Filmmaking | Interviews

Native Daughter, Indigenous Soul

1 Jun , 2008  

Written by Mary Trainor-Brigham | Posted by:

Documentarian Anne Makepeace returns to New England with a Guggenheim and a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute.

Even her name sounds American Indian: Anne Makepeace, evocative of the legendary and eloquent Peacemaker, founder of the Iroquois Confederacy.  It certainly must have had immediate appeal to the selection committee of the Guggenheim Foundation, which recently awarded her a grant in support of their mandate to “the cause of better international understanding.”

Their monies, along with support from the Sundance Documentary Fund and a year-long Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, will allow Makepeace to focus on her next project, Nutayunean, We Still Live Here, which chronicles the destruction and restoration of the Wampanoag Nation’s language, which hadn’t been spoken for 150 years.

After filming recently at a Wampanoag language immersion camp, Makepeace attests, there are now a number of fluent speakers; one of them, three-year-old Mae Alice Baird, is the first native Wampanoag speaker in seven generations.

Given her most recent enterprise, and a track-record of biographical works that include Ishi, the Last Yahi, and Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians, one could be
forgiven for thinking Makepeace to be Native. But she’s actually a native Yankee whose walkabout trajectory includes a long career stint in California, and a home-coming to New England, where she hopes to craft a humane and compelling record of the South Shore tribe’s once and future voice.

Says Makepeace, “I can’t remember when I didn’t have an interest in Native American life. I always had an affinity for their culture. I believe it has to do with my innate connection with the natural world —
feeling a part of it rather than wanting to exert power over it. As a kid, I sensed in myself a natural pantheistic orientation. And while others played Cowboys, I always sided with the Indians.”

She still sides with the Indians, and also the artists, the refugees, and the marginalized. But by any conventional standard, she has achieved laudable success. Public celebration of Makepeace’s work includes an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, an Award of Excellence from the American Anthropological Association, a Gold Hugo, a Voice for Humanity Award, etc, etc. Public funding has been bestowed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation, the American Film Institute, HBO, A&E, and others; the list goes on

But Makepeace isn’t one to rest on her laurels, and her savvy comprehension of the vicissitudes of an artist’s life keep her dancing back and forth between the largesse of “native time” and the exactitude of
application deadlines; the pleasure of exploration and particularities of production; the gift of her inestimable talents and the ongoing work it takes to bring the fruits of that giftedness into the world.

She calls to mind another independent woman filmmaker, Maya Deren, who also had a fascination with indigenous culture — Haitian Voudon practitioners — and gained access to their lives because she approached them as a passionately-engaged artist, not an objective social scientist. Deren astutely noted (in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti) the similarities between the way natives and artists are treated by more bourgeois society: ‘We too are exhibited as touristic curiosities on Monday, extolled as culture on Tuesday, denounced as immoral and unsanitary on Wednesday, reinstated for scientific study on Thursday, feasted for some obscurely stylish reason on Friday, forgotten Saturday, and revisited as
picturesque on Sunday.”

This sardonic litany certainly applies to the fate of Ishi, the Last Yahi, who lived out his days as a tourist attraction in a museum, the rest of his tribe having been decimated. Makepeace’s film shows that he was alternately lauded as virtuous and denounced as savage, and finally his dead body was subjected to an invasive autopsy, despite that being a violation of his spiritual path.

Any member of the “artists’ tribe” knows what science has only recently recognized, that there’s no such thing as pure objectivity, that merely to engage in the act of observation affects what is being observed. Thus the stories that filmmakers choose to tell always disclose a great deal about them.

In looking at Makepeace’s filmography, it’s clear that she has been a witness to other witnesses. Two films focus on photographers, the aforementioned Edward S. Curtis and the pacifist war correspondent, Robert Capa. By telling their stories, Makepeace further honed her own observational skills, in effect initiating herself. Initiation is a fundamental indigenous art, which Makepeace avers we all could benefit from: the ability to undergo a death of one’s identity and birth to a new, to evolve throughout life. Indeed, she
confesses that she became deeply identified with Curtis’ schizoid life, its rhythmic dance of fundraising followed by creative engagement.

Her biopic shows that his desire to record Native society went far beyond mere observation, as he petitioned for years to be allowed to participate in a vitalizing Snake Ritual. His longing to camp among the Indians and immerse himself fully in documenting their culture was a fascination repeatedly lacerated by the need to make trips back East to hob-nob with the elites and gain sufficient funding to continue his great task.

There is irony in the fact that Curtis’ major benefactor was the industrialist J. Pierpont Morgan. Initially dismissive of the photographer’s pleas, Morgan was so impressed by Curtis’ portfolio that he immediately arranged for years of financial support, support that ran out before the project was completed. Of course in return, Morgan and his wealthy cronies received handsomely bound copies of Curtis’ volumes, an inventory of their names including the King of England, Carnegie, Colgate, Vanderbilt, and others. Financial elitists all, many of them were engaged in enterprises contributing directly or indirectly to the literal and cultural genocide of American Indians.

Not included in the movie, but of interest to New Englanders is the fact that Curtis was not the only artistic collection pertinent to indigenous life, which this mogul fetishized. One can find Henry
David Thoreau’s Indian Journals in the basement of the Pierpont Morgan Museum, in a simple box of
the author’s making. Instead of being published, these writings were passed from one wealthy owner to
another like exotic, totemic baubles to be ogled but not taken seriously. Imagine the difference they could have made to the history of this nation had they become as popular as say, Walden, and encouraged vibrant intellectual discourse between immigrants and natives.

Makepeace is certainly open to such cross-cultural discourse: In documenting the life of Edward S. Curtis, she tracked down numerous descendants of the Indians he photographed, and didn’t shy from including their mixed reactions in her film. These range from one man suggesting that documentarians who violate taboo rituals should be tossed to their deaths from atop the mesas (as were some Spanish priests), to others who are poignantly and profoundly grateful that the ritual and regalia of their ancestors were so elegantly preserved.

Given his considerable contribution to their cultural preservation and revitalization, it’s stunning to learn that Curtis actually believed in the need for Indians to be assimilated into Euro-American ways. Enforcing this “vanishing tribe” orientation, he often photographed them, on horseback or in canoes, with their backs to the camera, “vanishing.”

So it evokes some mirth to see Makepeace include a scene in which an Indian elder bolts from being shown a Curtis photo of himself (as a papoose being carried by his mother) to hop into his pick-up and drive off. Vanishing? Hardly. Makepeace explains that while many viewers thought he exited the scene overwhelmed by emotion, in actuality the tide was right for fishing and he was off to cast lines. It’s a fitting echo of Curtis’ very first ethnographic shot of Chief Seattle’s daughter, Princess Angeline, clamming. As one native aphorism quoted in the film, “When the tide’s out, the table’s on!”

Another strong sensibility Makepeace exhibits is that of telling stories from a woman’s perspective. As such, we are not shown Curtis as merely a lone heroic adventurer, but as a man whose relational problems brought him into discord with his family (divorce in an age when it was scandalous) and occasionally with his Indian subjects. And while one can imagine that most male filmmakers would depict Robert Capa, the preeminent 20th century war photographer, all guts and glory, Makepeace aptly names his comprehensive biopic, Capa in Love and War. This honors not only his life-long commitment to pacifism (after dying on a battlefield in Vietnam, he was buried in a Quaker Cemetery) but his love of and grief for his partner and colleague, photojournalist Gerda Taro, who died in “action” decades earlier.

The myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece has been analyzed by Jungian therapists to show that while men can go straight for the gold, face war-like rams head on to claim their golden, solar wool, it’s better that women wait until evening to collect what of it has been snared in bushes and brambles. And so we have Makepeace not diving headlong into a war zone, but documenting the aftermath of it for Somali Bantu refugees, in Rain in a Dry Land. These are African natives coming not to native America, but into all the economic demands and travails of urban Western life — from community to relative isolation, ancient, lush landscapes to high-rise buildings. Echoes of Capa and Curtis, the war photographer and the ethnographer, meld in Makepeace’s heartfelt record.

And now she turns to the future, with the Wampanoag project. If we allow for the damage that the loss of a language brings about, the rending of yet another hole in what anthropologist/botanist Wade Davis calls our “ethnosphere,” then what measure can be given to the restoration of a native tongue? There’s mystery there, differentiation, restoration of values, perception, poetry, kapu space.

As with all her previous works, Makepeace says she has every intention of delving into both the dark and light dimensions of this history, by exploring how the language was systematically destroyed as well as
how its resurrection is being brought about. This willingness to tell the whole dappled tale brings to mind the figure of the Wampanoag Pot Carrier. The Pot Carrier is similar to the scapegoat or sin-eater in other cultures: the one with a strong enough eye to see into the dark aspects of the familial pot, then cleanse it out to bring them a new dawn.

What better for this nation, this people of the First Light, than to evoke this new dawn of a language unspoken for over a century? One delicious irony Makepeace notes is that the key means of its restoration has been the study of a Bible, which had been translated into Wampanoag to convert the heathen to Christianity.

Any engagement with Makepeace leaves one wishing she would make as many feature films as documentaries. She began there, but finds the sensibilities of Hollywood today too off-putting. She may not be as blunt as Capa who declared Tinseltown “the biggest mess of shit I ever stepped in.” But she does say, “Its sensibilities are dominated by young men, who are telling tales too dark, edgy and violent for me.” Exactly why we need stories told by this adventuresome, and humane woman who, in her own words, “always followed my passion, living the only life I long to live.”

Learn more about Anne Makepeace at www.makepeaceproductions.com.


Learn more about Anne Makepeace at www.makepeaceproductions.com.

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