Representations: Snare

[imagecaption] Screenshot from ‘SNARE’, Lisa Jackson from imagineNATIVE Programming, 2013. [/imagecaption]

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Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson’s short film ‘SNARE’ remembers the  Indigenous women who die outside. A group of women wearing white dresses walk bare foot on the earth in a circle. Each is caught by a snare, as if preyed upon or hunted by someone unknown. They hang suspended in mid-air, appearing lifeless or frozen. Then, as feathers fall down from above, they are slowly lowered back to the ground. They re-emerge in a circle suggestive of a shared experience of community, healing and survival. Each looks into the camera for the first time. No longer anonymous bodies, they become people with whom viewers can identify. Staring directly at us, a woman begins to sing ‘O Canada’, the national anthem, in Cree, an act that calls on the Canadian state to be accountable for the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women.