EDITOR'S NOTE Among Native American generations, the past, present and future seem to co-exist. We are always judging our decisions by what it will mean to children in the distant future, and what our ancestral relations would have wanted. In this issue of the American Indian News Service we look at generations—generations of Native visual storytellers; generations of families who have moved from their home community to the city and often back again, carrying their cultural values all the way; a father and his sons who are carving the art of their ancestors; three brothers who changed the face of rock and roll; and three elders whose dreams carried Native values as far as the stars. — Editor Kara Briggs |
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FILM
By Kara Briggs New York—The 2011 Native American Film + Video Festival at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York will bring an indigenous hemisphere together from March 31-April 3, at a free festival that celebrates the diversity and expression of contemporary Native filmmaking. "The festival brings you Native storytelling at its best—wrenching at times, touching, risky, ironic, hilarious and experimental," said Elizabeth Weatherford, director of the museum's Film and Video Center, which puts on this biennial event. The festival attracts filmmakers from Native communities across the Western Hemisphere, and offers them training workshops, panel discussions and networking opportunities. Weatherford is proud that many a professional connection has been made at this festival, generating new works. "This festival will have the largest representation of Native women filmmakers, and many films of the last two years address the stories of Native peoples immigrating and immigration," Weatherford said ... |
PEOPLE By Kara Briggs
New York—Every other year, the Film + Video Festival at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian begins by selecting 100 films, from shorts as long as five minutes each to feature-length films, to screen during the two-day festival. The selectors are Native filmmakers from across the Western Hemisphere, artists who, like the makers of the films they are screening, struggle to give voice to the unique stories of Native America. The task of screening more than 700 films could be mind-numbing, but Elizabeth Weatherford, director of the museum's Film and Video Center, always seems to pick the right four people. When the festival, which this year begins March 31 and concludes April 3, dims the lights it will be these selectors to thank for helping to shape a great festival ... |
CULTURE In May their Git-Hoan dance group is to perform at NMAI in New York By Kara Briggs
Kingston, Wash.—David Boxley is putting designs in red paint on a bentwood box, while his older son, David Robert Boxley, carves alder wood into a beaver face for a helmet commissioned by a Native dance troupe in nearby British Columbia. Father and son are often together, whether at performances of the Git-Hoan, Boxley's Tsimshian dance troupe (scheduled to appear at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York on May 21-22), or in the carver's shed by his house on Washington state's Kitsap Peninsula. A second son, Zachary, 26, who makes the drums and bentwood boxes now, works a job on the graveyard shift and is asleep in the house. An almost-constant winter rain muffles sounds. In the shed the father, 58, and the son, 30, talk while they work, finishing each other's sentences, and possibly each other's thoughts. "I've taken on a mantle of cultural leadership," Boxley said. "David Robert has, too, for his generation. We look at it from a broad spectrum of carrying on the culture. In 100 years no one alive will remember us. I don't care if people don't remember my name, as long as people are speaking our language, and people are still doing this kind of art." ... |
MUSIC American Indian News Service
Link Wray and his Ray Men broke into American pop music in 1958 with a loud guitar riff later characterized as the power chord, and a song that made some radio disc jockeys fearful of violence. But the Wrays, Vernon, Link and Doug, were no 1950s-era gang members. They were three brothers who were journeymen musicians by the time they reached their early 20s. As babies, they learned to sing along with their Shawnee Indian mother while she picked cotton and they picked up the guitar one afternoon from a worker in a traveling carnival who spied the three boys in a North Carolina yard trying to play the instrument. In the mid-1940s the brothers played country and western before slipping into a 1950s-Perry Como-styled pop. Then Link Wray cut loose on a demo, a recording that was headed for the wastebasket when a record executive's daughter chanced to play it. The song "Rumble" that she deemed to be right out of "West Side Story" has captivated generations of rock stars, movie directors and music lovers. Its signature power chord is credited as a progenitor of classic rock, punk and heavy metal ... |
HISTORY By Kara Briggs
New York—Reaghan Tarbell never set out to be a New Yorker, or a filmmaker, for that matter. But eight years ago, this descendant of Mohawk ironworkers moved to New York from the Kahnawake Reserve near Montreal. She came to work in the Film and Video Center of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. In the city, she found she had questions she'd never asked about the sojourns of her grandparents in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Little Caughnawaga. Little Caughnawaga, as Tarbell explained in her 2008 documentary, "To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey," was a small neighborhood that was home in the 1950s to as many as 700 Mohawks, making it the largest Mohawk settlement outside of Canada. "It is my family story," she said. "When I first moved here, my experience was so different than what I had heard about, how my whole community was here, your aunties, sisters, all lived here within 10 square blocks."... |
MUSEUM By Kara Briggs
When Maria Hinton was born in 1910, every Oneida family spoke the language of their ancestors—and at age 100, she has lived to make digital recordings in her language that can be heard on the world the Internet. When Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee, was born in 1908 in the foothills of the Ozarks, she was only one year younger than the state of Oklahoma—and she would live to become a leading figure in America's space race. When Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, Lumbee, was born in 1935, the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful force in North Carolina—she would live to play a pivotal role in getting civil rights extended to American Indian people. These highly accomplished elder ladies of Indian Country each have had a special relationship with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Together they represent some of the many American Indian elders for whom the opening of this museum in 2004 represented a watershed moment in American Indian arts, culture and achievement . Although Ross passed away at 99 in 2008, and Scheirbeck passed away at 75 in 2010, they, like Hinton, embodied some of the values that are of great importance to the museum, including scholarship and celebration of American Indian cultures. Hinton, who is Oneida and turned 100 last summer, was honored with the 2009 Prism Award from the museum for her work in reviving the Oneida language and teaching to successive generations of Oneidas. Last spring Hinton put the finishing touches on an exhaustive recording of the Oneida dictionary. Taking five years of almost daily work, she recorded 12,000 audio files, including tens of thousands of Oneida words, and told stories she first heard in her mother's tongue. In 1971, after helping to raise her grandchildren in California, Hinton returned to Wisconsin. Soon she and her brother, Amos Christjohn, began working with the Oneida Nation to teach the language to a generation of children who knew only English. They would work for the next 35 years to create a written Oneida dictionary. To that end, Hinton enrolled in the University of Wisconsin in 1973, and graduated cum laude in 1979. Then she became one of the founding teachers at the Oneida Nation Turtle School, and she continues teaching, though now her pupils are the people who teach the tribe's youth ... |
Go to www.americanindiannews.org to access full-lenght articles, high resolution photos, and Word documents with the full article. Add editor@americanindiannews.org to your address book to receive the HTML version of this news service. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C., New York City and Suitland, Md. View online exhibitions at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu The American Indian News Service is edited by Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which is contracted by the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service. Contact her at editor@americanindiannews.org or by phone at 503-577-0012. We're interested in how the American Indian News Service is used. We welcome copies of newspapers that contain news service material, or emailed links to online postings. Please forward to Red Hummingbird Media Corp., 8825 34th Ave. NE, Suite L-154, Tulalip, WA 98271; or e-mail to editor@americanindiannews.org. Kara Briggs, Editor National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center Cultural Resources Center To opt-out to this publication, please email editor@americanindiannews.org. Proud member of:
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