In the film La Nouvelle Kahnawake the French duo Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin zoom-in on a Mohawk tribe of Canadian First Nations people, located on the south shore of the St Lawrence river across from Montréal (Québec, Canada). Yet the film is as much about the artists research and presence in Kahnawake as it is about the Mohawks who live there. The artists appear throughout the film, embedding and acknowledging their own position as outsiders noting, "If this is a docu-mentary then the subject is us." But it’s not just a documentary, nor a critical analysis of the legal loopholes, business practices and cultural histories of the Mohawks. It’s a poetic and performative investigation of relationships in the global sphere, impacted by a cluster of forces so multiple and complex as to become abstract, almost metaphysical.

The Mohawks’ foray into technology points to the economic and cultural effects of globalization. More specifically, the story of the Mohawks of Kahnawake is indicative of a profound re-definition of the instruments and location of power in the global network—casting the internet as an untamed continent and a small band of native people as the new pioneers. The title of the film, "New Kahnawake" suggests an extension of the physical territory of Kahnawake, currently occupied by about 8,000 first nations people, through its transposition to a new land: the virtual domain of the world-wide-web. And like the British or French colonialists who brought their culture to the New World, this new Kahnawake territory mirrors the struggles of the landdwelling Mohawks. The social and political situation of the Mohawks, in both domains, remains unresolved due to manipulations by outside forces. The artists intentionally fold these mirrored territories to overlap in the film, layering the often incompatible artificial language of the virtual with the concrete physicality of the real, making visible the social and political tensions within and beyond the community.

Repeatedly throughout the film, screens and windows frame the camera view as a reminder of the conceptually porous relationship between the two Kahnawake territories, and of the computer screen as a window. Other markers in the film point to the digital in equally subtle and liminal ways. In one scene, a deepwater container ship floats down the St. Lawrence Seaway Canal bearing the moniker NAVIGATOR; a name familiar to long-time internet users as Netscape’s now defunct web-browser. A sharply spot-lit man in a red hat periodically interrupts the film accompanied by a professional and commercial voice-over. He’s an avatar inspired by the logo for RedHat, a success-ful software company that has packaged and sold the free and open-source operating system linux.