Anti-Ethnography Film Screening
Aligned with New Red Order’s exhibition Give it Back at Audian Gallery, this screening program examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse, unveiling the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline.
For Indigenous peoples, the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against them since the device’s inception. Anthropology's obsession with preserving images of so-called vanishing cultures, through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of ancestral remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress Indigenous peoples.
By relegating Indigenous identities to the past, and forcing Indigenous people to authenticate themselves through this past, their existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines Indigenous agency.
The ethnographer's encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that, for Indigenous communities, tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle and, finally, achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination.
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This screening is free and open to all regions. In order to watch the program, please register here to receive a virtual ticket to “unlock” the program. The program will be available from February 8th, 12:00am PST thru February 14th, 11:00pm PST. Once the program is unlocked, the viewer will have 24 hours to finish watching the program.
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Anti-Ethnography Program:
Land Acknowledgement, New Red Order, 2021
Sioux Ghost Dance, W.K.L. Dickson/Thomas Edison, 1894
Welcome to the Third World, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Auntie Beachress — Are You Looking at Me?, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Overweight with Crooked Teeth, Shelley Niro, 1997
Instant Identity Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez, 2007
Alphabet City Serenade, Diane Burns, 1992
Bizarre Thanksgiving Performance Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez
Auntie Beachress — Lakota Language Challenge, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
wawa, Sky Hopinka, 2014
Auntie Beachress — Only Boring People Get Bored, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Mobilize, Caroline Monnet, 2015
Dance to Miss Chief, Kent Monkman, 2010
Native Fantasy: Germany’s Indian Heroes, Axel Gerdau, Erik Olsen, and John Woo of The New York Times, 2014
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, 2018
We Only Answer Our Land Line, Woodrow Hunt and Olivia Camfield, 2019
Reclamation, Thirza Jean Cuthand, 2018
Auntie Beachress — Life's Struggles, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Curated by New Red Order
Image credit: New Red Order, Land Acknowledgement, 2021. Still from video. Courtesy of the artists.
