The First Indigenous Female Pornographer

The scopic drive is put on a curious kind of trial, where its contradictions are exposed as much through laughter as through discomfort. In her mockumentary, Anishinaabe filmmaker JL Whitecrow confronts the settler gaze with its own racial fantasies. The editing plays on Canada’s colonial archives to bring out their erotic dimension—the perverse logic that sexualized Indigenous bodies in order to further condemn them. It is within this terrain that the film takes root, subtly celebrating bodies whose natural movement the archive sought to suppress. The result is a film that, through a fictional interview, reconfigures the meaning of these bodily archives, striking a tone that balances between earnestness and satire.

This subversion through hilarity draws inspiration from Cree artist Kent Monkman and the work of Métis filmmaker Clint Alberta, while underscoring the political use of humour that Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr. identified as a distinctive feature of Indigenous traditions. Playwright Monica Mojica stars as the first Indigenous woman pornographer; through both her performance and her words, she articulates a sharp critique of the contemporary relationship between the settler and the Indigenous person, in which dynamics of exploitation have become more deftly disguised beneath the veneer of liberalism.

Miriam Sbih
Author and Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature