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From Indian Country Today:
Just over a year ago, Steve Judd, Kiowa/Choctaw, was working at a Bingo Hall in Goldsby, Okla.; today, he is working as a writer in Hollywood. Judd is a staff writer and Disney/ABC Writing Fellow on the new Disney XD comedy series “Zeke and Luther.”
Born in Oklahoma, Judd attended Haskell Indian Nations University and the University of Oklahoma where he focused on communications and Native American studies. Judd was inspired to make movies to combat the stereotypical portrayals of American Indians in films he saw as a child. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a writer. Growing up in Oklahoma, I never thought I could write for television, so I started to write film scripts.” While in college, Judd began his own production company called Restless Natives, which has produced several projects including the independent film, “American Indian Graffiti: This Thing Life,” the short-film spoof “MAC v. PC with a Native Twist” and the PBS documentary “Silent Thunder.”
via Indian Country Today:
The award-winning indigenous photographer and documentary filmmaker from Venezuela, David Hernandez-Palmar, visited Washington, D.C. recently to speak to members of Congress about the plight of his people, the Wayuu, who live across the countries of Venezuela and Colombia, and to talk to representatives of the Smithsonian Institute about repatriating the remains of Wayuu ancestors and cultural artifacts.
Palmar is also the co-director of “Owners of the Water: Conflict & Collaboration Over Rivers” a documentary about a Brazilian indigenous campaign to protect the Rio das Mortes River Basin from encroaching deforestation and pollution. This film was among the hundreds of Latin American indigenous entries at this year’s Native American Film + Video Festival in New York.‘You Are On Indian Land’ is a short 1969 Canadian documentary that focuses on Tribal Sovereignty, which has long been a source of contention between Natives and Federal Governments, by following a short lived protest by Canadian Mohawks. This 36 minute film ultimately asks, Who really owns Indian land?
The film shows the confrontation between police and a 1969 demonstration by Mohawks of the St. Regis Reserve on the bridge between Canada and the United States near Cornwall, Ontario. By blocking traffic on the bridge, which is on the Reserve, the Indians drew public attention to their grievance that they were prohibited by Canadian authorities from duty-free passage of personal purchases across the border, a right they claim was established by the Jay Treaty of 1794.
‘You Are On Indian Land’ is credited with being the first Canadian documentary to chronicle Native issues.
In March 2004, one of the world’s last voluntarily isolated groups of hunter-gatherers walked out of the forest in northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers’ bulldozers. They formed a new village with their more settled relatives, where they confronted the complexities of learning how to become “Ayoreo Indians” and more critically, how to survive in a rapidly changing world.
This documentary provides an intimate portrait of a divided community four months after this historical event, and their efforts to chart a collective future in a context shaped by deforestation, NGO activity, anthropologists and evangelical Christianity. Self-consciously engaging a history of ethnographic representations and tropes of “first contact,” the reflexive video uses the filmmaker’s narration to reflect on the experiences and confusions of a process that remains ultimately opaque for the “new people,” for their relatives, and for the anthropologist.
This film contributes to the visual anthropology of lowland South America by putting a human face to critical questions about “contact,” “indigeneity” and the ways certain narrow ideas of “modernity” continue to be presented as the only options for Native peoples in the Gran Chaco and beyond.
