This week’s module on cyberfeminism gave me another chance to spend time looking at the films and narratives available on the National Film Board of Canada’s website (https://www.nfb.ca/). I chose to look at the short film Woman Dress (https://www.nfb.ca/film/woman-dress/) by Cree filmmaker Thirza Cuthand. Here, Cuthand interviews a woman she identifies as “Auntie,” most likely the person credited as Beth Cuthand, and they talk about “Woman Dress,” a story told by Beth’s father and Thirza’s grandfather, Stan. The NFB page provides a succinct description:

Pre-contact, a Two Spirit[1] person named Woman Dress travels the Plains, gathering and sharing stories. Featuring archival images and dramatized re-enactments, this film shares a Cuthand family oral story, honouring and respecting Woman Dress without imposing colonial binaries on them.

This film is short but it provides a good opportunity to talk about Alexandra Hidalgo’s “Principles of Feminist Filmmaking” from her video book Camara Retorica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. While the film doesn’t always align with these goals as neatly as Hidalgo outlines them in her chapter, considering these principles in conjunction with the piece helped me to unpack a lot of what I saw in it and think about why Cuthand’s depiction of Woman Dress is so moving:

1. Foster Diversity in Front of and Behind the Camera:
2. Engage in an Ethics of Interdependence with Crewmembers
3. Engage in an Ethics of Interdependence with Documentary Participants

• These first three principles  are difficult to discuss since I’m not sure about how Cuthand made her film. Woman Dress features three indigenous women. Kiley May, who plays the Two-Spirit youth, Woman Dress, is transgender. Based on the credits, it appears that Cuthand’s crew was made up of around 50% women and 50% men, though of course this is going based on names alone, and it’s unclear how each individual identifies their gender. The only thing that really surprised me was how Beth Cuthand was credited only as featured. Meanwhile, Thirza takes full credit as the writer, even though her aunt’s recollections form the bulk of the narrative. Additionally, towards the end of the film, Thirza references her aunt’s former desire to “do something” with the story, and I wished that more would have been said about what this might have looked like. It would be easy to say that this doesn’t quite fit into Hidalgo’s vision of “interdependence with documentary participants”; however, because so much of the behind-the-scenes and familial relationship between the two Cuthands is unclear, it’s difficult to say and not my place to judge how the filmmaker should have handled this. What seems to be the most important is the fact that this is a conversation taking place between two women of different generations as they tell and comment on a story that highlights the importance of storytelling as a legacy and form of cultural transmission.

4. Practice Mentorship

• Cuthand doesn’t really talk about mentorship in terms of filmmaking here, but it still plays a prominent role in her work. She meditates more generally on the importance of storytelling and the transmission of those stories, which is apparent in the film’s emphasis on orality. The Cuthands narrate the story of Woman Dress and talk about the story’s place in their family over footage of the wandering youth superimposed on backdrop of changing natural landscapes. This technique allows us to visualize the travels of Woman Dress without drawing our attention away from the voice recounting the narrative. The content of the film also emphasizes the oral transmission of the story: Beth Cuthand says that she first heard the story form her father, who would have heard it from “people who hunted the buffalo who were still alive and still telling the stories (4:31-35). In a film about how storytelling takes place, the means by which these stories circulate is significant, and Beth’s comment (“still alive…still telling”) demonstrates the extent to which colonization imperils the oral transmission of histories and culture. So, while Thirza Cuthand tells stories through film, “Woman Dress” implies that her circle of mentors encompasses more than just filmmakers. Similarly, in committing the story to film she participates in its transmission (beyond her family and the Little Pine First Nation) as well as, potentially, mentoring other indigenous filmmakers.

5. Practice Strategic Contemplation

• Again, this is an instance where I’m applying Hidalgo’s concept loosely, since I can’t speak to the extent that Cuthand spent time contemplating her relation to the subjects she’s representing (though, she does have a longer documentary, Homelands, in which she discusses her identity and relationship to her family and heritage). Nevertheless, her film seems to represent strategic contemplation visually. Her self-conscious portrayal of herself as a storyteller extends beyond her conversation with Beth to the visual narrative in the film’s final moments. The moment she asks her aunt what she thinks Woman Dress would be doing if they were living in the present, scenes of contemporary Toronto appear; first Woman Dress, then Thirza are superimposed over them. As Beth asserts “as long as we keep telling [the stories] they’ll live,” Thirza and Woman Dress look each other in the eye, grasp hands, and embrace (Woman Dress 5:13-24). In doing this, Thirza acts out the strategic contemplation that Hidalgo advocates. Her literal embrace of the storyteller, Woman Dress, and the film’s emphasis on keeping stories alive signals the thought and care that have gone into depicting her subjects. The final image of the film, Toronto vanishing to reveal Thirza and Woman Dress embracing on the prairie, underscores this point. Women Dress, the story, and storytellers are our focus, and it is the job of filmmakers like Thirza to tell them. At the same time, Thirza-the-storyteller becomes her own subject and demonstrates a kinship with Woman Dress. That she attains this role through first listening to and then recounting the narrative (through film) reminds viewers that they too can play a role in keeping stories alive.

6. Address Social Justice

• Cuthand’s own identity as a queer indigenous woman is the subject of many of her films, and she talks about the difficulty of pinning this down in her longer documentary, Homelands. Unsure of how to identify herself in response to queries about “what” she is, she tries multiple titles:  “a human? A mixed-up boy-girl? A butch lesbian? A Scots-Cree half breed? Treaty but probably unable to pass my rights on to my kid should I have one? . . .” (Homelands 2:16-27). Her symbolic identification with the wandering Two-Spirit storyteller in the final scene of Woman Dress depicts the way that her identity straddles different communities. To further this point, she and her aunt begin the film by explaining that the distinction between masculine and feminine pronouns doesn’t exist in the Cree language, so Beth Cuthand tells the story as she heard it from her father, alternating between the two pronouns. The notion of a Two-Spirit person in Cree and other North American indigenous communities speaks to the complicated ways that gender exists outside of a strict binary, and language (for the purposes of the film) seems to support this. Additionally, Beth Cuthand reminds us of the legacy of Colonial oppression suffered by many indigenous people in Canada and the Americas when she ties the story’s circulation to conceptions of gender. While she had wanted her father to talk more about the story of Women Dress, she explains that he was reluctant: “I think he was king of embarrassed to talk openly about a Two-Spirited person, like Woman Dress. I think it was the influence of Christianity” (Woman Dress 4:44-54). Cuthand doesn’t say more beyond this, but her ascription of blame to Christianity certainly brings to mind the role played by churches and schools in the separation of indigenous children from their families and their subsequent “reeducation.” Whether this is exactly what happened to her father isn’t clear from this film. However, it seems deliberate that Thirza Cuthand has placed this piece of narration immediately after another statement in which her aunt recounts how leaders in the story of Woman Dress agree that “we should honor story tellers like Woman Dress . . . let’s agree that we won’t kill the story tellers” (3:57-4:15). The freedom and community engendered by Woman Dress’s stories appear in stark contrast with the oppressive expectations that may have made Stan Cuthand reluctant to talk about the character. In placing blame on Christianity, the film’s narrative highlights the stories and people colonialism has killed as well as the fact that it almost killed this one. Thirza Cuthand and Woman Dress show why the transmission of these narratives is so important for pushing against oppressive colonial narratives of gender. I’ve not been able to find out whether “feminist” is one of the labels that Cuthand would apply to herself, but it seems clear that her filmmaking aligns with many of the goals laid out by Hidalgo’s principles and, perhaps, even expands the way we might think about them.

Works Cited

Cuthand, Thirza. Homelands. Thirza Cuthand. 2010. https://www.thirzacuthand.com/videos/.

—. Woman Dress. National Film Board of Canada. 2019. https://www.nfb.ca/film/woman-dress/.

Hidalgo, Alexandra. “The Principles of Feminist Filmmaking.” Camara Retorica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. Computers and Composition Digital Press. 2016. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/camara/chaptertwo.html.

Re:searching for LGBTQ2S+ health. “Two-Spirit Community.” Re:searching for LGBTQ2S+ Health. 2020. https://lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php.

[1] According to lgbtqhealth.ca, “‘Two-spirit’ refers to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. As an umbrella term it may encompass same-sex attraction and a wide variety of gender variance, including people who might be described in Western culture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, gender queer, cross-dressers or who have multiple gender identities.”