Mothering and Care Work in Indigenous Cinema from Québec

Abstract:The recent media focus on unmarked graves at former residential schools throughout Canada has brought fresh discussion of the particular role played by these institutions in the physical and cultural genocide of First Nations peoples. Yet, beyond the residential schools, the shattering of intergenerational ties has been pursued with purpose through manifold attacks on women, mothers, and children, as well as through the suppression of broader communities of care. This article provides a condensed overview of the institutionalized violence targeting First Nations women and children, supporting the notion that, in this context, mothering and care work become intrinsic modes of resistance to genocide. The article goes on to examine cinematic representations that contribute to decolonizing Indigenous motherhood. While important recent work by "relève autochtone" filmmakers pays tribute to strong Indigenous mothers, this article first looks at the roots of this decolonial turn in First Nations' maternal representation, returning to the corpus of Alanis Obomsawin. It then analyzes two relève autochtone films, Mohawk filmmaker Sonia Bonspille Boileau's Le Dep (2015) and Chloé Leriche's Avant les rues (2016), arguing that, while these films may at first seem in some ways complicit with settler stereotypes, they ultimately present a broader, empowering understanding of mothering and care in First Nations communities.Abstract:L'attention récente portée par les médias sur les tombes anonymes trouvées sur les sites de plusieurs anciens pensionnats à travers le Canada a suscité des discussions sur le rôle particulier joué par ces institutions dans le génocide physique et culturel des Premières Nations. Pourtant, au-delà des pensionnats, la destruction des liens intergénérationnels a été délibérément poursuivie à travers de multiples formes d'attaques contre les femmes, les mères et les enfants, ainsi que par l'anéantissement des réseaux communautaires de soins. Cet article offre d'abord un aperçu condensé de la violence institutionnalisée ciblant les femmes et les enfants des Premières Nations, soutenant l'idée que, dans ce contexte, la maternité et le soin (care work) deviennent intrinsèquement des formes de résistance au génocide. L'article examine ensuite de manière critique les représentations cinématographiques qui contribuent à décoloniser la maternité autochtone. Alors que d'importants ouvrages par des cinéastes de la "relève autochtone" rendent hommage aux mères autochtones fortes, cet article s'intéresse d'abord aux racines de ce tournant décolonial dans la représentation maternelle des Premières Nations, en revenant au corpus d'Alanis Obomsawin. Il analyse ensuite deux films de la relève autochtone, Le Dep (2015) réalisé par la cinéaste mohawk Sonia Bonspille Boileau et Avant les rues (2016) de Chloé Leriche, en soutenant que, si ces films peuvent sembler récourir à des stéréotypes colonisateurs, ils présentent en fin de compte une vue plus large et puissante du travail maternel (mothering) et du soin (care) dans les communautés des Premières Nations.

For many, Canada Day 2021 was a day of mourning.In the preceding summer months, ground penetrating radar revealed the unmarked graves of over a thousand children on the premises of several former residential schools throughout the country.Until the last closing in the 1990s, approximately 150,000 children were forced into the residential school system, torn from their families, their cultures, and their languages, and immersed in a world of shame, neglect, and abuse.These institutions were part of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) referred to as a "cultural genocide," which it defines as "the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group" (TRC 2015, 3).This includes geographical dispossession, displacement, and control, as well as linguistic and spiritual prohibitions, and the disruption of families in order "to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next" (ibid.).
The recent media foregrounding of the unmarked graves has brought fresh discussion of the particular role played by these institutions in the break-up of families, and the physical and cultural genocide of First Nations peoples.Events such as these have the potential to trigger a national reckoning.However, the extent to which the shattering of intergenerational ties has been pursued with purpose for many decades, notably through manifold attacks on women, mothers, and children, as well as through the suppression of broader communities of care, has yet to receive adequate attention.

A brief history of institutionalized violence toward Indigenous women and children
Before European colonization, North American Indigenous cultures were largely matrilineal with elaborate female kinship structures.Sana Shahram explains that women were "treated with reverence, as the givers of life.They were seen as the keepers of tradition, practices, and customs, and the decision makers in realms of family, property rights, and education" (Shahram 2017, 14); moreover they "controlled the economy through the distribution of wealth and inheritance" (ibid., 15).1 Dismantling traditional gender roles and power structures, and imposing a patriarchal hierarchy, therefore became instrumental to the colonial project and its goals of destabilizing and assimilating Indigenous societies.
In Canada this was done through legislation that made First Nations women dependent on their fathers and husbands for Indian status, band membership, and residency on reserves, thus tearing apart families and stripping descendants of status as well (Government of Canada 2018).It was only in 2017 that the descendants of women who had lost status became eligible to register.Furthermore, in the 1930s eugenics legislation promoted the forced sterilization of those deemed "mentally defective" or posing a risk of transmitting mental deficits to their progeny.This designation was applied broadly to Indigenous women, whose ethnicity sufficed as a marker of unfit parenthood.Jennifer Brant and Kim Andersen claim that "between 25 and 50 percent of Indigenous women were involuntarily sterilized while they were in the hospital to have children between the 1920s and 1970s" (2021, 721).Far from being a relic of the past, coerced sterilization remains an ongoing practice in Canada, as a recent Senate committee report outlines (Standing Committee on Human Rights 2021).Indigenous women also had to endure having tens of thousands of children taken from them and raised by adoptive or foster settler families throughout Canada and the U.S. during three decades of institutionalized kidnappings, frequently referred to as "scoops."Despite the common reference being the "sixties scoop," variations on this practice have actually increased over time, constituting a veritable contemporary crisis.Brant and Anderson remind us that "the number of Indigenous children in state care is significantly higher than the number of children who attended residential schools, a reality now referred to as the 'millennium scoop '" (2021, 720).In some provinces such as Manitoba, Indigenous children made up 90 percent of child welfare cases in 2020 (ibid.).Part of the reason for the hugely disproportionate rates of removal of children from families is that Indigenous women, frequently mothers, are hyperincarcerated, representing "the fastest-growing prison population in Canada and around the world" (Scott 2019, 81).These women are taken away from their children, often for crimes related to the transgenerational effects of colonialism itself.Their children are generally put into state care and most end up in non-Indigenous families (ibid.).Isabel Scott rightly observes that the interlocking child welfare and prison systems constitute and reinforce colonial and patriarchal beliefs, stereotypes, and practices that actively function to dispossess Indigenous mothers of their children (and Indigenous children of their mothers), cultures, and abilities to reproduce healthy and vibrant Indigenous communities.(2019,79) Indigenous reproductive rights have further been eroded by the policy of birthing evacuations, often taking women hundreds of miles away from their communities and imposing an alienating colonial biomedical model of birth rather than supporting women's traditional birth practices within their communities.These evacuations have sometimes been doubly traumatic in that they include the risks of involuntary sterilization or confiscation of the baby into the child welfare system.
Finally, the political, legal, and social disregard of Indigenous women's lives has placed them in a position of intense vulnerability both within their communities and within the broader settler society.Yet at all levels, from government to law enforcement to the judicial system, state institutions have demonstrated staggering indifference, if not unwillingness, to adequately address the highly disproportionate rates of sexual assault, trafficking, extreme violence, and murder of Indigenous women (National Inquiry 2019).Elizabeth Rule compellingly argues that the normalized nature of this violence "must be understood as both an immediate threat to Indigenous women's lives and a systematic attack on Indigenous nations and cultures" (2018,749).This is because women are both physically and culturally responsible for the reproduction of the nation, and it is precisely because of this role of assuring a future that they are targeted.Native women's bodies are not merely perceived as invisible or disposable; rather, they also represent a threat (conscious or not) to the racial and patriarchal dominance of settler society.As such, sexual violence against Indigenous women is, according to Andrea Smith, nothing less than a "tool of genocide" (2015, 3).In Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Smith proposes that we understand sexual violence broadly, not merely as sexual assault, but also as sterilization, medical experimentation, and environmental racism in its specific impact on women's reproductive health.Smith traces detailed connections between the dehumanization of Indigenous women as "rapable" objects and lands viewed as "inherently violable," outlining how environmentally destructive practices such as nuclear testing and toxic waste disposal on and near Native lands result in widespread birth defects and transgenerational harm (2015,12).
My overview here is, of course, not meant to be exhaustive, but simply to evoke as a system some of the many modes of eroding Indigenous cultures by targeting women and families.None of the phenomena I have sketched above can be treated independently from the others.These are not disconnected and ahistorical issues, though the entire spectrum of neoliberal discourse often presents them as such.Rather, addressing these layers of violence will only be possible once they are correctly framed as deeply entangled collective effects of centuries of colonial rule and of present-day gendered and racist policies, biases, and social norms.

Decolonizing Indigenous motherwork on screen
Under these conditions, when traditional gender roles have been nearly obliterated, and Indigenous mothering and care work are not simply marginalized by the dominant culture but perpetually under attack; when Indigeneity suffices as a condemnation of unfit motherhood;2 when extended networks of care are undermined and dismantled, birthing, mothering (whether by mothers themselves or others in the family or community), and re-establishing kinship networks and a sense of community all become intrinsic forms of resistance and resilience.Under these conditions, too, cultural and aesthetic practices that challenge deficit narratives, give voice to Indigenous women, and represent mothers' and caretakers' crucial roles in connecting past and future become just as important as the relentless political and economic struggles for self-determination.As Neal McLeod asserts, "every time a story is told, every time one word of an Indigenous language is spoken, we are resisting the destruction of our collective memory" (2001,31).Cinema, to the extent that it reaches a wider audience and captures on screen both the visual and aural dimensions of representation, has become a particularly privileged form of "coming home through stories" (McLeod 2001).It can be harnessed as a dynamic strategy of self-definition and communal empowerment.Broadly speaking, cinema in the hands of First Nations' directors can be viewed as yet another form of activism, holding crucial regenerative and healing properties.
The last few decades have seen a flourishing of Indigenous cinematic productions in Canada, and Québec in particular.Miléna Santoro provides an excellent overview of developments in Indigenous filmmaking in the province since the 1960s (2018), and Karine Bertrand has highlighted the specific contributions of First Nations and Inuit women directors (2019; 2020).In just the last five years, as part of what has been termed a relève autochtone, a young generation of women filmmakers has undertaken specifically to represent Indigenous "good" mothers, breaking with colonial and patriarchal stereotypes.Several notable feature fiction films from this growing corpus -Myriam Verreault's Kuessipan (2019),3 Sonia Bonspille Boileau's Rustic Oracle (2019), and Tracey Deer's Beans (2020), among others -represent a clear breakthrough in terms of positive and authentic fictional representation of First Nations mothering for a wider Québécois and even global audience.They foreground strong, sober, present, engaged, and resistant mothers.Even while facing devastating circumstances (domestic abuse; death of a son; abduction and likely murder of a daughter; everyday racism and mob violence), the mothers portrayed in these works directly challenge and transcend the conditions directed against them.These films, of course, denounce oppression and victimization, but they also focus on celebrating maternal agency and resilience.They thus contribute to what Ann Haugo has called "decolonizing motherhood" by making "mother-characters become archetypal figures of strength" (2016,273).
There are, however, drawbacks to a narrow consideration of the novelty of "strong mothers" in this recent body of work.First, looking exclusively at the relève directors may overlook the roots of this decolonial turn in First Nations' maternal representation and miss the opportunity to dialogue with this earlier work.Moreover, defining the decolonial power of a character through readily identifiable "strength" places a certain burden on Indigenous characters that may, in fact, lead away from authenticity.Are films that feature absent, weak, or mediocre mothers necessarily complicit with colonial stereotypes?Can such characters nevertheless hold subversive or resistant potential?Finally, a focus exclusively on mothers themselves may reflect a settler cultural bias to the extent that it obscures the crucial role in Indigenous societies of wider networks of nurturing care including kin and community members.
In this article, I therefore want to both contextualize and complicate our understanding of recent cinematic representations of Indigenous mothering.It is important to remember that, decades ago, the "grandmother" of Indigenous cinema in Québec, Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin, had already undertaken the decolonization of motherwork and care on screen through lyrical documentaries that exemplify the militant and culturally transformative aspects of cinema.I will therefore dwell on the roots of the current emphasis on maternal strength in some of Obomsawin's key films, examining the intense presence of motherwork and care as tools for resisting cultural genocide.I then turn to a broader discussion of the perhaps ambivalent implications of screening less-than-ideal Indigenous mothers, analyzing Mohawk filmmaker Sonia Bonspille Boileau's Le Dep (2015) and "métis" director Chloé Leriche's Avant les rues (2016).4Neither of these works has a mother protagonist, nor even features motherhood in any substantial narrative way.Beyond pointing to Indigenous mothers and children as being what Shahram has called the "literal site of intergenerational trauma" (2017, 25), how do these films nevertheless contribute to decolonizing motherwork and care?Throughout this article, rather than the comparatively static notion of "motherhood," I will invoke the terms motherwork and mothering.This terminology is, first, a theoretical gesture that emphasizes diversity of experience and action over a supposedly stable and generalizable state linked to patriarchal gender relations (O'Reilly 2008, 3).5 Second, I use these terms to open this notion to a broader conceptualization of care as being performed by a variety of people in a wide range of contexts.While I insist on the specific roles of biological mothers, I also include the nurturing provided by kinship networks including men, as well as care provided through broader community structures.I also want to acknowledge care directed out toward the community or even nature itself.My conception of Indigenous motherwork here is informed by intersectional reflections on the radical political potential of care work in situations of continued racist and colonial oppression, such as bell hooks's notion of "homeplace as a site of resistance and liberation struggle " (1990, 43).This approach should not be confused with fundamental positions in feminist and queer thought that seek to champion the rights of women within patriarchal societies or distance motherhood from its profound ties to womanhood.Because of the matrilineal and egalitarian traditions informing many Indigenous tribal societies, as well as the intersectional nature of challenges they face to motherwork and care, Western feminism -centered around the experiences and needs of white women -has been seen by many Indigenous thinkers as at best irrelevant and at worst complicit with colonial ideology.Patricia Hill Collins (2021) has brilliantly articulated the need for a specific maternal theory addressing the motherwork performed by women of color, including Indigenous women.6Collins explains that women of color have long "performed motherwork that challenges social constructions of work and family as separate spheres, of male and female gender roles as similarly dichotomized, and of the search for autonomy as the guiding human quest" (2021,172).Along similar lines, Lisa Udel (2001) maintains that Native women's struggles have far less to do with liberal notions of individual autonomy and "rights," which predominate in settler feminism and queer theory, than with commitments to traditions and responsibilities.In light of all the systematic and continuing attacks on Indigenous reproduction and care that I mentioned earlier, pride in procreation and a "strategic use of a motherist stance" become crucial pieces in a larger struggle for collective survival (Udel 2001, 43).Another aspect of the resistance to genocide is recognizing "the importance of men to the revitalization of Native communities" and understanding how supporting men dealing with the destruction of their traditional roles leads to the "the solidification of a communal, extended network of support that acts as the family" (Udel 2001, 55).The two relève autochtone films that I discuss in the second half of this paper center, in fact, on young men whose struggles stem partly from an existential disorientation due to the loss of traditional male roles.
Mothering and care in a state of war While all of Alanis Obomsawin's films emerge from a resistant Indigenous female gaze, it is particularly Mother of Many Children (1977) and My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995) that foreground mothers and the specific roles and challenges Indigenous women face within the Canadian settler colonial system.These pivotal documentaries upend settler stereotypes of both a pure, natural motherhood and a selfish, unfit motherhood by valorizing real mothers and care work.They function as ethnographic and political records that counter decades of cinematic and media misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples.Jennifer Gauthier explains that Obombsawin's films "document the experiences of women who have made significant contributions to the struggle for sovereignty and recognition, helping to shape modern Indigeneity" (2010, 39).As "active participants in history" (ibid.), the women's voices dominate the screen: their life stories, descriptions of rituals, and testimonies, as well as Obomsawin's own guiding voice.7By allowing these voices to resonate and intermingle, multiple modes of gendered colonial silencing are, at least momentarily, broken.
Mother of Many Children is a highly fragmented tribute to Indigenous womanhood, mothering, and care work.The film moves in a meandering fashion from one woman's life story to another, occasionally circling back, without any overarching narrative or clear structuring principle.From rice harvesting to throat singing, from coming-of-age rituals to traditional crafts, from residential schools to alcoholism and incarceration, from art to political engagement, Mother of Many Children offers an authentic portrait of Indigenous women in various life stages and from numerous tribes throughout Canada.What is constant throughout the film is the intense presence of mothering and its resistance to genocide, albeit not in any simplistically redemptive way.
Obomsawin appropriates an ethnographic discourse that had long been the privilege of the colonial gaze and deploys it from an Indigenous perspective.In doing so, she not only provides a corrective panorama of Indigenous experiences, but also creates a critique of Canadian society that puts its most marginalized populations at the center.The film's fragmentary aesthetic is due in part to the piecemeal funding Obomsawin had to obtain gradually over the course of the filming process, forcing her to complete it in discrete segments.However, the fragmented form is extremely consequential in that it both reflects the physical and cultural disruption of First Nations' communities and registers the efforts to resist it by gathering the pieces of this shattered heritage.There is a notable refusal of linearity and message with which standard Western documentaries unfold.Instead, the interviews cover an immense range of experiences and situations in what Bertrand has called a "patchwork quilt" (2020, 78).This metaphor is particularly apt, likening Obomsawin's gathering of stories and experiences to a material craft passed down and altered through generations, registering the presence of each in a meaningful way.It implicitly turns the filmmaker's process into an act of motherwork.Obomsawin is not simply depicting, but also actively contributing to the preservation and reconstruction of Indigenous cultural traditions.Moreover, if we understand children as metaphorically standing in for Indigenous nations, Obomsawin acts as a "mother of nations" herself,8 performatively constructing a transtribal solidarity through her film.Randolph Lewis has accurately described how the outcome of Obomsawin's juxtaposed interviews and "lateral movement is a feeling that all these women are connected, despite differences in language, tribal affiliation, educational background, and geography" (Lewis 2006, 41).There is an irony in the title, however, since the documentary neither privileges Obomsawin herself nor any of the women she portrays.The setup is not that of a biblical "mother of nations."If there is a singular "mother of nations," it is Earth viewed through Indigenous spirituality.Naturally connected to this Mother, each woman depicted, regardless of her age or status, is in some ways engaged in motherwork.Each shares in being responsible, even potentially, for her nation and for the land.And each stands for what Gerald Vizenor (2008) termed "survivance" and a broader resistance of First Nations peoples to genocide.This is not merely a matter of physical reproduction and care, but also leadership and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and culture.
Obomsawin's film presents its subjects compassionately without ever reducing them to victim status, even where they are confronted with immense suffering.She dwells instead on the vibrancy of Native communities and the strength of their people within the colonial apparatus.Nevertheless, the film does not allow viewers to disentangle the celebration of survival from the backdrop of colonial history and contemporary oppression.Thus, an extended family singing peacefully to celebrate the birth of a child is juxtaposed with the issue of birth evacuations and the medicalization of traditional birthing rituals; images of women sharing ancient basket weaving knowledge with each other in a Montréal art cooperative are accompanied by a voiceover reminding viewers that this modern venue represents a necessary strategy of cultural survival, as the generational transmission of such crafts has been radically interrupted; and a grandmother teaching her grandchildren how to make dolls out of fallen leaves recalls that she never saw her own grandmother again after she and her siblings were forcibly taken to a residential school.
Obomsawin's film makes clear that oppression is not in the past; not only does it have ongoing intergenerational effects, but it also continues its work through every branch of society, from the educational system and media to the justice system and economic and political policy.As Caitlyn Doyle has observed with respect to other films by Obomsawin, the filmmaker "upsets this [colonial] dream of a historical cut that insulates the colonial present from its past," where settler violence would somehow "belong to a past beyond responsibility or retribution" (Doyle 2022, 110).In this sense, Mother of Many Children is as much a celebration of First Nations women, mothers, grandmothers, and resilient communities, as it is a call to action.As Lewis has argued, "Obomsawin's message is subtle but clear: Vulnerability can be overcome through solidarity and resistance.Start your own schools; launch your own lawsuits; tell your own stories" (2006,42).Each woman, no matter how young or old, how strong or suffering, is a role model to Indigenous viewers, her stories and struggles portrayed as central to keeping traditions alive, inspiring the youngest generations, and fighting for equality and sovereignty.
Obomsawin's series of documentaries around the Kanehsatake Resistance also address this intersection between mothering, care work, and resistance to genocide.The seminal Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) offers a crucial Indigenous perspective on the events commonly known as the "Oka Crisis," a 78-day standoff between Mohawk warriors, their families, and supporters with police and the Canadian army.The conflict was triggered by a developer's incursion on Mohawk burial grounds and sacred land in order to realize controversial plans to build a housing development and expand a golf course.This local dispute escalated to national proportions with the Mohawks' occupation of the Mercier Bridge, critical to commuter traffic.While mainstream media provided a heavily one-sided account of the blockade, and many attempts were made to discourage and restrict journalists from covering the conflict on the ground, Obomsawin remained behind the barricades, risking her life and safety to document this important struggle and stand in solidarity with the Mohawks.Kanehsatake offers a detailed chronological account of the resistance, framing it within the larger historical context of territorial dispossession of the Mohawk people.Obomsawin's extensive footage provided material for three follow-up films, including Spudwrench (1998), Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000), and My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995), which focuses on a particular Mohawk activist and mother, who was arrested and detained longer than others simply for refusing to give a non-Native name to authorities.
It is striking how central women, children, and families are in the entire Kanehsatake series.Part of the reason for this is strategic -just as Obomsawin believed her filming would "have a restraining effect on the army" (Lewis 2006, 93), the presence of women and children in this dangerous context served, hypothetically at least, as a calming force: a reminder to both sides that this is a peaceful occupation.9Indeed, throughout Kanehsatake, women are shown speaking publicly in protests and negotiations, pacifying tense situations and occasionally holding men back physically (see Figure 1).Early on in the film, activist Ellen Gabriel explains that it was clear when the police presence intensified that "the women have to go to the front because it's our obligation to do that, to protect the land, to protect our mother."Gabriel sets up the role of women as peacekeepers and equal participants in the defense of the land, but also frames the conflict in terms of a maternal symbolism that partly brings together the opposing actors in the struggle, since the land is ultimately the mother of all people.
At times, the film frames settlers symbolically as children in need of guidance.One woman who was almost hurt by an army flare scolds a soldier and hits him over the head as though she were disciplining a delinquent child (see Figure 1).Gabriel claims that, unprepared to encounter defiant families rather than troublemakers, the SWAT team was scared of them: They were like young babies who had never met something so strong, who had never met a spirit.Because we were fighting something without spirit.There was no thought to it.They were like robots.
Designating the SWAT team as "young babies" diminishes their authority and places them in a position of naiveté, while invoking the spiritual power stemming from the millennial temporality of Indigenous cultures.Furthermore, the periphrase "something without a spirit" correctly situates the struggle beyond local economic and political interests, on ideological and metaphysical territory, recognizing the profound mystification of the colonizers.
Beyond ensuring that the land is held peacefully, the families' presence ties into an explicit preoccupation with the notion of legacy.The question voiced by several of the warriors and thematically grounding this series of films is not merely that of the outcome of this particular conflict, but mainly one of intergenerational transmission: What will the children see and learn?What will be passed down to the grandchildren?My Name is Kahentiiosta responds most directly to these questions.It opens with simultaneously beautiful and troubling stills of Kahentiiosta's children amidst the conflict (see Figure 2).
These images exemplify how strikingly out of place children seem in such a confrontation, dressed in military clothes and surrounded by barbed wire.At the same time, they seem calm, reassured, and defiant.Numerous children and even babies were purposefully included by their parents in the Kanehsatake Resistance, and their presence is treated naturally by Obomsawin in the films.Lest this seem irresponsible, lest Kahentiiosta be labeled an "unfit mother" for putting her children in danger, she explains: I don't want my children killed.But I want them to see the struggle we're going through.This isn't for us, this isn't for me.I'm not here because I want to be.I'd rather be home like everybody else!But when the younger ones see what happened they'll be stronger.
Including the children in the defense of the land is thus viewed as a necessary aspect of mothering and care work.Immersion in the collective struggle is a mode of instruction in the process of resistance.Kahenstiiosta is clear that it is not easy, that she would rather they be home safe, but she insists it is matter of responsibility, of a generational duty towards a collective future.That is, "being home" would only provide a temporary physical safety.The children's long-term safety and the strength of their cultural identity depends on their presence in the space of dissent and armed struggle.One of the most lyrical scenes in any of Obomsawin's films captures this resistance to genocide through motherwork.10Kahentiiosta snuggles with one of her children by a fire, and the child points to a fallen projectile, asking her what it is."Nothing," the mother says at first, trying to avoid the topic.The child insists, asking if it's some sort of bomb.Kahentiiosta confirms, saying that it's poison and explaining that it makes you sick.In Kahentiiosta, the soundtrack foregrounds Kahentiiosta singing a lullaby to cover the helicopter noise as the camera films the moving light in the sky.Meanwhile the warmth of the firelight is directly contrasted with the searchlight shining down from a military helicopter.Obomsawin captures the opposition brilliantly, pointing again towards the higher-order conflict behind this land struggle, that between natural connection and surveillance society, between spirit and machine.A parallel scene in Kanehsatake shows four children with a man who, amid all the tension, is teaching them about types of trees and then giving them lessons in Mohawk.A helicopter drowns out their voices and they have to cover their ears.These are not "digressions," as Jerry White has suggested of Obomsawin's at times poetic style, but rather at the heart of the message of these documentaries.11These scenes pay tribute to mothering and care work under siege, making visible the crucial role of women in comforting little ones who are essentially experiencing a state of war and the community's dedication to building and maintaining identity and solidarity in resistance.
These documentaries have inspired filmmakers of the relève autochtone, who have turned to the intimate in order to explore the devastating impact of systemic colonial attacks on families and to celebrate strong women and mothers in the ongoing struggle against colonialism.In some recent fiction films, such as Boileau's Rustic Oracle or Deer's Beans, the focus is on defiant and resilient singular mothers that shatter settler stereotypes.These films share with the documentary genre a palpable didacticism in their approach.They dialogue indirectly with Obomsawin's work in terms of the emphasis on the presence of children in adult spaces of conflict.Both are told from the perspective of Indigenous children and are deeply concerned with what the child protagonists see, hear, and experience, as well as the impact that witnessing violence and resistance has on their development.Beans, moreover, directly pays tribute to Obomsawin by framing a coming-of-age story taking place during the Oka Crisis through the question of naming.The protagonist, Tekahentahkhwa/ Beans becomes aware of the symbolic importance of her name through her participation in the Kanehsatake Resistance.Referencing Kahentiiosta, Deer begins and closes the film with the line "My name is Tekahentahkhwa," carrying vastly different meanings at each point in the narrative.Rustic Oracle and Beans portray Indigenous womanhood and motherhood within settler society as an experience fundamentally haunted by vulnerability and intergenerational trauma when it is not already a work of mourning.Motherwork emerges not only as the burden to provide extraordinary protection and consolation to children, but also as the duty to include them in the quest for justice.Both stories are profoundly inspirational and merit a close anaysis of their depiction of decolonial mothering.For the purpose of this article, however, I am interested in what happens when mother figures fail to be extraordinary.Can cinematic representations of mothers who are ordinary, flawed, or absent still carry a decolonial message?

Absent mothers and vagabonds
Do Indigenous mothers have to be represented as identifiably "strong" in order for a film to qualify as doing decolonial work?Two relève films stand out in their seemingly opposite take on motherhood.Both Boileau's Le Dep and Leriche's Avant les rues focus on troubled young men, portray absent or less-than-ideal mothers and children, and depict a narrative that is ostensibly abstracted from the settler colonial context.In fact, as I discuss below, both films may even seem at first to reinforce negative stereotypes often found in mainstream media.Ultimately, however, they can both be read as being inscribed within a broader definition of mothering and care work and as making a claim for the urgent necessity of re-establishing networks of love and support as a mode of resistance against colonial alienation.
The entirety of Boileau's first feature fiction film Le Dep unfolds within the walls of an isolated convenience store, where Lydia (Eve Ringuette), a young Innu woman who has returned to her community as an adult, is covering the evening shift for another worker and must safeguard the $50,000 of social assistance benefits entrusted to her by her father, the store owner.This money is to be distributed to community members the following day.We see her cleaning, stocking shelves, meeting her non-Indigenous boyfriend who is a police officer and calmly fending off the advances of a drunk family friend, Régis (Robert-Pierre Côté), before a masked man enters the store, demanding the welfare cash at gunpoint.Lydia refuses, then quickly realizes the robber is her brother, P.A. (Charles Buckell-Robertson).He is struggling with withdrawal symptoms and desperately needs $4,000 to pay off a drug dealer in Montréal who will otherwise kill him.Lydia continues to refuse, explaining that he needs help, and that she won't take part in slowly killing him.The remainder of the film is a tense huis-clos standoff revealing various elements of the family history and the trauma that the children, particularly P.A., have had to endure.
Motherhood is ostensibly absent here, but I suggest that this very absence of the mother is the point of the film.The climax consists of a brief but crucial break in the diegesis, when P.A. has a flashback of a party where, as a very young child, he discovers his mother dead from alcohol poisoning and is then blamed and beaten by his father.Unable to grasp what happened or say goodbye because he is violently shoved away from her, P.A.'s body gradually shrinks into the background, his head almost merging with the mother through the camera's slow zoom out (see Figure 3).
While the mother's inert body within this memory is her only moment of representation, she nevertheless haunts the film, as that traumatic moment is, in a sense, embodied by P.A., whose life  Dep (2015) showing the camera's zoom out.This sequence begins with a close up of a terrified P.A. then shifts emphasis to the mother's body before slowly effacing him behind his mother's face as his father occupies the left part of the frame.becomes a form of living death.We see that the mother's fate haunts Lydia and others as well, when Régis drunkenly reminisces about the parties Lydia and P.A.'s parents would throw.He concludes somberly by lauding Lydia's courage in running away at 15: "Chuis content que tu t'en es sortie pendant que t'étais encore jeune.Je pense pas que personne veut te voir finir comme ta mère."We learn shortly afterward during P.A.'s key monologue that the parents would go on drinking binges for days, leaving the children without food, and that Lydia would brush her mother's hair and clean up her vomit to make her look presentable in front of DPJ (Direction de la protection de la jeunesse) officials.The film thus seems to rely on several stereotypes: a community dependent on welfare, an alcoholic, "unfit" mother, an abusive father, a drug addicted son.Yet it also subtly challenges them.The mention of the DPJ is negatively charged, evoking the constant state surveillance of Indigenous families through the lens of settler ideals and the fear and sense of inadequacy instilled in children and families by this institution.Furthermore, in what seems to be the hopeful message of the film, Lydia mentions that "people change" and relates to P.A. how hard their father worked to sober up.Régis's drunk presence, his mention of the binging parties and of his wife who drinks as much as he, serve as reminders that alcoholism and substance abuse more generally are a communal issue.They are what Jeff Barnaby referred to as "the art of forgetfulness" in Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013).Their causes cannot be separated from the legacy and ongoing forms of colonialism that promote the destruction of kinship ties and cultural traditions.And their solution cannot be left up to individuals to seek treatment, as the neoliberal model pretends.P.A. mocks his sister's suggestion that he seek help; he rejects both a settler-style therapy and a traditional sweat lodge as out of touch with the reality he is facing.
Instead, the exchange itself between P.A. and Lydia, largely at gunpoint, becomes the therapy.P.A. is able to voice his trauma; he is able to express his blame of the parents but also of Lydia, who ran away without taking him with her, leaving him to face his devastated mother's death and even worse abuse.P.A.'s accusations frame her as a second absent mother, perhaps even as his primary maternal figure.The two characters gradually deescalate and find compassion and forgiveness towards each other.Moreover, throughout the night, Lydia saves P.A.'s life by covering up his presence in the store to both her father and boyfriend.Through the help she extends her brother, ultimately giving him the money he needs, but primarily by listening and challenging him to find the strength to start over, Lydia is herself portrayed as performing a kind of motherwork.If P.A., like his mother, embodies the site of trauma under the colonial regime, the care Lydia offers her estranged brother works to untether him from this space and undo some of this intergenerational harm.
The film ends with a dramatic 360-degree tracking shot around Lydia caught between P.A. and her father, preventing them from shooting at one another and intervening when her father reflexively begins beating him (see Figure 4).Reminiscent of the restraint women bring in Obomsawin's documentaries about Kanehsatake, this shot conveys the life-and-death tension surrounding Lydia at that moment, but also highlights Lydia's courage and incites us to read her character, and perhaps the entire film, allegorically.To the extent that she is working in a family business, involved with a non-Indigenous Québécois policeman, and in charge of distributing welfare money, she holds a strong symbolic dimension at the intersection of the Innu community and the wider Québécois society and state.She incarnates a steadfast resistance to the conditions imposed by colonialism as well as its ill-suited solutions (she does not ultimately give in to putting P.A. in the hands of the police, for example).And by promoting and enacting forgiveness, responsibility, reconciliation, and healing, she acts as a metaphorical mother protecting both her family and the integrity and futurity of her Innu community.
The same themes of crime, compassion, and healing are foundational for Chloé Leriche's Avant les rues (Before the Streets) as well.This is the first feature fiction film to be shot in the Atikamekw language.It follows the story of a teenage boy in the reserve village of Manawan, named Shawnouk (Rykko Bellemare), who crosses paths with a white burglar looking for someone to guide him around the remote area's unmarked dirt roads (hence the film's title).When the owner of one of the hunting chalets they enter returns, and the burglar attempts to kill him, Shawnouk intervenes but accidentally kills his criminal companion.He then runs into the woods, struggling with the trauma of this act.Unable to find peace and plagued by a more generalized sense of purposelessness, he attempts to kill himself.Finally, he goes on a retreat to a sweat lodge where he undertakes, skeptically at first, a variety of traditional healing rituals in the company of a few others.Returning to his family we see him smiling for the first time, and ready, if need be, to assume responsibility for what happened.
Although the film's intense narrative of the male protagonist overshadows any representation of motherhood, female characters in fact help frame the film, and these women, alongside a more communitarian form of care rooted in traditional culture, allow Shawnouk to coincide with himself, to find a sense of pride and a voice.In Before the Streets there are two mothers: Shawnouk's sister Kwena (Kwena Bellemare-Boivin) who is a young single mom and their mother, Anita (Janis Ottawa).Kwena is very much a teenager, dressing in baggy boyish clothes, smoking pot with her brother and listening to booming music in her room while her mother watches her baby, occasionally nagging her to come take care of her daughter and pet bird.There is a sweet matterof-factness about Kwena's role as a teen mother that jars with Western conceptions; in the settler context, this character would surely be at the center of some dramatic arc.Instead, Leriche's normalizing gaze works against stereotypes of Indigenous teen motherhood as a negative statistic and marker of some sort of shortcoming or failure in a linear, bourgeois vision of life's journey.It highlights what Joëlle Papillon has described, in relation to Naomi Fontaine's novel Kuessipan, as "la solidité des filles plutôt que leur victimisation" (2019,42).Just like in Fontaine, or in Myriam Verreault's cinematic adaptation of Kuessipan, teen motherhood expressed through Leriche's portrayal of Kwena liberates her from the grille d'évaluation à travers laquelle les Occidentaux ont tendance à évaluer la valeur des filles et des femmes; cette 'grille' se base notamment sur l'apparence physique, mais aussi sur leur conformité à un parcours spécifique, dont la maternité adolescente est résolument exclue.(Papillon 2019, 43) Papillon explains that contemporary Indigenous maternity must partly be understood against the historical colonial background I sketched at the beginning of this article: residential schools, scoops, forced sterilization, imprisonment, child welfare, and abduction.
The first scene of the diegesis is of Anita playing outside with her granddaughter.It sets up the central motif and metaphorical framework of the film.As Shawnouk enters the frame and walks towards his mother to the right, a vagabond dog conspicuously crosses his path moving left (see Figure 5).This, combined with Anita's question about Kwena's absence ("Where do you go when you disappear?"),immediately poses the possibility that the unemployed, wandering youth appearing throughout the film are being compared to the vagabond dogs with no real sense of belonging.Indeed, Shawnouk's fateful encounter with the burglar occurs precisely because he is loafing around the corner store.Vagabond dogs appear in numerous scenes, but their presence is emphasized once Shawnouk returns after the crime and his stepfather, Paul-Yves, forces him to find work and stay out of trouble.Shawnouk is given the task of assisting with the Squad d'Intervention Canine.He must first bag a dead dog that's been run over, and then when inquiring about his role, he is told that he'll gather up dogs that are sick, that bite, or that don't belong to anyone and gas them (see Figure 6).And, in the meantime, he is required to provide them with basic necessities, getting them food and cleaning their cages.At this point, Shawnouk's unintentional crime is likened to a "bite" and he is facing the real possibility of imprisonment.The systematic nature of this canine control and extermination process shifts the meaning of the extended metaphor to the Indigenous population as a whole.Leriche seems to be using the dogs as a commentary on the state's treatment and "management" of Indigenous peoples, through omnipresent surveillance, disproportionate judicial penalties, and hyperincarceration.We understand that the vagabond metaphor actually reflects the settler gaze on Indigenous people, who are dehumanized and treated as though they have no culture, traditions, or proper family ties.Whether it's the prison system or the DPJ taking children that don't "belong to anyone" into state control because the parents are deemed unfit, the effect is the same: dehumanization and genocide, clearly evoked by the gassing.
Shawnouk is profoundly disturbed by the first cycle of this work he has to complete, and upon returning home attempts to hang himself, an act which can be read as partly as a mode of exerting some sort of agency rather than simply becoming a victim of the system.What follows, however, is Leriche's forceful resistance against the vagabond metaphor, since Shawnouk's whole family enters his room in shock and each person begins to weep alongside him, literally enveloping him and each other in layers of love (see Figure 7).
Moreover, because the two mothers play a background role in the film, Leriche is able to explore a wide range of care roles that challenge stereotypical portrayals of irremediable alienation, alcohol/ substance abuse, and violence.Anita's more prominent role as a grandmother than as a mother insists on the continuation of more traditional extended family structures.Her partner, Paul-Yves, is a rather austere police officer who repeatedly clashes with Shawnouk.Yet he nevertheless instinctively covers for his stepson by hiding evidence, giving a fictional alibi, making him get a job, and offering his emotional support whether Shawnouk decides to confess or not.Leriche further undoes the vagabond metaphor in a more profound sense by highlighting the presence and importance of the Atikamekw community beyond the extended family unit.When Shawnouk wanders through the woods after the crime, he comes across a young girl requesting help for her grandmother who has fallen.Shawnouk comes to assist the old woman and immediately she senses that he is tired and in trouble.She feeds him and forces him to rest overnight, caring for him without judgment.She also gives him some herbs and advises him to go to the sweat lodge.Once there, Shawnouk is supported in his healing process by several other men struggling with various difficulties.As he begins to find his voice, literally through drumming and singing, the film cuts to extradiegetic images of a powwow, perhaps a nod to the similar closing sequence of Obomsawin's Mother of Many Children, which ends with a powwow featuring a voiceover by a young woman saying: We have our language, music, art and our religious things that we need to keep.This is what we should be emphasizing now.There's all kinds of people who are lost right now 'cause they have no identity, and if you have a strong tie with your own people and you can look back at your traditions, well, that really makes you a lot stronger.That helps you in all the everyday difficulties.
Before the Streets is a fictional exploration of this same message.It recognizes the extended networks of care and the surviving traditions that ground First Nations communities and replace alienation with a situated and resounding voice.

Conclusion
Media attention has recently begun to focus on the scandal of residential schools, often presenting these institutions as part of a closed chapter of Canada's colonial history, but the multifaceted ways in which the state and settler society continue to contribute to the breakdown of family and community networks of care still remain silenced in the public discourse.Québec's Indigenous directors have countered this silence through their documentary and fiction work over the last decades, bringing increased attention to the central role played by women and mothers in resisting physical and cultural genocide.Alanis Obomsawin's work remains critical in any discussion of First Nations motherhood, and her films are often referenced by the younger generation of filmmakers making their voice heard through the relève autochtone.While recent fiction films such as Beans or Rustic Oracle follow closely in Obomsawin's footsteps, paying tribute to strong mothers who defy settler stereotypes, this article has sought to examine the decolonial potential behind films with ambivalent maternal representations.Both Le Dep and Before the Streets ostensibly focus on individual young men struggling with traumatic events.However, I have shown how their individual fates are tied in different ways to the collective oppression of the colonial apparatus as it seeks to create "vagabonds."In both cases, like Obomsawin's documentaries, the films portray a broadened understanding of motherwork and care, recognizing that "individual survival, empowerment, and identity require group survival, empowerment, and identity" (Collins 2021, 273).Through seemingly intimate psychological dramas, Boileau and Leriche both ultimately examine this communal survival and empowerment.They make the case that collective presencing relies on a broad understanding of resilient mothering as well as a re-valorization of kinship and community ties in which women's roles are essential.

Acknowledgment
I dedicate this article with my warmest gratitude to my mother, whose loving care for her newborn granddaughter made finalizing this work possible.Part of this analysis was presented at the Biennial Conference of the American Council for Québec Studies (ACQS) in Baltimore in October 2023.
Notes 1 See Paula Gunn Allen's seminal work The Sacred Hoop (1986), which remains one of the most extensive overviews of women's roles in Indigenous societies in North America, as well as the collection Mothers of the Nations (Lavell-Harvard and Anderson 2014) for a global overview of contemporary issues facing Indigenous women. 2 A particularly intense display of this logic and rhetoric is discussed in Elizabeth Rule's "Seals, Selfies and the Settler State" (2018), on the violent online attacks directed at Tanya Tagaq and her baby daughter in response to her "sealfie," a reminder to well-meaning animal rights activists that seal hunting is economically and culturally essential for the Inuit people.3 Myriam Verreault is not a First Nations filmmaker, but I mention Kuessipan here because it is a collaborative production with Innu writer Naomi Fontaine and the Uashat community, such that it can reasonably be included under the rubric of the "relève autochtone" for the decolonial work it performs.4 When asked about her sense of legitimacy to make this film, Leriche asserts her extensive work with the Wapikoni mobile project and the fact that she had recently learned that her father was "métis" (Gendron 2016, 6).It is unclear if she simply means of blended Indigenous and Franco-Québécois origin or seeking a more official status of recognition as Métis.In any case, I count Avant les rues as an Indigenous film because of its all-Native cast, collaborative production process, and culturally informed perspective, although I recognize this label may be controversial.
5 See Andrea O'Reilly 's Feminist Mothering (2008) for one version of the opposition between mothering and motherhood.While I would not adhere to any rigid boundaries between these terms (can motherhood really be reduced to a male-defined institution?),I do believe that mothering and motherwork have become more theoretically empowering concepts.6 I would add that the remnants and revitalization of traditional tribal community structures make Indigenous women's relationship with maternity quite unique within the general label "women of color," which has in part been co-opted by neoliberal culture.7 Several critics have noted the importance of Obomsawin's voiceovers in her oeuvre, which mark a refusal to "hide behind a faceless false objectivity" (White 1999, 31).While White and Gauthier insist on framing this aesthetic as the influence of Griersonian didacticism, which, they claim, Obomsawin appropriates and uses against the colonizers, Bertrand and Santoro productively link this culturally informed subjectivity to oral storytelling traditions.Bertrand claims that Obomsawin's aesthetic has contributed to "indigenization of film" (2019, 105).8 I am playing here on both the biblical reference and the uniting impulse behind the volume by Lavell-Harvard and Anderson entitled Mothers of the Nations.9 To the extent, however, that women and families represent the reproduction and resilience of Indigenous societies, they were also specifically targeted for shaming and violence, as in the case of the racist mob attack at Whiskey Trench.10 Different versions of this same scene are found in both Kahentiiosta and Kanehsatake.11 Miléna Santoro has also found Obomsawin's lyricism important, claiming that "far from being 'at odds' with the documentary form, [it] in fact constitutes an essential strategy in Obomsawin's creation of a visual sovereignty that results in both individual and collective self-assertion" (2018,337).

Figure 1
Figure 1 Stills from Alanis Obomsawin's Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) showing Mohawk women scolding warriors and soldiers in order to keep the occupation peaceful.

Figure 2
Figure 2 Stills from Alanis Obomsawin's My Name is Kahentiiosta (1995) showing the activist's children at the site of the conflict.

Figure 3
Figure 3 Stills from Sonia BonspilleBoileau's Le Dep (2015)  showing the camera's zoom out.This sequence begins with a close up of a terrified P.A. then shifts emphasis to the mother's body before slowly effacing him behind his mother's face as his father occupies the left part of the frame.

Figure 4
Figure 4 360-degree tracking shot still from Le Dep.

Figure 6
Figure 6 Stills showing vagabond dogs from Avant les rues.

Figure 7
Figure 7 After Shawnouk's suicide attempt in Avant les rues.