Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: The Medicine Game

Vision Maker Media’s “Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks” promotion concludes this week with our final featured Vision Maker Media film.

“The Medicine Game” follows the story of brothers from the Onondaga Nation who pursue their dreams of playing lacrosse for Syracuse University. With their dream nearly in reach, the boys are caught in a constant struggle to define their Native identity, live-up to their family’s expectations and balance challenges on and off the Reservation.

Watch “The Medicine Game” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Vision Maker Media would like to thank all the viewers who tuned in to stream 40 Years. 40 Films. 40 Weeks. In the last 40 years, the organization has created more than 500 films, awarded $11 million to independent producers and held hundreds of film-screening events across the nation. While only a portion of that was able to be shared in the last 40 weeks, Vision Maker Media hopes that these films have inspired viewers to look at the world through Indigenous eyes.

The AAAPB has been proud to collaborate with Vision Maker Media to share these films and celebrate the amazing work done by Vision Maker Media over the past forty years.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, http://www.visionmakermedia.org

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Silent Thunder

This week’s Vision Maker Media film focuses on Arapaho elder Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic spiritual leader who trains wild horses on the Wind River Reservation.

Told primarily in the voices of Addison and those around him, “Silent Thunder” demonstrates Addison’s unique method of training horses — and people — while encouraging them to keep their spirit.

Watch “Silent Thunder” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: My Louisiana Love

In this week’s Vision Maker Media film, Monique Verdin returns to Southeast Louisiana to find a place with her Houma Indian family, and becomes a witness to the impact of decades of environmental degradation.  As Monique’s losses mount, she finds herself turning to environmental activism, documenting her family’s struggle to stay close to the land despite the rapidly disappearing coastline and a cycle of disasters that includes two devastating hurricanes and the worst oil spill in US history.

“My Louisiana Love” provides an intimate documentary portrait of the impact on the oil industry and man-made environmental crises on the indigenous community of the Mississippi Delta.

Watch “My Louisiana Love” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

 

 

 

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Smokin’ Fish

This week’s featured Vision Maker Media film follows Cory Mann, a Tlingit businessman hustling to make a dollar in Juneau, Alaska, as he follows an impulse to spend a summer smoking salmon the way his great-grandmother used to do.

“Smokin’ Fish” interweaves the story of Mann’s family, his bills and his business with the untold history of the Tlingit and the process of preparing this traditional food. By turns tragic, bizarre, or just plain ridiculous, Smokin’ Fish illustrates one man’s attempts to navigate the messy zone of collision between the modern world and an ancient culture.

Watch “Smokin’ Fish” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Sousa on the Rez

This week’s featured Vision Maker Media film focuses on Native American marching bands, their history, and their players’ relationships with American and Western music. The film contains interviews with musicians in Native American bands and features both contemporary and historical footage of Native players.

“Sousa on the Rez” examines the history of American marching music, the influence of boarding schools on Native American musicians, stereotypes, and the continuing legacy of Native American marching bands throughout the country.

Watch “Sousa on the Rez” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

Pride in 1978

“Come on out! Join us, bring a friend!” This joyous sentiment, spoken by Harvey Milk at the San Francisco parade for the 8^th Gay Freedom Day in 1978, still resonates today. Over the past month, there have been countless events right here in Boston, and across the country, celebrating LGBTQ+ pride. In the last week of Pride Month, WGBH wanted to take the opportunity to look back on the history of the Pride movement in the United States through some broadcasts in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

This particular program is a sound portrait of one of the first pride parades in the United States, and captures the spirit of Pride that we still see today. Upon listening to the program, one can hear many chants and songs, some silly and lighthearted, like, “we’re here because we’re queer because we’re here because we’re queer,” and also serious, “Ain’t gonna let Anita Bryant turn us around,” referencing the famed anti-gay rights activist. Fresh off the heels of the Dade County-Miami decision, and just as the Briggs Initiative was proposed in California, sound bites and interviews in this program captures the sentiment of the LGBTQ+ movement in this moment in time.

Many of those participating in the parade were interviewed about the Briggs Initiative, also known as California Proposition 6, which would have banned gay men and lesbian women, as well as their straight allies, from working in the California public school system. This initiative was one of the most important gay rights issue in California at this time. One parade-goer states, “My friends, anyone who supports my right to be gay, can be fired, just for believing that. People think of it in terms of, it’s a gay rights issue, as opposed to being a free speech issue.” Another states, “If you’re white, male, straight, educated, and, uh, well-off, then that’s who gets the rights in this country. It’s been everyone else who’s had to go out into the streets and fight for their rights.” As is still true today, Pride parades have not only been a space for celebration, but also a space for activism, since their very beginnings.

One thing the listener notes is how diverse the interviewees are. They range from Vietnam veterans, to parents, to straight allies, to Mormons, to businessmen. There are people who believe that others are playing into gay stereotypes, and those who are completely unapologetic of their own flamboyance. There is even one man interviewed who does not even know that there is a gay pride parade happening until he is informed by the interviewer. All of these people unapologetically give their opinions on the parade, as well as gay rights, to the interviewers.

This sound portrait is only one of many broadcasts in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting that traces the LGBTQ+ movement in American history and broadcasting. As one parade-goer, Cathy Patterson, states, “Gay and straight are one and the same really, and we all have the same goal—or at least we should.”

You can enjoy more materials like this at http://americanarchive.org, under the LGBTQ tab in our browsing catalog.

This post was written by Olivia Hess, AAPB Intern and student at St. Lawrence University.

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Who Owns the Past?

This week’s featured Vision Maker Media film focuses on the discovery of a 9,000-year-old skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, which reignited the battle between anthropologists and Indian people over the control of human remains found on ancestral Indian lands.

“Who Owns the Past?” shows how the controversy that surrounded Kennewick Man became a test case for the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act, and delves into the roots of a conflict that reach back to the very beginnings of American history.

Watch “Who Owns the Past?” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

 

 

Forty Films, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: The Oneida Speak

In the 1930s, a group of elders from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin participated in FDR’s Works Progress Administration Writers Project and shared stories of their life on the farm. In numerous journals written in Oneida, the elders recall historical personal accounts of detrimental land-grabbing policies, and the devastating impact of small pox and boarding schools.

This week’s Emmy-nominated Vision Maker Media film uses these first-person accounts to blend traditional Oneida storytelling with modern media, providing a window to a world that no longer exists.

Watch “The Oneida Speak” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

 

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Injunuity

This week’s featured Vision Maker Media film is an eye-popping, mind-jolting mix of animation, music and real voices collected from interviews with Native Americans across the country to create a distinct view of modern America from a uniquely contemporary Native American perspective.

Told through nine short films that cover such topics as language preservation, sacred site degradation, consumerism and the environment, “Injunuity” is a thought-provoking collage of reflections on the Native American world, our shared past, our turbulent present and our undiscovered future.

Watch “Injunuity” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.

Forty Years, Forty Films, Forty Weeks: Navajo Code Talkers

The Navajo Marines who used their language as an essential defensive weapon during WWII tell their story in this week’s award-winning Vision Maker Media film.

Using archival footage and first-person interviews, the 1982 film was one of the first documentary features to present the history of the Navajo Code Talkers after decades of classified secrecy, and share the compelling story of their contributions to the war.

Watch “Navajo Code Talkers” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.

About Vision Maker Media

Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.

With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org

Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.

Follow Vision Maker Media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, or Google+.