Native language film & vid festival

[phil cash cash]

Hi Richard, Good question!  I will just quickly type out my general 
impression
and maybe others can add on to this.  I am thinking of at least two trends in
the native/indigenous communities. 
The first is the commercial filmmakers trend of using language code as a mode
of cultural/linguistic diversity.  Great films like Ten Canoes and 
Fast Runner
are the best examples everybody may be familiar with.  Lesser so but well
within this genre frame is Finding Our Talk, a documentary series and other
like this.  These type of films all adopt the media practices of the film
industry/commercialism. 
The second trend is on a smaller scale: local community video production using
language as a medium for cultural/language revitalization.  These are
community produced and community circulated visual media products.  Rarely do
these products garner the attention of the Sundance crowd or the newly
developing native/indigenous film circuits because they adopt a media practice
of a different kind.  That is they seem to employ film in a design mode to
promote learning/acquisition.  The most successful can reach wide audiences
such as the widely popular program Cree for Kids (see the web site), an award
winning Sesame Street-style program out of Canada.   Some communities are now
beginning to use YouTube (I have been trying to track this usage with my own
YouTube site posted previously) as a way of distributing content. 
So there is a tension of sorts over the delivery of content, though 
communities
may not see a difference and herein lies the interesting creative challenge. 
A third a perhaps newly developing practice is the purely ethnographic
documentary mode like the films coming out of the Amazon with Video in the
Villages project.  Natives filming natives.  
Where do linguists fit in all of this...well they have their own interesting
thing going on with the appearance of "The Linguists."  Btw, I get to 
meet the
filmmakers here in the comming week!  whahoo....
later,
Phil Cash Cash
UofA 

Quoting Richard LaFortune :

> there have been all these Native films festivals
> proliferating across the hemisphere over the past
> decade or so...what about a Native Language Film &
> Video Festival?  there is an existing corpus of work
> developed over this same span of time that features
> Native language as the primary or only vehicle for
> communicating the storyline, with more on the way:
>
> Bambi in Arapaho
> Windwalker in Cheyenne
> Atanarjuat (Inuit)
> Squanto- Algonquin
> Dances w Wolves- Lakota
> etc
> does there exist an inventory/database  of feature
> films or documentaries in our languages?  That's a
> tool for all of our communities and our media allies,
> as well as funders and journalists.
>
> in this mass media society Native (young) people
> especially need to see all in one place what our
> stories (or others' stories adapted to our needs) look
> like in the framework of newer technologies, legible
> to the cosmos of young people and children, inspiring
> them to see themselves telling our stories in our
> languages -and in a mode that likewise demonstrates to
> the world that our people, cultures and languages are
> relevant to the Information Age- to increase the
> likelihood of inspiring new works where not only our
> intangible assets are treated w dignity, but where our
> languages become the celebrities.
> Anguksuar

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