Two years ago, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian added a radio component to its Native American Film and Video Festival, having found that many vital indigenous voices neglected on film and TV were finding their way out over the audio airwaves. Reasoning that the same advantages of access and opportunity applied at least as well to digital media and the Internet, the festival is introducing electronic-media projects into this year's 10th incarnation, running through the weekend in Manhattan.
"We've broadened our reach beyond film," says festival co-director Elizabeth Weatherford. Many of the most creative Native American work, she explains, is found outside that medium, especially in the growing and increasingly networked area of Indian radio. "And we're noticing some of the same markers in multimedia," she says, adding that the fest is interested in the power of "new media in the hands of people who traditionally didn't have a lot of access."
As such, the museum is bringing together 15 speakers to discuss new technologies and their relationship to Native knowledge. Throughout the weekend, there will be presentations of Web sites, CD-ROMs, and educational pieces like Buffy Sainte-Marie's Cradleboard Project, as well as webcasts of both the event itself and of the radio show Native America Calling.
Many of these projects involve the preservation of tribal languages and stories. Of the 400 Native American nations, only about half still speak their own language, and in many of those nations, only a few hundred members do, explains Weatherford, noting that "there is a great sense of impending loss." The Prayer of Thanksgiving - an installation involving traditional beadwork, a CD-ROM, and a stylized replica of the Iroquois longhouse - comes out of artist Melanie Printup Hope's concern with the Tuscarora language she never learned in school.
"I see my child growing up in this computer age," says Printup Hope, "and I was looking for a way of giving children some interest in seeing and carrying on the stories." The CD-ROM is based on the Iroquois prayer of thanksgiving, and it combines English text with an audio recitation in Tuscarora by tribal elders.
Indeed, multimedia - with its interactivity and ability to combine audio, text, and pictures - is ideal for language education, and many of the projects at the festival are specifically tailored to preserve and teach Native languages. Weatherford points out that the new technologies tend to bring together a generation with elder knowledge and a technically savvy younger generation to reach out to kids who may be more literate in computers than in their native languages.
The festival, for its part, offers educators from across the continent a chance to get together and share their knowledge. "I find we're way ahead of many tribes," says Hocak cultural coordinator Kenneth Funmaker Sr., who is at the festival showing off elements of the Hocak Wazijaci Language and Culture Program. As part of a 25-year Hocak literacy plan for its 11 member-tribes in and around Wisconsin, the program has developed 13 language programs in HyperCard and HyperStudio and is developing a distance-learning network. So far, the group has adapted two of its counting programs for an Oklahoma tribe, and will use the Native American Film and Video Festival as an opportunity to demonstrate how the software is made.
"The main thing is to get people to steer things toward cooperative projects," says presenter James May, a member of the United Keetoowah Band and a dean at California State University, Monterey Bay. He explains that while neighboring tribes can have widely divergent languages, many share the same stories, and these stories can be the basis for common teaching programs. At the very least, electronic film-editing software makes it easy to dub or subtitle films and videos into many different languages. He'd like to see a network of Native-language technologists similar to Native American Public Telecommunications, a PBS-sponsored group of Native American TV and radio broadcasters on whose board May sits.
All the participants agree that electronic-media projects, whether strictly educational or more artistic in nature, are an important outlet in addition to the more traditional festival material. After all, points out Printup Hope, "This isn't something you can turn on the TV and watch.... The museum has given Native people the opportunity to voice their concerns."
