Smiling Indians
I just watched a short called Smiling Indians, made by directors Sterlin Harjo (who I’ve written about before) and Ryan Red Corn, who collaborated with Harjo in Barking Water. Here’s a short interview with Red Corn describing the impetus behind this short, which is dedicated to Edward Curtis, the famous photographer whose images of 19th century Native Americans occupies a stronghold in the popular imagination on Native peoples. Many if not most of these photographs show serious, and probably broadly perceived as stoic, faces of a people who were thought to be vanishing. In this sense, Smiling Indians demonstrates how the palimpsest of Native American history is being partly rewritten by Native filmmakers.
Red Corn is part of a video production group called the 1491s, which presently counts the following people among its members: Sterlin Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Migizi Pensoneau, Bobby Wilson, Garrett Drapeau, Elizabeth Day, and Sedelta Oosawhee. You can watch the 1491s’s videos here. Besides comedies and shorts, such as their first group project New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions, they have worked on more educational documentary style shorts and plan on working on features in the future. (Although the New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions were funny, I really cracked up after watching outtakes of “cultural adviser” Garret Drapeau.) Among the shorts with more political messages are Geronimo E-KIA and Bad Indians and among the more comedic ones are Singing Lessons by the 1491s and Slapping Medicine Man. I like the fact that the collective is using both serious poetry and comedy as expressions of Native culture (or cultures) and to effect changes in the ways Indians are perceived by the general public.
Singing Lessons by the 1491s
