We’re uplifting Indigenous voices! First, Farai interviews Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on what she’s learning from the survivors and descendants of the Federal Indian Boarding School system. Then, Farai speaks with Deputy Director of Western Native Voice, Ta’jin Perez, on the fight for tribal sovereignty. Plus, we revisit a 2014 conversation about Native American media from the podcast, “One With Farai” featuring Bird Runningwater, co-executive producer of the forthcoming TV series "Sovereign", and former director of the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program.
Farai Chideya:
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Farai Chideya:
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Farai Chideya:
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Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe and the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior. Last May, her office released an initial investigative report about the federal government system of Indian boarding schools. The investigation found that between 1819 and 1969, the system included 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawaii. These schools forcibly removed indigenous children from their homes, changing their names, cutting their hair, forcing them to perform military drills, and forbidding them from speaking their own languages. When children disobey, they faced harsh abuse including whippings, food deprivation, and solitary confinement.
Farai Chideya:
As Secretary of the Interior, Haaland also oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which administers federal programs to 574 federally recognized tribes. A few months after taking the jobs, she created the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative committing to uncovering the truth behind these programs. Now, she's on a year-long Road to Healing tour. She's traveling across the country to listen to survivor's stories and help them get the trauma informed support they need. Welcome back on the show, Secretary Haaland.
Deb Haaland:
Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.
Farai Chideya:
Among the first initiatives you announced after becoming Secretary of the Interior was the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. So last spring, your agency released a report outlining the scale and impact of this system. So what are the top line findings from the initial investigation? And did anything surprise you?
Deb Haaland:
The first report that we put out was meant to outline the number of schools, where they were located, how many students were there, what tribes they were from. That was the purpose of the first report. We're working on a second report now. We felt we were very successful with the first report, so it's almost like we were able to bring a lot of the information together in one place for the public to see otherwise it was scattered. People from certain states knew that information, but it was just good to have it all in one place, so we were happy for that.
Deb Haaland:
Shortly after that report came out, we felt that we wanted to hear from survivors and descendants directly, and then we announced our Road to Healing tour. And we've had five of those so far where we go to those particular communities and open it up for anyone to come forward and tell their stories. We want to hear from people. We feel that this is part of the healing process. And quite frankly, this whole entire initiative for me and for us, we felt it was important that we had that component of healing. We want people to heal from this trauma once and for all.
Farai Chideya:
So I met someone who's Ojibwe and she told me that she speaks Ojibwe. She's the youngest of her siblings, but her older siblings were sent off to boarding schools and forbidden to speak Ojibwe. So can you give us a sense of some of the things you're finding out either from personal narrative or other documentation?
Deb Haaland:
Oh, gosh. Well, yes. The US government felt that one of the tactics they could use would be to take away native languages. It was almost like they wanted to turn all these native children into non-native children. They wanted to take away their culture, their tradition at the forefront of any native culture and tradition is their language. So they felt that if they could take that away in sometimes the most brutal ways, that it would give them more leverage over those tribal people.
Deb Haaland:
It turned out that if they were able to take the language away from the young kids, they wouldn't be able to communicate with their elders any longer either. So there were elder tribal members back at home, when their children came home, if they came home at all, they wouldn't be able to communicate with them in the same ways. The end result of all of that, all of the oppression, all of the violence, all of the neglect against these children in these schools was that they wanted the land they wanted to move and to get people off of their land so that they could take over their lands.
Farai Chideya:
I also had done a documentary series, audio docs, and we'd spoken to some members of the Tohono Oʼodham, which is on the US-Mexico border. And in this case, as a young man, one of the people we spoke to had been sent away to a boarding school. But his grandparents, he came back and his grandparents were like, "Nope. You're just going to speak Oʼodham. We don't care that you don't want to speak it. You're going to speak it." And so he relearned it. But I also think of this tied up with the reproductive health aspects of indigenous women and the four sterilizations. Do you see that all being linked? And are you looking at it holistically?
Deb Haaland:
Well, these were wholesale assimilation policies, right? It was getting Indians to become mainstream Americas, killing the Indian to save the man. And so I feel like everything is linked. Members of my family were essentially victims of those healthcare issues. The way Indian Health Service was run, there wasn't enough funding for them. It was on a shoestring budget. And they made decisions based on funding rather than the health of the person. After they had taken away opportunities for native people to have their own food sources also, it made them very unhealthy.
Deb Haaland:
Or you think about the killing off of the American bison on the Great Plains. One of the reasons behind killing a thousand bison a day was to take away the food source of the plains' tribes. And so I think all of this is linked together. And so we're working on this one piece right now and hopefully, that will cause some healing in other areas also.
Farai Chideya:
I think a lot about the questions of land. I've spent some time studying broken treaties. And there are small efforts at repatriation, but also large areas of the United States or places that the US promised to preserve under treaty for indigenous people and did not. How are you approaching that as you look at the boarding schools and everything else?
Deb Haaland:
Well, for our part at the Department of the Interior, we're charged with managing the nation's public lands and cultural heritage for the American people. We're also charged with upholding the trust and treaty responsibilities of the US government. So when I think about those, the things that we're charged with, and when I think about the fact that tribes were kicked off their lands to make room for a national park, that happened in this country where tribes were made to leave their traditional homelands because the United States wanted to make a national park.
Deb Haaland:
So for our part, we're working hard to make sure that tribes are at the table when decisions are being made. We're working on co-management opportunities for tribes. We feel very strongly that tribal ecological knowledge is something that we can learn from. They are the first stewards of these lands, and we want to make sure that we are taking into consideration their desires for these ancestral homelands that they have.
Deb Haaland:
Additionally, there are specific opportunities for us to return land to tribes. We were able to return the National Bison Range, for example, to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. We also were able to return a fish hatchery in Idaho to the Nez Perce. They deserve to be a part of our future because so often, they were not part of our past. People, the federal government, made decisions with never having any tribal leader or tribal person with a seat at the table. So that is all changing. President Biden, his leadership makes it a priority for us to consult with tribes across the board, across the federal government, and that's what we're doing.
Farai Chideya:
On our show. We cover domestic extremism. And there has been some of the same groups that mobilize around extremist white supremacist causes, also organize around the question of land and who has access to it. How, if at all, are you factoring in the political sentiment in America today into the work you're doing?
Deb Haaland:
What I've said many, many times in speeches I've given and conversations I've had is that our public lands belong to every single American, right? With that being said, there are certain locations that are sacred to tribes, tribal sacred sites. When a tribe has a sacred site, regardless of who has title to that land, they have an obligation to protect it, and it's dear to them. So we always try to take that into consideration.
Deb Haaland:
I feel like I've worked very hard to think about this in a calm manner. I want to have conversations with people. I don't want extremism, I don't want violence. I want us to have the conversations. And there are a lot of other issues when it doesn't pertain to tribes that we have amazing career staff, and my amazing colleagues who work very hard every day to make sure that we're having the conversations we need to, and making sure that the American people have the benefit of our public lands.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Secretary Haaland, I am so grateful you made some time for us today. We hope that you will come on again. Thank you so much.
Deb Haaland:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
That was Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
Last month in Montana, State Senator Keith Regier filed a draft resolution to propose researching alternatives for the state's American Indian reservation system. The draft suggested that, "The Indian reservation system is a policy based entirely on race and is anti-constitutional." For the record, being indigenous is not a race. Sometimes, it's a federal category; sometimes, it's an ethnicity. You can go down that rabbit hole yourself.
Farai Chideya:
The draft was condemned by the state's American Indian Caucus, and the senator has since said he will not introduce the proposal. But Montana native community representatives have called this move a distraction from other pressing issues around the state's seven reservations.
Farai Chideya:
Our next guest, Ta'jin Perez, the Deputy Director for Western Native Voice is here to help us understand what's happening. Ta'jin is Totonac indigenous. He was raised in Wyoming, but now lives in Billings, Montana, where he works closely with indigenous leadership across the state. He's a first-generation American and a first-generation college graduate. Ta'jin previously served on the City of Billings Human Relations Commission and ran for Billings City Council in 2017. Welcome to the show, Ta'jin.
Ta’jin Perez:
Thanks. It's great to be here.
Farai Chideya:
So tell us about this draft resolution in the Montana State Legislature. Regardless of whether or not this ever gets introduced, it has definitely been floated. And so what is the effect of an effort like that?
Ta’jin Perez:
Absolutely. So what happened earlier in the session, we have a session that runs 90 days, and so it can be very fast-paced. And it only runs every other year as an active session. And it is a citizen legislature,. So these are not career politicians. Many of them are retired individuals. The vast majority are older, and the vast majority are non-native. 11 legislators are indigenous, whereas the rest of the 150 are non-native. There is very little representation of people of color as far as legislators are concerned. And the makeup of our legislature is a super majority of the conservative Republican Party overall, majority in the Senate and majority in the House.
Ta’jin Perez:
I just wanted to give that context as a way of painting the scene as it were to what we've got going on here in Montana. Montana is a state that has, in the last two elections, overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. And there is historically some far-right movements that have taken root in places like Western Montana, in Northern Idaho. So this is the part of the country where the more contemporary white flight that has happened. And with that, historically, comes with more conservative values, pushback against integration, pushback against the critical race theory, pushback on a lot of those things that are associated with the Civil Rights progress that happened in the late 20th century and is continuing through to today. None of this is in a vacuum of course.
Ta’jin Perez:
And so I think it's important to note that places like Montana, in particular Western Montana, have been the landing place for folks that are associated with the Proud Boys with far-right movements, with white supremacy movements, and demonstrate what a lot of voting constituency in Montana prioritizes and views, how that relates to the original question as to why Senator Regier, he represents a western Senate district of our state, this particular part of the state known as the Flathead Region.
Ta’jin Perez:
There is a growing community north of Flathead Lake that is non-native. And then you have a native reservation just to the southwest and south of Flathead Lake between Flathead Lake and Missoula. And Missoula being stereotypically here in Montana, sort of a liberal bastion. And then you have conservative areas that are more rural. And so there's been a lot of historical conflict between folks in Flathead County and Lake County with the tribes and tribal people. And then add onto that, the general racial tensions between native and non-native individuals. And so all of this mixed together makes for a condition and particularly from where Senator Regier represents of anti-Indian sentiment. There is a bill draft. And in Montana, the public has access to bill drafts.
Ta’jin Perez:
One of the things that I've come to learn of this situation is that Senator Regier essentially said the resolution was not personally his idea, that it was, in fact, something that a constituent group had put together from his district and had asked him to put it forward.
Farai Chideya:
Anyway, let me jump in here and just add a little more of what was in that resolution. The draft resolution said that reservations "failed to positively enhance the lives and wellbeing of Native Americans and led to drug abuse and welfare dependence." And to me, that hits all of the xenophobic bingo words because it comes up. It could be about black people in Baltimore, my hometown. It's the same language of welfare dependence and also, of course, this whole country was indigenous land. And so the whole trope of who is dependent on what. We are dependent on living on land. But how do you deal with that persistent stereotype of the dependency?
Ta’jin Perez:
Absolutely, and that's a really great point. So there's multiple levels of how people deal with this obviously. There's the micro level of individual-to-individual sort of that persecution and that stereotype of treating people differently. We're thankful to have a constitution that has, as part of it, right to dignity which was brought in during the 1972 process of our new state constitution. There was this effort to learn how other governments are run. So our state constitution actually has protections to discrimination from government or private individuals. We also have a human rights bureau. In our state, there's a mechanism for the individual type of things. But as far as a collective group and as an organization, the way that we deal with that is facing it head on and speaking that truth to that power.
Ta’jin Perez:
And so another hallmark of our constitution is Article 10 which guarantees something called Indian Education for All, and that is through our Office of Public Construction. The goal is that every school district in the state has some level of curriculum on the indigenous history, both historical as well as contemporary issues.
Ta’jin Perez:
The problem, however, is that the Indian Education for All program is not evenly being administered or assessed from urban areas to rural areas and reservation areas. And so there is a lot more work that could be done with that, even with a state constitution that protects against discrimination and enshrines the importance of indigenous culture and history and enables for that to be taught in curriculum and school. We still face these kinds of perceptions that are based not on truth, but are based on a very one-sided, xenophobic, and anti-indigenous lens and a misunderstanding of how human reservations came to be. It's that lack of education that's been so difficult over generations to fight against.
Ta’jin Perez:
But our organization and individual advocates and other folks that came out to decry Senator Regier's effort here and to backtrack on that plan shows that there is still some level of decency in the public discourse, even though the type of language is coming back around to the open type of discrimination that has been the hallmark of relations in border towns here in Montana, those places of close interaction between non-natives and indigenous people.
Farai Chideya:
So I was in my 30s by the time I learned the phrase and concept "tribal sovereignty." Tribal sovereignty is about the rights of indigenous people to govern their own lands, and it's also federal land. Can you explain that a little more clearly than I did?
Ta’jin Perez:
Absolutely. So tribal sovereignty is part of this idea of the three sovereigns that exist in the United States. So we have, of course, the tribal groups as a sovereign. So when there was first organized contact between Europe and the tribes of North America, there was this clash of perspectives of worldviews. The monarchies that believed there was a divine right to them holding land, the divine right for them to rule these areas, and that along with papal bulls that were declarations, enabled the monarchs of Europe to essentially cut up, predetermine who would colonize this "new world." And so they dealt with the "tribal chiefs" and the leaders of villages and of tribes and saw them in a similar light that these individuals held the authority and that they actually own the land around this perspective or juxtaposed with the indigenous perspective where there really isn't an ownership to land. Land cannot be owned. It is inhabited and that there's these groups of people.
Ta’jin Perez:
And so when these European pre-United States entities were making treaties, they were then enshrining in this legal sentence, enshrining of sovereignty of the entities, the tribes that these treaties were going into. And so as a product of English colonization, that behavior was preserved in the early United States. And then throughout the history of colonization and westward expansion, this contract between tribes eventually led to the reservation system where these lands were held in reserve in exchange for ceded lands, ceding these lands for the settlement of the United States government. And some of these treaties, of course, were not in good faith. The strategies were violent. And as time went on, especially post-Civil War that, to them, would be "Indian Wars," it moved away from tribes choosing this as equals. And it quickly became tribes choosing this option for self-preservation so that their people would not be wiped off the map.
Ta’jin Perez:
And then you have a third sovereign, which is the states. Because in the constitution, any rights that are not enumerated specifically to the federal government are then given to the states. So when it comes to conflicts between the sovereign of indigenous of tribes as political entities and the states, the arbiter there is the federal government. They're the decision-maker if there's any conflict between them.
Ta’jin Perez:
Generally, the treaties, as they were entered with the federal government, in the terms, they supersede any promises made to states. And in fact, when states entered the union and in particular, the example of Montana here, the federal government had to figure out what to do with the ceded land. They had to basically close out which land was going to be held entrust by the tribe and which land was going to be made available for non-tribal, I would call it encroachment, but settlement would be another way that it was characterized.
Ta’jin Perez:
In the years before statehood, a lot of the land that was promised to tribes was then surreptitiously given out to non-natives to figure out the final boundaries, and then the state became a state. After that, then there was the enshrinement of the barriers, the political barriers, boundaries, and that established relationship has now moved forward. Basically, it means that there is a lot of problems of jurisdiction. Who holds jurisdiction over what and has enabled some of the issues that we see today.
Farai Chideya:
And I want to just touch on one of those issues which is missing persons reports. According to the Montana Department of Justice, indigenous people made up nearly 31% of missing persons reports in 2021 despite being just slightly less than 7% of the state population. So that's a huge disparity there. How does this older history of land ownership and sovereignty and governance take us through to the kind of numbers that we're looking at today?
Ta’jin Perez:
Absolutely. So all of this has created a no-man's-land situation of varying policies related to law enforcement, related to jurisdiction issues. And there have been subsequent public laws that tribes can opt into, so each tribe is different. Some tribes have contracted the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be their law enforcement, which then becomes federal law enforcement while other tribes have local tribal police that works with federal law enforcement. So it's a patchwork of different policies and different jurisdictions. And this is something, criminal people, who understand that if you're not an enrolled tribal member inside of a reservation, then more than likely you are going to get away with committing some sort of crime. And additional to the problems of jurisdiction is the lack of actual law enforcement on the federal level through the FBI or through the BIA to adequately cover, in some cases, thousands of acres, millions of acres of land, even somewhere like the Crow Reservation here in Montana.
Ta’jin Perez:
These are widest expanses of back roads, of interstate, state highways, tribal roads, and there's not enough people. There's some estimates that the law enforcement actually patrol in some of these areas could be one individual covering thousands of square miles. So there's a lack of law enforcement. The confusion of jurisdiction, and that confusion creates bottlenecks in reporting, and criminal entities know this. People have shared with us individuals who are trafficking people, trafficking fentanyl that are from non-tribal members are coming onto these lands to their criminal enterprises. And all of that along with the lack of economic opportunity has compared to even role of reservation areas In Montana. We know that poverty is a contributing factor to crime. And so it's not a racial problem; it's a poverty problem.
Ta’jin Perez:
And these areas have been de-industrialized. The fact that these lands are entrust means that people don't have collateral to take out a loan for a business or for property or for improvements. So this is an area that because of the systems and because of how government has been created and the laws and policies have made these areas be uneconomic areas for the most part.
Farai Chideya:
I am lucky enough to have spent some time reporting on indigenous issues many years ago, went to the Crow Nation to talk about tribal colleges and went to Standing Rock. But I feel like I'm just very much at the beginning of learning things that, frankly, I never learned in school because that's just not the way most schools do things. So as we wrap up here, just explain a little bit about Western Native Voice, what it is that you are aiming to do in the world.
Ta’jin Perez:
So Western Native Voice, our organization has over 12,000 members. That's mostly in Montana, but there are folks across the country. We are not exclusively a membership group for just Native Americans. There are non-native allies who appreciate the information that we have. We are an organization that works to inspire native leadership, so our communities flourish, and we do that through four core programs.
Ta’jin Perez:
The first is civic education which is a program that we have to essentially tell the story, not just this story, the information I'm giving to you here today, but also the history of the native vote, the obstacles to citizenship and residency, and then how to register to vote, why it's important to vote, how policy is made. And so the the civic education pieces are number one starting point, a lot of the time, for people.
Then we have civic engagement which takes those lessons from civic education and puts them to practice. Primarily, what we do is Nonpartisan Get-Out-the-Vote work, as well as providing services such as rides to polls or ballot collection and delivery for folks who either can't or don't want to leave their home. It's a convenience that we have built a great reputation in communities.
Ta’jin Perez:
Our third program is public policy advocacy which is mostly to do with our engagement in the legislature here in the State of Montana. So a lot of that is providing information to the public and then providing testimony on behalf of the organization, on behalf of our members at the legislature.
Then lastly is leadership development, and that is intertwined with the other three that I mentioned. It's essentially our view of leadership is that every single person in our communities, native, non-native, everybody are inherently leaders, and that they have the skills in them and the ability to be leaders. It's simply a matter of providing an environment to learn strategies and an environment to practice leadership skills.
Ta’jin Perez:
And so that is our philosophy, our leadership development program, and we intertwine that through all of our points of interaction with the public and our members. Some of that includes our Community Organizer program where we take individuals from their communities, hire them, train them to be organizers locally to get information out to their friends and family, and then conferences and trainings that we host to help people build their capacities to be a leader, whether they want to run for office or join a board or a commission. So we do a number of other things other than that, but those are our four core programs.
Farai Chideya:
Well, it's such a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much, Ta'jin.
Ta’jin Perez:
Yes, thank you so much.
Farai Chideya:
That was Ta'jin Perez, the Deputy Director for Western Native Voice.
You are listening to Our Body Politic Bird.
Bird Runningwater is a member of the Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache Tribes. He spent two decades as the director of the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program where he developed and promoted films made by and about indigenous people around the world. He reshaped the entire world of film and television with his leadership.
Farai Chideya:
Bird left the Sundance Institute in October 2021 and became CEO of Cloud Woman Media. He's also co-executive producer of the TV series Sovereign which is currently in development as network television's first Native American family drama. He recently signed a first-look deal with Amazon Studios, and he's a member of the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board. I interviewed Bird for my One with Farai podcast back in July 2014 about his work at the Sundance Institute. Let's listen.
Bird, it's great to talk to you again.
Bird Runningwater:
It's great to hear your voice.
Farai Chideya:
First of all, let's explain for people the difference between the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute just so we get that clear.
Bird Runningwater:
Well, the Sundance Institute, which was founded by Robert Redford back in 1981, has six major programs. And those programs are the Feature Film Program, the Documentary Film Program, the Film Music Program, the Theater Program, and the Sundance Film Festival is a program of the institute in addition to my program, which is the Native American and Indigenous Program.
Farai Chideya:
And so what's that?
Bird Runningwater:
Well, the Native Program, as we call it in abbreviated form, really exists because of the mandate of Mr. Redford. Just a little bit of backstory, I guess, back probably 40 years ago or 35 years ago, he was asked to audition to play a native role on television, which he particularly resented which led him on a quest to seek out where are the native actors. And it sent him on another quest to find out where are the native filmmakers. And he eventually found some and created some training programs which really inspired the founding of the institute.
Farai Chideya:
And so what exactly do you offer to the filmmakers that you work with and nurture?
Bird Runningwater:
The Sundance Institute really created what's considered the lab model that, I think, a lot of people really borrow today and a lot of artist support programs around the world. And that lab model is really about supporting filmmakers and artists in a development process where we bring in creative advisors, established filmmakers who serve as mentors, and really support and work with the filmmakers that we select through our very competitive programs. And the intent is really about supporting the craft, but also really protecting the original and authentic voice of the artists.
Farai Chideya:
How do you think Native Americans are generally faring in the cultural media space in terms of both outward definition by non-native filmmakers, television producers, and also inwardly in terms of representation by people from the communities?
Bird Runningwater:
Wow. It's such a complex world right now within entertainment and media and whatnot. I think mostly because there's such huge shifts happening in terms of the way that just American audiences are consuming content in general. And so there's a lot of work happening in television like with the First Nations Experience which is a new Native American channel that launched a couple of years ago. And that's a PBS, Public Broadcasting model that, I think, is really working interestingly. It's being picked up across the country, and they're creating original programming and acquiring a lot of existing programming.
Bird Runningwater:
There's always native radio which goes across the whole country. Like I was just on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and did an interview on KILI Radio, which is a Okla Lakota radio station that really serves the community.
Bird Runningwater:
And there's a lot of great work happening that's a lot of very community-based, very regionally and tribally-specific as well that doesn't, a lot of times, travel outside of that. But I think a lot of it is tied to tribal sovereignty and a lot of cultural revitalization and language work that's happening right now because a lot of radios are broadcasting in their own languages. So it's a really rich and complex world.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I've met some of the people in public radio who are working on stations that are bilingual, and there seems to be a real vibrancy there. But because of your work, you are a cultural ambassador, and you go to a lot of different spaces and interact with people. And there are so many different nations within the United States and Canada. How do you think that we can develop a better framework for understanding the diversity of different native communities?
Bird Runningwater:
I think film is really one of those things, and storytelling is one of those things that can really unify people because you're telling stories, basically, stories about human beings, but I also think trying to get an audience to identify with an experience. And I think native storytelling is one of those areas that's really the freshest in terms of American cinema and trying to portray an experience to a broader audience and have them identify with it.
Farai Chideya:
So you've mentioned films including Smoke Signals, Miss Navajo, and Drunktown's Finest. What other films come to mind that you think people might want to check out if they want to see compelling film about Native communities?
Bird Runningwater:
One of our alumni is a Māori filmmaker named Taika Waititi. And he made a film called Boy which was based on a short film that we screened at our festival about 10 years ago that went on to be nominated for an Oscar. We supported him, again, through our screenwriters labs and directors labs to help nurture that feature film. And it became the highest-grossing New Zealand-made film in their country. I think it performed at around $10 or $11 million at the box office.
Film Clip:
Kia ora. My name is Boy, and welcome to my interesting world. My favorite person is Michael Jackson. Want to see some Michael Jackson dance moves? My favorite subjects are art, social studies...
You'll kick both your nuts off and you have none.
And Michael Jackson.
Thank you, Boy.
I'm named after my dad. He's overseas doing some pretty important stuff.
Who are you?
Boy.
All right. I'm your dad.
Oh.
Bird Runningwater:
Also a film we supported through a lab that we set up in Australia for indigenous filmmakers. There this film called Sampson and Delilah by Warwick Thornton that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and that won the Best First Feature Prize, which is called the Camera d'or. It's a really stunning film. It has a bit of an ache, a bit of a tragic ache to it, but, I think at the same time, it's really inspiring.
Bird Runningwater:
And on the American side, we had a film called On the Ice by Andrew MacLean, who belongs to the Inupiaq people of Northern Alaska, Barrow, Alaska, which is the northernmost part of the United States and the Arctic Circle. And he made this thriller called On the Ice about teenagers today up in that community.
Film Clip:
What is it, son?
It's James. He fell through the ice,
Warm up the machines.
Start calling the guys.
Get everybody over here.
I need a satellite picture of the ice conditions.
Tell me what happened.
Farai Chideya:
Let me ask you about your background, Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache. Tell me about the tribes that you're from and their history, and tell us a little bit about your life.
Bird Runningwater:
Well, my mother is Cheyenne which is a tribe that's located in two places, in Oklahoma and Montana. But we come from the Oklahoma group of Cheyennes. And my father's tribe is Mescalero Apache actually, coming from two bands of Apaches, the Mescalero Apache and the Chiricahua Apache. Chiricahua, I think, are most well-known as being Geronimo's band.
Bird Runningwater:
I feel very fortunate. My parents met at an Indian boarding school in the '60s and fell in love and got married. And they were coming from a generation that was really sent to boarding schools as an effort to mainstream them. And I think when they got together and had children, they tried to figure out, I think, the best way for us to be immersed within our cultures, within our languages, and then to really ensure that we had a cultural perspective on our lives and in the world. And I'm so grateful to them for having done that. And so I grew up in really rich childhood with my Cheyenne grandparents who really spoke Cheyenne to me. And I remember my grandparents raised me while my parents were away at college. And after they graduated, they scooped me back up, and took me to my father's reservation in New Mexico.
Bird Runningwater:
And I remember going to my first day of second grade at this new school on the reservation. And on the playground, everybody was speaking Apache. And it was my first really introduction to Apache and my father's tribe and everything. And I just remember being really perplexed thinking, "Oh my God. I have to figure this out." And I was fortunate, on one level, my parents' languages are unrelated, so they have to speak to each other in English. And so I grew up multilingual with English and Cheyenne and learned Apache. And then we're Southern New Mexico, so I heard a lot of Spanish, so I spoke Spanish. And being multilingual, I think, really helped me advance in the world and being able to adjust to different scenarios, situations, cultures, and whatnot.
Bird Runningwater:
Unfortunately, the school system back then, because a lot of my peers and classmates where first-language Apache speakers got put into learning disability classes, and their educational path was really, really tough because of the language barrier. I think it's something that just really inspired some of the work that I do even today by including indigenous languages in film. And I love American films to have subtitles which, I think, is representative of our own complexity as a nation.
Farai Chideya:
It sounds like you learned a lot of resilience and adaptability from your childhood because of having to move at a young age and having to be thrust into a new tribal culture and linguistic culture. But you also mentioned some of the educational inequities that seem to exist where you were.
Bird Runningwater:
Yeah.
Farai Chideya:
Is that something that you think has been remedied? Have you kept up on what's been going on with the schools?
Bird Runningwater:
Well, one of the things that I'm really proud of today is, within national political conversations like with organizations like the National Congress of American Indians and the National Indian Education Association, and these large policy-oriented groups, I remember 15 years ago where the idea of indigenous language revitalization was just barely an idea. And flash forward 15 years, it's become a common practice. Almost every tribe has some type of language revitalization program because of those failed educational policies from my youth where they really... And even my parents' generation where the idea was to mainstream people. English was the goal, be able to speak English properly.
Bird Runningwater:
And so nowadays, we're really shifting back towards creating more speakers of indigenous languages. And that's part of the work that I did when I worked for the Fund of the Four Directions, one of the Rockefeller family members. The work that I got to do was to fund tribal communities to create new speakers of their languages. And at that point, like I said, it was just an idea. The immersion language model was slowly moving from the Maori people of New Zealand up to Hawaii where native Hawaiians were establishing immersion programs. And then that model eventually moved over to North America where it's practiced quite a bit today.
Farai Chideya:
You mentioned the boarding schools where your parents met. But I've met so many people who they or members of their family were all but kidnapped basically to some of these boarding schools during the '60s. And it seems to be a chapter in our history that we have not yet processed as a nation.
Bird Runningwater:
And it is a part of our history, and it's a story that a lot of people are starting to tell today. One of the more interesting perspectives that we supported on film was a film by Blackhorse Lowe called Shimásáni, which in the Navajo language means "my grandmother." And it's an interesting take. It's this grandmother's story about how, growing up, her brother was sent off to boarding school but kept running away and coming home because they were mean, and they would mistreat him.
Bird Runningwater:
So in the film, he actually tells a story about two sisters where one of the sisters gets sent to boarding school, and the other one has to stay home which creates a scenario where the girl who's staying home really wants to go to boarding school and decides to run away to go to boarding school, just because she's interested to see where her sister is. Her sister brings her books. So it's an interesting flip on the traditional narrative of boarding school.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. It sounds like the kinds of films that are being produced have a richness of meaning, and yet, the things that often are the most heavily rewarded in our consumer society are things that don't really have a lot of meaning but make a lot of box office. So how do you get native films to also reach mainstream audiences?
Bird Runningwater:
Well, I think that's one of our biggest challenges as a film community. I guess the idea of a native person on the big screen is still highly sought after by the native audience because it doesn't happen so often. But at the same time, if we're looking at the marketplace and independent film, I have to take studios and networks out of the equation for this. But for the independent marketplace and the art house market, we have to make films that will really cross over and serve the broadest audience possible, mostly because the native audience as a marketplace hasn't yet quite been defined. And so we cannot just rely on performance with native audiences. We actually have to think about stories that travel and that reach broader audiences with the hopes of potential acquisition and distribution which has still yet to come, because a lot of distributors are really perplexed by native films.
Bird Runningwater:
They don't quite know what to do with them. The formulas that they apply to every art house film to reach what they call the art house audiences which is older, white, more affluent are what they've developed their formulas around. And so I don't think there's much effort to try to create new formulas. And so I think that's one of the areas that my program is really going to try to look at working on in the future, is really trying to define the native audience and look at what the potential performance could be for a film playing in theaters on reservations or in theaters with high native populations.
Bird Runningwater:
Again, going back to how consumption of content is changing, digital distribution is huge. Native audiences now have access to so much of our historical programming that they never really had access to before. One of the things about the films that we've supported through our program like Sampson and Delilah, On the Ice, Barking Water, all these films are playing some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world and winning awards, but our own native audiences have yet to see the films.
Farai Chideya:
So as we wrap up, what's your dream? What's your vision, Bird, for where you take this program next?
Bird Runningwater:
Oh, wow. Well, I think I really would love for our filmmaking community to really attain a level of success and of films really being seen, I think, by the largest audiences possible. I know a lot of people aspire maybe to win an Oscar or to reach a particular platform of that which, I think, would be nice. But I think a level of sustainability for Native filmmakers to continue working and to not have to max out credit cards to make a short film, but to actually be able to work and participate. And so I think really building a network with tribes across the country where films can circulate and screen and be seen and perform within that particular marketplace is definitely a dream of mine.
Farai Chideya:
That was Bird Runningwater co-executive producer of the forthcoming TV series, Sovereign, CEO of Cloud Woman Media, and former director of the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Nina Spensley is also executive producer. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Steve Lack and Anoa Changa are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Mike Goehler, Harry Evans and Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Luce Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.