Decolonizing Documentary Spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we consider how grassroots community partnerships can transform academic spaces into creative and interactive sites of Indigenous agency and advocacy. Focusing on two projects based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), we bring these initiatives into a discussion that takes into account the larger context of documentary filmmaking in the territory often referred to as Québec. We address how each project uses care and collaboration towards a practice of visual sovereignty. We start with a discussion of the First Peoples’ Postsecondary Storytelling Exchange (FPPSE), an Indigenous led, multi-institutional, five-year initiative using decolonizing film and research methods to understand the needs and aspirations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis post-secondary learners. This multi-year project involved 22 communities, 10 nations and generated over 100 video stories. The group used talking circles, filmmaking, and community engagement as methods to validate indigenous ways of learning and teaching. The facilitators created safe space through the sharing of food, the attentiveness to languages, the foregrounding of shared decision making, interactive methods and more. Following this, we discuss Circle Visions, a settler-initiated partnership project based at Concordia, which has collaborated with the non-profit Wapikoni Mobile since 2016 to facilitate care-full creative spaces on the university campus for emerging Indigenous artists. This initiative features an annual cross-platform media-making Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers with workshops focusing on animation, experimental video, podcasting, documentary, and 360-degree / VR filmmaking as a tool for decolonization. We reflect on how we can activate decolonized documentary spaces within existing settler institutions and use care-full methods to unsettle hierarchies, promote well-being, and foster Indigenous productions. We then offer some context about the documentary traditions that we are building on within the place now known as Quebec.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".