Kevin Lee Burton’s and Alicia Smith’s God Lake Narrows is an online documentative, or interactive documentary. The opening sequence uses global positioning to locate all of the reservations in Canada on a map and then customizes an introductory message according to the location of the viewer. By addressing the viewer as ‘you’ and using their location to determine the introduction to the piece, Burton and Smith reconfigure the relationship between viewer and documentative; in a sense, the gaze is turned back upon the viewer, who is ‘seen’ by the piece.
Once the viewer has been situated in relationship to God’s Lake and the Canadian reservation system, Burton historicizes common misconceptions about reserve life. The words are phrased in a casual first person voice, and Burton uses his own experiences to frame the facts he presents about the reservation system. The sections of text are bookended by pictures of houses in God’s Lake in the winter, the owners and inhabitants of which are notably absent. The sound composition by Christine Fellows mixes simple digital music, sounds of crunching footsteps in the snow, and announcements made by community members. Because the music is on loop and separated from the images and text, the viewer can proceed through the documentative at their own pace without running through the audio track.
The documentative is split into two discrete parts, which transition after Burton addresses “the age-old prejudice of reserves as desolate places—nothing but a cesspool of Indians” and asserts in bold that “It’s time to repaint that picture” (Burton and Smith 2012). The music changes from digital to instrumental, and the voices of community members become the focus of the sound composition. All of the pictures center God’s Lake community members, who are all slightly off-center and stand between the viewer and the insides of their homes.
When Burton tells the viewer, “there are differences between you and I,” he is intentionally and directly addressing settler viewers who do not have “a legacy of displacement and removal” (2012). The troubling of a one-way settler colonial gaze puts responsibility upon the settler viewer to change the way they think about reservations and First Nations people. The work of repainting the picture of reserve life becomes a collaborative effort facilitated by the documentative, but realized at the interface of medium and viewer.
Work Cited: God’s Lake Narrows, directed by Kevin Lee Burton and Alicia Smith, interactive documentary, http://godslake.nfb.ca/#/godslake (accessed December 14, 2015)