So, I made it to the
American Indian Film Festival going on in San Francisco this week. It technically started last Friday, but I've had a number of other social and non-social engagements to see to (o, my oppressive social life!). This morning, my emotions feel like they were run over by a truck. It's fine, I willingly submit myself to the emotional roller coaster that is the Film Festival -- and typically, it's painful in subterranean landscapes. What did Sherman Alexie say?
To be Indian is to be tragic. And I don't think that's a statement of victim hood, but maybe a statement of sobriety. Our collective post-
Apocalyptic survival is no joke.
Last year, I wanted to throw myself off of the Bay Bridge after watching an extremely rare showing of "
The Exiles."
Several years ago, I forced myself through documentary after documentary from
ANWR to
Ipperwash with the effect of wanting to lose my lunch when I left.
So, the program last night (
Monday, Nov. 9, 7:00 p.m.) started with music videos that were mildly entertaining. Having worked in Ohsweken for a year at my first job, I could have sworn that they filmed the video for "
Two Lane Road" on
Six Nations. The song was cute, but I'm not a fan of mainstream country. However, I will never diss a piece of art that has an ndn woman as the object of beauty, even if she is a kind of damsel in distress, there's just too few ndn women in any mainstream media.
"
Totem" was well constructed and certainly well acted (oh, thank you, Canada Council for the Arts, we grovel to your hefty fundings), but the message was far less subtle than I would have liked. It was nice to see some cameos of Ryan Red Corn's
Demockratees in it (if Ryan ever starts an army, I wanna be Sergeant-At-Arms). It was refreshing to see new ndn actors and of course, the overall message of rejuvenation and survival was empowering, I just hate how it gets wrapped up in such a cliche of Native culture as "craft," i.e., in the Canadian mainstream, our culture is all-too-often wrapped up in reductionist-portrayal of traditional "crafts" that I have issue with, more on that another time. What I would give to see the application of
racial formation theory to ndn identity in Canada.
"
Burn the Wagon" was hella real, which I loved. More importantly, it depicted personal heroes in my world:
ndn lawyers (and damn if the protagonist wasn't frighteningly like a particular hero on my f-list, grrl, you know who you are)... but it totally lacked any motivation of plot! It was really frustrating. To which, I told myself,
maybe it doesn't need a plot... which is a plausible answer, I'm particular to the suspense of a plot.
And really, what nearly had me in tears was the very short documentary of local Bay Area ndn, LaVerne Roberts, "
A New Frontier." Getting back to what made me want to lose my emotional cookies at the other films, it was here, in this one. The simple compacted serving of several individual stories of painfully young ndns who were disenfranchised, abandoned, neglected at the hands of various federally-mandanted bureaucratic programs and just left to (die?) figure it out. Imagining an 18-year old LaVerne, scared shitless on a park bench in San Jose
overnight, because she had the audacity to think that someone was going to escort her to the Indian Relocation Office from the Greyhound station (did anyone bother to give her a map?) because had she been home, a relative would have done the same. And yes, it also comes with the restitution of her finding the local ndn community,
Alcatraz, and making herself a life in the great urban reservation of San Francisco; but it's the sudden feeling of realizing that
an entire army of LaVerne's found themselves in her helpless position and the collective grief is too much to bear, cue: regurgitation.
The night ended with the
long documentary of the life of Adam Fortunate Eagle. I won't speak to it. It was made by a white man, and it showed. There was a powerful dynamic of apologism and performitivity for a non-ndn audience that I struggled to appreciate. But that struggle existed in Fortunate Eagle's life and he found his peace with it and I have to appreciate that were it not for his struggles and defeats, my righteous ndn ass would not be here right now writing this blog. And there it is, where we all fit on this timeline of survival, each generation overcoming some other tidal wave of genocide, digesting and forming new (and eventually problematic) defense mechanisms, until the waves settle down in some bright future that we're all moving towards -- or so, we hope, lest we throw ourselves off of the Golden Gate. Let's throw a film festival instead.
crushed
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