Workshops

Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Film and Visual Culture

This workshop proposes an investigation into the current intellectual and theoretical trends in Film and Visual Culture, as it applies to Indigenous filmmakers, photographers, choreographers, dancers, writers, and theorists. Through a series of core monthly meetings, proposed guest lectures, and film screenings, this workshop will demonstrate and consider the role of visual culture in the reproduction and production of Indigenous images by both Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and by non-Indigenous entities. While the latter has created stereotyped place-holders for cultural, gendered, religious, and racial denigration, the former foregrounds the strong presence of Indigenous people in the production of their own images, reflecting their own worldview. This proposed workshop asserts privileging Indigenous visual sovereignty and self-determination, and seeks to engage a variety of fields in such an endeavor. Visual sovereignty, like intellectual and political sovereignty, necessitates an Indigenous community’s or individual’s right to visually create a space for self-definition and determination. The following fields will serve as the workshop’s target audience: Dance, Film & Visual Culture, Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, History, English, Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies. Additionally, the CHASS Connect Program Director, Dr. Geoff Cohen, has agreed to publicize any guest lectures related to this proposed workshop to his student body (currently 480) and to offer extra credit to students for attending these talks. Such an agreement would foster relationships not only with the departments listed above, but also with the body of undergraduate humanities students.

Specific projects within the workshop seek to address:

1. filmic representations of Hopis, Pueblos of New Mexico, Apaches, and Navajos. This project seeks to investigate films in relationship to the geographies, languages, and material culture of these tribes, and specifically the use of Monument Valley as a site to film many tribes who are not, historically or contemporarily, situated in that place
2. a content analysis of radio novels produced by Taller Historia Oral Andino (in Aymara and Spanish): how they contribute to the notion of the ideal indigenous woman from the standpoint of traditional Aymara philosophy and social organization that is being reclaimed and renovated in Bolivia; filmmaking in Bolivia by indigenous people, that dramatize traditional stories and update them to comment on contemporary issues, or that present entirely new dramas that explore contemporary life from an indigenous optic.
3. the function of Native and First Nation film and photography as visual sites of genetic/blood memory that incite imaginative genesis. Such an approach throws into relief and combats the non-Native approach to Native people and visual representations as ethnographic spectacles, and demonstrates the role of the visual as both document and anti-document of Native families, communities and individuals. In other words, access is granted to the stories imbedded in these visual sites through genetic memory, not ephemera/paper documents; however, they are also material records of Native presence, as are the written narratives (Native literature) that are products of these sites. This seeming tension is not necessarily a tension at all: it merely suggests a re-coded relationship between visual and written narratives that privileges Native and Indigenous modes of memory and imagination
4. the portrayal of mixed race Native people in popular films, especially anxieties that surround filmic representations of mixed race Native women
5. the role of dance in Native Hawaiian life as a life force that is housed in individual bodies and communicates collective memory; the hula catalyzes both an ideological and material transformation within the dancer and his or her collective community
6. the reliance on government issued documentation in the construction of “authentic” Indigenous representations in films by non-Indigenous “experts,” and the function of Indigenous filmic projects that explicitly situate Indigenous people as the “experts” in Indigenous films

• Re-Examining Ethnic Identity and Acculturation: Addressing the Integration of Content, Process and Domain Specificity
• Theme: Divination, Prediction and the Very Idea of the Future
• Confronting Global Capital: The Challenges of Global Democracy
• The Global Interface
• Medieval Culture and Postmodern Legacies
• Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Film and Visual Culture