Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
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Quietly Radical Mission at Sundance: Supporting Native Filmmakers
02 weeks ago
It’s days before the Sundance Film Festival and Aurora Guerrero is busy. The 40-year-old filmmaker is set to debut her first feature-length project “Mosquita y Mari” at the festival in Park City, Utah, on Saturday, but it’s Wednesday and she finds herself in Los Angeles preparing to get in front of the camera for a television spot on up-and-coming filmmakers to watch.
It’s not exactly a standard Hollywood story. Her independent film is a teenage love story between two Chicana best friends who grow up in South East Los Angeles’ vibrant immigrant community. It relied largely on a grassroots funding campaign to raise money for production. But those facts have helped to lock in her place on the year’s indy film radar. When asked if there’s any one person who helped make all of it happen, she doesn’t hesitate.
“Bird,” Guerrero says. “Bird Runningwater.”
Bird, it turns out, is the director of Native American and Indigenous Programs at the Sundance Institute. In that capacity, and along with program manager Owl Johnson, Bird oversees NativeLabs, an innovative fellowship program that works with indigenous screenwriters and directors to help produce and show work that isn’t easy to see elsewhere.
Guerrero recounts Bird’s steady and persistent guidance. He helped mentor her through re-writing drafts of her script, which was over a decade in the making. And when it was time to go into post-production, it was Bird who nominated her for a prestigious TimeWarner fellowship to help carry the film across the finish line.
“He’s been behind a lot of indigenous filmmakers of color who are saying something different through contemporary cinema,” Guerrero says about Bird.
In an industry that struggles to include even more visible communities of color, like black actors and directors, indigenous artists often find it difficult to get support for their work. But Bird represents someone within an established institution who’s making it happen. Forget the status quo. There are indigenous stories to tell and there are people already telling them. It all goes to show that with the right support, our media landscape can be as forthcoming and representative as the people it purports to serve.
“I think that some of the most exciting films down the road are going to come from native filmmakers,” Bird says. “Our job is to help find those filmmakers and help them make their stories the strongest they can be.”
The Sundance Institute has maintained a commitment to native filmmakers since its inception in 1981. But that mission was bumped up a notch in the late 90s when it held a series of workshops for native filmmakers at UCLA. In 2008, NativeLabs became more intentional about its outreach and process by instituting a two-pronged approach: immersion in a native community and exposure to Sundance itself. Each year, a group of native filmmakers work on their craft at the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico and then screen their work at the Sundance Film Festival. Bird estimates that a total of 70 filmmakers have gone through the program.
“I really believe in the ability and talent of our native people,” Bird says, noting that the process of filmmaking has become much more accessible in recent years with advancements in technology.
Sterlin Harjo is another indigenous filmmaker who’s gone through NativeLabs. He premiered his feature, “Barking Water,” at Sundance in 2008 and calls Bird “the unsung hero of indigenous film.”
“There’s a lot of institutions out there that try to promote native films and native filmmakers,” Harjo says. “But they do it from the outside-in. It’s approached in this very institutionalized way.”
Sundance, he says, is different in that it relies on native filmmakers to support other native filmmakers. “There’s no museum-type feel to it,” Hardjo continues. “It’s not like there’s people looking at your work and trying to analyze it,” Harjo says, alluding to the popular ways in which indigenous filmmakers have their lives and work scrutinized.
That’s an important selling point for many native filmmakers, who do their creative work in the face of decades of racist caricatures promoted by Hollywood.
“It’s taken Hollywood a long time to realize that you can have a narrative fiction film that just happens to have native characters in it,” says Elise Marrubio, an associate professor of American Indian Studies at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Marrubio also directs the college’s Native American Film Series. “There’s a cultural perception of what a film with native people should look like, and that stereotype has been very hard to break down.”
And then there’s the business of filmmaking. When the economic crisis hit in 2009, Guerrero needed to find a new producer for her film. Bird helped her land Chad Burris, who grew up in Oklahoma before setting out for law school in Los Angeles.
“It’s crazy difficult,” Burris said about securing funding for the film. “You don’t have any big name actors, you don’t have a very recognizable audience, you don’t have a lot of the things that you need to get financed.” But he says he was motivated by the project’s bigger goals. “It’s allowed someone that’s got a fresh voice to tell a story that otherwise may not get told.”
The message is having an impact.
“We are now in a moment in our world where native people are saying ‘no longer do we want people making films about us as if they know us,’” Marrubio says. “We’re going to decide what stories we want to tell, how they want to tell them, and we’re going to make the movies.”
Obama Rejects Keystone Oil Sands Pipeline Application
02 weeks ago
The Obama administration rejected a bid to expand the controversial Keystone oil sands pipeline Wednesday, saying the deadline imposed by congress did not leave sufficient time to conduct the necessary review.
“Our Lakota people oppose this pipeline because of the potential contamination of the surface water and of the Oglala aquifer,” Deb White Plume, a Lakota activist, told Colorlines.com last fall. “We have thousands of ancient and historical cultural resources that would be destroyed across our treaty lands.”
Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline:
Earlier today, I received the Secretary of State’s recommendation on the pending application for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment. As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree.
This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people. I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil. Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security -including the potential development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico – even as we set higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and invest in alternatives like biofuels and natural gas. And we will do so in a way that benefits American workers and businesses without risking the health and safety of the American people and the environment.
Navajo Nation Sees Alarming Rise in HIV/AIDS Infections
01 month ago
The number of new HIV/AIDS infections recorded in the Navajo Nation today is three times the number recorded a decade ago, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. Experts say poor education is partly to blame, with some tribal members learning about HIV and AIDS only upon diagnosis.
The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Ceasar wrote about the rise of HIV infections on the Navajo reservation on Thursday, below is an excerpt from “Navajo Nation confronts HIV and AIDS:”
Most of the infections are occurring in the Navajo Nation, a vast expanse in the Four Corners region where poverty, poor education, alcohol abuse and the hardships of reservation life cultivate an environment in which the virus can spread.
Like Smith, some Navajo learn of HIV and AIDS upon diagnosis. Others believe it’s a white man’s disease. Doctors, meanwhile, must explain the virus and disease in round-about ways because, in traditional Navajo culture, to speak of death is to bring it about.
Larry Foster, the Navajo Nation’s sexually transmitted disease coordinator, said health professionals had encountered resistance when giving presentations on the disease.
“They didn’t want to listen because they thought we were bringing a curse, bringing death into their communities,” Foster said. “Nobody cares until they have seen an AIDS death in their family.”
Beyond the Navajo Nation, the overall rate of HIV and AIDS diagnosis for American Indians and Alaska Natives has been higher than the rate for whites, but generally lower than that of blacks or Latinos, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Native American Youth to Diane Sawyer: We’re Not Poverty Porn
01 month ago
Last month ABC’s 20/20 aired a special they called “Children of the Plains,” that portrayed the Lakota Indian reservation as a place that only dealt with crime, unemployment, alcoholism, overcrowded trailers and crumbling schools.
On Monday, young Native American students from Rosebud, South Dakota released a short video that challenged the claims made by “Children of the plains.”
“I know what you probably think of us…we saw the special too. Maybe you saw a picture, or read an article. But we want you to know, we’re more than that…We have so much more than poverty.”
“The stories are manipulative to the point of tears–literally,” wrote Rob Schmidt on Indian Country about the show. “A boy cries because his mother is an alcoholic. A girl cries because she tried to commit suicide. The school principal, an old lady in a motorized chair, cries because her work is so difficult.”
Schmidt argues the ABC documentary was little more than poverty porn because it didn’t offer any historical context or the causes of poverty for many Native American reservations.
“Are the Lakota responsible for their own plight, or is someone–the government or big business–causing it?,” Schmidt continued.
Sawyer glossed over broken treaties, stolen land and disinvestment by the end of the show, but by then it’s too little, too late. “The ‘poverty porn’ feeling predominates,” Schmidt said.
Kardashian In Trouble With Native American Group For ‘Indian Giver’ Comment
03 months ago
Kris Jenner made headlines earlier this week after saying that she “hate[s] an Indian giver.” The comment came in response to a “Good Morning America” host asking if her daughter Kim Kardashian would be returning an expensive engagement ring to soon-to-be ex-husband Kris Humphries. Now, the National Congress of American Indians has gotten involved, saying that the comments were “wrong and hurtful.”
“I hate an Indian giver, don’t you? It’s a gift … keep your gift, ” Jenner said on Thursday about the $2 million dollar ring.
In a statement made to RadarOnline, the National Congress of American Indians called Jenner’s comments “wrong and hurtful.”
“Once again American Indians and Alaska Natives have been misrepresented by a single misinformed statement. Native American people serve in our country’s military at disproportionate rates, are respected business leaders, citizens of the United States, members of Congress, professional athletes, musicians, teachers and active participants in civic life,” Jacqueline Johnson Pata, Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians, told RadarOnline.
The phrase “Indian giving” is wrong and hurtful,” she added. “The cultural values of Native Americans are based on giving unconditionally and empowering those around them. Instead this cultural value is forgotten when negative stereotyping of Native people occurs.
“November is Native American Heritage Month and this moment calls for a reflection on the contributions of America’s first peoples to this great country. There are over 5 million US citizens identified as American Indians or Alaska Natives and 565 federally recognized tribal nations. This November we’re focused on celebrating 1.7 million Native youth under the age of 18 that face many challenges. There are many hopeful solutions and we invite the Jenner and Kardashian family to join with the country in learning more during Native American Heritage Month.”.
Judge Approves Landmark $1.2 Billion Settlement for Black Farmers
03 months ago
A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.25 billion settlement in a lawsuit filed against the Agriculture Department by thousands of black farmers. The group of farmers said that they experienced widespread racial bias from the department when they were denied loans and programs throughout the 1980′s and ’90s.
CNN provides more details on the U.S. District judge Paul Friedman’s historic ruling:
“I’m very pleased that this has resolved itself,” U.S. District judge Paul Friedman said Friday. “It will provide relief to an awful lot of people.”
In an opinion filed in the case, Friedman deemed fair a proposed settlement that provides a system of compensation for black farmers who joined a class-action lawsuit claiming that they can prove racial bias in decisions related to Agriculture Department programs and support.
“Historical discrimination cannot be undone,” Friedman wrote, citing a basis to establish payments “for the broken promise to those African-American farmers and their descendants.”
As many as 68,000 African-American farmers who filed between 1999 and 2008 would apply for one of two forms of relief: “Track A” for a qualified claimant would lead to an uncontested payout of $50,000 after taxes, and “Track B” could yield up to $250,000 for damages that are substantiated by documents and other evidence.
“So many farmers had ever given up hope that this would ever come to pass,” said John Boyd, the head of the National Black Farmers Association.
Congress included $100 million for the claims in the 2008 farm bill and approved $1.15 billion in November 2010.
South Dakota Profits When Native Kids Get Thrown Into Foster Care
03 months ago
A year-long NPR News investigation has found that nearly 700 Native American children in South Dakota are being removed from their homes every year.
Sometimes the removals happen under very questionable circumstances. And the problem isn’t isolated to just one state; Native children are overrepresented in the foster care systems of dozens of others — including Washington, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.
In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act. The law made clear that — except in only rare circumstances –Native American children whose homes are deemed unfit must be placed with their relatives or tribes.
But 32 states are failing to abide by the act in one way or another, and, the NPR investigation has found, nowhere is that more apparent than in South Dakota.
In South Dakota, Native American children make up less than 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half of the children in foster care. Nearly 90 percent of them are in non-native homes or group homes, according to analysis of state records.
State officials say they’re doing what’s in the best interest of the children, but the NPR investigation found the state does have a financial incentive to remove kids form their home. Here’s why:
The state receives thousands of dollars from the federal government for every child it takes from a family, and in some cases the state gets even more money if the child is Native American. The result is that South Dakota is now removing children at a rate higher than the vast majority of other states in the country. …
Critics say foster care in South Dakota has become a powerhouse for private group home providers who bring in millions of dollars in state contracts to care for kids. Among them is Children’s Home Society, the state’s largest foster care provider, which has close ties with top government officials. It used to be run by South Dakota’s Gov. Dennis Daugard. An NPR investigation has found that Daugard was on the group’s payroll while he was lieutenant governor — and while the group received tens of millions of dollars in no-bid state contracts. It’s an unusual relationship highlighting the powerful role money and politics play in South Dakota’s foster care system.
Less than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster
care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the
national average. The state says parents have “neglected” their
children, but that’s a subjective term.
All this sound eerily familiar?
Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act because Native American children were being taken and sent to boarding schools in a deliberate effort to wash away their indigenous heritage.
Read the complete first part of NPR’s year-long investigation on NPR.org.
Urban Outfitters’ ‘Indian Chic’ Prompts Sadly Familiar Outrage
03 months ago
It doesn’t take more than the ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt to know that corporate America loves to pimp other people’s culture for profits.
So it wasn’t all that surprising when Urban Outfitters released 21 products as part of its new “Navajo” fashion line. The new garments included the “Navajo Flask” and the “Navajo Hipster Panty.”
But the Navajo Nation, which owns the trademark to the name “Navajo,” didn’t make it easy for the company to sell its products. And in the complicated legal battle that’s ensued, the familiar theme of how and if companies should be able to profit off of the cultural symbols of communities of color has once again taken center stage.
Recently, the Navajo Nation sent Urban Outfitters a cease-and-desist letter in an effort to stop the company from using the trademarked name. ”When products that have absolutely no connection to the Navajo Nation, its entities, its people, and their products are marketed and retailed under the guise that they are Navajo in origin, the Navajo Nation does not regard this as benign or trivial,” the tribe’s attorney Brian Lewis told the Washington Post last week.
Neither the Navajo Nation nor Urban Outfitters responded to requests for comments from Colorlines.com this week. But it seems that the Navajo Nation got its demands met. This week Jenna Sauers at Jezebel noticed that the company had simply re-named the products. For instance, the “Navajo Hipster Panty” is now just the “Printed Hipster Panty.”
But for some, there’s a larger ethical question of whether any mainstream company can and should profit off of Native culture.
Sasha Houston Brown is a 24-year-old Native American woman who lives in Minneapolis. On Columbus Day, she published a scathing open letter on Racialicious addressed directly to Glen T. Senk, CEO of Urban Outfitters, Inc. In it, she describes her visceral reaction to seeing the products at a local Urban Outfitters store. Brown described the collection as “distasteful and racially demeaning” and criticized the company for what she called its “perverted cultural appropriation.”
The letter apparently got the company’s attention. A user logged into the Disqus comment system as “Glenn T. Senk” responded, saying that the company is “deeply sorry this issue has triggered an offended reaction” and posting the company’s Philadelphia phone number to discuss the matter. Brown followed up, but has not yet received a response.
On Thursday afternoon, Brown spoke to Colorlines.com about why she wrote the letter. “My issue was never about a specific company,” Brown said by phone. “They shouldn’t have the right to profit off of our culture.”
She continued: “It’s not just about a pair of underwear or a flask, it’s about how we are viewed by corporate America and dominant society.”
Brown said she had become increasingly disturbed by what she called “Indian chic,” which she described as the recurring trend in mainstream fashion and jewelry to mimic Native prints. She noted that it was particularly disturbing because Native artists who create fashion and jewelry are seldom recognized for their work. “We’re in a culture where Native people are invisible in the mainstream,” she said. “It really plays into the culture. Here you have a dominant corporation interpreting what they believe to be Native fashion or art, ripping it off, and making a profit.”
So should mainstream fashion designers stay away from pieces that are inspired by indigenous art? Not exactly, according to Brown. “If it’s done in the appropriate manner, it could be a really great segue for designers to have real conversations with tribes about the art’s history and where it comes from.”
But, Brown warned, it’s a thin and often dangerous line to walk.
“There’s no real recognition of the history of this nation, in terms of how we were robbed of our land and culture,” she says. “We’ve fought so hard to protect what little we have today.”
Native American Leader and Activist Elouise Cobell Dies at 65
03 months ago
Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet tribal member whose fifteen year fight to force the U.S. to account for more than a century of mismanaged Indian land royalties worth $3.4 billion — died late Sunday. She was 65.
Cobell died at a hospital in Great Falls, Montana from complications with cancer, a family spokesperson told the Associated Press.
Cobell was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in 1996 claiming the Interior Department had misspent, lost or stolen billions of dollars meant for Native American land trust account holders dating back to the 1880s. In the video to the right, Cobell says the class-action lawsuit she filed is the largest in the history of the United States.
Her fifteen year fight led to a $3.4 billion settlement in 2010 from the Obama administration. Cobell funded the class action herself from a $300,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” that she won in 1997.
“Maybe one of these days, they won’t even think about me. They’ll just keep going and say, ‘This is because I did it,’” Cobell said in an interview with the AP. “I never started this case with any intentions of being a hero. I just wanted this case to give justice to people that didn’t have it.”
U.S. Government Pressures Cherokee Nation to Accept Descendants of Slaves
04 months ago
The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs has ordered the Cherokee Nation to restore voting rights and benefits that were revoked from about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by Cherokee members, known as freedmen.
In August, the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court reversed and vacated a district court decision that granted equal tribal citizenship rights to descendants of freedmen and immediately stripped them of their voting rights and benefits including medical care, food stipends and assistance for low-income homeowners.
“I urge you to consider carefully the nation’s next steps in proceeding with an election that does not comply with federal law,” Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk wrote in letter Friday to acting Chief S. Joe Crittenden. “The department will not recognize any action taken by the nation that is inconsistent with these principles and does not accord its freedmen members full rights of citizenship.”
The Associated Press provides more context and recent history of the Cherokee Nation and freedmen:
The tribe also barred the descendants from voting in a Sept. 24 special election for principal chief. The Cherokee Supreme Court ordered the special election after it said it could not determine with certainty the outcome of a close and hotly contested June election between incumbent Chad Smith and longtime tribal councilman Bill John Baker. The results had flip-flopped between the two during weeks of counts and recounts. Baker had twice been declared winner, but so had Smith.
…
More than 76 percent of Cherokee voters approved a 2007 amendment removing the freedmen and other non-Indians from the tribal rolls, but no action was taken until the tribe’s Supreme Court upheld the results of that special election last month. Cherokee leaders who backed the amendment, including Smith, said the vote was about the fundamental right of every government to determine its citizens, not about racial exclusion.
The U.S. government says a 1866 treaty between the Cherokee tribe and the U.S. government guaranteed that the slaves were tribal citizens, whether or not they had Cherokee blood.
“The Cherokee Nation will not be governed by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Joe Crittenden, the tribe’s acting principal chief, said in a statement. “We will hold our election and continue our long legacy of responsible self-governance.”
The federal government, however, says that unless the freedmen are allowed to vote in the election on September 24, the results will not be valid. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is also withholding a $33 million disbursement until the Cherokee Nation accepts the freedmen.