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      Sterlin Harjo Can Do a Lot More Than ‘Reservation Dogs’

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      The filmmaker directed “Love and Fury,” a Netflix documentary about Native American artists, before his hit Hulu series.Sterlin Harjo has had a year.In August, FX on Hulu released the series “Reservation Dogs,” the acclaimed dark comedy about four Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma that Harjo created with Taika Waititi. The next month, Harjo presented a prize at the Emmy Awards alongside the show’s four young breakout stars. Two days before I talked to him, “Reservation Dogs” won the Gotham Award for short format breakout series. (Was he expecting it? “I was not. I would have had less wine.”)And to top it off, Netflix this month released “Love and Fury,” Harjo’s second documentary, about Native artists navigating their careers, both in the United States and abroad. What happens, the film asks, when they push Native art into a postcolonial world?The dancer Emily Johnson, as seen in Harjo’s “Love and Fury.”Netflix For roughly a year, Harjo and his crew followed more than 20 artists, few of whom were complete strangers: Members of the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul, sometimes stay with him in Tulsa, Okla., when they are on tour. Tommy Orange, the author of the acclaimed “There There,” asked Harjo to moderate an event he was speaking at. (Harjo then filmed the event for this documentary.)Harjo, of course, is a Native artist, too: The Seminole and Muscogee Creek filmmaker directed three features (“Four Sheets to the Wind,” “Barking Water” and “Mekko”) and a documentary (“This May Be the Last Time”) before brainstorming “Reservation Dogs” over tequilas with Waititi.These artists pass through one another’s orbits constantly, drawing closer and closer together. As he explained on a recent call, Harjo wanted to express that notion himself — but through the lens of community.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why love and fury? How are those two concepts related?As artists, I think collectively we have all of these different experiences and these different types of survival that we come from. And you can take that survival, you can take any sort of oppression, and feel bitter and feel like things are hopeless. Because some of us are displaced, some of us have lost our language, a lot of us have, there’s a lot of abuse in boarding schools, a lot of things that happened throughout history. Not just Western expansion. It was also a lot of things, a lot of U.S. policies, that really did oppress our people.And so you can take that and convert that into feeling bitter and angry. Or you can take that anger and turn it into love and creation. And I think that’s what each of these artists do. All of them are connected to community, all of them have community-driven work. And they take this history and try to make sense of it and express themselves in this way that people can connect to. And I think that that is love.Devery Jacobs, left, and Paulina Alexis in “Reservation Dogs,” which Harjo created with Taika Waititi.Shane Brown/FXThe last film you made was in 2015. Does it feel different this time around, after “Reservation Dogs”?I made this before “Reservation Dogs.” So I was making this very low-budget, and I just really wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. Contemporary Native art has not been looked at and presented in a way that I felt like it should be. There’s such a dated view of what Native art is in the world. I’m friends with all of these artists, and I’ve just known artists forever. It felt like an opportunity to show this world that hasn’t been seen and also help reframe Native art.I wanted it to organically expand. So if I’m filming with one artist and then I meet a couple more artists, I would follow them and go do stuff with them.I’ve done many documentaries where I do the sit-down interview with slow motion B-roll over it, and that’s great. But I wanted to do something different. I purposely didn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. I was looking at a lot of Les Blank films, specifically, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” about [the musician-songwriter] Leon Russell. But you watch the film, and it’s really about this time period [the early 1970s].We watched this documentary called “Heartworn Highways” that’s about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, back in the ’70s. It was what it sounds like: It’s a visual document of what was happening. That’s what I wanted to do with this: film people doing their thing.Did you go into this with specific people you knew you were going to follow?Yeah, originally it was [the singer] Micah P. Hinson, [the interdisciplinary artist] Cannupa Hanska Luger, [the painter] Haley Greenfeather English and my friend Penny Pitchlynn, who has the band Labrys. Penny’s tour didn’t happen, so I didn’t end up going with her on tour. She’s still on the film, but [the dancer] Emily Johnson becomes a bigger part of the documentary. And it was really following them, and then organically letting it expand with other people.I wanted to show this community: how everyone’s connected in this Native art world. If you look at “Reservation Dogs,” it’s similar; it’s about a community. I’m really interested in community-driven filmmaking and storytelling.You’ve now made three features and two documentaries. Is there as much room for artistic freedom with documentaries as there is with a feature film?There’s not, but I think it’s just a different way of telling a story; I really like the boundaries that you have with documentary. With “Love and Fury,” I set up these rules [for] each person on the camera, including myself. I said, “Act like you’re the only person in the room getting footage, like it’s 1970 and we only have one camera.” If you don’t get it, no one will.We all shot with zoom lenses. So instead of cutting and reframing, we could zoom in to do close-ups or zoom out for wides. The idea was, act like we’re not editing. So don’t do a fast zoom; let it be fluid so I can keep it in the film. I love working that way because it’s a challenge. And it’s very different from the control you have on a narrative. There’s something in that challenge that I really like as a storyteller.What do you think the documentary itself, and these artists, have to say about endurance?All of these artists have been working for so many years. And we’re in a time period right now, myself included, where people want to pay attention to Native art and Native stories, and there’s talk of inclusion and diversity. I think that they all just kept working, even though there was no money and no way of guaranteeing they would have careers. And the fact that they kept pushing and keep pushing to this day is just a testament to their endurance, but also their people’s endurance. I think that that’s what drives us: our people survived a lot of things, and our endurance in this art world is connected to that. More

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      Joanne Shenandoah, Leading Native American Musician, Dies at 64

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      Ms. Shenandoah was considered the matriarch of Indigenous music for revolutionizing its sound. She won a Grammy Award for her contributions to a 2005 album.Joanne Shenandoah, the most critically acclaimed and honored Native American musician of her generation, known for infusing ancestral melodies with the sound of contemporary instruments, died on Nov. 22 at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. She was 64. Her husband, Douglas M. George-Kanentiio, said the cause was complications of liver failure.Ms. Shenandoah reshaped American Indigenous music by taking ancient songs and blending them with her own accompaniment on flute, piano, cello and guitar.She recorded 15 albums and numerous singles, and collaborated with many other musicians. She won a Grammy Award for Best Native American Music Album for two tracks on the 2005 album “Sacred Ground: A Tribute to Mother Earth”: “Seeking Light,” a solo track, and “Mother Earth,” which she performed with Rita Coolidge, also a Native American musician, and Ms. Coolidge’s trio, Walela.Her albums “Peacemaker’s Journey” (2000) and “Covenant” (2003) were nominated for the Grammy for Best Native American Music Album, a category that has since been discontinued to the frustration of many Native Americans.Ms. Shenandoah’s album “Peacemaker’s Journey” (2000) was one of 15 she recorded, and one of two that was nominated for a Grammy Award.Ms. Shenandoah, who was a member of the Wolf Clan of the Oneida Nation in central New York, also won 14 Native American Music Awards, the most ever awarded to a single artist.“She sang with deep roots from her ancestors and flawlessly incorporated her oral traditions into contemporary folk, country and Americana formats,” the Native American Music Awards & Association said in a statement.Earlier this year, Ms. Shenandoah released her last full-length recording, “Oh Shenandoah,” a collection of country-infused songs that included a dedication to missing murdered Indigenous women called “Missing You.”She dominated the Native American music scene for three decades, often singing with her daughter, Leah Shenandoah, and her sister Diane Shenandoah. Among her venues were Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and the Smithsonian Institution.She performed with Willie Nelson and Neil Young and for the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.“Joanne is to contemporary Native American music what Aretha Franklin, Etta James, or Billie Holiday are to their respective genres,” Ed Koban, a Native American Music Award nominee and Mohawk tribal member, told Native News Online. “A timeless and elegant voice that did not need vocal tricks or gymnastics, instead was gentle, soft and pure.”Ms. Shenandoah recorded a track for Robbie Robertson’s 1998 album “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.” “She weaves you into a trance with her beautiful Iroquois chants,” Mr. Robertson said of her singing, “and wraps her voice around you like a warm blanket on a cool winter’s night.”With her music, along with the content of her lyrics, she sought to counter centuries of mistreatment and marginalization of Native Americans; she also pleaded for her listeners to protect the earth, and she hoped to offer solace to the soul.In “Prophecy Song,” she calls on her listeners to awaken: “We are now reminded to be aware of our place upon this earth,” she intones, “and to fulfill our obligations to ourselves, our families, nations, the natural world and to the Creator.”Joanne Lynn Shenandoah was born on June 23, 1957, in Syracuse, N.Y. Her mother, Maisie (Winder) Shenandoah, was an artist, and her father, Clifford Shenandoah, was an iron worker who raised the family on the Oneida Reservation, just east of Syracuse. Her ancestors included Chief Skenandoa (the spelling varies), an ally to George Washington during the American Revolution.Joanne may have been destined to be a singer from birth; her Oneida Wolf Clan name, Tekaliwakwha, means “she sings.” But as she grew into adulthood, she planned to become a businesswoman. For a time, she sang only informally, at weddings and funerals.She studied business administration, first at Andrews University in Michigan, then at Montgomery Community College in Maryland. She left one semester before graduating to start a computer consulting business in Bethesda, Md.Ms. Shenandoah in 2015. Her music “was meditative, healing and uplifted the spirit,” her niece said.AlamyOne day in 1990 she had a revelation, her husband said in an interview. While she was sitting in an office in Arlington, Va., staring out of the window, she saw a massive oak tree being taken down. It occurred to her, Mr. George-Kanentiio said, that just as the tree was being uprooted, she too had been uprooted, removed from her Native soil.“That’s the moment she decided to return to Oneida,” he said. “She was very successful, making a lot of money, but she wanted to make music full-time, and so she left, without a safety net.”She had already recorded a solo CD in 1989, “Joanne Shenandoah,” and after she moved back to Oneida in 1990, other gigs and albums followed. She gained national attention when she was included on the soundtrack for “Northern Exposure,” an early 1990s television show set in Alaska, which showcased her song “I May Want a Man.”It was during this time that she met Mr. George-Kanentiio on a blind date arranged by a friend. He was the editor of a Native American newspaper, Akwesasne Notes, on the Mohawk Territory in Northern New York. They were married nine months later, in 1991. He worked as a writer and became her road manager as they traveled all over the world.In addition to her husband, daughter and sister Diane, she is survived by a grandson and three other sisters, Wanda Wood and Victoria and Danielle Shenandoah.She performed at both of President Bill Clinton’s inaugurations. And at the invitation of Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, Ms. Shenandoah composed music for the unveiling of the Sacagawea dollar coin at the White House in 1999. In 2012, she traveled to the Vatican for the canonization of the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha.“Joanne’s music was meditative, healing and uplifted the spirit,” Michelle Schenandoah, her niece (she spells her surname differently) and the founder of Rematriation Magazine & Media, wrote in a recent tribute. “Her lyrics helped comfort those suffering from grief, healing from physical ailments and is often used in the delivery of babies, surgeries and played for those transitioning to the spirit realm.” More

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      New Initiative Aims to Change How Movies Portray Muslims

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      An advocacy group has created a worker database with help from Disney to bring more Muslims into the filmmaking process.A new initiative to promote the inclusion of Muslims in filmmaking has been created by an advocacy group with the support of the Walt Disney Company — following a report issued this year that found that Muslims are rarely depicted in popular films and that many Muslim characters are linked to violence.The project, the Pillars Muslim Artist Database, was announced on Tuesday by the Pillars Fund, an advocacy group in Chicago. It produced the earlier report on depiction along with the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and others.Kashif Shaikh, a co-founder of Pillars and its president, said that when the group discussed the findings, those in the industry often said they did not know where to find Muslim writers or actors.The database, Shaikh said, aims to give Muslim actors, directors, cinematographers, sound technicians and others, who could help create more nuanced portrayals, the chance to compose online profiles that can be reviewed by those hiring for film, television and streaming productions.That way, “Muslims around the country would be able to opt in and talk about their talents, talk about their expertise,” Shaikh said. “It was really meant to be a resource for studios, for the film industry.”The report on depiction, “Missing & Maligned,” was issued in June and analyzed 200 top-grossing movies released between 2017 and 2019 across the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.Of 8,965 speaking characters, 1.6 percent were Muslim, the report said. It added that just over 60 percent of primary and secondary Muslim characters appeared in movies set in the historical or recent past. Just under 40 percent appeared in three movies which took place in present-day Australia, the report said, and most of those characters — including “the only present-day Muslim lead” — appeared in one movie, “Ali’s Wedding,” released in 2017.Pillars, along with the Inclusion Initiative and the British actor Riz Ahmed and his production company, Left Handed Films, also released a companion report titled “The Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion” that was intended to “fundamentally change the way Muslims are portrayed on screen.”Before the reports were issued, Shaikh said, Pillars had begun conversations with Disney, which supported the creation of the database with a $20,000 grant.Latondra Newton, senior vice president and chief diversity officer of Disney, said in a statement that the support was part of an ongoing effort “to amplify underrepresented voices and untold stories,” adding: “We are honored to support the new Pillars Muslim Artist Database.”This follows the announcement last week of a guide, “The Time Is Now: The Power of Native Representation in Entertainment,” that was the result of a partnership between Disney and IllumiNative, a nonprofit group that works to raise the visibility of “Native Nations and peoples in American Society.”That guide was created “to help move beyond the outdated, inaccurate and often offensive depictions of Native peoples in pop culture,” the group said in a statement. It includes sections on “Combating Negative Stereotypes,” “Avoiding Cultural Appropriation” and “Supporting Native Storytellers.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Boys in Red Hats’ Review: Cool Story, Bro

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      This documentary explores the incident on Jan. 18, 2019, when a high school student grinned and stared at a Native American demonstrator at a raucous Lincoln Memorial gathering.Jonathan Schroder’s “The Boys in Red Hats” is a maddening instance of a movie at war with itself. That’s appropriate enough since its subject is the encounter on Jan. 18, 2019, between white high school students and a Native American demonstrator at the Lincoln Memorial. The incident became a viral flash point over one teenager’s grinning in the face of the Native American elder.As an alumnus of the students’ school, Covington Catholic in Kentucky, Schroder presents this film as his journey toward understanding. He hears out pooh-poohing parent chaperones, agitated former students, one student’s attorney and a current pupil whose identity is concealed. Black activists on the day and Covington’s penchant for pep rallies are both advanced as explanations for the teens’ behavior.Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter. These include Mohawk journalist Vincent Schilling; Anne Branigin, a writer for The Root; and Allissa Richardson, a journalism professor who sees a “textbook example of white privilege.”Schroder’s request to interview the Covington Catholic student who attracted so much ire is turned down, and the same happens (in person) with Nathan Phillips, the Native American drummer. (I don’t even know where to begin with his weirdly nostalgic story of being punched in the head by a Covington teacher while a student.)A fizzled ending points fingers at media bias and our “bubbles.” Some viewers of the Lincoln Memorial events might instead invoke the pioneering media theorists The Marx Brothers: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”The Boys in Red HatsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore’ Review: Embracing Our Ghosts

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      This ethereal experimental documentary by Sky Hopinka is an essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life.An essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life that resists the touristic gaze, “Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore,” the debut feature from the Ho-Chunk artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, isn’t too concerned with whether we fully understand the traditions and rituals it entrancingly commits to screen. It refreshingly centers the Native perspective, and beckons audiences onto its wavelength by tapping into something more intuitive, the stuff of dreams.“You don’t have to say much,” says one of the film’s two subjects, Sweetwater Sahme, as she leads the filmmaker on a hike through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, gesturing at the quivering foliage. “It’s a feeling, an energy. And there’s so much to look at.”The documentary, anchored in the Chinookan origin-of-death myth (a dialogue between a wolf and a coyote about the afterlife), separately follows two young parents — pregnant Sahme and Jordan Mercier, both friends of Hopinka’s — as they grapple with questions of legacy and identity.Subtitles switch between English and Chinook jargon, yet the oral component (including Hopinka’s narration) occasionally fades into the backdrop with sound design that amplifies the crackling of a fire, the bubbling and thrashing of the ocean and waterfalls.The natural world, with its never-ending tides and its cycles of life and death, provides a framework for the preservation of Indigenous culture, resilient despite its new forms and manifestations. An extended interlude sees a Native song and dance performed inside a school gymnasium. In voice-over, Sahme considers the link between her unborn child and her grandmother while a long canoe makes its way down a river lined with cranes and factories.An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the ShoreNot rated. In English and Chinook jargon, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. On Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      Writing Native American Stand-Ups Into the History of Comedy

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWriting Native American Stand-Ups Into the History of ComedyAn author who specializes in unearthing forgotten figures argues for the importance of Charlie Hill, the first Indigenous comic to appear on “The Tonight Show.”The Oneida Nation comedian Charlie Hill on “The Tonight Show” when Jay Leno was the guest host in 1991.Credit…Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank, via NBCUniversal, via, Getty ImagesFeb. 16, 2021, 3:08 p.m. ETTo the extent Will Rogers is known today, it’s as the folksy founding father of topical political comedy, the first comic to tell jokes about the president to an audience including the president. Woodrow Wilson apparently could take a joke.What’s often overlooked about the early-20th-century superstar is that he was Native American, a fact centered and explored in Kliph Nesteroff’s new book, “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy.” Nesteroff doesn’t just map a direct line from Rogers’s Cherokee roots to his political perspective; the author reintroduces Rogers as an altogether modern comic: moody, depressive, with uglier prejudices than his aw-shucks image would indicate.Nesteroff digs into an episode in which Rogers faced a backlash for using a racial slur about Black people on the radio in 1934. This led to denunciations in newspapers, protests and boycotts — with Rogers stubbornly doubling down a year before dying in a plane crash. “That story was scrubbed from history books,” Nesteroff told me in a video interview.In recent years, Nesteroff, 40 and often seen wearing a fedora, has carved out a niche as the premier popular historian of comedy because of his knack for unearthing such forgotten stories.A meticulous collector of showbiz lore, Nesteroff filled his 2015 book, “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy,” with fascinating detours about obscure figures like Jean Carroll and Shecky Greene. One of his early articles that got attention was a 2010 blog post about Cary Grant’s enthusiasm for LSD. Then relatively unknown, the movie star’s drug use has since made its way into Vanity Fair and even a documentary.“Now I wouldn’t write about it,” Nesteroff said, saying he gets annoyed by histories that keep going over common knowledge: “I want to write about the details people don’t know.”Kliph Nesteroff has become something of a historian of stand-up.Credit…Jim HerringtonHis new book, which darts back and forth in time, is a sprawling look at Indigenous comedians, an overlooked branch of comedy. The book’s title (“We Had a Little Real Estate Problem”) is the punchline to a joke by the unsung hero of this narrative, the Oneida Nation comic Charlie Hill. (The setup: “My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York.”) A contemporary of David Letterman and Jay Leno in the Los Angeles comedy scene of the 1970s, Hill was a handsome performer with superbly crafted jokes who became one of the few famous Indigenous stand-ups. Nesteroff writes that Hill was the first and only such comic on “The Tonight Show.”On his network television debut, on “The Richard Pryor Show,” Hill delivered a tight, five-minute set that skewered Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans and described pilgrims as “illegal aliens,” likening them to house guests who won’t leave. Hill performed for three more decades and was a stalwart at the Comedy Store (although he barely received any airtime in the recent five-part documentary on the club), inspiring many Indigenous comics. “What Eddie Murphy was in the ’80s for young Black comics, that’s what Charlie Hill did for new young Indigenous comedians in the last 15 years,” Nesteroff said.And yet, while there are many more Native American comics today, including the members of the sketch troupe 1491 that Nesteroff chronicles in his book, mainstream opportunities remain scarce. “When we hear diversity in Hollywood, Native Americans are seldom included under that umbrella,” Nesteroff said. “That needs to change.”His book provides context for an argument about the importance of representation, detailing an exhaustive history of the racism suffered by Indigenous people in popular culture, tracking stereotypes of the stoic, humorless Native American from pulp fiction and animation (which was particularly egregious) to “I Love Lucy” and “Dances With Wolves.”Nesteroff begins his book describing growing up in Western Canada, where images of Indigenous artists, he says, are more common than in the United States. For years he worked as a stand-up comic, and confesses he still misses performing. He got sidetracked after his online posts about showbiz history drew attention. An appearance on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2013 led to his first book deal.Back then, he balked at being called a historian. “That’s what a boring person does,” Nesteroff said, summarizing his previous prejudice rooted in a checkered academic career. (He was expelled from high school for roasting teachers in a speech for school president.) But he has since embraced the term, even saying it’s “his role to educate people,” and he has done so as a talking head on CNN and Vice.Nesteroff still has the instincts of a comic. “I always go for the best story because I am still at heart an entertainer,” he said. “My biggest fear is being boring.”That’s evident from our conversation, which he packs with detail-rich stories and occasional impressions. When asked about his Hollywood neighborhood, he said he didn’t want to reveal it “because of internet fascists,” but immediately started explaining its showbiz history, including a building nearby where an actor from one of the cult director Ed Wood’s movies committed suicide. “People say L.A. doesn’t honor its history, but it’s not true when it comes to residential buildings,” he said. “It’s a status symbol to live in Greta Garbo’s old house. The house from ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’ was just put on the market.”Nesteroff prefers writing about the past over the present, but they often blur in his books. In “Real Estate,” he describes protests against white actors playing Native American roles dating all the way to the 1911 film “Curse of the Red Man,” which led to meetings between Indigenous delegations and President William Howard Taft that sound remarkably similar to current controversies. In another chapter, Nesteroff recounts an argument between Will Rogers and the journalist H.L. Mencken from the 1920s, about how much harm comedy can do, that could be taken from any number of podcasts today.Nesteroff finds that people are amazed to see history repeating itself — “it blows minds,” he said — but like a comic who knows not to make a punchline too on the nose, he declines to draw a connection with the current day. “I’d rather the reader discover it themselves,” he said, before adding that the echoes are definitely intentional.If there is one consistent theme from his intrepid reporting on the roots of comedy, it’s this: there’s less new under the sun than you think.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More