3
Friendship, Refusal, and Alternate Archives of Diaspora
Early in his experimental documentary Shooting Indians (1997), filmmaker Ali Kazimi describes an interaction with border officials while traveling with Iroquois (Onondaga) photographer Jeff Thomas to Buffalo, New York, the traditional territories of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy where Thomas grew up. The American border guard asks, “Nationality?” Mobilizing an Iroquois interpretation of the 1794 Jay Treaty, Thomas replies “Six Nations”; Kazimi says, “Indian.”1 This experience at the border underscores the complexities of colonial naming, geographies, and identification: Thomas has to pass a checkpoint in order to move within the traditional territories of his nation, but in asserting his nationality as Six Nations, he—like so many of the Iroquois Confederacy—“refuse[s] the absolute sovereignty of at least two settler states, and in doing so . . . reveal[s] the fragility and moral turpitude of those states.” Kazimi’s Indian citizenship and passport serve as a reminder of the transit of “Indian” that shaped the colonization of North America, and the subsequent division of land that violently displaced the Onondaga and other Native nations.2 Though over two decades have passed since its (limited) release, Kazimi’s thoughtful film deserves renewed attention, especially in light of ongoing conversations around theorizing the entangled web of relations that position non-Native people of color within settler colonialism in uneven and contradictory ways, including their relationship to Indigenous nations.3 In this book, I have sought to make sense of that entangled web in terms of attachments to settler colonialism that are structural and not easily overcome by accumulating knowledge, or by knowing better. This raises an important question: What kinds of (future) relations are possible under these conditions? For non-Native people, coming to terms with the reality of ongoing colonization can provoke an existential crisis, one that I have observed both in the classroom and in activist spaces: What is my place here? Are we going to get kicked out? Do I need to have my bags packed and ready to go home? Some perceive Indigenous movements for sovereignty and nationhood to be inherently antimigrant, even as coalitional artistic, activist, and scholarly work suggests the opposite. Mutual aid and support across movements for Black Lives Matter and No Dakota Access Pipeline, or the solidarity actions between Indigenous and migrant justice activists from New Mexico to British Columbia, suggest that Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty are expansive and capacious, rather than xenophobic and restrictive.4
I do not propose a solution to this existential dilemma, but I believe there is much to be learned from artists who engage in the process of working through relation and respect.5 Kazimi is a prolific documentary filmmaker particularly known for feature-length works such as Continuous Journey (2004), which revisits the 1914 Komagata Maru incident in which the Canadian government denied entry to a Japanese charter ship carrying 376 Indians (Sikh, Hindu, Muslim); Narmada: A Valley Rising (1994), about the movement to prevent the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam project in India; and Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence (2022), about the struggles of the Sinixt nation to regain recognition after being declared officially extinct by the Canadian government. Born and raised in a Muslim family in Hyderabad, India, he moved to Toronto in the early 1980s to study film. Kazimi’s own experiences of difference, racism, and migration permeate his films, which are broadly interested in social justice and activism, touching on questions of representation, history and archives, and mass mobilization against injustice.6 Similar to Shani Mootoo, Kazimi came of age as a filmmaker during a pivotal moment in the 1980s and 1990s when BIPOC artists were garnering more support and recognition for their work: Shooting Indians received funding from multiple state sources, including the Canada Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, a now-defunct private body that was established (1991) and later dissolved (2009) by the federal government. While these funders were designed to support artists in creating works about individual lives and experiences—or, of their respective communities—relational and coalitional conversations emerged as an unintended outcome, largely due to artists’ collective organizing efforts.7
In the spirit of such collectivity, while this chapter is “about” Ali Kazimi’s work, it is a specifically relational study of Kazimi’s work. I consider Kazimi’s work alongside his friendship with Thomas and the contexts of refusal and activism that condition the emergence of that friendship, and of both Kazimi’s and Thomas’s projects. This is not a teleological reading but one that thinks about a particular artist as embedded within a wider web, one that is regenerative. Kazimi and Thomas’s friendship is not isolated or exceptional, but one that I map onto a constellation of other relations and movements, in Toronto, across Canada, and across North America.
The film’s longevity mirrors, and is perhaps mutually informed by, the friendship between Thomas and Kazimi that anchors both the film’s aesthetic and representational politics and the ethic of relation and “epistemology of respect” it establishes.8 In 1984, Kazimi, then a film student at York University in Toronto, began shooting his thesis, a portrait of Iroquois (Onondaga) photographer Jeff Thomas, after seeing some of Thomas’s work published in Sweetgrass, a local Native magazine. After a nearly decade-long pause, Kazimi and Thomas reunited in 1993 to begin shooting again, at which point the filming process became introspective, as Thomas viewed and reflected on older footage of himself, now part of the archive. The film, an experimental documentary entitled Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas, was completed four years later, in 1997. In 2005, Kazimi and Thomas paired up again, this time to participate in a cross-country set of conversations between South Asian and Indigenous artists that also featured a screening of Shooting Indians. A few years later in 2009, Toronto’s South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC) curated an art exhibition inspired by Shooting Indians and featured Kazimi and Thomas in conversation. In 2021, Toronto’s Reel Asian and ImagiNATIVE film festivals collaborated to present a screening of Shooting Indians alongside a moderated discussion with Kazimi and Thomas.
I am struck both by the endurance of Shooting Indians—an independent film that has screened primarily at film festivals and, occasionally, in Canadian postsecondary classrooms—and by the endurance of Kazimi and Thomas, not just as lifelong friends, but as friends so committed to this project that they return to the film again and again in public forums (not a common practice by any means). Shooting Indians is a unique film in this regard. Among the handful of feature-length documentaries that examine Asian-Indigenous relationality, many have been profiles of those with Asian and Native ancestry. Though these films importantly excavate heretofore unknown or marginalized histories, their focus on ancestry reasserts the primacy of biological reproduction as a mode of connection and relation. Cedar and Bamboo (2010) profiles four individuals of Chinese and Native ancestry in British Columbia; Alejandro Yoshizawa’s All Our Father’s Relations (2016) is about four Musqueam siblings who travel to China to connect with their Chinese father’s roots; and Lucy Ostrander and Don Sellers’s Honor Thy Mother (2021) is about the Indigenous women who migrated to Bainbridge Island (Squamish territories) in the early 1940s to pick berries for Japanese American farmers and later married their fellow workers, Filipino immigrant men.
Two recent documentaries focus on other forms of relation. Ann Kaneko’s Manzanar Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (2021) is about a coalition between Japanese Americans, Paiute peoples, and California ranchers that emerges in the context of Los Angeles’s water crisis. By evoking the entanglements of Paiute displacement, Japanese World War II incarceration, and environmental health at the Manzanar internment camp, Manzanar Diverted focuses not on interpersonal relationships but on the forms of structural violence (colonial land dispossession, incarceration, ecologically destructive infrastructure development) that place Paiute, Japanese American, and rural white Americans in relation to one another. Another film, Chris Hsiung’s Elder in the Making (2015), about Hsiung’s road trip with Cowboy Smithx (Blackfoot) to Smithx’s traditional territories, shares similarities with Shooting Indians insofar as it focuses on Hsiung’s journey of learning from Smithx. Yet Shooting Indians is crucially different from all of these films in its depiction and facilitation of enduring friendship, both on- and off-screen.
By anchoring this chapter in friendship—by amplifying the radical potential of friendship—I am reading queerly, anchoring futurity in platonic intimacy rather than the (hetero)normative and reproductive couple. It is worth pointing out here the significance of radical friendship as a mode of relationality that is generative, without being biologically reproductive. In popular imaginaries, friendship is often adjunct to romantic partnership: friendships facilitate romantic love by offering spaces for advice, gossip, and venting; for addressing emotional or intellectual needs that other social or familial arrangements do not fully meet. Yet queer and feminist scholars and activists have had a great deal to say about the generativity of friendship. As bell hooks writes, “Friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.”9 Collectivity and collaboration have been touchstones for undermining the aims of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.10 The open-endedness of friendship and the looser expectations and lower stakes surrounding friendships give them radical potential. In conversation with his friend Maura Roberts, Cree poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt muses that “friendship offers up a kind of sociality that makes experimentation in the name of a larger political project possible. Loose ends don’t have to be tied up.”11 The friendships and collectivities developed in response to the AIDS crisis, for example, generated experimentation with collective models of care that have offered alternate ways of thinking about kinship and relation. However, friendship is not inherently radical or utopian. For its part, queer friendship can ironically be complicit in the very normative structures it imagines it disrupts; as Leah Claire Allen and John Garrison point out, the idea of “chosen family” that is oppositional to biological family problematically relies on that neoliberal cornerstone, “choice.”12 To meet their radical potential, friendships take work. Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa (Kwagiulth, Kwakwaka’wakw Nation) and Cindy Holmes point out that when friends are unevenly located with respect to power and difference, there is an opportunity to build allyship, but this requires accountability on the part of those with privilege rather than reciprocity on the part of those more marginalized.13
Kazimi and Thomas’s deep connection is resonant with the Indigenous feminist and queer studies scholarship on Indigenous models of kinship that not only disrupt homo- and heteronormative relationship structures privileged by neoliberal capitalism but also suggest alternate decolonial possibilities. Native Hawaiian scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio argues that restoring pilina, which roughly translates to connection or association, by cultivating relationship and reciprocity is essential to decolonization given that colonization has disrupted such connections through the imposition of heteropatriarchal, capitalist modes of relation. Difficult to translate to English, these are rich, layered, storied forms of connection and kinship between humans, and across human and more-than-human beings.14 Kim TallBear likewise notes that the language and discourse to write and think about multiple forms of relationality, including sexual and nonsexual ones, have historically been far more expansive in Dakota traditions.15 The Dakota language does not posit a binary between the human and nonhuman, for example; nonhuman beings are respected as kin and relatives with their own nations and polities.16 Western discourses are inadequate by comparison. Though Shooting Indians does not address human–nonhuman relations, the connection and reciprocity that the film has cultivated between Kazimi and Thomas (first in its production, then later in its distribution and circulation) seems continuous with—or, at minimum, aligned with—the forms of relationality described by Osorio and TallBear that are not easily captured by settler structures of relation. As Jafari S. Allen writes, “The practice of loving friendship is a powerful tool (that we have now) that can be used to heal from the multiple and compounded traumas of race/sex terror.”17 Extending Allen, we might say that friendship is a tool not just for healing from multiple forms of violence, but for building alternate futures.
Just as friendship is generative, so is refusal. In Shooting Indians, friendship and refusal collide, becoming mutually reinforcing. Kazimi and Thomas’s friendship is integral to the film’s politic of refusal—a concept most forcefully developed by Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, who argues that Kahnawake Mohawk nationalism is characterized by a politics of refusal.18 She writes that “[Mohawks] interrupt and fundamentally challenge stories that have been told about them and about others like them, as well as the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to take their land and their selves from them.”19 She concludes that Mohawk refusal is generative as Kahnawake Mohawk members exercise new modes of survival, existence, and sovereignty. Rather than merely negating U.S. or Canadian state sovereignty, refusal generates alternative forms of nationhood, sovereignty, and belonging. The seventy-eight-day standoff against the Canadian military by Mohawk citizens of Kahnawake and Kahnestake in 1990—an uprising popularly known as the Oka Crisis—was generated by this culture of Indigenous refusal. Simpson discusses the refusal of Kahnawake Mohawks both as ethnographic subjects (refusing to be transparently available as objects of study) and as political subjects articulating claims to nation, identity, and sovereignty (refusing settler state accommodations, for example). Simpson herself enacts a refusal to reproduce expected forms of anthropological knowledge. I extend Simpson’s argument to reflect on the potential of Indigenous politics of refusal to generate alternate, critical forms of diasporic belonging and participation within (and ultimately, against) white settler societies. The Mohawk uprising, for instance, generated new kinds of diasporic cultural politics across Canada, as this public moment of colonial encounter brought into relief the suturing of settler structure with colonial event.
Shooting Indians is a film that both emerges from the cultures of refusal that Indigenous politics have helped to cultivate within South Asian diasporas in Canada and generates continued forms of refusal, if unevenly. In form and content, Shooting Indians archives counterhegemonic forms of diasporic–Indigenous relationality. The film responds to the Hollywood western’s long legacy of constructing audience expectations of the imaginary Indian. These expectations, as Philip Deloria (Dakota) theorizes, emerge through, and produce, the colonial-imperial relations shaping settler societies. Expectations signal normative assumptions and beliefs, as they constitute “the dense economies of meaning, representation, and act that have inflected both American culture writ large and individuals, both Indian and non-Indian.”20 The film excavates what Deloria refers to as the “ghostly presences” of expectations that “materialize at critical moments to shape reactions in subtle ways.”21 The film’s interruption of these expectations echoes Maile Arvin’s observations on how refusal operates in the context of visual art: through the “refusal to participate in the production of ‘natural,’ ‘authentic’ Indigenous subjects who might be easily apprehended and utilized by either Western social scientific knowledge production or the Western contemporary art canon.”22 In this way, Shooting Indians expands the scope of diasporic film toward the lateral, countercolonial relationalities that settler states tend to submerge within dominant frameworks of multiculturalist belonging and identification. To interpret Shooting Indians through this frame, I first situate it in terms of the Toronto-based South Asian diasporic cultural politics from which it emerged. I then analyze some of the ways the film itself, in form and content, enacts a practice of refusal; this analysis includes close readings of key scenes and a reflection on its experimental mode. Finally, I assess the generative effects of the film, both on Kazimi’s own work, and on the conversations and cultural politics that the film continues to inspire decades after its release.
Before that, some contextualizing notes. This chapter focuses on the entanglement of state politics of “race,” “ethnicity,” and/or “culture” with settler colonialism: specifically, the ways in which the laws, policies, and cultural practices of white settler states provide structural incentives to diasporic populations to adopt dominant modes of belonging and identification. South Asian diasporic politics steeped in conservatism, constituted through colonialism, capitalism, caste, cisheteropatriarchy, and anti-Blackness are an effect of these incentives.23 This dynamic is best understood in terms of the competing and entangled representations and claims to land, identity, and politics that multiple histories and processes of colonization and imperialism generate. In Canada, official and unofficial forms of multiculturalism—promoting liberal-pluralist models of recognizing cultural difference—sit in tension with Indigenous sovereignty, which challenges their elisions. Settler national imaginaries entice non-Indigenous, nonwhite populations to escape marginalization by aligning with settler power. Settler power compels “ethno-racial groups” to assimilate into white settlerhood and/or participate in neoliberal logics of competition for scarce resources and recognition: these are the dominant forms of cross-racial relationality available. Antiracist responses thus often forge collaborative links between groups, without necessarily upheaving their framing as discrete “groups.” In other words, they do not always see an outside to the settler state.24 By contrast, the work of diasporic writers such as Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and SKY Lee, and activist organizations such as No One Is Illegal, gestures toward the ongoing work of forming diasporic identities that seriously engage with questions of Indigenous sovereignty.25 To return to Wong’s provocation: “What happens if we position Indigenous people’s struggles instead of normalized whiteness as the reference point through which we come to articulate our subjectivities? How would such a move radically transform our perceptions of the land on which we live?”26
Counterhegemonic Relationalities
I situate Shooting Indians’ production and reception within the artistic-activist work of South Asian diasporas in Toronto that has been generated through Indigenous refusals of the colonial nation-state. Anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan, in a special issue of Cultural Anthropology that includes and builds on Simpson’s work, situates refusal within broader debates in anthropology, noting the concept’s initial use by Marcel Mauss in 1967.27 She details three aspects of refusal. The first is that refusal is social and affiliative.28 By refusing the state’s structures of social and cultural organization, practices of refusal enable the (re)production of new forms of community. The second is refusal’s distinction from resistance. As Audra Simpson notes, resistance “overinscribe[s] the state with its power to determine what matter[s].”29 Whereas resistance unwittingly reaffirms terms of engagement set by the state, refusal critiques them and, in the process, fashions new forms of relationality and coexistence. McGranahan states, “If resistance involves consciously defying or opposing superiors ‘in a context of differential power relationships,’ then refusal rejects this hierarchical relationship, repositing the relationship as one configured altogether differently.”30 Finally, refusal is hopeful and willful; underpinning acts of refusal is the promise of other modes of existence and relationality.31
Unlike Simpson’s work, the refusal I outline here is not an Indigenous refusal of settler-colonial epistemologies or ontologies that attempt to displace and erase dynamic sovereignties and modes of existence, either on my part as researcher or on the part of the filmmakers or artists. While Indigenous refusal emerges directly from conditions of dispossession and violence produced by settler colonialism, diasporic refusal requires the development of a critical consciousness around complicity in ongoing colonization: diasporic peoples may have the privilege to consent to settler power and to accrue its benefits, even marginally. However, the diasporic practices I describe are made possible through Indigenous refusal, which provides the impetus to counter cultural imaginaries that reproduce settler-colonial epistemologies and ontologies. They support Indigenous refusal, but do not and cannot substitute for Indigenous refusal. Rather than normalizing the colonial conditions of existence that mark diasporic life in settler societies, these cultural productions explicitly identify settler-colonial erasure and deferral, refusing to take these for granted. It is useful here to invoke Michelle Raheja’s concept of visual sovereignty, which she develops to describe the critical aesthetic, representational, and spectatorial practices of Indigenous actors, directors, and audiences.32 Visual sovereignty, in other words, describes specifically Indigenous responses to visual culture. Jeff Thomas’s work quite clearly enacts forms of visual sovereignty. Kazimi’s work is not enacting visual sovereignty—it does not have the authority to do so—but there is something happening here that is about being in relation to Thomas’s visual sovereignty. It is a sideways or lateral relation that Kazimi develops beside Thomas, on the basis of shared craft and deepening vision—one that also opens up the possibility for thinking beyond the constraints of sovereignty, not necessarily to supplant sovereignty, but to supplement it. This is possible, again, because of refusal’s generativity.
As described in previous chapters, the Mohawk Uprising/Oka Crisis was key in the cultivation of this refusal politics within South Asian diasporic communities. This moment of colonial encounter brought into relief the suturing of settler structure with colonial event, compelling the Canadian public to reflect on its significance. As Robinder Kaur Sehdev remembers:
When the news camera captured images of soldiers erecting razor wire and shooting tear gas at crowds, those of us watching the evening news could disapprove while, thanks to geographic distance, we could also remove ourselves from the state-caused state of crisis. Yet we were called upon, Haudenosaunee or not, Native or not, when negotiators and warriors reminded us that this crisis was produced by the state, and when they asked us where the honour of our leaders had gone. In these questions, we were challenged to consider our belonging in communities that seek justice or those that have benefitted from injustice and dispossession.33
Kaushalya Bannerji’s poem “Oka Nada” references both the assault on Mohawks during the crisis as well as its broader colonial genealogies:
I am from the country
Columbus dreamt of
You, the country
Columbus conquered.
Now in your land
My words are circling
blue Oka sky
they come back to us
alight on tongue.
Protect me with your brazen passion
for history is my truth,
Earth, my witness
my home,
this native land.34
Other examples of the South Asian diasporic politics can be found in the magazine Rungh (on whose board of directors Kazimi serves). Rajinderpal S. Pal’s poem “Collective Amnesia,” published in 1998 shortly after the release of Shooting Indians, included this stanza:
the massacre more subtle
than blood covered midnight trains
in this country with collective amnesia
we Hollywood eyes
cowboys and Indians
we don’t talk of
tuberculosis smallpox or alcohol numb(ers)
we talk of two founding nations
and founding fathers
but nothing had been lost till they arrived.35
Pal makes a number of interconnected points: he draws parallels between the spectacular violence of India’s partition in 1947 (“blood covered midnight trains”) and the slow deaths due to disease and alcoholism in Canada (though, to be sure, there were also more spectacular forms of violence); mirroring the themes of Shooting Indians, he also suggests that the pedagogies of Hollywood westerns enforce a “collective amnesia” that supports Canada’s national origin stories of “two founding nations” (English and French), and founding fathers. In an essay conversation published in this same issue of Rungh, Métis two-spirit writer Sharron Proulx-Turner and queer South Asian activist Sanhita Brahmacharie discuss immigrant communities’ expectations of First Nations peoples. Brahmacharie reflects: “It was not until I was much older that I realized . . . that, in fact, aboriginal peoples were as invisible to me as I was, in all my ‘visible minority’ glory, to white Canadian culture”;36 Proulx-Turner observes: “Immigrants learn to hate aboriginal peoples right away. If not at home, then in the history books, the art, novels, movies, ESL classes, TV, newspapers, ads, comics, video games, and so on.”37 Proulx-Turner continues, “So when we aboriginal folks carry out our duty to protect mother earth from slaughter, when we push for settlement of centuries-old land claims, when we demand our right to self-determination, join us. Join us as our sisters and allies. Join us as our brothers.”38 In June 2005, it was the radical/progressive South Asian community fostered by Desh that protested an annual Toronto AIDS fundraiser fashion show organized around the theme of “Bollywood Cowboy.”39 A press release by lead organization the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention stated: “The pairing of cowboys and Indians alludes to the exploitation and extermination of Aboriginal peoples. While in this case South Asians are the primary target, the colonial connotations remain extreme, unfair, and racist. We are committed to ensuring that this type of representation does not occur in the future.”40
Alongside examples such as these, Shooting Indians reflects a preoccupation and focus in the 1990s and early to mid-2000s with the colonial expectations and intimacies linking South Asians and Indigenous nations in North America. The film’s title evokes these intimacies on multiple levels: it might refer to a tradition of cowboys killing Indians in many Hollywood westerns, or to visual cultural interests in capturing Indians (South Asian or First Nations) through film and photography. It could also refer to Indians (South Asian or First Nations) like Thomas and Kazimi who engage in photographic and filmic capture themselves. It is worth noting that the work of Kazimi, the queer South Asian festival Desh Pardesh, and others was examining connections between diaspora and indigeneity outside the settler state well before the theoretical language for understanding the particular dynamics of settler colonialism began to circulate across activist, scholarly, or artistic communities.41
Photographic Intimacies
Ongoing conversations among Toronto artists/activists on South Asian relationships to Indigenous politics generated the creative opening through which Shooting Indians developed. In other words, South Asian artists/activists’ refusal and disruption of the model minority discourses that position them as communities of productive citizens in relation to Indigenous communities generated possibilities for Kazimi’s critical lens. Shooting Indians enacts a refusal of the colonial modes of knowledge production that produce the imaginary Indian as fossilized relic, and meditates on practices of photographic and filmic portraiture in order to forge diasporic–Indigenous intimacies.42 There are multiple layers: Kazimi meets Thomas through a shared interest in Edward Curtis, whose infamous portrait series of “vanishing Indians” had come under fire in the early 1980s for being staged to produce a constructed authenticity.43 When they meet, Thomas is working on a project that critiques Curtis. Shooting Indians itself is a kind of filmic portrait of Thomas, one that excavates the intimacies embedded in the practice of creating portraiture: the process of constructing a portrait authentic to the inner world of its subject arguably demands a self-awareness on the part of the photographer (or filmmaker, in this instance) about their expectations.
Kazimi correspondingly places himself into the narrative: the first few photographs we see in the film are of him: first as a child in 1965, greeting a visitor from England who brought him a toy set of cowboys and Indians, and then as a young filmmaker looking through the lens of a video camera (Figure 14). This is followed by three of Curtis’s portraits, and then again an early 1980s photo of Kazimi behind the camera. The succession of photographs immediately posits a chain of meaning that links together Kazimi’s early experiences with cowboys and Indians to his development as a filmmaker, a link that Curtis’s legacy only contextualizes further. Kazimi places this personal history within a longer transnational one, signaled by the opening shot of a spinning desk globe—symbolizing the post-1492 spatial remapping of earth—in combination with a voiceover: “My journey begins where Columbus’s journey was supposed to end: in India.”44 It’s when he arrives in Canada as a film student, he notes, that people refer to him as “East Indian.” Shortly thereafter he discovers Curtis’s vanishing Indians, which for Kazimi evoke the Indians of Hollywood westerns. In this respect, Shooting Indians is a diasporic response to Hollywood westerns, which Kazimi grew up watching in India. This speaks to a common experience, one emerging from the transnational circulation of westerns. For example, in his foreword to The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad, political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed similarly reflects: “As a teenager, I flocked to Hollywood films showing in Lahore cinemas and would invariably side with the white man fighting the Red Indians [sic].”45 Indigenous spectators have responded to westerns in similar ways: in her comparative study of perceptions of The Searchers among American Indians and Anglo-Americans, JoEllen Shively found that Native respondents, like white respondents, identified with John Wayne’s character, while distancing themselves from the film’s Indian characters.46 An early montage in Shooting Indians includes a childhood photograph of Thomas and his brother dressed up in cowboy outfits, holding rifles and posing in front of a Christmas tree (Figure 15). However, as Shooting Indians makes clear in its examination of Kazimi and Thomas’s relationships to the imaginary Indian, there are distinct stakes for the internalization and incorporation of this cultural construction depending on one’s social location as Native or non-Native. Thomas, for instance, turned to photography following an accident that left him with chronic pain because doctors refused to treat him on the assumption that he was a “lazy Indian” who was “malingering.” For Thomas, impact of the imaginary Indian has been felt and embodied.47
Figure 14. Cowboy and Indian figurines with Kazimi’s childhood photograph; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
Figure 15. Jeff Thomas and his brother, dressed up as cowboys; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
By contrast, as the film shows, for Kazimi the imaginary Indian has been a more distant source of curiosity, confusion, and complicity. Linking his internalization of the imaginary Indian to Columbus’s “Indian,” Kazimi both presents a critique of colonial nomenclature and implicates himself as part of Columbus’s transnational historical legacy. His self-reflection begins to excavate the social conditions of the emergence of his identity as an “East Indian” in relation to the “Red Indian” and colonial expansion. That self-reflexivity presents a critique of documentary convention, which as Bill Nichols argues,
posits an organizing agency that possesses information and knowledge, a text that conveys it, and a subject who will gain it. He-who-knows (the agency is usually masculine) will share that knowledge with those who wish to know; they, too, can take the place of the subject-who-knows. Knowledge, as much or more than the imaginary identification between viewer and fictional character, promises the viewer a sense of plenitude or self-sufficiency.48
Conventional documentary’s promise of mastery over knowledge belies its constructions of truth and reality. As filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha boldly asserts, “There is no such thing as documentary”; documentary films rely on techniques such as minimal editing, long takes, and handheld cameras to achieve the “look” of realism.49 Shooting Indians does not share this commitment to realism or authenticity, though the premise of Shooting Indians seems conventional at first: Kazimi follows Thomas as he develops his latest project, which critically engages with Edward Curtis. However, the interruption of filming midway through expands the scope of the film, turning it into a journey. Interspersed through the portrait of Thomas are Kazimi’s own questions and reflections by both Thomas and Kazimi on their relationship with one another, as filmmaker and subject. In its emphasis on the constructedness of meaning and critique of the authority of the filmmaker, Shooting Indians belongs to a genre of film that is often referred to as “experimental documentary.”50
Moreover, as cultural critics Margot Francis and Peter Feng have noted, Shooting Indians is also a critical revision of the ethnographic documentary.51 Ethnography, the predominant research method of anthropology, seeks to record and document a culture or community; ethnographic film uses documentary techniques to do so. Since at least the 1980s, anthropology as a field has debated the power dynamics shaping this research method, underscoring issues of positionality, social location, ethics, and the presumptions of neutrality and objectivity.52 The ethnographic film has been subject to similar sorts of criticism, largely following on the heels of movements for decolonization, feminism, and Black power, and against war and imperialism, in the 1950s–1970s.53 As Catherine Russell notes, “Ethnographic film theory and criticism is an ongoing discussion of issues of objectivity, subjectivity, realism, narrative structure, and ethical questions of representation.”54 Trinh’s 1982 film Reassemblage was exemplary of this critique: Trinh refused to ethnographically “capture” Senegalese culture, providing no narration and compelling the viewer to meditate on their need to assign particular types of meaning to the images they see on the screen.
As a non-Indigenous filmmaker seeking to capture the elusive “real Indian,” Kazimi is an ethnographer of sorts; he comes across a profile of Thomas in an art magazine while “hunting for the subject of a thesis film,” and this initial pursuit of Thomas stems from a desire to find the authentic Indians popularized by both Hollywood and Curtis. However, he subverts the conventions of this genre by laying bare his own desires, assumptions, and misconceptions. As Francis explains:
Shooting Indians repeatedly undermines those aspects of the documentary form (such as anonymous voice-overs, seamless editing, and camera invisibility) which work to assert the film-maker’s authority. While the video refuses an “omniscient eye” through visual and narrative strategies that foreground Kazimi’s self-reflexive analysis, at the same time it acknowledges his draw to “exotic” representations of First Nations peoples.55
The film suggests that there are multiple sites of complicity, contestation, and negotiation within dominant representational politics. Rather than presenting himself as the expert behind the camera, documenting the authentic truths of his subject, Kazimi questions the sources of his knowledge, and continues to unravel them as the film progresses. Shooting Indians thus troubles this promise of knowledge through ethnographic documentary: even if there are things to be learned from the film, they simultaneously demand a commitment to unlearning that leads not to a sense of mastery over a topic but to the cultivation of humility in relation to knowledge. The film’s disjointed structure compels the audience to engage in unlearning. For example, the film stops production midway through due to extenuating circumstances in Thomas’s personal life. The newer footage, shot ten years later, presents the audience with Thomas’s transformed relationship to Curtis. In the early 1980s, Thomas saw Curtis’s oeuvre as primarily exploitative and grossly inauthentic; by the 1990s, while holding onto that critique, he also reinterprets Curtis’s work in terms of the agency of those he photographed, thus unraveling our assumptions with respect to Curtis as well. Shooting Indians thus forces us to question the knowledge we acquire at the start of the film.56
Kazimi’s self-reflexivity in the film not only critiques ethnographic approaches but also transforms ethnography via autoethnography. Mary Louise Pratt distinguishes between the two: “If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.”57 While autoethnographic texts may not necessarily be more truthful than ethnographies, they self-reflexively draw attention to issues of social location, authenticity, and power relations with respect to marginalized subjects. In Shooting Indians, Kazimi reflects on his identity in relation to not only dominant identities but also Indigenous ones. Moreover, he positions himself not simply as a marginal subject, but as a marginal subject who is implicated in reproducing the marginalization of Indigenous peoples in Canada. As Francis comments, Kazimi does not merely “reverse” the gaze, but complicates the presumption that he is capable of reversing it, given that his “narration . . . reminds us that the global reach of American popular culture provided him with a steady diet of western kitsch. . . . Kazimi frequently reveals his own presumptions about Aboriginal cultures precisely in order to analyze his implicatedness in mainstream culture.”58 Thus, Francis suggests, the film invites spectators to do the same.59
Shooting Indians’ self-reflexivity is not narcissistic but profoundly invested in forging an intimacy between Kazimi as filmmaker and Thomas as subject. The still shots of Kazimi’s photos and Curtis’s portraits segue into a close-up of a set of hands flipping through a magazine featuring Thomas’s work before settling onto another, this time of two successive photos of Kazimi filming Thomas. We then see the film’s first live shot of Thomas—a blue-tinted close-up against a black backdrop—and then, finally, the main title card. The succession of frames suggests that viewers understand Thomas in relation to Kazimi, not only contextualizing their encounter but, through the two photographs, providing us with a sense of their closeness: the 3″ x 3″ black-and-white prints with white borders have a vintage look that visually recalls the childhood photo we see earlier in the film. The photos are shot as photos that we view as if flipping through a family picture album, inviting us to consider the intimacy cultivated by Kazimi and Thomas through the documentary. Routing friendship through the photo album—a bastion of familial intimacy—the film presents an affective link between the latent reproductive function of the family and the generative possibilities of friendship. This early scene is a crucial one. It serves as synecdoche for the film itself as it evokes the authority of the photograph in order to craft an archive of countercolonial relationality. As Ann Cvetkovich observes, “As an archival object, the photograph’s power derives as much from its affective magic as from its realist claims, and ultimately from the powerful combination of the two.”60 That the photos of Kazimi and Thomas together are black-and-white prints is not incidental; evoking a distant past, they insert their friendship into the historical record. Because we see them in relation to their personal histories, these photos queer time, interrupting the privileged status of biological reproduction as marker of time and (re)generation within colonial capitalist frames. That their friendship is familial, rather, offers a more expansive interpretation of intimacy and relation.
Dialogic Relationalities
While the interplay of photography and film creates an affective intimacy in Shooting Indians, we see other forms of relationality emerge through the film’s establishment of a dialogue between Kazimi and Thomas that disrupts and refuses multiculturalist representation. In her essay “Consent’s Revenge,” Audra Simpson asks:
How . . . do those who are targeted for elimination, those who have had their land stolen from them, their bodies and their cultures worked on to be made into something else articulate their politics? How can one articulate political projects if one has been offered a half-life of civilization in exchange for land? These people have preexisting political traditions to draw from—so how do they, then, do things? They refuse to consent to the apparatuses of the state.61
A static and flattened conceptualization of “culture” informs the state apparatus of Canadian multiculturalism—both its official and unofficial forms—which is framed through ahistorical notions of authenticity and essentialism. As long established by scholars of race and racism in Canada, this multiculturalist construction of difference props up a whiteness as the simultaneously hypervisible and invisible core of Canadianness, eliding ongoing assaults on Indigenous land and peoples, the exploitation of racialized labor, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and other forms of violence. Under multiculturalism, “dialogue” is welcomed as a benign and neutral form of relationality that does little to upset dominant ideologies of racism and colonization.
While this is the hegemonic understanding of “dialogue,” there are also submerged forms of dialogue oriented toward more transformative politics. If the superficial forms of relationality cultivated vis-à-vis multiculturalism consent to statist modes of belonging, then the generation of radical relationalities that bypass white settler interlocutors constitutes a form of refusal. Shooting Indians is exemplary of these. The film’s focus is not on learning about cultural difference, but about the historical and political contexts that create cultural difference. The signs of cultural difference are a starting rather than end point, and ultimately it is converging (and diverging) experiences of oppression that form the basis for dialogue. For example, Kazimi sonically gestures to the dialogic aspects of the film through a range of soundtrack accompaniments: a track by Indian fusion rock band Indian Ocean opens the film, while a piece by Six Nations women singers closes it. Against the “sonic dissonance”—to cite Comanche scholar Dustin Tahmahkera—generated by what Jodi Byrd calls “cacophonies of colonialism,” the film’s acoustic aesthetics introduce possibilities for a decolonial relational soundscape.62 Kazimi more didactically muses on relationality with the inclusion of Thomas’s reflection on their relationship. While cognizant of the nonequivalence of their experiences, Thomas notes the ease and connection that came specifically from a sense of their shared experiences of marginalization:
I liked what you were doing, the fact that you were a student and that you had an interest. And I think, if I remember correctly, you talked too about that sense of being an outsider in Canada and the kind of problems that we had were both parallel. So in a sense I thought that it would make . . . it was just interesting to do it from that standpoint. I don’t think I would have been comfortable doing it with anybody else.
The dialogic practice of the film is held together through the metaphor of journey. Hamid Naficy, in his now-classic survey of diasporic cinema, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, notes that journeys and journeying are a key feature of diasporic films, whether physical or metaphorical.63 He observes three patterns of journeys across these films: “outward journeys of escape, home seeking, and home founding; journeys of quest, homelessness, and lostness; and inward, homecoming journeys.”64 The metaphor of the journey is certainly central to Shooting Indians, as referenced in the title (“A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas”), and explicitly named by Kazimi at different moments. As a film that is concerned about the racial-colonial politics of identity and exclusion in North America, it corresponds most closely to the pattern of “outward journeys of escape, home seeking, and home founding.”
Yet Shooting Indians crucially revises expectations around diasporic narratives that are structured by the conflicts and tensions inherent in migrating from old to new homeland by implicitly engaging with Celia Haig-Brown’s question: “What does it mean to take seriously not only the land from which one comes, but the land and original people of the place where one arrives?”65 It questions the binary of “old” and “new” homelands by situating migration in terms of the interlinked forms of colonization that both bind together Kazimi and Thomas as two “Indians” and hail Kazimi’s participation in colonial logics. The film’s first shot—the spinning globe, mentioned earlier—and Kazimi’s voiceover concerning Columbus’s journey immediately make this link. More compellingly, the film visually constructs Kazimi’s “new homeland” as Indigenous rather than settler land, by filming Thomas across a range of settings, signaling the Indigenous presence that persists even within colonized landscapes. This is one of the most powerful aspects of Shooting Indians as it mirrors Thomas’s own photographic practice, which inserts Indigenous bodies into settler spaces. As depicted in the film, Thomas’s Bear Portrait Series features his son across urban settings: “The first Bear Portrait set in motion a new way of looking at the city and . . . my revolution was against the invisible urban Iroquois presence.”66 The series speaks back to long histories promulgating the myth of the vanishing Indian vis-à-vis settler spaces that colonizers subsequently claim as their own. In Shooting Indians, Thomas’s photographs serve as a pedagogic model for how to reconceptualize land and Indigeneity under colonial conditions, thus creating a dialogue between Thomas and Kazimi’s respective crafts. Three scenes are notable: Thomas at the Six Nations reserve in southwestern Ontario, where he (partly) grew up; in Toronto’s multiracial enclave, Kensington Market; and in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.
The scene at the Six Nations reserve comes early in the film; Kazimi accompanies Thomas for a photoshoot of Thomas’s grandmother, Emily. The reserve is particularly important as the site where Kazimi and non-Native audiences would most expect to encounter Native people: the space where the contemporary settler imagination would relegate Indigenous bodies. Noting his own misperceptions, Kazimi recalls: “I look for totem poles. Jeff patiently points out that they are Indigenous only to west coast cultures. I’m embarrassed. I quickly tell him about India’s many official languages, its tribal peoples, the differences in culture.” For his part, Thomas shares that he is nervous given colonial histories of reserve photography, and his potential complicity with them: “When I first began photographing here, I was hesitant to take pictures. I was afraid of the attitudes that always existed about people coming in and taking photographs. In the early part of the century, they had a lot of people coming here. . . . These people came, took something, left, and they never came back; it was never an exchange of anything, it was just a taking away of documentation.” Although the film never explicitly states it, Thomas’s confession here also serves as a gentle reminder to Kazimi of his ethical responsibilities as a filmmaker of Thomas at the reserve.
Kazimi follows Thomas’s cue in his documentation of the reserve as an intimate space of home and community, rather than a site of ethnographic consumption. Thomas visits his sister-in-law and nephew before seeing Emily; filmed at mid-range, these scenes position Thomas and his relatives in-place without spectacularizing the reserve. We see the everydayness of the reserve space: a mix of green foliage and bare autumn trees, gently swaying goldenrod, a house undergoing renovation (Figure 16). Moreover, as Shooting Indians shows, while it holds a special place for Thomas—he spent a great deal of time here as a child, at his grandmother’s house—he grew up in Buffalo, New York, and isn’t inherently “at home” here either. Nor can his relationship to the reserve be explained through the framework of assimilation: he is both urban and strongly rooted in the reserve. His photos—presented in still shots interspersed between live-action shots of Thomas at work with his camera—depict Thomas’s sense of the rich and quiet beauty of the space (Figure 17). To return to Deloria, assumptions concerning the spatial ordering of Native bodies/communities are instances of the sorts of expectations that emerge from, and sustain, the colonial-imperial relations of the settler state. As Kazimi recounts at the end of this scene, “My worldview has changed after our visit to the reserve. I had gone expecting the beads, feathers, and teepees of the Curtis images. Images that Jeff’s been trying to confront in his photographs.”
Figure 16. Approaching Emily’s house; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
Figure 17. Jeff taking photographs at his grandmother’s house; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
If settler imaginaries relegate Indigeneity to reserve spaces, then they perceive urban spaces to be devoid of Indigeneity; to be quintessentially non-Indigenous. It makes sense, then, that Shooting Indians segues from Six Nations to a brief scene in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Shots of Thomas in Kensington are notably the only ones that were filmed on the streets of Toronto (Figure 18).67 This is a significant directorial choice, given Kensington’s place in the cityscape: it’s a historic, multiethnic neighborhood with eclectic markets and shops, and a hub for independent art and music. With its dense concentration (even in the early 1980s) of East and Southeast Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, and Eastern European vendors, the neighborhood embodies the ethos of Toronto as multicultural city. However, the subsumption of Indigeneity within multiculturalism—in both its official and unofficial forms—also has the effect of reconfiguring Indigeneity as ethnic group and correspondingly diminishing Indigenous sovereignty claims.68 As Bruno Cornellier and Michael Griffiths assert, “Liberal multicultural policies act comparably across multiple sites and spaces as avenues for the reinstitution of [Indigenous] dispossession.”69 The choice to film Thomas in Kensington thus places a submerged Indigenous presence back into multicultural space, mirroring Thomas’s own portrait series of his son Bear. Although Kensington is vibrant and bustling on most days, in the film Thomas is wandering around taking photos of a nearly empty, seemingly dead neighborhood. This may have been circumstantial (it appears to be a rainy, cloudy day), but the effect is to amplify the authority of Thomas’s body and movements in this iconic space. By contrast, filming Thomas amid a sea of multiracial figures would have reproduced the notion of Indigenous peoples as minority group, rather than members of nations. Shooting Indians in this scene thus not only undoes assumptions about Indigenous urban absence but also—for those familiar with Toronto’s geographies and Kensington Market specifically—gestures to the distinction between Indigenous nations and postcolonial diasporic groups.
Figure 18. Jeff in Toronto’s Kensington Market; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
The other urban space featured in the film is Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. These scenes are particularly significant for their emphasis on Thomas’s body against the backdrop of the Canadian parliament buildings, symbolizing settler power, and monuments, fetishizing (and memorializing) the imaginary Indian. Here Kazimi mirrors again Thomas’s practice of reinserting Indigenous presence, this time not just into urban space but also a locus of settler power. Thus, a wide shot of the parliament buildings segues into a close-up of Thomas, who subsequently points toward a church spire (gesturing to where he lives). Here Thomas is in the agentic pose of onlooker gazing past a historical site of colonial power (Figure 19). Another scene at the Canadian National Library and Archive features a medium shot of a backlit Thomas reviewing Curtis’s photographs against a large window looking out onto high-rise buildings (Figure 20). He is doubly in the position of engaging in a practice of critical spectatorship—reviewing and returning Curtis’s gaze—and taking up space in a contemporary urban setting. These moments in the film are mundane yet powerful mediations into hegemonic representational politics: Kazimi’s journey with Thomas is a journey toward developing an alternate diasporic archive of land, Indigeneity, and settler culture.
Figure 19. Jeff pointing to his home, past the church spire; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
Figure 20. Jeff at the Canadian National Archives; screenshot from Shooting Indians.
Collaborative Knowledge Production and Generative Effects
A central aspect of refusal is that it is generative, moving beyond critique of/resistance to the state—which Simpson argues repeats hegemonic structures—to model new forms of relationality. Beyond rehearsing a critique of colonial knowledge, Shooting Indians models alternative forms of knowledge production that are dialogic and collaborative. In this sense, it is an example of what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori) refers to as a “connecting” project.70 She notes that “connectedness positions individuals in sets of relationships with other people and with the environment. . . . To be connected is to be whole.”71 Kazimi is not all-knowing at the start of the film, nor does he suggest that he has reached that status by the end of the film. However, he does shift from searching for authentic “Red Indians” to acquiring a more nuanced understanding of indigeneity in Canada. By the end of the film, he admits that he has unlearned many of his assumptions: “Aboriginal cultures, like all cultures, including my own, have borrowed, incorporated, and absorbed influences from all encounters, reviving—and at times reinventing—themselves. In the end, what has vanished is my image of the mythic, imaginary Red Indian.” By repurposing the colonial euphemisms of discovery, journey, and exploration, Kazimi unhinges them from their associations with conquest and exploitation, and reattaches them to a self-conscious ethical curiosity and interest. An implicit question underpinning the film is what a process of countercolonial, cross-racial learning and dialogue across difference would look like. The film shows us that this learning process is relational for Kazimi and Thomas: it happens through dialogue and collaboration. That the two are even able to embark on this journey hinges on a mutual sense of trust. For Kazimi, the collaboration was transformative. At the 2011 Rebels with a Cause Film Festival screening, Kazimi discussed how his journey with Thomas inspired his subsequent research into early South Asian history in Canada: “Our engagement has been absolutely instrumental to the work I do, to the point that I don’t think we can talk about the so-called exclusion of South Asians or Asians from early Canadian history without acknowledging the paradox of Aboriginal colonization.” That influence is evident in his 2004 feature-length documentary, Continuous Journey, which brought public attention to the Canadian government’s refusal to allow the 376 Indian passengers of the Komagata Maru charter ship to enter Canada in 1914. The passengers were laying claim to their legal right as British subjects to travel freely across the Commonwealth. Kazimi’s film, which draws on years of meticulous archival research, reveals the government’s choices to be clearly embedded within official policy and public culture that aim to maintain Canada as a “White Man’s Country.” In their speeches and letters, Kazimi finds that government officials drew reference to the precedent set by policies of genocide and assimilation that targeted Indigenous peoples. Though these connections were at times implicit, Kazimi amplifies them by overlaying images of government officials atop images of Native people while a voiceover reads these key texts; as we hear Mackenzie King (then bureaucrat, and later prime minister) state in a confidential report, “That Canada should remain a White Man’s Country is believed to not only be desirable, but necessary on political and social grounds,” a black-and-white picture of King casually posed on a chair is overlaid on a sepia photograph of a suited and mustached white person measuring a Native (Plains Indian) person’s height, as two others watch, seated on the ground in front of a teepee.
In Kazimi’s film Narmada: A Valley Rises, the connections are discernable in a different way. Kazimi worked on this film after he had begun initial work on Shooting Indians. Here, he shifts focus from Canada to India, and from questions of Native representation in Canada to the struggles of Indigenous peoples—Adivasis—in India.72 The style and aesthetic of Narmada are quite distinct from but related to Shooting Indians: whereas Shooting Indians responds to the conventions of ethnographic documentary, Narmada captures an unfolding social movement. Kazimi is present in the film as narrator, and he identifies and positions himself in the first scene, but the concern of this film is less self-reflexivity and representational politics than it is the politics of documenting a mass mobilization in the Third World, for an ostensibly First World audience. The film follows the six-thousand-person march of primarily Adivasis and rural people—those most vulnerable to flooding from the Sardar Sarovar dam—to protest the World Bank–funded project. In an interview with Michael Hoolboom, Kazimi reflects that the questions that he had begun to explore around representation with Jeff Thomas surfaced in his approach to the film, as he encountered discourses of authenticity and purity with respect to Adivasi people:
I used everything that I had learned and reflected upon in Jeff’s work in my own representation of the indigenous people of India. I caught myself circling around ideas of “the pure tribal,” a term even activists used. The suggestion was that deep in the country’s interior one might encounter “real tribals” wearing loin cloths, carrying bows and arrows. I remember undertaking a trip and catching myself with this question: what am I doing? I felt I was in a trance, once again seduced by clichés.73
In his observations about the allure of stereotypes and clichés, Kazimi reminds us that the loss of diasporic–Indigenous relationality is deep seated, and that there remain persistent limits of solidarity and knowing better. Though these questions of authenticity do not surface in the film as explicitly as they do in Shooting Indians, from the outset the film frames the struggle against the dam as an Indigenous one. The early contextualizing scene uses long shots to emphasize the richness, sacredness, and beauty of the Narmada Valley, and one-on-one interviews underscore the significance for land-based Adivasi people. Kazimi is also careful and intentional in his depiction of the movement and march participants. His use of medium shots and one-on-one interviews not only captures the energy and momentum of the movement but also narrows the gap between viewers who might perceive a distance between themselves and the documentary’s subjects. Kazimi actively sought out one-on-one interviews to counter the perception that “one-to-one discussions in collectivized societies and cultures like India were uncommon. And it would take an extremely talented director to draw out of ordinary Indians how they really felt.”74 Against the depiction of Global South underclasses as blurred, nameless masses of people, Narmada humanizes its subjects, even as Kazimi’s class and linguistic proclivities (and perhaps, my own as a viewer) end up centering some voices—in particular, those of English-speaking spokespeople and leaders Medha Patkar and Baba Amte—at the expense of others.75
Kazimi and Thomas’s friendship has had ripple effects beyond the film—gesturing to the hope and possibility of moving beyond the impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity—though these have been uneven. The dialogic framework modeled by Kazimi and Thomas has generated conversations and artistic work among South Asian diasporas and Indigenous peoples in Canada; in this way the film’s refusals have helped to nurture a community of people invested in relational work. In 2005–2006, the Toronto-based SAVAC partnered with TRIBE, an Aboriginal arts collective based in Saskatoon, to host a series of panel discussions across Canada among South Asian and First Nations artists, called “Define Indian”; Thomas and Kazimi participated in the Saskatoon leg of the discussions. Echoing the unfinished, ongoing nature of Kazimi and Thomas’s conversation in the film, Thomas observed at a Shooting Indians screening at the 2011 Rebels with a Cause Film Festival at York University that during the Saskatoon discussions,
there was a tension in the room. . . . You could kind of feel like people were angling to express themselves, but not quite feeling comfortable enough to do it. And I think that’s what resonates with the film, and why it’s still so important in a lot of ways. . . . We haven’t reached that point yet where we are actually having those conversations, from my perspective, in an art gallery.
A few years after the SAVAC-TRIBE project, in 2009, SAVAC curated a Shooting Indians–inspired exhibit entitled Crossing Lines: An Intercultural Dialogue at the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant (in southwestern Ontario, Canada), which featured the work of eight South Asian and Indigenous artists who examine “the issues of connection and disconnection” and “the sites of intersections and divergence that exist between them.”76 The dialogic nature of the content was mirrored in the exhibit’s opening reception, in which SAVAC transported a busload of Torontonians to the Glenhyrst Gallery; Kazimi and Thomas joined participants on the thirty- to forty-minute journey for a conversation and reflection on Shooting Indians. In a catalog essay for the exhibit, curator Srimoyee Mitra explains:
Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeff Thomas helped me understand the strategy of developing cross-cultural dialogues as a process of building trust and mutual respect. It formed a touchstone for this exhibition. As a next-generation immigrant and cultural practitioner, I felt that it was important to highlight and revisit the discussion started by the duo in this exhibition.77
The exhibit was uneven in its engagement with the notion of dialogue. On the one hand, Mitra’s essay moves—to some extent, at least—beyond a liberal framework of cross-cultural dialogue to link the strategy of cross-cultural dialogue explicitly to shared and divergent experiences of colonization elsewhere in the curatorial statement, as evident in questions such as “Do immigrants perpetuate the brutal legacy of colonialism established by European settlers when we migrate to Canada? Can Indigenous communities and immigrants work towards a framework of decolonization that transforms the social, political, and cultural landscape and empowers us to coexist peacefully along with the dominant cultures with dignity and mutual respect?”78 At the same time, keywords such as colonialism, decolonization, and dominant cultures are buried underneath the exhibit title and the imagery of the catalog cover page, which features Afshin Matlabi’s Natives (2009). The piece features two figures, one ostensibly Native, the other South Asian, marked by stereotypical hand gestures: one stands with a hand raised in greeting (Native); the other holds an Indian classical dance pose (South Asian). Mitra notes that Matlabi subtly gestures toward the disjointed, fraught relationship between South Asian and Indigenous communities through the use of multidirectional color strokes and differential placement of the two figures.79 However, because the piece neither signals toward historical or political contexts nor offers ways of reading these figures beyond stereotype, those without prior knowledge could easily experience it as repetition of stereotype and liberal forms of dialogue. Here, again, is the structural impasse that does not simply disappear. Most pertinently, those steeped in hegemonic colonial ideologies would likely take what Stuart Hall refers to as “negotiated” or “oppositional” positions in relation to such a piece in order to protect those ideologies.80
This is a concern that one could raise with respect to Shooting Indians as well. While the film is an important one, it cannot do this work of refusal on its own. It is therefore important, as I have emphasized throughout this chapter, to consider the film alongside a broader trajectory and political culture of Indigenous and diasporic refusal. One film alone cannot bear the sole responsibility for carrying this project. To return to Simpson, the generativity of refusal is partly what makes it so powerful. Shooting Indians was born through existing cultures of refusal in Toronto’s South Asian diasporic communities and has inspired emerging practices of refusal, grounded in diasporic–Indigenous connectivity. The film resonates because of its connection to this broader context.
In the more than two decades since the release of Shooting Indians, there has been deepening engagement with relational methods across multiple (inter)disciplines and activist spaces; those invested in that work will find the film an important one to (re)visit as an archive of relationality. The film cultivates and documents diasporic–Indigenous relationality through its meditation on, and repetition of, the intimacy of the photograph, inviting us into Kazimi and Thomas’s journey of friendship. Kazimi’s profile of Jeff Thomas not only provides audiences with a window into his life and work but also begins to develop an aesthetic of land and Indigeneity that mirrors Thomas’s own refusals of settler imaginaries. The film thus develops a practice of cinematic refusal, crafting a diasporic archive that rejects the multiculturalist modes of belonging and identification while reclaiming the radical potential of cross-colonial/racial dialogue. This cinematic refusal works to undo the forms of liberal recognition and national interpellation characteristic of hegemonic films, which are perhaps most evident in the limitations of the diasporic westerns discussed in chapter 1. In doing so, the film has strengthened and nuanced the imaginary threads of diasporic–Indigenous relationality, from the coalitional migrant justice organizing of No One Is Illegal, to Desh Pardesh, to the 2011–2013 study/action group South Asian Settler Colonialism, which organized South Asians in Solidarity with Idle No More.81 By capturing the radical potential of enduring friendship, Shooting Indians opens onto a portal of alternate possibilities for living and loving on occupied Indigenous land.