Atanarjuat: Visual Sovereignty

According to Michelle Raheja, visual sovereignty is “the creative self-representation of Native American visual artists” (Raheja 9). In other words, it is the way that Native American films are able to relay a story with actual information and support from Indigenous people. The main goal of visual sovereignty is to get rid of all stereotypes by using methods that portray real life stories and scenarios in Indigenous people’s lives. One main aspect of visual sovereignty is the usage of oral history from important tribes that help give a background to telling the tale. It is promoted on two critical registers that appeal to the mass; one is to inform the audience about key issues that Native Americans have had to face in their history and current

problems, and another way is to use technologies that produce a feel that makes it possible to stage scenes that incorporate the learned oral traditions.
Atanarjuat presents the film on Inuit land on ice to display a location where Inuit can connect to the area and the circumstances set in that place.

The entire film is spoken in Inuktitut to show how the language is very crucial in telling the story and explain the importance language plays in their culture and everyday lives, from hunting for food to taking care of the elders. The tribes in Atanarjuat consider themselves tribes that have to fight and survive on their land. This characteristic represents visual sovereignty as it is a trait the elders telling the story have also passed down through generations. They are using the methods of visual storytelling to explain actual occurrences within a Native American tribe or family. “Igloolik Isuma Productions, Inc., the company that produced this film, employs ethnographic film conventions to serve didactic purposes within the Inuit communities of Canada, forging much-needed economic opportunities in depressed markets, educating younger generations alienated from community elders and tribal epistemologies through diasporic conditions, and addressing the lingering effects of colonization, natural environments in immediate peril, and high mortality, substance abuse, and incarceration rates in order to expand to future children and the unknowledgeable public” (Raheja 201). Some of the ways that visual sovereignty is seen is by describing the power women have in the Inuit culture, allowing the audience to see how the different gender roles are played out in Native American culture. The filmmakers also pay attention to detail by panning through landscapes slowly and holding on to specific scenes that enable the audience to gather the intensity of the situation. We see different shots from the characters’ daily lives, showing the methodology behind cooking and preparing meat, and the disputes that occur on the ice between the tribes for food or marriage. The filmmaker deliberately took incredibly long shots of people

walking or running across the ice to show the large terrain of land that the Inuit tribe inhabited. The center of the entire story is a curse, or shaman, that is set upon the tribes where they have bad luck in finding enough food to feed everyone. This representation of the spirituality surrounding the two tribes is an example of visual sovereignty as these images display the ethnic origins of the film for American viewers. Through visual sovereignty, the tribes are able to preserve their heritage of their land and tell the story the right way through the media.