native practices and tradition,” he said. “There has to be that level of intent and experience that you bring. In time, the spirits will make clear who is legitimate and who is not.”

Squirrelly Love

Just after noon today, there was a strange noise outside my mother’s bedroom. It sounded like someone was trying to get into the house, though the noise stopped suddenly.

I looked out the sliding door to the screened porch,

and saw a classic love triangle being played out, animal-style. Clinging to the screen, upside down, was a large female Sciurus carolinensis, an Eastern Gray Squirrel, and a significantly smaller male, who was obviously attempting to seduce his lady-love.

At the same time, he was fending off the advances of another male, who was perched on the curve of the aluminum downspout and was trying to stare down male #1. Both males were switching their tails threateningly and chattering at one another, though #1 was far more aggressive with it. Periodically he’d leave the female’s side to rush toward male #2, shouting threats and whatnot, then he’d dash back to his woman, who seemed frozen to the screen, tense and unyielding.

Now, it was clear that all three of them saw me. I went out onto the porch so that we wouldn’t lose any more precious air conditioning to the Florida swelter, and they all stared openly at me. But hormones make us bold, and when we are in the grips of something so primal, we care little for convention or circumspection.

After a while, male #2 ran the length of the screened porch—amazing how solid their footing is on such flimsy material as nylon screening!—and ended up directly opposite the couple, likewise upside down. He soon tired of making his challenge from afar, and watched them from the bougainvillea bush, neatly avoiding its thorns.

Male #1 began his seduction in earnest. He sidled up next to the female, then nibbled at her ear, then put a gentle paw around her shoulder. She was unmoved.

He snuggled into her, nuzzled her neck, stroked her back. She pulled back and—I kid you not—slapped away his paw with hers.

Undeterred, he nibbled at her ear again (successfully removing a mite or other bug, apparently), and began a soft “chip-chip—wheeeeze, chip-chip—wheeeeze” that seemed to soothe and entice her. She unfroze, and moved closer to him, but kept her tail tightly down, denying him further access.

Immediately male #2 left the bougainvillea and ran across the roof of the screened porch, then jumped into the fragrant jasmine bush at the end of the house. At first I thought this was the beginning of another confrontation, but it was actually his exit strategy.

The song of love continued, and the female melted, slowly descending the screen; the male was glued to her side. They gently hopped to a chair on the stoop, then quietly slid to the ground. At last, the long-awaited sign: her tail flipped up. And together they crawled under the platform of my gas grill, a very narrow (but considerably more private) space.

I heard a few last chip-chips, and a little rustling, but they were otherwise most discreet in their lovemaking.

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight; Gonna grab some afternoon delight. . . . Sky rockets in flight. Afternoon delight.