Organized by the Film and Video Center of the Smithsonian
National Museum of the American Indian (FVC), the festival was presented in New
York City at the NMAI George Gustav Heye Center, the Donnell Media Center of
the New York Public Library, and the American Indian Community House. For
information on other segments, please visit
style=’color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none’>www.nativenetworks.si.edu
(English) or www.redesindigenas.si.edu (Espanol).
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Manhattan, A Moving
Picture Postcard
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Steve
Bilich, 2002, short, 13 min.
In this
piece, a Native American moves through a series of jumpy Manhattan visuals to
juxtapose a man of nature against a super-urban man. This work was shot on a
hand-cranked Kodak camera bought for 9 dollars at a midtown flea market–bravo!
It works fairly well as a visual meditation on what our losses are as a
superimposed, overbuilt people until the director uses the tragedy of 9/11 to
try and bring home the point, in case anyone had missed it. I hadn’t. When 9/11
entered into the piece, it shifted into something else entirely. In the Q&A
session, the director explained that in the film he was trying to connect the
two horrific massacres of Native Americans and New York Americans. While
neither one needs more to make their own commentary, the two combined makes a
statement that makes us drop to our knees and weep.
Estos
Dolores Somos
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Roberto
Olivares, 2003, short, 6 min.
This video
tells the story about the 10th anniversary of the March of the Color
for the Earth, which is a Zapatista movement in Mexico to create a constitution
that would recognize indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, if the piece did not
have introductions, a read-along synopsis and a full explanation in the
follow-up Q&A, I would not have understood its background. The work was
inaccessible. So, that aside, it felt like a poetically told corporate video,
complete with moving text and voice over.
Ghost
Riders
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V.
Blackhawk Aamott, 2003, feature, 58 min.
Ghost
Riders documents
the Lakota Nation’s annual Big Foot Memorial Ride through 300 miles of the
Dakotas over a two-week period each December. V. Blackhawk Aamott, writer and
director, chronicles this modern day Native American ritual of "stirring
up the spirits" to honor their ancestors who bravely rode the same path
against incarceration by the white man in 1890. 110 years earlier, 300 unarmed
Lakota men, women and children were slaughtered after their leader Big Foot
gave them up peacefully at Wounded Knee Creek. At that time, 23 Medals of Honor
were issued by the U.S. Government to the 7th Cavalry for the
carnage. Today, the youth of the Lakota Nation rides alongside the ghosts of
the Massacre of Wounded Knee to ensure the ways of their people will never die.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Aamott
gives his audience a warm-seated peephole view into this annual winter
experience without disturbing even a blade of the plain’s grass. We meet Cork
Horse, Leader of the Future Generation Big Foot Rider, who rides because he
wants to give hope to his children. We are told that the present day children
of the Lakota Nation are lost in successive generations of relocation,
containment and assimilation by the U.S. Government. The children have turned
to alcohol, drugs and suicide. We meet a small Native American of about the age
of 5 that tells us, "I am not an Indian".
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> If
education means assimilation, why would a Lakota child value school? If all the
older generations of the Pine Ridge Reservation have been sent away to boarding
schools by the U.S. government to forget the Lakota ways, who will speak the
language? One of the lost children who almost overdosed on "huffing"
(inhaling glue, gas, and toxins), who has now become a Big Foot Rider, gives us
the answer. Gather together the horses, stir the spirits of the ancestors and
ride until the days of the Buffalo return.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Aamott’s
camera is a gentle, respectful witness. He weaves between Mini DV and Super 8
and as he moves between past and present, the viewer gets the felling that
Aamott and his editor are a few cuts away from the final cut. There is more
here than is needed to tell the story. His title cards could use some work or
be eliminated. However, what he
gets right is the documentation of a critical piece of American history and
current events, the winter bitten faces of determination on the Lakota children
who ride to save their culture, and a few magnificent sunrises over the Pine
Ridge Reservation – a hopeful prophecy of the future. |
