Reviews: Environmental Documentaries on Native Communities

I’ll be teaching a class next year on indigenous communities and environmental issues, and as I pull my syllabus together I’ve been watching a bunch of documentaries. At the same time, I was packing to leave Michigan for New Hampshire and was already a bit stress-y and nuts, so I ended up getting angry and sad three times a night as I worked my way through the docs. The following is a rundown of the films I watched, and some of my basic impressions:

Crude (2009): Focuses on a court case in Ecuador between various Amazonian communities (both indigenous and not) against Chevron. Chevron bought Texaco in the 1990s, and Texaco had been operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon since the late 1950s. The film follows the lawyers for the plaintiffs and their struggle to not only try the case in Ecuador, but to gain publicity in the U.S. to bring some level of public opinion to weigh against Chevron. It’s long – nearly two hours – but provides an honest portrait of the efforts to prosecute and raise public consciousness about the case. For example, one of the early scenes shows the U.S.-based lawyer working on the case prepping one of the indigenous leaders who was going to speak at one of the Chevron shareholder meetings. He rearranges the leader’s testimony drastically, to frame it in a way that is most beneficial to raise concern. The Chevron reps in the documentary were absolutely crazy-making. I honestly don’t know how they live with themselves or sleep at night, especially when you see the footage of the environmental contamination and health issues suffered by residents in the areas Texaco/Chevron participated in contaminating. It’s a solid documentary, and another UMich grad (from Anthro) said that her students responded positively to it as a teaching tool.

The Buffalo War (2001): This documentary portrays the activism surrounding the state of Montana’s persistence in killing the buffalo that wander outside of Yellowstone National Park each winter as they search for winter forage. Ranchers, Lakota activists, environmental groups, the National Park Service, and Montana representatives are all given time to say their piece. The doc is fairly well-balanced, and mostly condemns the state of Montana for their wildlife control practices which then bring the other groups into conflict over whether the buffalo or ranchers deserve more protection. The 500-mile walk that centered around Lakota community member Rosalie Little Thunder, who carried a sacred buffalo pipe from Rapid City, SD to the north entrance of Yellowstone, at times made me cry, but at other times made me wonder if I could show this to non-Native students. The footage of the environmental activists was at times annoying to me. Is this awful? I wanted them all to shower and groom more often. But I like the portrayal of several kinds of activism, and the equal time given to understanding the points of view of both the ranchers and activists.

Power Paths (2010): This film’s main focus is energy production, at Navajo, Hopi, and a bit on Lakota reservations. The most time is spent considering coal mining and energy production impacting the Navajo and Hopi, and ties the economic, environmental, and social costs of resource extraction and energy production for tribal communities to the benefits that are enjoyed amongst residents in sunbelt cities. The asymmetry of knowledge and resources – most residents of Phoenix or L.A. have no idea where the power for their air conditioners, computers, or lighting is being produced, while Navajo and Hopi community members must daily face the economic and environmental inequities resulting from that energy production – is very effectively evoked. The documentary also addresses the difference between energy policies in the U.S. as compared to Denmark and Germany – two countries that have made room for or heavily invested in the development of renewable energy. The differences were striking, and stuck with me long after I viewed the documentary. The doc also shows lots of community activism, and paints in broad strokes the actions taken by community activists. Fellow Stanford alumna Enei Begaye suggested this video to me, and she and her husband – alongside other veteran Navajo and Hopi environmental and community activists – are portrayed, but the doc doesn’t really get as much into their activism as into the issues around which they are organizing. The Lakota focus on renewable energy development is covered in less depth, but the cameos of KILI radio staff are fun. It’s well done, very recent, and I’ll definitely include it in my class.

When Is Enough, Enough? (2005): This was produced as part of a CBC program called “The Nature of Things,” so it feels a tad less activist-y and much more Frontline-ish. It contains a solid summary of the many different perspectives in the Native and scientific communities re: oil sand extraction in Alberta, and has a very strong explanation of human experience within an environment – especially surrounding its coverage of the impact of James Bay hydro on the same Cree communities that will have to deal with the oil sand extraction. I liked this film because it provides an excellent portrayal of the enmeshment of government and capital – some of the scenes explaining the negotiations between the tribe, the oil companies, and the Canadian government representatives meant to be environmental watchdogs are ridiculous. I’m not sure if I’ll include this in my class … I like that it’s about a Canadian community, but because it’s on oil extraction it is competing against Crude re: my syllabus coverage.

Drumbeat for Mother Earth (1999): This film focuses on the dangers posed by POPs (Persistant Organic Pollutants) as they invade the food chain and the human body. There’s good coverage of the POP issue in many indigenous communities, including some in Mexico and Guatemala; in the U.S., they touch on the Gwich’in, Penobscot, Oneida, MN Chippewa, and Lakota. The framing device for the doc is an episode of Native America Calling on POPs, and it works fairly well, especially as there is such wide coverage from many different Native communities. It can be a bit cheesy in some parts, a bit pan-Indian, but it walks the line pretty well. The breadth of coverage does sacrifice depth in terms of understanding the communities, but the doc stays well-focused on ensuring that the audience fully understands POPs. I’m not sure if I’ll use this yet.

In the Light of Reverence (2001): I saw this a long time ago when it premiered in San Francisco, when I was still in college. Malinda Maynor, one of the producers, was a grad student at Stanford in the History Department, so a lot of us undergrads got to go see the film. It covers three different religious rights issues – at Hopi, for the Wintu in California, and at Devils Tower (Lakota) – but at each site the religious rights are completely enmeshed in issues of land, territory, and the environment. It has some of the most obvious footage of white racism (from South Dakota, OF COURSE) I’ve seen in any of the documentaries, and I think I’ll always have a soft spot for this documentary. Very well done, beautiful footage, excellent coverage of the issues presented.

Rising Waters: Global Warming and the Fate of the Pacific Islands (2000): I was so zoned out when I saw this one. It was the third environmental documentary of the evening and I was already emotionally exhausted from the first two docs, and physically exhausted from packing. So I don’t know if I can give the film its due. But overall it’s well-done, and I like how it covers several different Pacific Islander communities and their struggles with the impact of global warming. The environmental impact is explained well and in concrete terms, and I definitely want to use it as a teaching tool.

River of Renewal (2009): This video covers several environmental issues along the Klamath issue, dealing partly with access to water, but mostly around fishing rights and the impact that water use (and misuse) has upon the salmon runs along the river. The dude who pulls the viewer through the issues, following the Klamath to the source, is a Native Stanford grad (but I never heard of him) who is an actor. I thought the documentary was very well-done, and I especially liked the inclusion of the negative impact that federal western water and energy policies have had upon species survival in the Klamath River. I’m going to use this one for sure.

Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action (2005): This was another film suggested by Enei, and she and her husband Evon are one set of the featured activists. The activists are as follows: Gail Small (Northern Cheyenne, MT), Evon Peter (Gwich’in, AK), Mitchell & Rita Capitan (Eastern Navajo, NM), and Barry Dana (Penobscot, ME). I really liked this documentary. Gail Small’s description of not only her story but the history of her tribe – the Northern Cheyenne, led by Little Wolf and Dull Knife, escaped from imprisonment in Oklahoma and Wyoming after being attacked and captured and marched north to their old homelands. Holy shit those people are kick-ass. Evon and Enei’s portion was super sweet, and the impact of possible oil exploration and global warming on Evon Peters’ community is, in a word, terrifying. Mitchell and Rita Capitan’s story is impressive, and made me understand tribal politics and dissent in Navajo much better. It always seems like Navajo present such a united front, it is instructive to realize that the “united front” mentality can be extremely painful to disempowered community members. Finally, Barry Dana’s portion was one of my favorites; in particular, in the way it tied environmental rights and activism to the expression of tribal sovereignty. After the EPA allowed the state of Maine to continue to monitor and enforce water quality standards along the Penobscot river – akin to letting the fox guard the hen house considering how enmeshed state political power is with a highly polluting paper industry – Dana’s community marched papers the state was trying to force them to hand over to the state capital, as an expression of a government-to-government relationship, a.k.a tribal sovereignty. Of all the films, I liked this one the most for being so community-specific. Through the stories of the activists, the histories of their communities are told and set an emotional backdrop against the more current stories of environmental activism.

X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, Scott Lyons

Just got off the phone with my Ojib boyfriend Neek [real name: Tyonek Ogemageshig, you can’t get much more Ojibwe than that as my friend Veronica (also Ojib) tells me]. I was complaining about the book I just finished. “It’s by one of your people,” I said, accusingly.

Neek just laughed, as he always does when I am being a prickly Mandan-Hidatsa nationalist. It is one of his gifts, to be able to love people and deflate their self-righteousness and general grumpiness. He said, “What Ojibwe’s gotten under your skin this time? You just have a thin skin.” WhatEVER! I replied. He said, “You just can’t deal with Ojibwes’ power and strength.” I started laughing. Too ridiculous. He said, “You get distraught, overwrought, and I can tell it just stresses you out: the power of Ojibwes.”

Anyways.

The book I was talking about was X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, by Scott Lyons. Lyons will be at UMich starting this year, I guess coming from Syracuse, so I was curious about his book and decided to read it as I packed and moved in preparation to my new job. His book is divided into four parts after the introduction: Identity Crisis, Culture and Its Cops, Nations and Nationalism since 1492, Resignations. The back of the book reads, “Lyons explores the complexity of contemporary Indian identity and current debates among Indians about traditionalism, nationalism, and tribalism. … Employing the x-mark as a metaphor for what he calls the ‘Indian assent to the new,’ … Lyons contends that Indians should be able to choose nontraditional ways of living, thinking, and being without fear of condemnation as inauthentic.”

In his Introduction, after telling us that he used to think that Spock and other actors of the late ‘60s were Native, Lyons writes, “I use x-mark to symbolize Native assent to the new, and to call into question old ideas of ‘assimilation’ and ‘acculturation.’ … I wrote this book because I was increasingly dissatisfied with the ways in which terms like identity, culture, and nation are used, which is to say, ‘naturally,’ ahistorically, and with a large measure of essentialism” (33).

Lyons’ tone is charming and self-deprecating, and his writing is accessible (although after seven years of grad school who knows how good I am at assessing that any more). He always reaches for the more complicated answer, and leads us there, through his thinking. In that way he reminds me of my former advisor, Phil Deloria, who is also skilled at leading you through multiple possible complicated and deeply engaged interpretations before coming down, always, somewhere in the middle. Which is right, but can be unsatisfying depending on the subject. Like say if you were asking what classes you should take next quarter. Lyons is deeply rooted in the literatures of Ojibwe writers, and in those doing lit crit stuff in Native American Studies; he knows his onions.

I liked the book, but it also annoyed me. Much like my relationships with my Ojibwe friends and boyfriend. [that was a joke] My issues started with the limitation Lyons placed on what the x-mark could mean – on treaties it may mean assent as in Lyons’ metaphor, but on a petition protesting cultural repression, it could mean something much closer to resistance. I also got annoyed because, like all lit crit people I guess, Lyons has defined a rather narrow range regarding from whom we draw our intellectual traditions [it’s mostly the Indians who wrote in English, largely to white people]. Being in the archive for every research project I’ve done has taught me that some documents, like treaty negotiations, petitions, or letters, illuminate a powerful and incisive Indian intelligentsia operating in every Native community. They may not have been writing essays that appeared in Harper’s, but they were crafting, initiating, and realizing a powerful intellectual tradition within Indian communities. This leads to my third issue, which is the level of historical understanding of some of his major examples, such as Red Power, or tribal constitutions and citizenship codes. But on to the chapter summary, with some of my “issues” embedded within.

Chapter One, “Identity”: Lyons does some theoretical work re: what constitutes identity/how is it formed, then historicizes the development of Indian identity in the U.S. (in broad strokes) – including differences in the way Native vs. non-Native communities practiced identity. He mobilizes theory proposed by Manuel Castells that describes three different modes by which identities are produced (legitimizing identity, resistance identity, project identity). After talking about legitimizing identity and resistance identity – the former produced in tandem with the dominant political system, the latter produced in opposition to it – he digs in to explore the potential of the “project identity,” which is formed around a common cause.

He identifies Indigenism as a ‘project identity’ – one focused on “promoting indigenous culture in opposition to neoliberalism and settler culture, [it] seeks a life where power is decentralized and people live in harmony with the natural world and each other. It focuses on ecological sustainability, collective rights, the primacy of Native ways of knowing and indigenous values, and the political virtues of ‘respectful coexistance.” I think the summary is true enough, but tends to elide the very dirty (as in literally, soil-based) struggles that lead to indigenist projects. His summary sounds so neat and clean and calm and peaceful, but across the globe communities are investing in the rhetorics of indigenism because they are being killed directly or via environmental genocide. It’s messy and dirty and heartbreaking, and their use of indigenous identity grows from that soil. But this is a small thing. Overall I agree with his overarching analysis that “Indian” as identity was “never a stable signifier and Indians played a role in its making,” (69) and it stands as one of his “x-marks.” His conclusion to the chapter calls upon all Natives to make their “x-mark” in defining Indian identity/indigenous identity.

Chapter Two: “Culture and Its Cops”: The meat of his chapter I agree with – especially in his layered reading of different moments when Native identity has been policed. He comes out at a place in which he says he doesn’t necessarily like “culture cops” – those who rigidly interpret cherry-picked tradition for political, social, cultural power. But then again, he says, he doesn’t necessarily dislike them either, especially when they are policing on behalf of nationalist projects. Le sigh.

But at those dissonant moments in which it is clear that his engagement with actual history as opposed to a genericized history wanes, I bristle. Those moments impact his claims, for his claims are built upon them. And it bugs me that he’ll engage more deeply with Gerald Vizenor’s “post-Indian gobbledygook” (in the quoted words of Craig Womack), than with the boring, mundane, meat of how Indian communities survived the Reservation and Termination Eras. [I think this is where I depart from American Studies and Native American Studies: I actually think historical detail – deep, contextualized, and meaty detail – matters]

For example, Lyons dates U.S. Native “cultural revival” to the 1960s, post-American Indian Chicago Conference, and bookends his chapter with the AICC Declaration of Indian Purpose. This, however, begs the question, how did those people who attended AICC magically emerge with the Declaration of Indian Purpose … was it perhaps because they had all been continually reviving their indigenous cultures since the beginning of the reservation era? Because that’s what I’ve seen in the archival records at places like Standing Rock, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Fort Berthold, and Crow – and what I am willing to bet exists in most archival records and community practices in every Indian community across the country, especially if you add data from works like Christian McMillan’s Making Indian Law, John Troutman’s Indian Blues, any of Clyde Ellis’ works, Paul Rosier’s Serving Their Country, Phil Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, any of Fred Hoxie’s works, or Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert’s article “Hopi Footraces and American Marathons.” Some people were shamed and abused into forgetting or abandoning indigenous cultural practices during the Reservation Era, despite the Indian Reorganization Act, and through the Termination Era. Others were not. The AICC, Red Power movements, and cultural revitalization are only “revitalizations” if you do not engage with the longue durée of Native resistance and commitment to community cultural practices.

Chapter Three, “Nations and Nationalism since 1492”: All about the nation and how nationalism is practiced. I think this is his strongest chapter. He puts contemporary ‘Native intellectuals’ into conversation, along with developments in global indigenous consciousness. His end point is that nations and nationalisms are still concepts being deployed, and that globalization hasn’t made the nation-state defunct, yet. He says that both “nation” as a concept and nationalism as a practice can be dangerous. But they can also be good. Depending on how they are used. Yes, yes, very true. His analysis and what he brings together into his conversation are much more interesting and useful than his summary, obviously.

Chapter Four, “Resignations”: His final chapter is about legal belonging in Indian communities – citizenship and enrollment. He advocates that Native communities move towards a citizenship status rather than enrollment, as enrollment denotes something less than nationhood/the exertion of tribal sovereignty. Native citizenship, he suggests, should be taken seriously and crafted by Native communities so as to encourage the end result they wish to produce for their nation – and citizenship can serve as one of the “x-marks” through which Native communities subvert a disempowering present in order to build toward a realistic and more empowered future.

Anyways, it’s a strong, thought-provoking book. He’s smart. Worth reading, especially because he deploys and puts many different thinkers, writers, and events into conversation with each other. Glad I read it.

News from Home

A few summers ago, the roads out to the country in Mandaree were completely jacked up. When I drove out to my Auntie Tillie's house, you had to drive sloooooooowly in case you hit one of the parts of the road that was tore up from all the trucks going back and forth from the oil wells. It was worrisome because there are a lot of older folks that live out that way, and at night it would be dangerous to run into one of those huge potholes.

The truck traffic was high, and sometimes I would see an elderly Native lady in a tiny car being pushed down the road by a huge semi. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing -- the method being used to extract oil from the Bakken field drilling going on at Fort Berthold -- needs hundreds of gallons of water that must be hauled to extraction sites before being pushed down into the well, and hauled from the sites after the briny "produced water" emerges. The produced water then need to be either stored or treated, each of which produces its own set of environmental issues. The process requires much more truck traffic than other, older methods of oil extraction.

The way I experienced this was via the trucks. They are relentless. And every time I return home to visit family, there are more of them. Some of them hauling oil? Many of them endlessly hauling water and brine back and forth, back and forth.

My cousins and aunties tell me that the oil development on Fort Berthold is only in its beginning stages, and it will become much more extreme in the years to come. Already, the truck traffic is increasing, the community is changing as rig workers from Oklahoma and Texas are imported to supplement the existing labor pool, the roads keep getting torn up and rebuilt, and some tribal members see royalty checks from the wells on their lands -- or checks from oil and gas companies to tribal middlemen who support industry interests in the tribal government. At night, the roads are lit up by the gas being burned off of wells alongside the highways, towering, endless bursts of flame.

The Fort Berthold I knew as a little kid, as a young adult taking time off from college, as a graduate student continually scraping together dollars to return home as a relative, a researcher, and a tribal member, has a new rhythm. It's a rhythm that sometimes barrels down the highways at 70mph like a big truck hauling water -- when it's moving that fast the changes seem inevitable, unstoppable, and you may as well jump on board and try to make some money before you get left behind.

Sometimes the rhythm corresponds to the still quiet of my Auntie Tillie's house out in the country, nestled into a small valley, where you could still hear crickets and the sound of the wind in the cottonwoods and sometimes, sometimes, coyotes yelling around at night. The stillness of running on a gravel road with the sun pounding down on you. The stillness of sitting on the porch while auntie threshed beans. That stillness used to feel safe and comforting, a reminder of a way of life I never got to live because I was born long after the Garrison Dam flooded out our river valley lands. Now, it feels like the calm before a storm.

My relatives are worried. I'm worried. What will we have to repair after the storm has passed and companies with names like Concho, Abraxas, Continental Resources, Whiting, Marathon, Brigham, Hess, Samson, and EOG have taken what they wanted and disappeared to the next site? I don't think anyone knows, and that makes it scarier.