On May 3, 2021, professors Meredith McCoy (American Studies) and Barbara Allen (Political Science) presented a roundtable with the documentarians and key interviewees behind two films, First Daughter and the Black Snake and Stories I Didn’t Know. The CCCE co-sponsored this event along with the Dean of Students, the Dean of the College, the Department of Political Science, the Department of History, American Studies, Environmental Studies Program, and the Public Policy Program. Here, Meredith and Barbara speak about the event, the films, and how they intersect with their and others’ work on campus.
Barbara Allen: We thought that Reuben should speak first for a couple of different reasons. In the film, he says those fascinating and really important things about the breadth of experience beyond the thing that someone may know, like the US–Dakota Wars. He explains that there’s a history that people may know vaguely, or they may know none. But if they know something, what they know is about something that’s a terrible event. And of course, they should know that, but they should know about the present. They should also know about, as he put it, the Dakota being here ten thousand years. This period of the Wars is a small period. As he says, of course, it’s significant, but it’s still a small period for the whole. And I thought that was such an important thing to get across.
And then I also think that it’s important for people to understand that many people have suffered trauma, and many peoples have suffered trauma collectively. Reuben, in my view, presented a way of really dealing with that—that is, healing for himself, healing for people who are traumatized in the collective. And asking: how will we move forward? Those people who might be implicated in the trauma, or who were implicated in the past and then are also present in going forward. How does that work? So I thought that was an important question to get across. Also, Reuben is closer to the age of most of the students and a student himself.
I thought what he had to say was so important, both in the film and then to hear him talk about it at a bit more length in the conversation. I wonder if we could take a couple of steps back and if you could talk a little about how this event came to be. Did either of you have any particular connections with either of the films?
BA: The two filmmakers are colleagues in a group that I’m a member of called Film Fatales. We’re all women filmmakers who have directed at least two full-length feature documentaries. Melody Gilbert used to live in Minnesota and she actually taught one year at Carleton College. Keri I met through Winona. Keri has made a number of documentaries and has known Winona for many years. Keri introduced me to Film Fatales.
I’m not sure if I understood this correctly — did you have classes that were involved in this event?
Meredith McCoy: I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking about, but one of the things that happened during the day is Winona LaDuke set aside an hour to visit with the Native student organization, this really brilliant mentoring opportunity. Native students on campus don’t get that kind of attention very often. And so for someone, again, of Winona LaDuke’s status to set aside time to just visit with them, the students who attended said that it was tremendously encouraging. She talked to them about the kind of persistence that they need to get through higher education as Native students and the kinds of things they’ll be able to do for their communities once they finish their Carleton degrees. We’re very grateful for that chance to visit with her in combination with the film event that night.
Oh, that’s such a fantastic opportunity. I’d like to ask you both, as well, how do you each see this particular event fitting in with the other work you’re doing or other work you’re seeing happen in the community?
BA: I make documentary films as well as teach political science and some classes listed also in CAMS. And as an educator, I’m aware of a lot of huge disparities in education. So this kind of knowledge of inequities informs most of what I do and a lot of what I teach, even though it isn’t directly connected to my research. Knowledge of injustice and inequality informs the kinds of films that I make and it informs the kinds of things that I try to do on the campus more broadly. I think that if you can’t come across in terms of friendship and doing projects together and creating something together with colleagues and students, there’s just no hope for being able to make these kinds of changes that absolutely have to be made.
MM: I think for me it’s about reckoning with difficult histories towards Indigenous futures. If you think about the intersection of these two films, [Stories I Didn’t Know] is about figuring out how we live in this space with the magnitude of this history of violence weighing down on our shoulders and how we as Indigenous people are focusing toward those futures. And then with [First Daughter and the Black Snake], thinking about the work that Winona LaDuke does in food sovereignty and environmental justice and thinking about making space for us to be in right relation with our lands and waters and more-than-human relations. All of that work is toward a world where Indigenous peoples are able to live in the way that we know is right for us and is perhaps by extension, right for other people as well.
And so for me, a film event like this on campus raises the profile of the kind of Indigenous Studies work that actually certain members of our community at Carleton have been doing for a long time but haven’t gotten a lot of attention for. So when I’m thinking about what this event does for me, it allows me to feed those curricular spaces that I’m working in, and it also allows me to try to amplify the visibility of this other work and make space for all the people that do Indigenous Studies-related work on our campus to find each other in these shared spaces of collective interest.
