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A Wind River-made documentary highlighting missing and murdered Indigenous people won big recently in a film festival.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann reports.
Who She Is recently won Best Animated Film at the Oregon Documentary Film Festival.
The documentary brings faces and voices to four Indigenous women caught in the MMIP epidemic – Sheila, Lela, Jocelyn, and Abbi.
It aims to humanize the people behind the statistics.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Native American women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average.
Co-producer Jordan Dresser (Northern Arapaho) said the film’s team intentionally chose to make an animated documentary to help bring each woman alive.
“It’s important to know the people who are victims of it and what’s happening to them, like the actual people who get murdered, you know, and actual people who survive it. I think it’s very important that we always allow them to have a space to tell their stories in good ways.”
The film was co-produced by Dresser and Sophie Barksdale, with animation by Ojibwe artist Jonathan Thunder and Casper-based artist Tony Elmore.
Craig George, photographed in April, 2019, out on the sea ice, working on the whale census. (Photo: Ravenna Koenig/Alaska’s Energy Desk/KTOO-Juneau)
Communities across Alaska’s North Slope are mourning the loss of Craig George, who recently died in a rafting accident.
At the age of 70, George was more than just a scientist to the Inupiaq of Utqiagvik – called Barrow when he arrived in 1977.
He would become one of the world’s experts on bowhead whales, and as KNBA’s Rhonda McBride reports, so respected among the Inupiaq, he was made an honorary whaling captain.
Among the many tributes to Craig George on Facebook, you’ll find different recordings of him singing this song, which he wrote to celebrate whaling.
In those videos, you’ll see people singing along in the chorus, to the lines, “Keep, keep on whaling. Keep on Whaling, and paddle that Umiak through. Keep, keep on whaling. Let that big old whale come to you.”
For George, bowhead whales were more than about research.
“It’s hard to measure the complete impact that Craig had on our lives.”
Richard Glenn, an Inupiaq whaler and longtime friend, says he admired George’s holistic approach to science, that he learned about seals, birds, everything connected to the world of the whale – and that included people.
“I think the world has yet to realize after a career of 50 years almost, what we feel.”
George was part of a group of scientists who challenged the status quo – and went on to prove that Native whalers had a better understanding of how to accurately track the whale population than Western science.
“When the world might have been focused against them. These gentlemen spent their careers corroborating traditional knowledge about the movement of animals and the population — and they backed their work up with real science and world class science.”
George would often say that he received more from the Inupiat than he could ever possibly give back.
“And yet we know he’s given back so much, taken our traditional knowledge and science to the world stage and defended it many times successfully. For that reason alone, we owe him a lot of gratitude.”
Richard Glenn says Craig George left a body of knowledge that will help North Slope whalers, now and into the future, do just what his song says, “Keep on Whaling.”
Indian Industrial School, located in the eastern part of Genoa, Neb., now operated as a museum. (Photo: Ammodramus via Wiki CC)
No remains were found at a former Indian boarding school in Genoa, Neb., after a two-week archeological dig, the Associated Press reports.
The team, lead by the state’s archeologist, will now examine data and consider next steps.
They also plan to hold a virtual meeting this week with tribal representatives from across the U.S.
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