Thursday, March 31st was the opening night of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. This was my third time at the Festival and while I have always enjoyed myself in the past, this year, the organizers took it up a notch. So, I’d like to congratulate everyone involved with putting the Festival together. First off, while the Native Networks website remains an invaluable resource, I love this year’s festival website. Second, it was pretty cool that on opening night, the film screened online and the Q&A included questions from around the world via Twitter (the Festival hashtag is #NAFVF11, which I’ve been using to tweet about the festival). Finally, the director of the opening night film, Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, Zacharias Kunuk, skyped in from the Arctic! Oh, and the Festival trailer was a nice touch, too. So, an all around great job of making use of technology to bring these films to the world and back.

And now, on to the show… The opening night film, Qapirangajuq, was directed by Zacharias Zunuk, who also directed the well known film Atanarjuaat/The Fast Runner. This documentary was a huge undertaking involving interviews with 60 elders from 4 communities who speak 5 different Innuit dialects and live in different parts of the Arctic. The elders discussed environmental concerns such as changing wind patterns which make it impossible to accurately predict the weather,* changes in the location of the setting of the sun, and the drastic melting of ice in the Arctic. The documentary presaged the festival’s focus on the environment (Friday, April 1 was largely devoted to films on the environment and ended with a panel discussion called “Protecting our Rivers”).

One of the highlights of the screening came during the Q&A, when an audience member asked co-director Ian Mauro about the correlation which the film made between the positioning of celestial bodies and the environmental crisis. Mauro, who has a doctorate in Environmental Studies, gave a great explanation, but in my effort to jot it down, I only caught interesting pieces. Elders from all over were commenting about the shift in the earth’s axis but Mauro could find nothing about it in the scholarly literature. However, scientists did stand up and take notice when Mauro described a process that is known to them as “refraction.” Due to the collision of hot and cold air in the Arctic, the sun creates an optical illusion which makes it appear at times of the year when it would not normally appear. Mauro noted that this oscillation process is the same that can sort of help you tell the future: if a walrus is oscillating in the horizon, it is a few hours away. Qapirangajuq is the Inuktitut word that comes closest to the English word “refraction” (I believe Mauro translated the word into English as “a pencil that looks bent in the water”). Hearing all this was a highlight to me because it was an instance of native people observing what scientists had not. (In that Russell Means video I referenced earlier, he also noted that scientists still had not come to understand that hair carries memory.)