Documentary Educational Resources - Indigenous Studies / Architecture & Dwellings / All Films

Sheep Eaters

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:21:00 GMT

The spectacular Wind River Mountain Range of northwest Wyoming was once home to a little known but fascinating band of Shoshone Indians known as the Tuku Dika, or Sheep Eaters. As their name implies, these peoples were among the most successful hunters of North America's wild sheep, the majestic Rocky Mountain "big horns". These magnificent creatures still roam the rugged Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem; however, the tribe that followed them for hundreds of years was relegated to life on the reservation by the turn of the nineteenth century. This four-part series examines the life ways of this ancient band of high mountain Shoshones.

Part 1 - Trading & Tools: This film examines the skills of tanning, flint napping and bow making among the Sheep Eaters, who utilized dogs to help them travel and gather resources.

Part 2 - Plants & Minerals: The Sheep Eaters relied heavily on the plants they could gather for medicinal and edible uses, often cooking food in a unique soapstone vessel.

Part 3 - Shelters & Petroglyphs: The Sheep Eaters followed migrating big horn sheep and utilized caves and cliff overhangs for shelter, only building wood-pole structures—wickuips—where no natural shelter was readily available. Rock art, associated with vision quests are also examined.

Part 4 - Hunting & Fishing: The tribe used wooden traps and bows to harvest the big horns. Fish spears, baskets and fish traps helped bring fish to their families.

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From the Inside Out

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:18:00 GMT

From the Inside Out
Buy Now: $295.00

In the Navajo language there is neither a word for religion nor art. The only word that could be used to describe both is "hozho" – beauty, balance, order and harmony.

Navajo history is turbulent, and in order to survive the Navajo had to adapt. Baskets are a part of this history, changing throughout time and adapting with the people. They contribute to the balance, harmony, and beauty of Navajo life. Inititally purely functional pieces, baskets gradually became integrated into various ceremonies, elevating them to sacred and symbolic levels.

Oppression, trade, and technology eventually led to dwindling numbers of basket weavers, but beginning in the 1970s Navajo basketry experienced a renaissance led by a group of families in the Douglas Mesa region of the Utah reservation.Secularized basketry is now a thriving part of Navajo trade and traditional baskets continue to be an important part of Navajo ceremonial life.

In intimate detail, From the Inside Out depicts both the new and old roles baskets play in the lives of contemporary basket-weavers.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Durango Film Festival, Colorado, 2005

First Place - Educational Films, Broadcast Education Association Faculty Contest, 2005

Contemporary Native America Screening, Lesley University, MA, 2005

Northeastern Anthropological Association Ethnographic Film & Video Festival, NY, 2005

Heard Museum Film Festival, Arizona, 2005

19th Pärnu International Film Festival, Estonia, 2005

SVA/AAA Conference, Washington DC, 2005

Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, TX, 2006

Disclaimer on Naming:
Please be aware that this documentary may include outdated or potentially offensive language. Such terms are not endorsed by DER but are presented in their original context to promote awareness, education, and discussion. Learn more about DER’s efforts to use reparative language and honor the preferred names of Indigenous communities by clicking here.

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Cree Hunters of Mistassini

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Cree Hunters of Mistassini
Buy Now: $320.00

For thousands of years, the Cree Indians of James Bay inhabited the northern Quebec forests - originally gathering wild rice, and later hunting, fishing, and trapping. Traditionally, small groups of families spent the winter months together in the bush, subsisting on moose, beaver, deer, wild geese and caribou. In 1973 a film crew joined three families in their annual move to the north. In this film we come to know the Blacksmiths, the Jollys, and the Voyageurs: building a one-room lodge floored with pine boughs, hunting, trapping, preparing food and skins, and living together in the bush.

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Down To Earth

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Down To Earth
Buy Now: $295.00

This fascinating multidisciplinary social history investigates the contributions of New Mexico's diverse cultures to the state's unique architectural heritage. Today adobe is often associated with wealth and the "Santa Fe Style." But adobe architecture also continues to play a vital role in Native American and Hispanic cultures in New Mexico. Adobe is not just a building material. Its formal and structural elements cannot be divorced from its social, cultural, and environmental functions. Down to Earth explores the increasing pressures of tourism and development and illustrates the relationship between the environment of New Mexico and the continuity of cultural tradition.

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Dani Films

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dani Films
Buy Now: $500.00

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

This special edition 2-disc DVD set includes:

• Dani Sweet Potatoes & Dani Houses digitally remastered

• commentary on both films by Karl Heider

• a narrated pictorial history (9 min) of Heider's career in archaeology and anthropology

In 1963, under the auspices of the EDC curriculum project Man: A Course of Study, an elementary social studies curriculum, Karl Heider returned to the central highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). Heider had spent the previous two years in the Grand Baliem Valley with Robert Gardner's Harvard-Peabody exhibition, and his intention was to return from this second trip with material to be used to teach American grade school students about digging-stick horticulture and house construction. However, after producing the Netsilik series, the EDC curriculum project fell victim to the political climate of the time. Heider spent the following years presenting Hubula (known as Dani* outside of the community) material himself, eventually producing the ethnographic classics, Dani Sweet Potatoes and Dani Houses.

About the films:

Dani Sweet Potatoes (19 min) A study of the sophisticated process of sweet potato horticulture developed by the Hubula. The film follows the Hubula sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking, and eating. At that time the Hubula had the simplest of tools - long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water - and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (By now, most Hubula use steel shovels, axes, and bush knives and make stone adzes only for the tourist trade.)

Even though their tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serves as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings. In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times joining together in a cooperative work party.

Dani Houses (16 min) The film observes both round and square house construction techniques of the Hubula. It shows how the ground is cleared, walls are made from boards, poles lashed together, and roofs being thatched. Though it follows the house-building process from beginning to end, one is left asking the question: What happened after the houses were built?

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in these films is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in these films is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

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Dead Birds

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dead Birds
Buy Now: $34.95

Robert Gardner's seminal 1964 film Dead Birds is a portrait of the lives, beliefs, practices and ritual warfare of the Hubula people of the remote Baliem Valley in western New Guinea, now part of Indonesia. In 1963 Dead Birds won the prestigious Robert Flaherty Award and in 1998 was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Dead Birds is considered a pivotal work in the history of the discipline of visual anthropology and continues to be used frequently in university lectures and seminars to engage students in wider questions and debates.

Filmmaker Robert Gardner, in describing the experience making the film, comments, “Dead Birds is a film about the Dani*, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles.

When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. Without war there would be no way to satisfy the ghosts. Wars were also the best way they knew to keep a terrible harmony in a life which would be, without the strife they invented, mostly hard and dull.

Dead Birds has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die. In making Dead Birds certain kinds of behavior were followed, never directed. It was an attempt to see people from within and to wonder, when the selected fragments of that life were assembled, if they might speak not only of the Dani but also of ourselves.”

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

The special edition 2-disc DVD of Dead Birds includes the remastered film and the following extra features:

6 sequences of edited scenes cut from the first answer print of Dead Birds with original narration and a commentary by Robert Gardner and Lucien Taylor
An audio track of commentary by Robert Gardner and Ross McElwee
A French language track narrated by Jean Rouch
A gallery of photographs shot during the making of Dead Birds and accompanied by excerpts read by Robert Gardner from his field journals
An excerpt from a television interview featuring a conversation about Dead Birds between Octavio Paz, William Alfred and Robert Gardner
2 sequences from a black and white print of Dead Birds made at the timeof the film 's release. These are accompanied by a conversation byRobert Gardner and Lucien Taylor
Previously unreleased outtakes from the archive of footage shot for Dead Birds

“A cinematographic interpretation of the life of a group of Grand Valley Dani, who are mountain Papuans in West New Guinea (Irian Barat, Indonesia), studied by the Harvard-Peabody Expedition (1961-1963). This film was made by Gardner in 1961, before the area was pacified by the Dutch government. The film focuses on Weyak, the farmer and warrior, and on Pua, the young swineherd, following them through the events of Dani life: sweet potato horticulture, pig keeping, salt winning, battles, raids and ceremonies.” —Karl G. Heider

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in this film is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in this film is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

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Gogodala

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Gogodala
Buy Now: $320.00

This film examines the implications of the Australian colonial era for the Gogodala people of the Fly River Delta, Western Papua New Guinea. Excessive missionary zeal, tolerated and encouraged by the government, contributed to the almost total destruction of Gogodala art and culture. More recently, an indirect grant from the Australian government has enabled the people to reconstruct a traditional longhouse, along with a new meaning and function: as a cultural center.

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Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza
Buy Now: $320.00

This original ethnographic video depicts how New Agers, the Mexican state, tourists, and 1920s archaeologists all contend to “clear” the site of the antique Maya city of Chichen Itza in order to produce their own idealized and unobstructed visions of “Maya” while the local Maya themselves struggle to occupy the site as vendors and artisans.

The setting is the spring Equinox, when a shadow said to represent the Maya serpent-god Kukulkan appears on one temple pyramid. As more than 40,000 New Age spiritualists and secular tourists from the United States and Mexico converge to witness this solar phenomenon, the video depicts the surrounding social event as a complicated entanglement of expected dualisms concerning tourism. Going beyond previous films that reduce tourism to neo-colonial and exoticizing social relations, this video portrays a Maya cultural site where US New Agers — rather than local Mayas — appear as exotic ritualists who are on display for other secular tourists and for local Mayas.

While the video does examine representations of Mayas by visiting New Agers as part of globalizing discourses on the exotic and evolution, it also shows how during the ongoing economic crisis, resident Mayas struggle against the Mexican state — rather than against tourists — that regularly “sweeps” them from the tourist zone in order to anchor the nation in an image of pure antiquity.

This video also asks what kind of fieldwork is possible as part of such a spectacle. It questions the status of ethnographic authority as people from the various groups converging on the event, ironically including the anthropologist-videomakers, trade positions and compete to speak about the Maya.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, Award 1997

Margaret Mead Festival, 1997

Royal Anthropological Institute, Material Culture and Archaeology Prize, 1998

Latin American Studies Association Film Festival, Washington DC, 2001

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Iauaretê, Waterfall of the Jaguars

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

Iauaretê, Waterfall of the Jaguars
Buy Now: $320.00

In Iauaretê, Waterfall of the Jaguars, the Tariano Indians of the upper Rio Negro decide to reclaim their culture after decades of missionary-imposed Catholicism. This involves the restoration of the sacred Iauaretê waterfall, home of the Jaguar people who tried to destroy the mythological Tariano ancestor Ahkomi. Contemporary Tariano leaders also visit a museum in Manaus where they recover precious stolen decorations, in order to put them back into ritual use. The attempt at cultural revival culminates in the rebuilding of the Maloca, the communal house that was destroyed upon the arrival of priests in the 1920s. The house is inaugurated with celebration and traditional dancing, and older people hope that their children and grandchildren continue to reclaim their Indian cultural identity.

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Jigging for Lake Trout

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Jigging for Lake Trout
Buy Now: $295.00

Jigging for Lake Trout

More signs of winter's end as more wildlife returns. The family makes an excursion for fresh fish from a lake. They build a karmak and move in the furs, cooking troughs, etc. The woman sets up her lamp, spreads the furs and attends to the children. There are signs of returning wildlife. The man moves out on the lake ice and chips a hole for fishing. He baits his hook and lowers it jigging the line to attract the fish. Crouched by the hole, he persists with his purpose and takes some fish, as does his wife who has joined him. Both remain at the hole through a severe blizzard.

Films in the Netsilik series

At The Autumn River Camp
At The Caribou Crossing Place
At The Spring Sea Ice Camp
At The Winter Sea Ice Camp

Building a Kayak

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Jigging for Lake Trout

Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice

About the Netsilik series

These films reveal the live reality of traditional Inuit lifebefore the European acculturation. The Netsilik of the Pelly Bay regionin the Canadian Arctic had long lived apart from other people and haddepended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain lifethrough the rigors of the Arctic year.

The filming was done during the summers of 1963 and 1964 and in the late winter of 1965 under the ethnographic direction of Dr. AsenBalikci of the University of Montréal, assisted by Guy Mary-Rousseliere, O.M.I., both anthropologists of wide Arctic experience. Quentin Brownwas Producer-Director, and Kevin Smith the Executive Producer for theseries. A minimum of cultural reconstruction was required during thefilming; the Netsilik families readily agreed to live in the old wayonce more and showed considerable aptitude in recalling and representing the earlier ways of life.

Note on Term "Eskimo":

The films in this series make use of the name "Eskimo." While once broadly applied, it is a perjorative term and considered offensive. While the inception of the word is a matter of debate, it is no longer used or applied in our film catalog. The context in which the term appears in this series is an acknowledged relic of a colonial past, presented in its original version. DER apologizes for any offense caused.

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