Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man
(Canada, 77 min.)
Dir. Sinakson Trevor Solway
Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World premiere)
From the earliest days of cinema, the image of the taciturn “Indian” has been employed to evoke a near silent yet compelling individual. These weren’t stories focused on hearing the inner thoughts and feelings of these individuals, merely using them as narrative fodder as a mode of otherness, erasing almost all motivation in favour of displaying acts of “savagery” that the dominant culture was tasked with erasing. Indigenous clothing was exoticised to be mere “costume,” the internal emotional drives and inner lives of the members of that community were presented as opaque as the desires of a body of water or the flow of wind over the plains.
Just as the these stereotypical representations have been consistently interrogated over the last few decades, as more and more First Nation people pick up cameras to tell their own stories, so too have the very notions of masculinity that many of these films perpetuated been reason for introspection. The question of what it means to be a cowboy, a musician, a teammate, a father, or a friend, with all the societal and generational trauma that these relationships evoke, is explicitly at the heart of Sinakson Trevor Solway’s gentle yet probing film Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man.
Solway brings his camera to the Siksika Nation, just east along the train line from Calgary, Alberta. We meet many individuals from the community, from radio DJs to rodeo riders, each in their own way contributing to the culture. There are additional elements of Canadian iconography on display, from hockey games to Tim Horton’s cups in the arena, that border on stereotypical. However, the sense of the quotidian permeates the film and gives it much of its power, reflecting upon those elements that do conform to notions of integration within common society.
Yet even here there are hints of additional challenges. We see one individual blow into a breathalizer so that he can operate his car, a reminder of the scourge that alcohol continues to wreak on so many communities—an often-weaponized factor used to stupefy those who fight valiantly for their people. There’s a gentle discussion about the breaking of speed laws, the flashing of a badge by one member a reminder of the challenging relationship between outside law enforcement and those within their territorial control. Only the washboard roads, almost un-drivable through neglect, serve as true deterrence rather than a fear of being pulled over by a cop.
We see community ceremonies and grand exposure at the likes of Calgary’s famous stampede, employing horse craft that goes back generations, dances and drumming that evoke ancestral celebrations, and hockey checks into the boards that are the absolute equivalent to any small town in the country we commonly call Canada.
It’s not simply the actions, but the words of these individuals that Solway teases out that go beyond what’s often portrayed on screen. There’s an immediacy and intimacy in what the director is able to show, peering behind what’s commonly hidden or simply ignored in favour of broader, more simplistic visions of what life on the “rez” is truly like.
There are darker exemplars of how Indigenous life has previously been portrayed, often through a calculating, anthropological lens. The notion of exoticism, feeding external fascinations for the trappings of these cultures while retaining a certain distance to whom they are interrogating, is further baked into the films that Solway counters here.. These walls are broken down through Solway’s gentle yet effective storytelling.
Some of the most charming moments are when people question why the camera is there in the first place, from a kid coming over to hang out with a friend, when a frog is in need of some resuscitation, or a time where it’s placed gingerly on the snow in order to help mend a fence. It’s a reminder, and a welcome one, that despite all the sensitivity of the filmmaker, the camera is still an intruder into regular life, one that may be tolerated or even embraced at times, but still an interloper nonetheless.
Then there are stories told of these men about their own struggles and desires, be it in the form of winning a hockey game, or simply coming to terms with the breakdown of a relationship. There’s nothing palpably academic or psychoanalytic about these revelations—they’re just factual truths of these individuals raising their kids in ways that differ from their own childhood experiences, finding modalities both large and small to break patterns for the betterment of future generations.
So while the revelations are few, and are at best subtle, it’s through this quiet immersion that Siksikakowan succeeds. The film serves as a forceful rejection of prejudices, but does so with a form that never overtly or aggressively makes that case. When simply the act of continuing to exist is a form of cultural resistance, and when the participation in events where music and dance are commonplace rather than acts to be repressed, the message is nonetheless well received. But more than that, it’s an inward look within the community, asking questions of its own members and their own relationships to a poisonous past, and finding out what it means, looking forward over the plains, to be a modern Blackfoot man and all that that represents.
