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Report from the American Indian Film Festival

Published on November 13, 2007

Arts Engine's Arctic Son screened at the 32nd annual American Indian Film Festival along with nearly fifty other documentaries by and about American Indians and Canada First Nations peoples. Writer Hope Richardson reports on the film festival's nine-day celebration and its emphasis on inclusion—particularly of indigenous youth filmmakers.

On my way home from San Francisco's 32nd annual American Indian Film Festival last week, something in the window of The Humidor caught my eye. While it wouldn't usually be jarring to look in a tobacco store display case and see a pipe carved in the shape of an Indian chief's head, just then—two blocks from the foremost venue for films by and about American Indians and Canada First Nations peoples—it was a perfectly absurd moment. The films featured in this festival shrug off cigar-store-Indian stereotypes with such grace and wit that it's bizarre to emerge from the theater into a world where Indians are cast in a limited set of flat, reductive images.

A still from the film I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind.

The first film shown in the festival, a five-minute short called I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind, plays with the contrast between popular media stereotypes and the "real" American Indian and First Nations people who are our neighbors and coworkers. Cringe-inducing celluloid images of Indians are paired with a pithy poem by Canadian author Thomas King about "the clichés we can't rewind." King, who is Cherokee, wrote and directed the film and is one of three fine actors who recite the poem. The smart execution of this spoken-word project makes what could easily have been a silly public service announcement into five minutes of sharp cultural commentary.

From the opening night onward, I had a feeling of being present at a community gathering. The festival, sponsored by the American Indian Film Institute (AIFI), is a nine-day celebration of ambitious scope and with an emphasis on inclusiveness. More than half the films submitted were accepted, giving many filmmakers a chance to see their work on the big screen for the first time. (This year more than 90 films were screened, out of approximately 145 entries.) Indigenous filmmakers were strongly represented, and films spanned a range of Indian nations and North American regions.

Over half the films in this year's festival were documentaries. While the 34-plus hours of documentary film are exhaustive, where else would you have the opportunity to see a 16-year-old girl's film demonstrating the traditional art of Karuk basket weaving, with narration in the Karuk language? The festival takes seriously the task of documenting living cultures, and many of the films record traditional dances, songs, and ceremonies.

Two of the prominent films in the festival confront the ways in which the U.S. government and its institutions continue to encroach on native sovereignty and threaten the lives and liberty of American Indian individuals. Making the River, a film directed by Sarah Del Seronde that received prominent placement in the final night of screenings and drew a lot of attention at the festival, tells the story of former inmate Jimi Simmons. Simmons was removed from his family when he was 17 months old. Over the next two and a half decades he dropped in and out of various state institutions—orphanages, juvenile detention, and finally, the Washington State Penitentiary. It was there, in 1979, that Jimi and his brother were charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing of a prison guard, and the state that had raised him in its custody threatened to take his life.

The film is admirable as a portrait of the Indian community within the prison, as a testament to Simmons' struggle, and as a celebration of the victory his legal team ultimately secured, against all odds. Chronology and other critical details in the film are sometimes hard to pin down, and I kept wishing for a tighter, more straightforward presentation of facts. But Simmons' story is compelling and shines needed light on problems in the criminal justice system.

Standing Silent Nation, directed by Suree Towfighnia, tells the story of an Oglala Lakota family with a vision of remedying problems of unemployment and economic depression on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota by planting industrial hemp. Tired of depending on the U.S. government and eager for self-sufficiency, they assert: "You put us in this prison, but you put us in here with a piece of paper that said we could grow what we want to."

Alex White Plume is not your typical iconoclast - he's reserved, a family man, and he's never shown losing his temper, though there are many moments of outrage in this film. It is heartbreaking and a bit surreal to watch the Drug Enforcement Administration repeatedly swoop down on the reservation to perform "eradication operations" on a harvest that should be of no interest to them. (Industrial hemp contains less than one percent THC and is not a drug crop.) The White Plumes were ultimately defeated in court, though the film ends with a postscript that they intend to bring the issue before Congress. The filmmakers, responding to their audience's frequently asked question, "What can I do?" have set up an action-oriented website.

Billy Luther's quietly masterful Miss Navajo is a standout among the festival's documentaries. As a friend who watched the movie with me observed, the Miss Navajo pageant is a lot different from Miss New Jersey. Contestants wake up at 3 a.m. to start sharpening their knives for the pageant's sheep-butchering competition. They're required to answer questions about Navajo spiritual traditions, history and culture, and they must demonstrate mastery of the Navajo language. If Miss Navajo is not a typical pageant, shy 21-year-old Crystal Frazier, the film's main subject, is not your typical contestant. A tomboy and a self-described "reservation person," Crystal is more passionate about perusing poultry magazines than about painting her fingernails.

Part of the appeal of this film is seeing the phenomenon of the beauty pageant turned upside down, becoming an affirmative, wholesome experience that's about culture instead of conformity. Beyond that, the pageant is a fascinating lens through which to view the Navajo people's fight to keep their traditions—and perhaps most importantly, their language—alive. Under the U.S. government's early assimilation policies, Navajo children got their mouths washed out with soap when they tried to speak their language in school. Now for Crystal and some of her fellow contestants, who did not grow up speaking Navajo at home, the language requirement is the hardest part of the competition. (Miss Navajo airs on PBS' Independent Lens this week - check local listings.)

Being Innu is another notable documentary that focuses on the next generation. The teenagers of Sheshatshiu, Labrador are the third generation coming of age in this community since the nomadic people of the Innu Nation were forced onto reservation land in the '60s.

A still from the film Being Innu.

In Sheshatshiu, there is an average of one suicide attempt per month. The local school gives away bikes as prizes to try to keep attendance rates above 50 percent. Alcohol and drug abuse have devastated the second generation, and many kids in the community have grown up in the care of their grandparents. Now many teenagers are tackling substance abuse problems, as well, and facing a lack of opportunity and a limited future in their isolated community. The young men and women in the film tell haunting stories. Neil, interviewed in the woods on an abandoned couch where he spends a lot of his time (and where he sometimes sleeps), rarely sees his father: "Sometimes I can see him drive by, honk his horn to say hello...I saw him yesterday before I was drunk." April, who first appears on camera sniffing gas in an abandoned lot, has lost both her father and brother to suicide.

Director Catherine Mullins displays obvious compassion for the six teenagers whose lives she follows, while the youths appear alternately wary of being filmed and eager to exploit the presence of a camera. I kept hoping for a moment of candor when one of the kids would let down their guard, and I can't help but wonder how this film would have been different with less mediation by the filmmaker. What if Mullins had handed the camera over to her subjects and put them in control of their own stories?

It's heartening to see that the American Indian Film Festival encourages youth to get behind the camera through AIFI's Tribal Touring Program, a mobile media workshop that visits several Native American communities each year, connecting aspiring young filmmakers with industry professionals and teaching valuable technical skills. This year, AIFI devoted nearly four hours of the festival to screening youth films. The Institute's investment in a new generation of filmmakers inspires faith that American Indian and First Nations film projects will continue to thrive.

Hope Richardson is a freelance writer and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area.