Film Festival explores Native films
“Into the Circle”, a short documentary admitted to the festival, shows how a Native charter school helps a Lakota family reclaim its heritage.
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COURTESY / BHFF
Film Festival explores Native films
By Talli Nauman
Native Sun News Today Correspondent
HILL CITY — Six independent films exploring the vast and nuanced panorama of Native cultural regeneration in contemporary Turtle Island will showcase at the 13th Annual Black Hills Film Festival. Viewers can purchase festival passes or tickets to individual showings and watch the virtual edition Feb. 18-28 on Film Festival Flix. Some offerings are admission-free.
“The Way Home” is a feature documentary by Rapid City-born Sicangu Lakota filmmaker Gemma Lockhart. It depicts the first time a tribe in the United States obtained the return of human remains from the Smithsonian Institution.
Dakotah tribal members sought return of long lost relatives under the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. The law was influenced by the Smithsonian Institution’s policy of reunifying thousands of Native enclaves continent-wide with cultural patrimony bestowed on the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History.
NMAI Repatriation Program Manager Jim Pepper Henry calls repatriation “a healing between the Indian and museum communities.” In “The Way Home”, the viewer sees how meaningful such reintegration is to individuals of one Oceti Sakowin tribe in the Northern Great Plains.
The movie’s relevance and timely showing can scarcely be exaggerated. It is on screen at the Black Hills Film Festivals exclusive online venue less than a year after the discovery of hundreds of clandestine graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.
The revelation fueled today’s movement for discovery and repossession of all Indian boarding school children’s remains. Since the burial grounds were made and are held by Catholic and other churches or by the military, the movement faces stubborn institutional legacies in its quest for reparations.
Los Angeles cinematographer Eric Haase and Sicangu Lakota Elder Lydia Whirlwind Soldier produced this portrait demonstrating the importance of taking steps toward reconciliation. Whirlwind Soldier is recognized with the Governor’s 2015 South Dakota Living Indian Treasure Award for her preservation of traditional art forms.
In another production, Cree muralist Jesse Gourney, an advocate for church and state reparations to boarding school survivors, submitted his short narrative “Johnny Crow” to the 2022 Black Hills Film Festival. Fresh from the 2021 Edmonton International Film Festival, it shares some of his more than 100 murals, many of which honor wildlife and the natural world. The collaborative project consists of animations of the spray-painted works.
The abominable abuses that Native children suffered in former boarding schools led to massive cultural disintegration. One regenerative effort is through an educational model in the hands of Native people that restores language, custom, and tribal connection. “Into the Circle”, a short documentary admitted to the festival, shows how that system helps a Lakota family reclaim its heritage.
The film depicts the K-12 educational system at the Native American Community Academy, or NACA, located on ancestral Tiwa and Keres homelands in Albuquerque. Its success as a public charter school has hatched the NACA-Inspired Schools Network, launching campuses across Indian country, including in Rapid City.
North Dakota Native filmmaker Justin Deegan’s documentary feature “The Long Game,” tells the story of a regenerative effort in the creation of the MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) Interpretive Center. The innovative facility is located across the bridge from the tribal headquarters of the Three Affiliated Tribes in New Town, N.D. Overlooking Lake Sakakawea on the Missouri River, it serves as a cultural center dedicated to education, preservation, retention and revitalization of language, culture and historical perspectives of the Upper-Missouri agricultural nations.
The center was a contender USA Today’s Readers’ Choice competition for Top 10 New Attractions of 2021. Competitors included the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, the Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience at multiple sites, the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, and many others.
Deegan took part in the 2021 Black Hills Film Festival, captivating theatre-goers with enthusiastic conversations and showing his award-winning documentary short “Totems.” As “Totems” heads for the 30th Arizona International Film Festival in Tucson in April, he told organizers there, “I love cinema. I grew up watching films of every sort since childhood. I knew that I wanted to make a film, but I never knew how to go about doing it.” As an actor cast in a short film, he said he “discovered they made the film without me. That is the very moment I decided to make my own films.”
As Lakota society digs for the roots that assimilation policy tried to chop away, some tribal members are revealing stories about the relics of history kept secret over decades to protect them. “Above Boy” is a short documentary about the life of Godfrey Chipps, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, who bears the family name of Crazy Horse’s medicine man. Starting In 2014, international Believe Media founders Luke Thornton and Liz Silver traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation and the South Dakota Badlands with German directors to produce it.
A locally directed short, “Strong Hearts: an Indigenous Love Letter to my Sons”, also shows community members seeking to pass along traditional knowledge through family connections. In it, writer and director Gary Litefoot Davis, shares a father’s wisdom and Indigenous world view, poetically expressed as a love letter to his three sons. Through its raw and vulnerable narration, he conveys a message of strength, beauty, and power to the young men, imploring them to live a life of purpose. Shot on location at sites of decisive Indigenous victories over the U.S. military, the historical happenings recalled in the movie become teaching moments. Majestic natural landscapes provide an epic visual backdrop for delivering a message meant to give the boys the impetus to reclaim their Native American narrative.
The virtual festival features 40 films from South Dakota and around the world. Not all of them will be offered, however, at the live portion of the festival, which has been rescheduled to the following dates:
May 31 – Matthews Opera House, Spearfish
June 3 – 5 – Historic Hot Springs Theatre, Hill City High School Theatre
June 6 – The Elks, Rapid City
Session tickets will be sold at the live venues. In-person workshops, seminars and special guest presentations will be included along with some new films not available in the virtual festival.
More information and details are available on www.BlackHillsFilmFestival.org
(Talli Nauman is the director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness. Contact her at talli.nauman@gmail.net)
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February 11, 2022