Native Life

Georgina Lightning: the first Native female director of a feature-length film

By KATHY WISE

Named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2007 by Filmmaker magazine, Cree Indian director Georgina Lightning is actually not new to Hollywood. But with her latest project, Older than America, she has become something Tinseltown has never seen before — the first Native female director of a feature-length film.

Native American directors have been making films since the dawn of the celluloid era: before color, before sound. James Young Deer (Winnebago) directed 17 westerns from 1909 to 1924, and he was quickly followed by Edwin Carewe (Chickasaw), who directed close to 60 films from 1914 to 1934 and produced and acted in nearly as many.

But over the following six decades, no major motion picture — with the exception of several self-produced releases by Cherokee actor Will Rogers — would be directed by a Native American. It took Chris Eyre's directorial debut with Smoke Signals in 1998 [read the story from September 2009 issue of C&I here ] to jumpstart the Native directorial renaissance. And it has taken Georgina Lightning — and another decade — for the first Native female director to get behind the camera of a feature-length film.

Like her predecessors, Lightning wears a number of hats in front of and behind the camera. She wrote, directed, executive produced, and stars in (with Adam Beach and Wes Studi) the award-winning Older than America, which tackles the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools — a topic close to her heart.

C&I caught up with Lightning at the 2009 Native American Film + Video Festival in New York City to talk about her film, her new production company, and the surprising inspiration behind it all.

C&I: In Older than America, the daughter of an Indian boarding school survivor unravels the mystery of her mother's trauma, which has significantly affected her own life, through a series of haunting visions. Why have the Indian boarding schools had such an ongoing impact on Native American communities?
Lightning: Over 50 percent of the students who attended boarding schools died in boarding schools, but it is not in the history books. And even though 1975 was the last account of mandatory assimilation, the transgenerational trauma continues to affect everybody. It affects me, it affects my children. I learned from a young age that how you're raised affects you as an adult. My dad was a victim of boarding schools; I am a product of boarding schools. My dad was institutionalized from the age of 6 to 18, and he committed suicide when I was 18 years old. Never in my life growing up did I ever even know that my dad had been in a boarding school. The whole boarding school mentality is, "Shut up and don't talk about it. Don't tell us what you think, don't tell us what you feel. Don't speak unless you're spoken to."And you don't bring up the past, ever. So there was no mention of the boarding schools.

C&I: Was making Older than America a cathartic process for you?
Lightning: It has been extremely intense. You have to talk about it all the time, and just getting that out is very therapeutic. But at the same time, hearing these tragic stories over and over, just when you think you've heard the last of it or the worst of it, someone hits you like a Mack truck up the side of your head and it will just floor you. You cannot believe the discrimination that went on and what people have to live with. My heart just breaks.

C&I: You have talked openly about your father's alcoholism and abuse, but you credit him with being the inspiration behind your film career. Why is that?
Lightning: Whenever I heard my father coming home, I would try to hide before he saw me. But one time when I was 6 years old, I was watching television and didn't hear him come in. I was caught sitting on the couch watching a program, and he came in and sat down. I looked over without letting him know that I was looking at him, straining as hard as I could to see him out of the corner of my eye, and he got emotional for a second. I don't remember what the program was, but for that minute I didn't feel scared. I was like, Wow, something could move my dad. A seed was planted at that time. You are a kid, you don't know the reasons. I figured it was the actors on that screen that made my dad human for a moment. And so I wanted to be that. I started taking every drama class in my junior high and high school.

C&I: What was your own school experience like?
Lightning: Growing up, I was raised in the city, in Edmonton, Alberta. My two sisters and I went to the white [public] school, brown as can be, where they hated us. My sister's way of dealing with it was that she dyed her hair blond and became the suntanned, whitewashed girl. My oldest sister left to live in a small town with my aunt at a very young age after a suicide attempt. And me, I learned how to become a fighter. Every kid in the school wanted to see if they could challenge the squaw. I don't have any brothers, but my cousins were hockey players, and I grew up exercising that fighting gene from a very young age. I was scared to death all the time — terrified — but I would defend myself. So I didn't have many friends; I was pretty much a loner.

C&I: How did you end up in Los Angeles?
Lightning: I started out studying at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, at the fine arts department there. Then I transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, where I studied for three years. I received the Michael Thoma Award, which is for the most progressed actor at the school. I was the first Native American to ever graduate from that program.

C&I: Was the transition to film a smooth one?
Lightning: I wasn't allowed to audition while I was in the academy. So after I finished my training I got an agent, and it was the most disheartening thing in the world. As the lead ingénue in the [academy's] repertory company, I had played the most amazing, challenging female roles that you can think of from the greatest playwrights: [Bertolt] Brecht and Shakespeare and Sam Shepard. And then you get in the film industry and — are you kidding me? — you're not just a woman in a man's world, but you're Native American, a minority. I remember getting the script for [the 1993 Columbia Pictures film] Geronimo and there were two female roles that were okay — Geronimo's wife was a pretty crucial role in the script. But by the time they finished the revisions, there were no female roles available. They had wiped out the women.

C&I: Have you found it difficult to be cast in non-Native roles?
Lightning: You are stereotyped. They put you in the file as Native American, and even if you hear of a role that's out there that you really want to audition for, they won't submit you for the role unless it specifically requests a Native American actor. And that really made me angry. I did not get into the industry to be a Native American actor, I got in the industry to be an actor. I happen to be Native American. So out of frustration, that's why I started a production company with Audrey Martinez in 2002. The whole mission of Tribal Alliance Productions is to produce content and projects that showcase Native Americans in front of and behind the camera.

C&I: Why did you decide to set Older than America in Minnesota instead of Canada, where you are from?
Lightning: Christine [Kunewa] Walker, who produced Factotum in Minnesota, is from there, so she said, "Georgie, why don't you think about Minnesota?"At first I was skeptical, but when I actually went there and started meeting the people, I knew that was exactly where I had to make this movie, because the history of Minnesota is so deeply Native American: AIM [American Indian Movement] started there, the hanging of the 38 [Sioux Indians in 1862] — the largest hanging in U.S. history — happened there. At one point, after Lincoln freed the slaves, they even tried to make it a non-Native state by exterminating or relocating all of the Native Americans. What better place to make Older than America?

C&I: You ended up shooting on the Fond du Lac Chippewa reservation, in the northeastern part of the state. Was the tribe receptive to the film crew?
Lightning: At first they didn't want anything to do with us. They had heard of a bad experience a neighboring Minnesota tribe had with [another film]. But then they called our producer up and said, "Once we read what it is about — the boarding schools — there isn't one person on the reservation who hasn't felt the effects in a very deep way. What do you need?"They completely changed their whole energy.

C&I: Did the tribe feel the same way once filming was done?
Lightning: At the wrap party, one of the council members said to me, "It's been the greatest experience for the spirit of the people and our tribe. It has brought good energy to the rez, and it has also started to help bridge some of our relationships with the white community. There is already healing that has started from this."And he became emotional and started crying. To this day I go back and they are like family to me.

C&I: You included several scenes of Native spiritual ceremonies in the film. Was it a controversial decision to disclose sacred tribal practices?
Lightning: The opening scene of the film is the sun dance ceremony. It is the most powerful ceremony we have. The Plains Indians, we have sun dances, we have sweats, and we have healing ceremonies. When I was creating this whole scenario around the boarding school thing, I went back and forth so many times and I prayed so hard on it: Should I incorporate these ceremonies into the film? Because it is taboo to show them publicly. I'm doing this for my community, and I need them to accept and endorse this film. But I just had to go with it. At the end of the day, it's about who we are: our ceremonies, our dances, our songs. All of those things that existed before boarding schools. All of those things that are older than America.

• For more information on the film, including upcoming screenings and the film's latest awards, visit www.olderthanamerica.com and www.myspace.com/glightning.

Movie review

Older than America
Georgina Lightning, director
www.olderthanamerica.com

With standout performances by Adam Beach as a sympathetic boyfriend/tribal policeman and Wes Studi as an activist deejay considered "the voice of the rez," you could say Older than America is part-Smoke Signals (although darker and set in Minnesota instead of Idaho), part-Girl, Interrupted (the Native American version), and entirely Georgina Lightning. She wrote, directed, executive produced, and stars in this powerful suspense drama about a Native woman on the woodsy Fond du Lac Indian Reservation who's troubled by dreams of atrocities suffered by her mother at a nearby Indian school. The school's now shuttered, but not so long ago, so-called "sacred priests" tortured Indian kids there, even going so far as to commit one who dared rebel to a mental hospital. Well-developed characters and humorous lines like, "White folks set one foot on the rez and you start acting like you're on peyote or something,"balance the mood as the sinister events stack up. An authentic, haunting statement-movie that should be seen by anyone who cares about Indian affairs — or humanity.

—Wolf Schneider

The Next Generation Of Native Film

Seattle-based Longhouse Media, which was founded in partnership with the Swinomish Tribe, started its Native Lens program in 2003 to serve as a model media literacy program for Native youth. Each year they take their SuperFly Filmmaking Experience on the road to different reservations, offering students the opportunity to make four to five short films in a 36-hour period with the help of established indigenous filmmakers and actors. At the 2009 Native American Film + Video Festival, Cody Cayou (Swinomish) and Travis Tom (Swinomish/Lummi) screened their short Fifteen.

An attempt to satisfy an assignment for their health class, the surprisingly sophisticated film explores issues of peer pressure and alcohol abuse. Partly based on personal experience (both boys had already been in treatment for alcohol abuse by the age of 15), the short reveals the pure joy of youth amid desperate surroundings. Cayou and Tom, along with 19-year-old Nick Clark (Grand Ronde), have since filmed the National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY) Choice Award-winning documentary March Point about former Swinomish reservation land that is now home to two refineries.
• To check the film's showtimes on the PBS Independent Lens series and for more information on Longhouse Media, visit www.pbs.org/independentlens/marchpoint, www.longhousemedia.org, and www.marchpointmovie.com.

Based in Flagstaff, Arizona, Outta Your Backpack Media (OYBM) literally puts the tools Native kids need to start making films on their backs. OYBM equips eligible wannabe filmmakers with a backpack filled with an Apple laptop, editing software, digital video camera, mic, headphones — even a list of media contacts — to enable youth to create their own images of what it means to be Native American. One of the highlights of the youth projects featured at the film festival was Stick Mania, a humorous and endearing short about a stick figure who comes to life to befriend a lonely boy.
• This and other films created as part of OYBMedia's two- to four-day youth workshops can be viewed online at www.oybm.org.

Native high schools are also getting into the film business. The Four Directions Charter School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the festival entry This Is Me, an intensely moving autobiographical short by David Sam (Ojibwe). Sam had previously attended Red Lake High School, where a Native student shot and killed five students, a teacher, and an unarmed security guard before committing suicide in 2005. Based on his eerie resemblance to the shooter, Sam is subsequently bullied. The film follows Sam as he defends himself for the first time, "putting on a mask of intimidation."But instead of becoming hardened himself, he discovers confidence and self-esteem, loses weight, learns to play the guitar, and starts making friends and films. He does not feel accepted in the end, but he no longer minds. He has found his creative space in the world.
• To view David Sam's film, visit www.inprogress.smugmug.com and click on "2009 Festival Favorites.”

Native Film Festivals

Older than America may not be available on Netflix yet, but chances are you can see it at a Native film festival near you, along with the latest offerings from the country's best-established and up-and-coming Native directors.

International Cherokee Film Festival
Tulsa, Oklahoma
October 9-10
www.internationalcherokeefilmfestival.com

Indigenous Film & Arts Festival
Denver
October 13-18
www.iiirm.org

imagineNATIVE Film + Media Festival
Toronto
October 14-18
www.imaginenative.org

American Indian Film Festival
San Francisco
November 6-14
www.aifisf.com

Santa Fe Film Festival
Santa Fe, New Mexico
December 2-6
www.santafefilmfestival.com

Sundance Film Festival
Park City, Utah
January 21-31, 2010
www.sundance.org

Fargo Film Festival
Fargo, North Dakota
March 2-6, 2010
www.fargofilmfestival.org

Festival of Native Film & Culture
Agua Caliente Cultural Museum
Palm Springs, California
March 10-14, 2010
www.accmuseum.org

Native American Film + Video Festival
National Museum of the American Indian
New York, biennial (date TBA)
www.nativenetworks.si.edu

Issue: October 2009