(bright music) (upbeat music) (gentle electronic music) - Welcome to TVFilm, I'm Amani Olugbala.

TVFilm showcases the talents of upstate New York media makers across all genres.

This episode features films that highlight the work of indigenous women in upstate New York.

The director is a member of the Oneida Nation Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Michelle Schenandoah.

- (speaking in foreign language), I'm Michelle Schenandoah, I'm the founder of Rematriation Magazine and Media, and I worked with a Kanien'kehá꞉ka director, Katsitsionni Fox to bring you the Rematriation Magazine Indigenous Women's Voices Series.

- So she:kon, my name is Katsitsionni.

I am from Akwesasne, I'm a filmmaker.

I helped to direct the series "Rematriation".

- So Katsitsionni and I collaborated together, and took a look around within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and looked at, you know, some of like the really big changemakers, women who are, you know, making some really positive change within our communities, but also nationally.

So we included voices of indigenous women from other nations.

- Marion Delaronde is from our sister community of Kahnawake, and she's been doing amazing work revitalizing language.

And Angie Ferguson is from Onondaga, which is a few hours from here, and she's doing work in rematriating our indigenous seeds.

And Matika Wilbur is actually from the West Coast, and she started this amazing project called Project 562 that she's been doing for years.

- I think with each one, you know, I cried, and it just made me feel really overwhelmed because I know that for myself and for most all indigenous women, you don't really see our stories reflected and filmed like this.

So for ours, when they were completed, with each one, I just felt so inspired, and I felt so grateful, and it made me feel really good knowing that, you know, we created these positive stories, you know, and we're sharing them out there with the world for everyone to see something about who we really are.

- There's so very little content of indigenous women and even less content that has empowering stories of indigenous women.

So it was really important for us to go and document all these amazing women, and to really show that how we see it, you know, through our own lens.

So it was important, you know, that we have indigenous women leading the team to make the series.

For our young people, you know, I think about my granddaughters when I do this work, and that they can see us in media, and see us how we really are.

And also for the future generations, when they're looking back at this time period, that they have something to look at that's authentic, and that's real, and that's being generated by us.

(singing in a foreign language) - Rematriation is a return of the sacred to the mother.

(women singing in a foreign language) Rematriation Magazine is proud to present inspirational indigenous women who are leading the way with their gifts and culture.

(women singing in a foreign language) Marion Delaronde is a member of the Kanien'kehá꞉ka Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake.

(percussive music) She produces a children's television show entirely in the Mohawk language, which has been broadcast on public access television for over a decade.

- My name is Kawanohon Marion Delaronde, I'm a Wolf Clan from the Kanien'kehá꞉ka Nation, and I live in Kahnawake.

I'm a mom of two kids.

(women singing in Mohawk) I think all of the first words they heard were all in Kanyen'keha.

If I speak to them in Kanyen'keha first thing in the morning, they will speak back in Kanyen'keha, but it's always something I have to keep rebuilding, and it's a lot of pressure.

(women singing in Mohawk) (woman speaking in Mohawk) (women singing in Mohawk) (woman speaking in Mohawk) - This is how I check the barbecue.

- Some of the language initiatives we have in Kahnawake are Kanien'kehá:ka Ratiwennahní:rats, that's a adult immersion class, and that's on top of the immersion programs offered in elementary school.

I can walk to a store and find someone to speak Kanyen'keha with, pretty, fairly easily.

It's when we have visitors coming for a conference, maybe from Tuscarora or from another nation that it really has an impact on them to just go to a cafe, and there's an elder and a younger person speaking Mohawk together.

It's something really beautiful that we should not take for granted.

I also am a co-host of a talk show for second language Kanyen'keha learners called "Tewawennakará:tats".

(percussive music) And we just take this momentum we're building every day, and the language is such a powerful one, to reconnect us.

(percussive music) (woman speaking Mohawk) (woman speaking Mohawk) (woman speaking Mohawk) That show is there for second language learners to stay in touch with Kanyen'keha.

We're not perfect speakers, you know, we're second language learners, but I guess the important thing we can do with that is role model.

You know, you don't have to go from zero to 100 in your process of learning Kanyen'keha.

(woman speaking Mohawk) It feels just natural to be able to take charge of a project and do something.

That's the kinda thing that makes me real happy.

(percussive music) (woman singing in a foreign language) - I created a show called Tóta tánon Ohkwá:ri at the Kanien'kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center here in Kahnawake.

Originally, it was just two puppets.

And now I think it's almost like they want the whole town to be in the show.

We probably have 20 puppets now or more.

I wanna try once more.

And action.

(woman speaking Mohawk) You can cut, actually, we can start from (speaking Mohawk) we can cut through like reaction shots from the (speaking Mohawk), you know.

(woman speaking Mohawk) It's to help make learning Kanyen'keha fun for kids.

Oh my God.

- Now you wanted to do some bark etching, this one is winter bark, so this is the one you can do it on.

- Which one is the ash?

A language revitalization is much bigger, I mean, thank goodness for the teachers, but it's bigger than the classroom.

It's something that has to be approached from everybody.

And what I have is a creative side, and I guess that's what I feel like I'm comfortable in, and I could bring the language through in so many ways into my community.

It's like puppets are a nice place to go.

I guess, kinda like that's what storytelling and legends are.

(percussive music) Get her holding the stick.

(percussive music) Our sense of humor is a real big thing in Kahnawake, we love to laugh at ourselves, at each other, you know?

(laughs) Okay I'm getting carried away now.

(laughs) And I guess it's also just the people I work with that really make it fun.

I enjoy the creative aspect, and the spontaneity, the younger generation can see us working hard to do it.

And I think that's one thing that really fills me with happiness is that it's sorta like what we're doing in this generation is like, we've seen the previous generation work so hard to create these spaces for us to do this.

And I guess it's just that torch.

(percussive music) (laughs) It's a perfect picture.

(speaking Mohawk) (women singing in a foreign language) - Angela Ferguson is Eel Clan of the (speaking Onondaga) Onondaga Nation.

Angela is a key individual to establishing her nation's food sovereignty program and traditional community farm.

She is a member of Braiding the Sacred in which he travels across Turtle Island to learn from indigenous elders about growing corn and its sacred teachings.

She is currently working on the creation of a non-GMO ordinance across the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

(percussive music) (woman singing in a foreign language) (women singing in a foreign language) - My Onondaga name is (speaking a foreign language), it means she puts her feet in the water first.

Even though I don't even own one footstep of land, I tell everybody, I plant the most food, so it's not really a requirement.

(laughs) I said somehow, some way, when that's your purpose, and you really enjoy doing that, the creator always provides a place.

And growing up here on this nation, growing all the food up here on this farm here, this is our ancestral land that was returned back to the Onondaga people.

And it sat empty for many years.

There was not any food coming out of this place, and I felt like we had to be growing food on this land that was returned back to us.

Originally, I had started working in the elders garden for Chief Virgil Thomas (speaking Onondaga), and he was surprised at the amount of food that I could produce out of that little garden, doing everything by hand, traditional gardening, the same way our ancestors did.

There's different people in our community that you can see have the gift for planting, or they just love it.

We have a lot of youth now getting involved, and we take a lot of these projects to the nation school so that the kids can participate too.

And we do seed sorting, and we have husking bees, and then the kids can take the seeds home to plant.

Yeah, we had a whole bench full of (speaking Onondaga) there and it's all gone, all the honey, and there's only three jars left.

I brought 30 something jars.

So we have five people that do hunting and fishing throughout the year.

And then 15, the men do that, and the women do the gardening.

Last year, they got a total of 33 deer, and that fed the whole nation.

Every single house we were able to deliver to.

Plus to fill up the freezer for the winter so that when people had ceremonies and they needed that for their ceremony, they could come up and get it.

And to cook for a Grand Council or whatever, share with community events, we had extra.

(women singing in a foreign language) In 2015, the council allowed us to come up here and start planting food up here for the people.

And I encourage other nations to do the same thing.

So I've been kind of traveling around, convincing other nations to get their councils on board with it.

And it's happening all over the whole Confederacy.

(women singing in a foreign language) One of the main reasons that I really wanted to start growing the foods for the people is because I see a lot of health effects.

A lot of the foods that we're eating now that our bodies are not accustomed to.

Our people are dying at much earlier ages from things that are more severe, that we could fix a lot of that with the food.

(wood tapping) So about 10 years ago, I jumped in at the falls on the intersection, on the nation, and when I jumped out of the water, I hit the top of my head on a rock and I broke my back.

And I was laid up, incapacitated for like almost a year in a body cast.

During my recovery time, I had a dream and Leon Shenandoah came to me, our previous Tadodaho.

He said, "My own people are making me so sad, I'm so ashamed."

And I felt like in the dream, he was speaking to me directly.

And I used that as my motivation to change my whole lifestyle and become traditional, and no longer use alcohol or any of those things that can contaminate your mind.

And ever since then, till now, I use that as a motivation to try to become a better version of myself.

(women singing in a foreign language) From our Haudenosaunee perspective, women are the givers of life.

They're natural-born seed carriers.

They carry seeds within themselves, and their job is to nurture and provide for both male and female.

And that's kind of how our earth is too.

(women singing in a foreign language) I told the council, if they let me have a farm crew, and I'll take them 18 seeds and feed the whole Confederacy with it.

Yeah, we've been growing all the different varieties.

So this is yellow corn.

This is the Mohawk yellow flower corn.

This is our like ceremony blue corn we use, six nations blue.

This is Mohawk red flower.

In this room is the Carl Barnes Seed Collection that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have taken under their stewardship.

We are making sure that the varieties get rematriated back to the places they originally came from and to their people.

So we consider all of these little seeds in this room to be relatives to different people on Turtle Island.

(women singing in a foreign language) It's pretty amazing stuff.

And some of the seeds are the last there is on earth.

There's corn from the beginning of time, Teosinte, to the grandfather corn.

And basically all of these seeds have evolved into different varieties of that through the care and the love or the attention of different indigenous people in North and South America.

Little by little, you would see how many different nations are in here represented, and it's kind of like a huge assembly, a gathering of nations or something.

Cause there's even corn, the original corn that Columbus encountered when he landed.

(women singing in a foreign language) Well, the work that I'm participating in now in agriculture and with the seeds has been very humbling.

It's reminded me that no one can do any project alone.

I've really gotten a lot closer to some of the women in the community that we do this gardening because we've developed a bond that's pretty much unbreakable because of it.

I've developed a closer relationship with the children by involving them and encouraging them.

And I can see our future in their faces.

I wanna do what I'm intended to do so that I can leave the best of myself behind for the next seven generations.

We already have started the process of trading food and using our food as currency, so that you don't need money.

Your little garden is gonna make, determine your own self-worth.

And that feeling in itself, every person that's had one now is hooked.

And that is empowerment.

That is what real sovereignty is, not only being able to celebrate the foods that you have ceremonies for, but be growing them and eating them as well.

And then actually utilizing that ability to bring you and your family the things that you need, and your nation, and hence your Confederacy.

So everyone is starting to get on board with that same thought.

(women singing in a foreign language) (men singing in a foreign language) - Matika Wilbur is a documentary photographer from the Swinomish and Tulalip Nations.

While visiting Machu Picchu, Matika's late grandmother revealed to her in a dream to bring the lens to her own people.

(woman speaking a foreign language) - Yes, that was good, that was the one, good job.

(laughs) My name is Matika Wilbur, and I'm from the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes in Washington State.

(group chanting in a foreign language) I'm currently working on a documentary project called 562, and Project 562 is an effort to encourage our collective consciousness to acknowledge our own indigenous communities through photographic narratives told from our own perspectives.

(group chanting in a foreign language) I didn't initially want to be a documentary photographer or an educator.

I became both of those things because the elders in my community asked me to come home and do that work.

And so they said to me, you know, "The path has been laid for you.

And everywhere you go, people will help you.

And you'll find all the right people, all the medicine people will guide you and take care of you the entire way."

I really did not know what this experience was gonna be like to go to a community where I didn't know anybody and knock on people's doors, and hopefully meet somebody.

(laughs) I arrived at the community, and I really didn't know who I was gonna interview.

And I just went to the Tribal Center, and I told them what I was doing.

And they said, "Oh, go talk to the Culture Department."

I met Marva Scott, who's a woman I still talk with on a regular basis, she's their cultural coordinator.

She brought back the 111 chin tattoos to their tribal community.

And they let me stay with them, and they fed me, and they showed me how their ceremonies work, they took me to the ceremonies, and they brought me into the school, and they showed me their school, and I made all of these beautiful portraits that I still show to this day in exhibitions, and Marva became like one of these women that became a very good close, like sister to me.

(woman singing in a foreign language) When I had to leave and go onto the next tribe, I remember like bawling my eyes out when I was leaving, like, "Oh no, I have to do this again."

You know, like fall in love, and I would stay, just like I would stay in so many tribal communities, and then I have to pack my bags and go on to the next place.

(woman singing in a foreign language) Good, now bring your arms together like this.

Bring your hands together like that.

That's good, can you feel your energy?

Bless yourselves like this.

Bless your mind, yeah.

Bless your heart.

When I was a teacher at the tribal school at my res, I taught photography, and I taught visual literacy.

And we were looking for textbooks and curriculum that we could use to teach young people, such as yourself, about all of the tribes in the United States.

And when we were looking for those images and stories, we couldn't find them.

Did you know that Standing Rock was started by these kiddos?

The movement was started with a group of young people, most of them your age, eighth, ninth, and 10th graders, who heard about the pipeline coming through their region, and decided that they didn't want that for their children.

And people came from everywhere to pray with them.

They estimate that over 25,000 native people went to Standing Rock in support of the movement.

It's a really powerful story, and something amazing to imagine, that something as powerful as Standing Rock and the movement could happen from people your age, from young people who were willing to pray and protect the sacred.

When I hear the term native woman, I, of course, think of all the women that come came before me, and how my work is informed by and shaped by the long line of women that I come from that gave me the opportunity really just to be native.

I think about the experience that my mother had.

My mother was the first one in our community to get an Indian name again, because they had built a boarding school so close to our reservation.

And the religious persecution was so real that all of those sort of things had to go to sleep, and they had to be done in hiding.

(group chanting in a foreign language) I think that we have to take responsibility to become our grandmother's granddaughters, and to reconnect to the earth, and to rekindle that relationship and that fire inside of us that used to burn so bright.

(crowd chanting in a foreign language) But we are now in a time where our culture is reawakening, where our songs have come back to us, our language has come back to us, and we're in a time where you guys are the first generation where you're gonna have an entire lifetime without religious persecution.

Where it will be legal for you to be native people.

(crowd chanting in a foreign language) I've always felt like I was being taken care of immensely by all of the people that I've encountered, and the ancestors that walk with me, and I can feel them.

(percussive music) We're always surrounded by their prayers, and their belief systems, and their original intentions.

They never left us.

And so I love thinking to myself like that I get to be a part of that.

And that to me is a real blessing.

Look at the camera.

(laughs) And when you spend a lot of time in Indian country, you know, the laughter is one of the first things that I always notice.

It's an indicator, in so many ways, of inclusion and the way that our people managed to survive, you know, hundreds of years of oppression is through laughter.

And we let out our spirit.

And so I think that it gets to sing a little bit when we get to laugh, and I think that's important.

(woman singing in a foreign language) The greatest hope is that our people begin creating and finding that space for themselves, and that they reconnect to our original teachings, whatever that may be, wherever they're from, and know that they're enough.

It's always to reach our own Indian people, our young people, so that they can see a world of possibility and all of the people around the country that love them so dearly and want to lift them up and rise with them.

(woman singing in a foreign language) - This program is produced by Rematriation Magazine and is a presentation of Vision Maker Media with major funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

- Learn more about the films and filmmakers in this season of TVFilm at WMHT.org/TVFilm, and be sure to connect with WMHT on social media.

I'm Amani Olugbala.

(upbeat music) - TVFilm is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.