Alanis Obomsawin
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”
I’ve seen this quote, or something close to it, around the internet, often attributed to “Cree Prophecy” or “Native American saying.” Further digging led me to an investigation that found this quote attributed to Alanis Obomsawin, a member of the Abenaki Nation and one of Canada's foremost documentary filmmakers, in a collection of essays published in 1972 titled “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?” Perhaps it was a saying she repeated, or perhaps she was the originator. Perhaps it doesn’t matter! But after finding this famous filmmaker at the root of this quote, I went down a rabbit hole reading about her past and watching some of her documentaries.
Alanis Obomsawin was born in New Hampshire, and grew up on the Odanak reservation, in Quebec, speaking Western Abanaki as her first language. She grew up without official recognition by the Canadian or American government, as her family had moved between Abenaki regions spanning the two countries. She has produced 53 films documenting the lives, culture, history, and struggles of First Nations peoples. You can watch forty of those films online for free thanks to the National Film Board of Canada, for which she has consulted and produced films since 1965.
“There’s a lot of beautiful things that happen in making a film — for instance to see, no matter what people have gone through, their will to live. I think that’s the part I find most exciting. It doesn’t matter where I go — whether it’s our west or up north — when I’m going to a native person, I’m always going home. I would never even stop going to prisons, and skid row, where you find a high percentage of our people. You watch the drinking, the people sleeping on the sidewalks, being abused, and you hear terrible language. It’s a snake pit. But I cannot divorce myself from them. There was a time in my life when I was told that’s where I should be. I fought back and fought back. That’s why I understand and love all the people down there. They’re not separate from me.”
from an interview with POV Magazine, “The Long Walk of Alanis Obomsawin”
Living in the town of Trois-Riveres as a teenager, the only Indian child in the town, she was beaten up by her fellow students. She often references the prejudice and racism that she experienced throughout her life, and the profound inner strength and belief in herself that it took to resist succumbing to others’ beliefs about her, her family, and her people.
From watching only two of her films (Amisk and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance), I learned so much about the history of Montreal and the First Nations people who lived there before Europeans came there and it was reshaped. I learned about incidents in modern history that I’d never heard of. I saw a way of living outside capitalism, and how profit has motivated people to destroy the bounty that already existed in pursuit of something that, as Alanis Obomsawin said, we cannot eat.
