Director Aaron Glass
Country/Production USA / Canada
Release 2004
Length 33 mins
Format Colour / DVD or VHS / PAL / All region
Location Columbia / America
Ethnic Group Kwakiutl
University New York University
Prizes/Commendations Commendation Blackwell Student Video Prize 2005
Order No RAI-200.352
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The Hamat’sa (or “Cannibal Dance”) is the most important—and highly represented ceremony of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat’sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker’s fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research subjects.
