Shooting Indians

New Internationalist, June, 1998

directed by Ali Kazimi (Mongrel Media, Toronto, Canada)

`Here I'm called an East Indian,' says Ali Kazimi of his life in Canada. While growing up in India, Kazimi heard the classic myths of the American Red Man, the noble, authentic people who vanished. Once in Canada his desire to find the authentic led him to Native artist Jeff Thomas, a photographer of Iroquois descent, born in Buffalo, New York, now living in Canada.

Thomas's life is a fascinating journey from the grim neighbourhoods of East Buffalo to his work for the National Archives. As an artist he has worked to represent many facets of modern Native life. One set of his portraits shows the before-and-after transformation of pow-wow dancers as they change from their street clothes into traditional dress; even Thomas often doesn't recognize them afterwards. Another series shows historic statues of Indians - often at the feet of an explorer - with Thomas's son posed in front. It is an ironic mode: the mythic brave and the living inheritor of a complex tradition.

Ali Kazimi's film, Shooting Indians, centres on Thomas's struggle with the classic work of Edward Curtis, a white photographer who, during the years 1898 to 1928, created a remarkable record of Native peoples in North America. Curtis's reputation has seen many reversals. Today his work stands as a source and a foil; the images remain deeply disturbing to many Native viewers, in the way that they romanticize, implying that Native peoples, while noble, were doomed. In most of his portraits Curtis insisted that no evidence of white contact be visible. Native leaders posed at his studio or in wilderness landscapes in traditional dress only, no European objects or clothes allowed.

Thomas and Kazimi managed to find the lead actress, now 100 years old, who played a topless Indian princess in a film shot by Curtis on Vancouver Island in 1914 called In the Land of the Head Hunters. To her as well, the Curtis film was a mixed experience - a white man's vision but accurate enough to serve as a delightful home movie from a very different time.

Unfortunately there was no tradition of Indians photographing themselves, says Thomas, and this provides the starting point for his work. His challenge is to show modern Native people as dignified heirs to a rich tradition and as ordinary, unromanticized folks too. But the film is also biography, the portrait of a contemporary. Thomas struggles with marriage, fatherhood, and work. At one point, in the mid-1980s, the film nearly died because Thomas's personal life was in turmoil. In fact Thomas and Kazimi lost track of each other for years, brought together again by chance.

This is a quiet, subtle film, where both subject and filmmaker reveal their evolving ideas, both struggling to show respect for those they photograph, but without a mythic gloss. For Thomas it's a case of studying, not vilifying Curtis. For Kazimi `what has vanished is my image of the mythic, imaginary Red Indian.'

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Reviewers: Louise Gray, Peter Whittaker, Vanessa Baird, Peter Steven

Reviews editor: Vanessa Baird