In This Issue:

• Native American Film + Video Festival celebrates three decades of cinematic storytelling and support
• Native comic artists inspire, amaze and amuse
• NMAI garden sows seeds of federal trend
• Applications for artists program sought

As audiences enjoy 60 diverse films from across the hemisphere, Native filmmakers praise the festival's influence on their craft and community since 1979

Courtesy of the filmmaker "A Return Home" will be shown at the National Museum of the American Indian's Native American Film + Video Festival in New York. The 31-minute film, produced in 2008, explores the experience of B. Emerson Kitsman, mother of filmmaker Ramona D. Emerson. Kitsman, a contemporary painter, returns to her childhood home on the Navajo Nation, asking questions about what it means to come home and what it means to be a Native artist today.

By Kara Briggs
NMAI E-Newservice

"Distribution companies don't know what to do with some films because they aren't ‘identifiably' Indian," said "Barking Water" director Sterlin Harjo. "There is a certain expectation—a flute, a drum, an eagle flying in the sky, people talking funny. I just want to tell them an honest story."

Courtesy of the filmmaker The Native American Film + Video Festival at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York runs March 26-29 at the George Gustav Heye Center. Gwich'in director Princess Lucaj's "Pow Wow Dreams" features Thirza Defoe, Ojibwe and Oneida. Defoe plays one of four sisters in a Native American drum group who face a dilemma when one decides to leave. The eight-minute film is an example of the well-crafted, Native American-directed shorts for which this festival is known. Feature films and documentaries will also be screened.

Courtesy of the filmmaker Young Apache skateboarders are the subject of this eight-minute video by director Dustinn Craig, who is White Mountain Apache and Navajo. Finely-crafted, short films are a specialty of the National Museum of the American Indian's Native American Film + Video Festival in New York. The video will be screened in the afternoon of March 28.

Courtesy of the filmmaker Director Tessa Desnomie, Cree, developed the film called "ati-wîcahsin/It's Getting Easier" with the National Film Board of Canada. In it, the filmmaker and her grandmother talk about changing times. It will be screened at the National Museum of the American Indian's Native American Film + Video Festival in New York on Sunday, March 29.

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New York—The Native American Film + Video Festival marks its 30th anniversary this month much the way it began—by screening some of the year's best feature films and documentaries by indigenous filmmakers from North, Central and South America.

The festival is March 26 through March 29 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City. Sixty new works, from eight countries and 55 Native nations, will be screened.

"When we began to do the festival in 1979, 10 percent of the works were done by Native filmmakers; now 95 percent are," said Elizabeth Weatherford, director of the Film and Video Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

"In '79, there were so many people who did not have access to a platform to speak," she said, "...a place to tell the stories in their head."

The event is the longest-running hemisphere-wide indigenous film festival, Weatherford said. Only the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco, which focuses on filmmakers from the United States, is older, by three years. The NMAI festival, staged every two years, actually pre-dates the establishment of the Smithsonian's museum by 10 years, having started at its predecessor, the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Thirty years ago, Native filmmaking took a leap forward when technology made video cameras portable and accessible, recalled Victor Masayesva Jr., whose work was shown in the early years of the Native American Film + Video Festival.

"Part of my experimentation was to produce programs in my mother tongue, which is Hopi," Masayesva said. "You can imagine there wasn't that much of an audience for it."

Now an audience has developed for all kinds of American Indian films—whether viewing the works at one of the more than 45 indigenous film festivals around the world, on DVD, or switching on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada. In the United States, a cadre of American Indian feature filmmakers has grown since the 1998 Native-written, directed and co-produced "Smoke Signals" broke out of the movie industry's Native category. This year, new films including "We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears" from "Smoke Signals" director Chris Eyre and "Barking Water" from Sterlin Harjo will be screened at the festival.

One of the distinctions of the NMAI festival is that it invites a panel of four from the ranks of indigenous filmmakers to select the 60 films that will be screened from among about 450 submissions.

This year the selectors, "who are Native, media makers and many of whom are involved in cultural activism," include Eyre, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho; Zezinho Yube, who is Hunikui and who coordinates the Brazilian Ministry of Culture's Point of Culture program at Vídeo nas Aldeias; Fred Rickard, who is Cree and the founding director of the Weeneebeg Film Festival in Moose Factory, Ont.; and Nanobah Becker, Navajo, who was chosen to participate in Project: Involve, a professional development program of Film Independent based in Los Angeles.

As a result of these diverse panel members, Weatherford said, "we show a variety of indigenous film — not all slick, professional work, but youth-made media, community-based media and short fiction film. We don't give awards, and everyone is equally invited."

For those who want to build film careers, the festival provides a chance to show in the Big Apple, to draw press attention and attract an urban audience different from those that go to festivals around the country. Georgina Lightning, whose "Older Than America" is featured at this year's festival, has organized a press screening 10 days beforehand to draw attention to her film's festival appearance.

"Back in the '50s, '60s and '70s, you had art-house cinema where people could show their films, they would be put in theaters and word of mouth would grow," said Harjo, who is Seminole and Creek. "We show in festivals, and we get invited to more festivals. Festivals are almost my theatrical run."

After that, Native-made films may go to a couple of art-house theaters, some colleges, the Web, then Netflix and Amazon.com, he said. Lightning, who is Cree, has found that a festival run for a film like hers, a supernatural thriller that explores the impact of boarding school experience on generations of a Native family, can continue for two or three years, both nationally and abroad.

"In the U.S.," said Paul M. Rickard, who is a Omuskego Cree filmmaker from Canada, "most films are shorts that might broadcast on public television, and a few feature-length films by people like Harjo."

Rickard said Canada's Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and the National Film Board of Canada have provided distribution and funding options for Native filmmakers. As a result, the number has multiplied in recent years. Rickard produces a TV series called "Finding Our Talk: A Journey through Aboriginal Languages," on which he uses Native directors.

He has also produced documentaries, including one about Native architecture and a recent film by director Reaghan Tarbell, "Little Caughnawaga: To Brooklyn and Back" that will screen at the festival. It is about the families of Mohawk ironworkers who have lived and carried on their culture in 10 square blocks of Brooklyn for 50 years while helping to build New York's skyscrapers.

"My films revolve around culture and language," Rickard said. "And I see these aspects in indigenous films from New Zealand and South Africa. I grew up in the whole idea of connection to the land and how that relates to modern day. That's always my favorite kind of film to watch."

Harjo, whose "Barking Water" follows the road trip of a man seeking his former lover's help in making an end-of-life visit to his daughter, tries to tell culturally specific stories about Indians in Oklahoma. "Barking Water" premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

"Distribution companies don't know what to do with some films because they aren't ‘identifiably' Indian," Harjo said. "There is a certain expectation—a flute, a drum, an eagle flying in the sky, people talking funny. I just want to tell them an honest story."

In some ways, it isn't so different from 30 years ago, when Victor Masayesva's Hopi language films were criticized for being more ethnographic than cinematic. Meanwhile, the Native American Film + Video Festival has provided a consistent venue for a wide spectrum of Native films and filmmakers from around the Western Hemisphere.

"It's been a constant place of support," Harjo said, "a place where a lot of work gets shown. It's been really good about building an indigenous community of filmmakers."

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Native comic artists inspire, amaze and amuse

Courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture "Frybread Man" (2003) is a best seller for Ryan Huna Smith, a Chemehuevi and Navajo artist. His work is featured in Comic Art Indigène, an exhibition showing at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian through May 31.

The NMAI exhibition shows the power Native heroes command across mediums from stone to newspaper, and even on the surface of a skateboard

Washington—In 1940, two young Jewish Americans who were outraged about Nazi atrocities created a comic-book icon, Captain America.

Captain America carries a red-white-and-blue shield, but it is an older heroic figure that introduces Comic Art Indigène, an exhibition that runs until May 31 at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

This hero, also bearing a red-white-and-blue shield with stripes reminiscent of the American flag, was drawn 800 years ago by an unknown Pueblo artist on the wall of a cave in what is now Utah.

"The first time I saw that pictograph, I immediately drew that comparison between it and Captain America," said Tony Chavarria, the curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe, N.M. "It comes from a time of drought and mass exodus of the Pueblo peoples from the Four Corners region. Like Captain America, it became an icon."

Chavarria, who is Santa Clara Pueblo, created the exhibition to celebrate the Native American artists who work in the tradition of comic art. The art of comic books, or newspaper funny pages, combines pictures and words to tell a story. Like ancient rock art or 19th century ledger art from the Great Plains tribes, it uses symbols like thunderbolts or feathers to convey a plot. Comic book heroes, like the Pueblo pictograph known as All American Man, often have secret origins.

"Cartooning is storytelling...." said Marty Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota editorial cartoonist. "For some reason, we always look down on it, think it is childish. But I think it is a very mature medium that can tell a lot of different stories."

Courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture In "Behold…Po'Pay" from "Tewa Tales of Suspense," cartoonist Jason Garcia depicts the historic hero of the 1680 Pueblo revolt against Spanish colonizers like a superhero from a 1964 Avengers comic. This work by Garcia, who is Santa Clara Pueblo, is featured in Comic Art Indigène, an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian through May 31.

Courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture Known as "All American Man," this pictograph was drawn by an unknown Pueblo artist 800 years ago in what is now Utah. Like iconic heroes from 20th-century comic books, "All American Man" was drawn during a time of profound change. His red-white-and-blue shield is reminiscent of Captain America's shield.

Courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture Jolene Nenibah Yazzie's "Ko' Asdzaa," or "fire woman," is one in a series of her Native interpretations of female heroes. Works by Yazzie, who is Navajo, are featured in Comic Art Indigène, an exhibition showing at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian through May 31.

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Through the mid-20th century, comic art — bold, graphic and colorful — grew in popularity. Its form was dictated by the medium of newspapers, which would shrink the art and print it on low-quality paper. An overly detailed drawing would turn to visual mush. Yet this streamlined form of storytelling became art for the masses, for the disenfranchised, and for the American Indians.

"For me, because of my anthropology background, it's not only art that interests me," Chavarria said. "It's how art informs culture, and culture informs art. Today, we call it pop art."

The artists featured in Comic Art Indigène came to the field as children. Marty Two Bulls, editorial cartoonist, remembers, "My older uncles and cousin, they were always doing cartoons of one another."

Others, like Ryan Huna Smith and Jolene Nenibah Yazzie, grew up reading comics books.

For Smith, superheroes provided inspiration for "Frybread Man," a pudgy anti-hero, who was transformed when he ate radioactive frybread. Although "Frybread Man" was rejected by the publication of the Institute of American Indian Arts, for which it was created in 2003, the print remains Smith's biggest seller.

"I am basically a Star Wars generation kid," said Smith, who is Chemehuevi and Navajo. "Growing up looking at comics, watching cartoons, I was so influenced that as I progressed with my art, it became a part of what I do."

In 1996, he worked with a partner on what has become something of a classic comic book, "Tribal Force." Although there was only one edition, Chavarria said, it was influential for its attempt to present a superhero without insulting the image of Native people.

"I wanted to give insight into what it's like living on the reservation, being Native," Smith said. "I wanted someone who became a hero for the people of the earth."

Yazzie, who is Navajo, loved Wonder Woman and her streaming black hair, but longed for a genuinely Native superhero. In recent years, she has created a series of Native women warriors on skateboard decks. Ko' Asdzaa, Navajo for "fire woman," was among her first.

Jason Garcia's "Behold…Po'Pay" from "Tewa Tales of Suspense" features the historic hero of the 1680 Pueblo revolt against Spanish colonizers. The comic is drawn by the Santa Clara artist in the stance of the superheroes featured in the 1964 Avengers comic book, who "found themselves united against a common threat."

Not all Native comic art is about superheroes. Eva Mirabal of Taos Pueblo honed her cartooning in newspapers even before Marty Two Bulls.

Mirabal, a formally trained artist who died in 1968, joined the Women's Army Corps during World War II and was assigned to create a cartoon for WAC publications. Her character G.I. Gertie, who was not Indian, experienced the sometimes comic travails of wartime duty.

Two Bulls, who is Oglala Lakota and now freelances for Indian Country Today, likes his cartoons to make people think a different way about a subject.

"Cartooning is storytelling," Two Bulls said. "It was invented here in the United States. For some reason, we always look down on it, think it is childish. But I think it is a very mature medium that can tell a lot of different stories."

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NMAI garden sows seeds of federal trend

The idea of growing food outside a public building in Washington, modeled by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian since 2004, catches on at USDA

By Kara Briggs
NMAI E-Newservice

Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian "The Land has Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Native Landscapes, and the National Museum of the American Indian" (2008, $24.95), edited by Duane Blue Spruce and Tanya Thrasher, was published in association with the NMAI and the Smithsonian Institution by the University of North Carolina Press. Available everywhere.

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New U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took a jackhammer to 1,250 square feet of unnecessary asphalt last month and made way for "The People's Garden" outside his department's offices in Washington, D.C.

Whether driven by the economic downturn, concern over food safety or worry about climate change, gardens should replace pavement at every public building in the nation's capital, Vilsack said.

The asphalt will be replaced with a 612-square-foot garden where heirloom vegetables will be grown. Lawn will be planted on the remaining space. Last year, another garden on the USDA's grounds grew 720 pounds of tomatoes, squash and other vegetables, which were donated to a local food bank.

Gardening is an idea that the nearby National Museum of the American Indian incorporated into its original landscape design.

The NMAI's flagship building on the National Mall opened five years ago with traditional croplands on its sunny south side. Employing the waffle-garden technique, a traditional dry-farming method of the Zuni, the museum grows the Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash. The tall corn stalks companionably provide a natural trellis for the beans, while generous-sized, low-lying squash leaves provide shade for the roots of the other vegetables. Other crops traditionally cultivated by Native peoples, including tobacco and tomatoes, grow nearby. And throughout the summer, staff and local children release ladybugs for natural pest control.

A new book, "The Land has Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Native Landscapes and the National Museum of the American Indian," edited by Duane Blue Spruce, Laguna and San Juan Pueblo, and Tanya Thrasher, Cherokee, explains the traditional practices of tribes across the hemisphere that inspired the museum and its landscape.

"About 60 percent of the world's diet today is derived from foods indigenous to the Americas, such as potatoes, chilies, tomatoes, and even chocolate. The museum's traditional croplands incorporate the irrigation and planting techniques of Native peoples that revolutionized agriculture around the world," the book says.

Vilsack is following a more recent tradition of American gardening as a public service.

During the Woodrow Wilson administration of World War I, Americans followed the example of First Lady Edith Wilson and planted "liberty gardens" to generate food production while the country was at war. As the war continued, they came to be known as "victory gardens." During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt inspired 20 million Americans to cultivate plots of food after she planted her own victory garden at the White House. By war's end, gardens produced 40 percent of the nation's vegetables.

Vilsack, the former Iowa governor, hopes to inspire a similar return to the backyard garden.

"President Obama has expressed his commitment to responsible stewardship of our land, water and other natural resources," Vilsack said. "And one way of restoring the land to its natural condition is what we are doing here today—‘breaking pavement' for The People's Garden."

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Applications for artists program sought

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is seeking applications from Native artists to participate in the Artist Leadership Program or the Emerging Artist Program.

The Artist Leadership Program is for accomplished artists who are recognized in their communities. The Emerging Artist Program is for high school and college artists.

Applications are due April 6, 2009, and the programs will be conducted in the summer.

"The goal of these programs is to create an interactive process between indigenous artists and the National Museum of the American Indian," said NMAI Director Kevin Gover, who is Pawnee and Comanche.

The Artist Leadership Program brings artists to the museum in Washington, D.C., for 10 days of research and training. Artists will agree to conduct a project in their home community, which could be a youth art project, an arts symposium or workshop. The museum will contract with the artist to support this project in the amount of $6,000 to $7,000.

The Emerging Artist Program brings college students to the museum for five days, in which they will receive help in developing a career plan. Artists will create a work based on what they learned at the museum, and the museum will pay a $500 honorarium.

The high school student will be selected by the U.S. Department of Education. This student will be the first-place winner of the department's National Art Contest. For information about that contest, visit www.indianeducation.org. The high school student and a parent will receive travel to the museum for three days.

Applications and information about the programs are on the museum's website, at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/icap/leadership.html. Call (301) 238-1544, or email ALP@si.edu, for more information.

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C. The Museum also operates the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, and the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

The National Museum of the American Indian is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere, past, present and future, through partnership with Native people and others. The museum works to support the continuance of culture, traditional values, and transitions in contemporary Native life.

The NMAI E-Newservice is a free news service to news media serving Native America from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. The NMAI E-Newservice provides articles, photographs and editorial content for news outlets to use free of charge. Please credit the NMAI E-Newservice, AND use bylines as provided. Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist, is the editor. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which contracts with the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service. Contact her at editor@nmaie-newservice.com or by phone at 503-577-0012 if you have questions, comments or requests, or if you wish to subscribe.

Kara Briggs, Editor
Eileen Maxwell, NMAI Director of Public Affairs
Leonda Levchuk, NMAI Copy Editor
Sarah E. Smith, Red Hummingbird Media Corp., Copy Editor
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