“Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais”
Or, English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Kerstin Knopf in
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Abstract
This essay attempts to outline the conditions of anticolonial filmmaking as well as different strategies that are employed. Foremost it deals with the issue of language and shows through two examples how filmmakers strive to undermine the authority of the colonial language. The Métis filmmaker Maria Campbell, in The Road Allowance People, employs a Métis vernacular interspersed with Mitchif words, constructing a linguistic medium which does not alienate oral knowledge – the film’s subject – from its cultural context. Often dismissed as substandard English, such vernacular forms become central in the postcolonial context. The Métis director Gil Cardinal and Cree producer Doug Cuthand, in Big Bear, apply an inverted linguistic self/Other dichotomy by having the Cree people speak English and the soldiers and settlers speak an unintelligible gibberish. Thus, the filmmakers subvert the conventional filmic tradition of putting indigenous people in an inferior position through the “other” English they speak.