Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019)

This article examines the ways in which the river in the film Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019) medially constructs the Arctic from a female Inuit point of view. I argue that the cinematic techniques of the film mobilise the Inuit cosmological concept of Imaq (Water), thereby forming continuities between bodies of water – human and environmental – and revising the colonial trope of female Indigenous bodies as an extension of land to be conquered. The article examines scenes where the female Inuit body is paralleled to the riverscape and argues that these parallels visually construct a female gaze directed back at the colonial projections of Arctic people(s) while envisioning a connection of body and land that is based on hybridity and renewal. The choice of cinematic techniques speaks back to the violence of Canadian colonial images, challenges the narratives of disappearance and decay in relation to indigeneity, and imagines an Indigenous Arctic that is globally connected.