Narrative Sovereignty: Native Filmmakers are America’s Teachers
By Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), Founder + Executive Director, IllumiNative
Invisibility is deadly. When they don’t see us, we don’t exist. One of the biggest perpetrators of our erasure has been the multi-trillion dollar entertainment industry. Native American characters only make up between 0-.04% of primetime TV and films. What’s more, the 2021 Hollywood Diversity Report found Native representation in film has remained stagnant at 0.6%. Quite a stark difference from the 66.9% for white men. While these numbers are staggering, they are not surprising. They are part of the fuel that ignites our work to build pathways for Native creatives in the film industry.
My name is Crystal Echo Hawk. I am a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and the founder and Executive Director of IllumiNative, a Native woman-led racial and social justice nonprofit organization dedicated to building power for Native peoples by amplifying Native voices, stories, and issues. These statistics are from Reclaiming Native Truth, the largest public opinion and strategy setting research project ever conducted by Native peoples and the basis on which IllumiNative was founded. Led by this founding research initiative, we work to dismantle the invisibility, erasure, and toxic stereotypes that impact Native peoples today.
This past August, during one of Indian Country’s largest artistic events of the year, IllumiNative hosted the first annual “Indigenous Futures: Envisioning the Next 100 Years” at the centennial Santa Fe Indian Market. For two days, we invited Native creatives to speak and celebrate their accomplishments in building power in television and film, climate justice, politics, fashion, and more. More than an event, this was a moment to celebrate the power that Native creatives continue to build across all sectors. As part of our celebration of Native excellence, we invited Navajo filmmaker Shaandiin Tome to share her award-winning documentary, Long Line of Ladies. This film, which premiered at Sundance and screened at SXSW, follows a Karuk girl as she and her family prepare for her Ihuk, a traditional Karuk coming-of-age ceremony and has earned numerous accolades.
Far from a traditional screening room, the event space at LaFonda was transformed into a gallery-meets-lounge-meets-your Aunties garden. When the screening started, attendees slowly trickled in, sinking into plush couches and making seats on hand-woven Native-made blankets. At one moment, I looked around and realized that we were in a room filled with Native creatives, screening a Native-made film, about a traditional ceremony that had once gone to sleep, and a community that fought to keep it alive for present and future generations. The power of that moment was just one of several moments like it that weekend that showcased the need for not only IllumiNative’s work, but also the need for Native-led documentaries that shed light on how powerful Native communities are and always have been.
Long Line of Ladies is one of the many films we recommend to partners as a model for how to get it right — that is — how to tell Native stories with authenticity and originality. It isn’t just what the film is about — it’s how it is told. It never shows the ceremony. There is a way to tell that story that honors the cultural protocols of the Karuk people. There is always a way to tell a story with respect for community, and this is something that Native filmmakers know.
We are in a time of abundance in Indigenous filmmaking. This does not mean that Native filmmakers are suddenly more active today than they were 30 years ago. It means there have been generations of filmmakers before them who have built pathways for this generation to walk. It means that decades of storytelling moved some — though not all — barriers. It also means this generation is walking the walk so that the next generation can run.
Native filmmakers carry double duty. Our research found that 87% of state-level history standards fail to cover Native peoples history in a post-1900 context. This means that the majority of people educated in the U.S. learn next to nothing about Native peoples in contemporary society. If someone does not exist for you, then they are invisible. If they are invisible, then they are less than human. This makes it easier to dehumanize us, which extends to violating our lands, our women and 2SLGBTQ+ peoples, and our rights. When Native filmmakers are telling their stories, they are also tasked with humanizing our communities for a non-Native audience and educating that audience about our continued existence. A documentary about a Karuk girl is also a story about how Karuk people exist today, presently, beside you. Documentaries led by and about Native peoples are the present-day historians, text books, and teachers. Where else will the American public learn about us in a contemporary context? The American education system has shown for centuries that it cannot be relied on to fill in the gaps. Native filmmakers are exercising narrative sovereignty, pushing back against dominant narratives that continue to erase us, our languages, our history and cultures.
We know from Reclaiming Native Truth that 78% of audiences are interested in and understand the importance of increasing Native representation in Hollywood. What we need now from allies in the industry is to create space for Native peoples — for our stories, our dreams and our realities. Native filmmakers are ready and their time is now.
Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee) is the founder and Executive Director of IllumiNative, the first and only national Native-led organization focused on changing the narrative about Native peoples on a mass scale. Crystal built IllumiNative to activate a cohesive set of research-informed strategies that illuminate the voices, stories, contributions, and assets of contemporary Native peoples to disrupt the invisibility and toxic stereotypes Native peoples face.
