These Are My People...
1969 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, Willie Dunn, Barbara Wilson, Roy Daniels
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Made entirely by an Indigenous crew, the film features Standing Arrow and Tom Porter of Akwesasne discussing Kanien'kéhaka longhouse religion, culture and government, and how settler arrival changed their way of life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate this for the right reasons—Indigenous authorship, 1969 counterculture moment—but honestly, it works because Mitchell and crew just *made* a documentary that refuses the ethnographic gaze entirely; they're not performing Indigeneity for settlers, they're having a conversation, and that refusal is more subversive than any formal trick.
A landmark document precisely *because* it understands its own historical weight—four Indigenous filmmakers claiming the apparatus itself in 1969, situating Kanien'kéhaka sovereignty discourse within the NFB's own institution, a genealogy that still matters; the measured, unhurried pacing of Standing Arrow and Tom Porter's voices becomes an argument about who gets to narrate history.
The singular choice here is trusting silence and the speakers' own rhythm—no music bed, no explanatory voiceover, just the camera holding on their faces while they reclaim narrative authority; that restraint, that refusal to *help* the audience, is what makes 13 minutes feel like a complete statement.