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Native American Stories: New Video Releases

2007; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 475 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jaf.2007.0009

1535-1882

Christine Dupres,

American Environmental and Regional History

Reviewed by: Native American Stories: New Video Releases Christine Dupres Native American Stories: New Video Releases. 2001. Produced and directed by Pat Ferrero. Five videos, 9 to 13 min. Video format, color. (Hearts and Hands Media Arts.) Director Pat Ferrero is familiar to folklorists through films such as Quilts in Women's Lives (1980), Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World (1983), [End Page 89] and Hearts and Hands: A Social History of Nineteenth-Century Women and Quilts (1987), and as a featured filmmaker in Sharon R. Sherman's book, Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture (1998). Ferrero's recent videos on Native Americans were created as a series intended to be part of the Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. They range in topic from a narrative examination of the famed Iroquois steelworkers of New York City to a touching piece on contemporary teens of the Quechan tribe. All of the videos are between nine and thirteen minutes long. Skywalkers focuses on the Iroquois steelworkers, many of whom lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and traveled to work in New York City. Although most of us have seen pictures and film clips of the remarkable Iroquois men balancing on beams hundreds of feet in the air, few have heard firsthand testimony of their experiences. The film looks at the role these men play in their society and the "effects of their work on family life and community values." The video is structured by the narratives of the steelworkers and their families as they discuss the dangers inherent in their work and what it felt like to walk on long, narrow beams high above the ground. "Your legs become rubber and start to shake as you walk," says one man in the video. "[W]alk, or the momentum will be lost and you could lose your balance." And your life. Ferrero did some digging to get the wonderful vintage footage of workers and managed to secure startling still photos from a variety of sources, including Bethlehem Steel, the Onondogan Historical Society, the National Archives Canada, the Smithsonian, and the Rochester Museum. Though brief, Skywalkers manages to discuss issues that range from class disparities to feminist concerns and examines the ways in which the women of the families of the skywalkers were affected by their men's occupation. When asked why he did such dangerous work, one man replies, "Why? Economics. Keeping families together, making sure they're fed . . . just like our ancestors, before they'd hunt, they'd pray." A wife muses that her husband's "'roughness of attitude' was a shell. But really [the men, the skywalkers] are soft inside. They value children, because they know how close they come to being done with life every day with this work." A second video, The Great Law of the Iroquois, explores the Iroquois "tradition of managing violence by using reason," which the video explains is foundational to Iroquois culture. Pacifist belief are explored through firsthand explanations of the Iroquois use of wampum shells, which are held sacred in Iroquois cosmology, and through discussions of the "historic origins of the Iroquois Confederacy," which is made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. The film concludes with the repatriation of wampum belts traded long ago in treaties made with the governments of Denmark, France, England, and the U.S. "The wampum belts hold the words of our ancestors," says an Iroquois elder in the film. "Our ancestors are in the wampum belts. They are the words and spirit of those who've gone before us; we can't divorce ourselves from that." Among the most affecting videos in this series, Coyote and the Spirit Run deals with tribal leader Preston Jefferson and his work with Quechan teens of the American Southwest. The Quechan people live across from Yuma, Arizona, where the river divides Mexico from the U.S. Coyote and the Spirit Run takes as its topic the Quechan myth of Jackrabbit and Coyote. During the spirit run, Quechan children and teens run for four days through the Ward Valley to protest a pending nuclear waste facility. The video begins with a...