Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again
2021 · 34m · Canada
Directed by Courtney Montour
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Mary Two-Axe Earley's more than two-decade fight against sex discrimination in Canada's Indian Act, and her place in the women's rights movement, are recounted.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A *biography* about legislative persistence—sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Montour's making a film about a woman everyone forgot, which is its own kind of provocation; the real contrarian move is letting the archive and testimony speak without irony.
Montour situates Earley's fight within the genealogy of Indigenous sovereignty and second-wave feminism with formal precision, using documentary's archive-as-argument tradition to recover a figure whose erasure was deliberate—this is curatorial work in the truest sense, a reclamation through rigorous form.
The decision to let Earley's own voice and presence dominate rather than bury her under narration is what transforms this from dutiful biography into something alive; Montour trusts the subject, and that restraint becomes the entire film's spine.