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August 10, 2007

The gift of "Miss Navajo"

'Miss Navajo' is a gift to all of us

I carry many moments from this year's Traverse City Film Festival. Among the treasured is Sunday at the State Theatre before, during and after "Miss Navajo."

Produced and directed by Billy Luther, it is a documentary about a Navajo beauty pageant where contestants are required to know Navajo stories, language, history, government, how to shear a sheep and even butcher one. Luther follows six young American Indian women in the 2005 pageant, focusing on a woman named Crystal.

Sponsored by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, the film was a gift for me from the moment band members drummed outside the State Theatre as we stood in line. Once inside, festival founder Michael Moore talked about the importance of Native American filmmakers and the stories they had to tell in a nation "founded on genocide and built on slavery."

The documentary explains and refuses to hide the past, but it also brims with humor and sweetness. It honors and respects the rich contributions the First People make to American culture, history and heritage. It takes viewers into the big-sky, desert beauty of the American Southwest, Navajo Nation and Denny's restaurant-hotel where the contestants stayed and the pageant was held. Hopefully, it helps heal a deep and painful national wound.

I cried when an early Miss Navajo, maybe my age or younger, broke down in a film interview as she recalled the day as a little girl she was pulled from her weeping grandmother and taken far away to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. There, she was forced to speak English and punished if she did not. Like many Indian children in the last century, she was stripped of family, culture and spiritual belief in the name of "assimilation," a U.S. government euphemism for the near destruction of native families.

Stories are powerful. They can open minds and hearts, bring understanding and compassion, show us the generational effects of war, racism, hatred, love repression and government policies. Or they can dull, harden and desensitize via the steady stream of sex, violence, inane sitcoms and talking heads that trivialize, numb, ridicule and rob souls in the American wasteland we call TV.

Luther received a standing ovation for his work, his first, he said. The son of a former Miss Navajo, he dedicated the film to his mother and grandmother because they believed in him and the importance of the story he had to tell.

I am grateful to him for the film, to the Grand Traverse Band and film festival for showing it, Rotary Charities for giving the festival a home at the State and to the hundreds of volunteers who make the festival possible.

Reach Loraine Anderson by e-mailing landerson@record-eagle.com.

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