In Twice Colonized, Inuit civil rights activist Aaju Peter begins the first draft of her (yet unpublished) memoirs with this question: “Is it possible to change the world and mend your own wounds at the same time?” It reflects how the personal and political collide in Peter’s own life, with her decades-long fight against the neglect and oppression suffered by Inuit communities, fuelled by her own personal traumas. All this looms large in Danish filmmaker Lin Alluna’s vivid and revealing portrait of someone renowned in indigenous rights circles for her steel-willed persistence and fiery speeches in defence of the Inuit way of life, delivered in small classrooms and at international conferences alike.
By capturing the fury and fragility of Peter’s complex personality – she’s at once a headstrong political operator, a bingo-playing grandmother, a coffee-drinking cosmopolitan, and a tortured woman struggling to end an abusive relationship – Twice Colonized, which premiered in competition at Sundance, provides the viewer with a nuanced view of a modern-day First Nations campaigner.
The strength of Twice Colonized lies with the way Alluna – a Dane whom Peter half-jokingly describes as “my coloniser” in the film – veers away from offering a picture-perfect, politically correct heroine or a mystic sage imparting nuggets of wisdom to the viewer. Here, Peter is shown to be just as human as any of her allies or detractors, thanks to the footage filmed by Alluna’s quartet of cinematographers and Mark Bukdahl’s editing.
The downside of this delicate, personal approach is the somewhat sketchy historical context of Peter’s political struggles. The issues could sound confusing and perhaps inconvenient to the liberal-minded, as they pitch the indigenous population in Arctic Canada against the seemingly well-meaning (and star-powered) environmentalist groups. Twice Colonized is perhaps best consumed alongside Angry Inuk, Canadian Inuit activist-filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s 2016 documentary outlining the rationale and progress of the Inuit’s campaign to overturn international bans against seal-hunting, in which Peter stands at the very forefront. Arnaquq-Baril is credited as a producer of Twice Colonized, a Danish-Greenlandic-Canadian co-production.
Bar a few sequences of archived footage or home videos, Twice Colonized avoids exposition or flashbacks of any kind, and stays focused on Peter’s here and now. We see her whipping up debate at a seal-hunting forum by questioning her (European) audience whether protecting other living species is more important than helping indigenous peoples, we also see her taking even her closest friends to task when they recall their surprise of seeing an Inuit woman seemingly so attuned to a modern, “Western” lifestyle. And there are indeed quite a few of these awkward exchanges, captured perfectly – complete with cringes – by Alluna’s crew.
But Peter is far from merely being overly sensitive in these interactions, as the viewer is slowly eased into her back story via her recollections or conversations with friends and her brother. The daughter of a pastor-teacher, Peter grew up on the western coast of Greenland until she was 11, when she was abruptly sent to Denmark to continue her studies – a modified version of a previously bungled colonial strategy to fashion “little Danes” out of young Greenlanders.
When Peter returned to Greenland seven years later, she was all messed up: she could no longer speak Kalaallisut or converse with her mother, and was made to feel estranged from both her roots and her new “Danish” identity. Because of that, she relocated to Canada when she’s 20 and rebooted her life in the Arctic Inuit-majority town of Frobisher Bay. As the town gradually morphs into Iqaluit, the capital of the Nunavut Territory established in 1999, Peter also changes, establishing herself as an activist, a sealskin fashion designer and eventually a lawyer.
With all this personal tumult behind her, Peter’s thinly-veiled mix of anger and lament is understandable. At times, she resembles a walking embodiment of Frantz Fanon’s politically-charged studies about the impact of colonialism on the psyche of the colonised. This is especially true when she is shown visiting Copenhagen to lobby for the support of Danish parliamentarians. As she walks around the palatial buildings in the centre of town, she exclaims “The Empire!” in a tone that is three parts disdain and one part awe.
That said, Alluna treats Peter with respect. Peter is not the filmmaker’s object of study but more a subject of her own, as she is omnipresent throughout the film (the credits describe the film “as lived by Aaju Peter”) and is never merely “spoken about” in interviews with her acquaintances.
And beneath the tough veneer lies a mellow soul too, as Peter is shown to be vulnerable or even helpless when faced with domestic misfortunes that fate could bestow upon anyone. Chatting to her brother during their return to their former home in the southern Greenlandic village of Nanortalik, Peter reflects on how her lack of a well-adjusted childhood might have led to her not knowing how to raise children. That’s a reference, perhaps, of the death of her 17-year-old son, who had recently killed himself. While she seems to have come to grips with that tragedy, she is shown struggling desperately – against herself, as it turns out – to leave her violent partner once and for all.
Twice Colonized rarely flinches throughout its exploration of Peter’s life, and this is perhaps due to the activist’s strong personality. At one point, her brother says to her: “Maybe we could talk about the bright side of our story?” Peter demurs. “The crew already knows this is going to be a rough trip”. And then she adds: “Our childhood is in the middle of those changes, right?” Indeed, Twice Colonized begins with a childhood lost but expands into something much much more, where spectres of an individual’s past bleed into the collective horrors of the present.
Director: Lin Alluna
Screenwriter: Aaju Peter
Producers: Emile Hertling Péronard, Alethea Araquq-Baril, Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Bob Moore
Executive producers: Inuk Silis Høegh, Mila Aung-Thwin, Daniel Cross
Cinematographers: Iris Ng, David Bauer, Glauco Bermudez, Lin Alluna
Editor: Mark Bukdahl
Music composer: Olivier Alary, Johannes Malfatti, Celina Kalluk
Sound designer: Benoît Dame, Catherine van der Donckt
Production companies: Ánorâk Film
World sales: Autlook Filmsales
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In English, Kalaallisut, Inuktitut
92 minutes
