Thoughts on filming Older than America: an interview with Georgina Lightning.
Georgina Lightning began her career in Hollywood in 1990, the same year the film Dances with Wolves hit theaters. For nearly two decades, she acted in television and in films; Older than America (2008) is her directorial debut. We interviewed Georgina while she was in Missouri to screen the film as part of the Citizen Jane Film Festival and visit elementary and undergraduate classrooms to talk about filmmaking and Native history. In one fifth grade class, which had been studying the history of Native boarding schools, she introduced herself to the class and asked "Do you know what genocide is?" They did not, and she helped them understand this history by telling stories about her parents' generation and their traumatic experiences with residential schools, before showing the trailer for Older than America. We heard later from members of this class that her talk was the most important moment of their fifth grade year. Later, University of Missouri undergraduate students were equally riveted by her discussion of Hollywood casting practices and her own growth as an actor and then director in an industry that all too often writes Native roles and perspectives out of scripts.Lightning, born in 1964, is a member of the Samson Band of Mushwatchees Cree from Hobbema in Alberta, Canada. She moved to Los Angeles in her twenties to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and has had roles on television programs--including Walker, Texas Ranger, The West Wing, and Blackstone--as well as feature films such as Johnny Greyeyes (2000), Christmas in the Clouds (2001), Backroads (2003), Dreamkeeper (2003) and Ghosts of the Heartland (2007). She also supported the emerging careers of her three children-Cody Lightning, Crystle Lightning, and William Lightning--who are active in the industry as performers. Yet after her own extensive training in acting and theater, she found it "disheartening to go into the film industry" ("Guided") due to the small range and general paucity of roles for Native performers, as well as the racial politics of casting that can be limiting for Native actors. Finding work and agents willing to cast her in anything but explicitly Native American roles was a struggle. In response, she broadened her activities from acting to work as a producer, director, cultural advisor, and acting coach. She has been very active in promoting Native participation in the film industry through the Los Angeles production company that she founded in 2002 with Audrey Martinez, Tribal Alliance Productions, and the organization Native Media Network. She is also an outspoken activist for Indigenous and environmental rights, and has supported the Idle No More movement both in Canada and more broadly through her strong social media networks.
Older Than America follows Rain (Georgina Lightning), a young Native woman, who through a series of haunting visions begins to suspect atrocities committed against generations of Native children at a nearby boarding school, now long abandoned. An earthquake (unusual for the Minnesota reservation of Fond du Lac, the film's setting) brings attention from a curious geologist, and seems to "unearth" the painful history surrounding the boarding school and its cemetery. Rain learns through investigation of her aunt Apple (Tantoo Cardinal) and the local Priest that her mother (a boarding school survivor) has been institutionalized and subjected to shock therapy as a means of silencing her. Rain herself is threatened with the same treatment, but escapes with supernatural aid and with help from her boyfriend Johnny (Adam Beach). In a climactic confrontation at the empty school building, the ghosts of the boarding school overcome the priest. Rain releases her mother from the psychiatric hospital, helps to give the children a ceremonial burial, and takes part in a healing ceremony with the rest of the community. As they chant to the beat of the drums, the boarding school ghosts withdraw into the forest.
Lightning's film combines Indigenous history and ceremonial methods of healing with established Euro-American narrative genres, specifically the supernatural thriller and tropes of the gothic including a "madwoman in the attic" and the revelation of repressed trauma through haunted buildings and settings (Beadling). Psychiatric institutionalization and electroshock therapy become metaphors for a range of institutional violations of Native families, including sexual abuse (which has been widely documented in Catholic residential schools across Canada). The film's characters also instantiate schematic dramatizations of Native responses to colonization, from Auntie Apple's eager adoption of Christianity to her sister's resistance to local political corruption around land development (involving a local radio personality, played by Wes Studi).
Older than America is a fictional film, and it is also a film that documents, bearing witness (as its characters do) to the collective trauma of Indigenous experiences in residential Canadian and U.S. schools. This testimonial work has been important to the film's key actors and actresses, and Lighting describes an overwhelming sense of injustice as motivation for her craft and for Older Than America:
When I actually had support as a filmmaker, to make a film about anything that I was interested in, I knew I wanted to make something that was 'media that matters'. And what matters to me is my community--the well-being of the Native American community.... We're in a really dark state right now.... A lot of our youth are lost. They have turned to alcohol and drug addiction. On my reservation, there is a lot of crack cocaine with our young people, I mean we are losing them left and right.
Tantoo Cardinal describes her commitment to social justice and speaking out through the arts in an interview with RealTV Films at the SXSW Film Festival (archived on YouTube):
That's how I got into this business in the first place--it was rage. Absolute, livid rage.... I've felt the injustices and I've seen the injustices. I wasn't allowed to have my mother. I didn't have my father. My grandparents were there in my life and my grandfather was gone by the time I was ten, and my brother had an early death.... There's so little left of our family, and it's such a struggle to live as a full human being in this society when your family's been demolished and your community's been demolished and it's all been demolished. And that's my passion, is that I will live, and I will live to tell. And that was, at a certain point in my life, that was the only reason to live, is that I wanted to tell on them ... because I've seen things, and I know things ... and that's why I'm in the arts.
Cardinal's outspoken articulation of the political work of performance--her moving assertion that through the arts and specifically acting, she will "live to tell"--lends resonance to her performance of Auntie Apple, a character who has survived her boarding school years by remaining blind to the injustices around her. In an interview about the film, Cherokee actor Wes Studi points out that the film's characters (especially his character of the DJ) begin to heal not only through ceremonial means but also through the activist assertion of "our own sovereignty--something that we're going to have to take--no one's simply going to give it to us."
Older than America continues this activism at the level of both film production practices and the film's representation of Indigenous histories (boarding schools in particular). Lightning uses established film genres--here, gothic horror and thriller--to tell Native history. It is a strategy common to other Native features, including Smoke Signals (road movie) and others. Financing for the film came partly from the San Miguel band in California and Lightning's business partner (and San Miguel band member) Audrey Martinez. Their company Tribal Alliance's first feature film production, Sawtooth (2004, dir. Andreas Kidess), anticipates Older than America in its horror genre tropes, the pairing of actor Adam Beach (Salteaux) and Georgina Lightning as a central couple, and even moments in the script, as when Beach's character Jim says "Some things are older than America." Older than America screened at festivals around the country when it was released in 2008, winning multiple awards including best director and best supporting actor (for Wes Studi) at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francicsco.
The following interview took place in October, 2009, in the recording studio of the KBIA radio station on the University of Missouri campus. We have edited the transcript for length and readability, but the full interview is available online as a podcast at http://lindseyfoat.com/portfolio.php.
Joanna Hearne (JH): We're here with Georgina Lightning, who is the director and lead actor and writer for Older Than America, which is her new feature film about indigenous experiences in Canada.... Georgina, welcome and thank you for coming to talk to us.
Georgina Lightning (GL): Thanks for having me.
JH: Tell us about Older Than America. What is this film about?
GL: Well, it's a film that deals with boarding school, but what I tried to do was take a serious subject matter and entertain people with a story. So I took an issue that was really serious and I'm passionate about, which is residential school experience. My family's been affected by it. I'm considered a product of boarding school. My father was a victim of boarding school. He hung himself when I was 18 years old. And his whole adult life, basically, he lived in rage, you know, complete rage all the time. So in order to understand that I started researching it, because I wanted to get a handle on it because I'm a mother myself. I just wanted to figure out what that was because there are cycles of abuse. Abuse circulates, continues, gets passed on from generation to generation, and I wanted to put a halt on all of that stuff.... Once I really discovered what that was about I wanted the world to know about it. And since I'm in the film industry, have been for 20 years, I thought that I needed to make a film about it. So the best way to convey that was not just to make a documentary, because that's only a certain type of audience that you get. So how to achieve that was to take a subject matter such as residential, boarding school and build a compelling story around that. So I built a story where we follow a woman, we follow a woman's journey--rain.... We open up the film where she's having nightmares and visions and she thinks she's slipping like her mom. Her mom was institutionalized in the '60s for paranoid schizophrenia because she claimed she knew where six kids were buried in an unmarked grave at the boarding school. The priest and mayor didn't want that for the town so they threw her in a mental facility and gave her tons of electric shock therapy. So Rain ... never got married, she never really lived her life, because she always felt that that was her destiny to be in a mental facility one day.
JH: A lot of Americans don't know the experiences of Native Americans and First Nations Canadians in residential schools, boarding school.... So could you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say the boarding school experience, because it's a very distinct historical experience.
GL: Well, it's something that happened when they had to discontinue the Indian war.... Basically, it's a continuation of genocide to assimilate the Native Americans. So kill the Indian, save the man was actually the motto followed by General Pratt. Let's kill the Indian in them, but save the man, because what we can do with them is make them members of society, functioning members of society, they can do basically slave labor. So they taught them farming, masonry, cooking, sewing, you know, menial tasks. No academics ... it was religion, religion and labor.... Children were institutionalized. Some of them--they have told me their stories--they were in there from 4 years old on. Four to when they were 18, 17, some of them left when they were 15 ... they ran away and ran across provinces or states to escape and started working on farms and things like that. So I mean, I heard so many stories, and I barely touched the surface of it in the film with the abuses.... It's just enough to raise consciousness, so people who are compelled to learn more can actually go and learn more if they so desire to do so, but it's enough to get the point across.
Lindsey Foat (LF): That relates to a question that I had about the educational aspects of it.... The geologist character mentions "Well why didn't I learn about this in history books" and is totally oblivious. And on the website you have some of the historical photos of children at boarding schools. So could you talk a little bit about how this functions in educating people about something that isn't in our history books.
GL: ... It's uncovering American history ... what the film unleashes is a major, major part of American history, you know, what we consider the holocaust of Native America ... the numbers would blow your mind. So what we know ... is half the children that attended boarding school, died at boarding school.... And you won't realize that--I didn't get the impact of what that meant until I actually went to one of the schools my dad attended. And when you go there and you see the graves, you know--you just walk around and you think it's a normal school until you see a gravesite and you can't see the end of it. That blows your mind. It's like these little tiny--they used to use these headstones that they used on Vietnam vets--the little grey stones It's pretty bone chilling....
It's surprising that even Native Americans don't know that. I mean, I didn't know that until my dad took his own life. It was probably a year later when I was soul searching and I needed to understand, I just had this quest for understanding.... And I actually pushed one of my uncles into revealing some of what my dad's past was, because I was in therapy. I was in really intense therapy and I learned that the way you are as an adult is largely because of your childhood. Okay, so what was my dad's childhood? Because he never ever, ever spoke of it. So, he was gone, so I couldn't ask him, so I began asking my uncles, and nobody would say anything to me. They wouldn't tell me until I got into a heated, a really heated fight with one of my uncles and then he told me it was a boarding school thing. Boarding school? I had no idea that my dad even went to a boarding school.
So then I needed to know what that was because I was a young adult and I thought well, what's so bad about that? That would have been so amazing, I would have loved that myself. So you go in a school and you get to stay with all your friends and have a major sleep over. That's fun, you know? But no, that's not what it was at all. It was an assimilation process that they had to go through, where they were stripped of who they were--their identity, language, ceremonies, anything. Who we were before boarding school is what "older than America" means....
We didn't go to the sweat or support under the arbor at sun dance ceremonies or anything like that. And I believe it would have made a huge difference in my life. My children are getting back to that now. My son, he just finished his four day fast with no food or water.... We drove up there, in Alberta, the south of Alberta. He's prepping to do sun dance for his first year; he's making the commitment to do four years to do that ceremony.... To say that my son is officially a pipe carrier gives me a lot of pride. It brings us back to who we were beforehand, before all of the craziness that happened to us....
JH: And your father was Cree ... was he speaking Cree when he entered boarding school and then being taught in English?
GL: Yeah. They lived way up north in the bush. I mean, my aunts and uncles don't--they barely speak English at all. They live old school, way, way out in the bush. Running water's just a new commodity for them, it's really crazy. You know? It's a beautiful place. I've been spending some time there. My son, my oldest son is up there right now. It's really, extremely remote. I try to picture living there and I can't yet, coming from LA. But it's way up, there's valleys, there's lush green, and tons and tons of trees. There's bear warnings. It's grizzly territory. It's really wild.
... It's really mind boggling. They took children from that lifestyle, from living way up north like that, just rounded them up, and then tossed them into these boarding schools and separated them there. My dad had a twin brother, who's gone as well, but all of the siblings, all of them, got taken and separated. So it's like they want you to be completely isolated, because it's easier to break you down.... So there's no contact with anybody that you know, so you're completely isolated and alone. Yeah, and then you cannot speak your language because if you do, you'll be--you know, it's by any means necessary, by any means necessary, which kind of gave them the permit to do anything they wanted at any time to these children.
And you speak to some of the people that went to these boarding schools, and I mean to see a grown man stand up and he's trying to talk to you, but he can't, he breaks down in tears in front of an entire audience. And it's just a lot of it hasn't been spoken of yet. After tons of praying on it--what should I put in this film, what needs to be said, what needs to be withheld--all of that stuff.... I went back and forth on whether I should include the ceremonies or not, because that was a huge deal. So I left them in and I had a screening before I locked edit. I had a screening for an audience and they were half and half--half Native and half non-Native--to see whether we should include those ceremonies and whether they were necessary. And at the end of this, traditional sun dancers that were sitting in the audience said, yes, you have to leave them in. So I'm like, okay, whew. Because I really needed my community to accept the film, to respond positively. I really needed that for myself, forget as a filmmaker, but just for myself, to know that I was on the right track.
So we left them in ... I've been at 52 screenings so far, and here's the example. Michael Moore, he invited us to his festival. We sold out the next day after our tickets went on sale and it was in this gorgeous theater.... When we pulled up there was a drum group on the street performing.... There was an elder in the theater that prayed for us prior to the screening. I mean, it was such an awesome welcoming. And then, when we looked at the audience, after the film there was a standing ovation that was awkwardly long.... And it just kept going on and I looked at those people and it was 90% non-Natives in that audience. They were just overwhelmed....
And what a lot of the purpose of the film is to do is to create a compassion and an understanding for non-Natives, because they don't know. The racism that I grew up in was pretty extreme. I thought ... we've got to show a film where people can gain some compassion and understanding, so let's talk about it but don't point a finger at them.... We're just presenting the reality of what happened.... There's a healing and there's a beautiful ending to it, so people are not running out, they're not angry, they don't feel any way other than compassion, which is goal accomplished. It melts some of that hatred, or that bad perception that they have....
It was prophesied that all this would happen. It was prophesied that for seven generations as a people we would be in great and incredible darkness and we would lose many of our people to diseases, to the Indian wars, to boarding school, to all different kinds, suicide, drugs, alcoholism. But by the seventh generation, we would make a comeback. We would finally stand up and become who we are and who we were. And I am a member of the seventh generation, so it's partly my obligation and responsibility to help push that forward....
JH: Thank you. I want to invite you to talk a little bit about the film's production and the story of its production. How did you take the history that you wanted to tell and the personal stories that you wanted to tell that you've been talking about, and make those into a dramatic script with a character who herself has not experienced boarding school but has experienced the trauma from the previous generation's experiences in boarding school? I mean, how did that story come to be, and how did you actually end up making the film?
GL: ... Well, it's basically based on my life.... I never actually went to boarding school, but I was affected by it and a lot of people that I know around me were deeply affected by the boarding school experience because they either attended the boarding schools or their parents attended them or their partner attended it. So they have to deal with whatever traumatic effects that had on them.... I started with one character, with Rain, and built around her. So as we were going along in a storyline--now I need somebody to help pull this part out or that part out. So like the radio announcer, which is Wes Studi's character.... I wanted to take somebody who had crossed over and come back again, so he was the perfect person. He had enlisted in the War like he was supposed to, and he worked for the mayor. He worked for the proper side, to be the most obedient Native American man that he could be. And then he realized how horrible it was and he came back and thought "wow, I can't believe I served on that side." Or we have Auntie Apple, who's played by Tantoo Cardinal, and that was actually a joke.... But these are all people that I know, it's based on people I know....
JH: So you wrote a script based on what you know and the people that you know and the history and the memories. It's not so easy to get from script to finished film.
GL: Well, I was having a hard time. Christine Walker who is my partner and was the producer on this whole project ... partnered me up with somebody and I sat there and worked with them, and ... it was really painful. Because when you're working with a Hollywood screenwriter, you have to first go through Indian 101. You have to teach them what ... everything means, because it's a Native perspective and they're not Native. So you have to teach them that first, and then you go on to what the story is. And they start writing and come back later and say, "okay, well, check this out" and you read it, and it's like "what?".... It was so off. And you don't understand how someone can interpret what you say in that way....
So then we went on to another person. I started with another writer and we started the whole process again, and he actually took an extra month, which was really grueling. You know, you're sitting there--"when am I getting this story?"--and then he finally shows it to you and he's so excited and you read it, and there was actually.... You know I'm talking about the beast within? He created a beast that was 30 feet tall and was computer generated. He was a real monster that came across the Bering Straits. And I was like, "I'm Native American--first of all, we don't believe in that theory." And another thing, that's like a five million dollar thing right there, just having that monster.... No, that took away from everything, that became a monster movie. Yeah, and it was really frustrating, and then Christine says, "I've heard you talk about this story for two years, let me take a shot at it." And Christine had studied scriptwriting before.... So she goes off, and she starts writing, and she shows up, and she was reading it out loud to me, and probably 15 pages in, I was extremely excited jumping up and down like "Yes! Now we have something to work from!" And it was awesome.... From there we just started building and we did several rewrites, and Christine was a great person for me to collaborate with, because she got it, she understood. She's an Indigenous woman herself.... She's the one that helped, and she's the one that actually did take all of my ideas and shape them into a script.
JH: It's a genre film, too. It's a ghost story. How do you see the traditions of the Hollywood genre film working with the activist history that you're also conveying in this film?
GL: Actually ... in developing this I didn't think of it as being a thriller at all. I was just basically telling the truth from the way I see it. And we do believe in spirits and that was something that Christine and I--she would be like "and then the ghost" and I was "no, it's not a ghost." A ghost is a non-Native way of saying like the bogeyman or whatever ... that's a horror flick, that's a thriller. A spirit is something that really happened, a spirit comes into a sweat. Spirits exist and they're real. They're not scary either, so it's a spirit movie. And then, when you translate that to a non-Native person, they'll say it's a thriller or a suspense. It's labeled a dramatic suspense, so yes it's very suspenseful, but there is no bogeyman in the movie or anything like that, ghosts.
JH: What was your budget for the film? How did you get financing?
GL: The budget, at the end of the day, was two million. How did I get the funding? I have a partner and we have a production company, Audrey Martinez and myself. We started this company in 2002 to create and develop Native American projects, to support talent in front of and behind the camera.... I met her on a film set I was helping with and my kids were actors and I got the cast for it and she had financed this short film for an AFI student.... I didn't know who she was, she didn't know who I was. We were just babbling about our kids and our ex-husbands, which we both had, and we just had such parallel stories ... so we just clicked as friends....
So we were talking about all of that stuff and here to find out ... she was funding the project. So then we talked about her involvement in film, my involvement, and it just made all the sense in the world, because we had the same goals. We had the same desires as far as the film industry goes, so it was perfect. And one day, we were at the awards for actors in Hollywood, and Wes was like "Georgie, you make sure you call me when it's ready." None of the actors knew what they were getting into. It was just like I'm going to make my first film and I really want you to be a part of my first project. You know I really wanted people that I knew, loved and respected to be with me on my first one as a director. I'd worked on several sets before as an acting coach and I'd been an associate producer. I'd produced on things, but I'd never directed. I directed this, it was going to be my first time, and so Audrey was standing there and said, "Georgina, whatever it takes, I want to support that. Whatever the budget is, I want to give it to you, because I want to make this happen for you." Because she saw me, you know, I had been out hustling like you wouldn't believe with this project to get it funded, and she saw that from afar, and she said, "I want to make it happen."
LF: Well, talking about the film process ... you've already talked about it some but just all the tragic stories that you were learning from people--could you talk about how some of those were then incorporated into the script and the story?
GL: Yeah. Electric shock therapy. This gentleman from British Columbia, he told me an electric shock story. He's actually a brilliant mathematician. And they found that this kid was brilliant in math, and they at the time were doing this experimentation with electric shock to see how it would deteriorate the mind.... They shipped him ... to New York and tested him and shocked him and shocked him and shocked him and then they would evaluate him after all of these shocks....
... And then there was this lady who told a story of her and her cousin standing there on a stairwell and there were two nuns, sisters who were arguing. And one of the Native children, her cousin, was right near this argument, and the nun just got upset and pushed her cousin down the stairs so hard that her head was split open and blood was all over and she, her cousin, knew that she was dead. And she saw how these nuns didn't even respond to that. They just continued their argument like it was nothing. There was a dead child laying there with her head cracked open, but they didn't care.... And at that moment she realized ... she had no value to her life. And she grew up with that whole notion of that--she's worthless ... she can be killed at any moment, and nobody would ever care, you know.
There's enough to give you the feeling of what happened in that boarding school. When you grow up and you are full of fear ... you're in constant fear and it does something to you. You can't sleep at night or you stay awake until your dad is sleeping and you know everyone is sleep and ... you can fall asleep for a couple hours until you have to go to school. Or your dad's coming home so you run and hide until he leaves. These children had to live like that all the time.... In the boarding school, you're sitting in your bed, but the next bed over to you is all of a sudden empty. Where did that girl go? Where did that boy across there, where did he disappear to? They just disappear left and right and that's normal and ... you could be next....
We're living with what happened there right now. Our kids are lost, they're on drugs, there's prostitution like crazy, there's violent crimes that are committed against them and there's no justice whatsoever, you know. There's a big organization right now, Women Against Violence, because there's been over 500 Native American women who have disappeared and there's been no investigation on where they went to across the country.... A Native woman can disappear and there's no investigation effort, there's no question, they don't make the newspaper. But you know a non-Native--and it's on every news channel and there are news flashes about it and it's on the cover of every newspaper "Where is Haley?".... That person is in our mind every day and we're in search of that person, but Native Americans, that doesn't happen with them.
JH: One of the things that I thought of as I watched Older than America is that so much of the action of this film centers around the recovery of knowledge, knowledge that has been suppressed, traditional knowledge and also knowledge of the history of the boarding schools and personal experiences that have been suppressed and repressed. There's even a scientist in the film who's using his equipment to measure an anomaly, an anomalous earthquake, but there's also historical research, there's archival research, church records. People recover their own memories and their families' memories. So there was a real theme in this film for me of knowledge--and finding and recovering knowledge that has been lost or suppressed or ignored. So how did you come to focus so strongly on the recovery of different kinds of knowledge in the film, both the colonial archive and also traditional spiritual knowledge and personal familial knowledge?
GL: Well ... I'm a spiritual person. And after a lot of prayer ... I have this one opportunity and ... especially I guess if you're a minority there's not as many opportunities for you, this might be my one chance to tell a story. I've got to tell it in the best way and make it most effective. So what do we include again? What do we not, what do we leave out? And that's just after tons of prayer and figuring out and looking at my community and asking what is it that we need. And I'd go to sleep at night with that thought and wake up in the morning and go "okay, we need to have this or we need to have that." And really in order to help my children, because ... I'm a mother of three children. One day I'm going to be a grandmother and so on, so what can I do with this film that will help us right now?
So what can I accomplish with the children? When I was a kid, I didn't have any spirituality or any guidance or anything like that, and I wasn't proud of being Native American. I had self-hatred. I loathed who I was, because I was taught to do that. So how can we instill pride in our youth?.... Before I got into the film industry, I looked after kids. Childcare was my thing. I worked at a youth center with teenagers, young teenagers, and then I worked with little kids in day care, programming, doing educational programming for children. And so, I'm the type that gets attached to everybody, so the house would be full--like my daughter's birthday, we'd invite the entire day care. You know I just fell in love with these kids and I got to know them on a personal basis. And then they grew up, and I'm in Hollywood, and things were happening to these kids. Two of them committed suicide back to back, one shot himself, and one hung themself, and it put me in a major depression.... I felt partly responsible for that because I wasn't there to help them through their situation. And here I am living in Hollywood and being selfish and living my dreams when I should be doing something for my community.
So all of that went into this film. All of that went into ... what can I do to help here, because [of] ... a ceremony that I went to when I got into that depression. I flew home with my three kids and we went through a ceremony and something that was said to me in that ceremony didn't crystallize until I got to make films, actually make them. And I was like--"that's what she meant"--this grandmother spirit meant you need to go back to that place, because you can do more for our people there than you can at home, because if you stay home, you'll get sick. When you make film, the power of the media is so effective, it's the most powerful tool in the world. So that's why when I make a film it has to have an impact. It has to matter, it has to mean something. It has to be effective in some way or another so let's send a message to our youth.... We know that this happened.... I know that this happened to my dad. I know it happened to my aunts and uncles, I know that this happened. So now what do we do with that information? We have to understand it and we have to move on from it. We have to heal ... and I understand the church and why and how they were involved, and I have to forgive that. You have to forgive to move on, because we want to be productive members of society, we want to be happy.
So if I can provide any kind of information like that, or push somebody in that direction, that satisfies me. It's not spoken of enough. Maybe it will provoke victims to speak about their story, because you have to talk about it in order to deal with it. You can't leave it suppressed because it manifests itself in different ways, in very negative ways. So in order for you to move on and quest for happiness, you have to get that dirt out. It's like there's layers and layers and layers. It's like peeling an onion. You want to get to what's inside, the food source.....
I've gotten hundreds of emails from people all over the country. And actually people abroad who have had boarding school experiences, so it didn't just happen here. It happened to other Indigenous continents all over the world and they've heard about it, so they're like, "wow, can I share my story?" or "I just heard a story about that, because we were talking about your film." They send me all these stories, and I try to personally answer all of them or just let them know that I did read it and acknowledge it and send them a response back.... It's to promote and provoke a healing process and create a dialogue across the country, which it's done already.
JH: ... You spoke a moment ago about not wanting your film to be categorized just as Native American cinema. And it's interesting because Native cinema is emerging as a category, both as a critical category and an industry category--I mean there are film festivals now that are just on Native film. Do you think of that category as a limiting category? Or does it open up new possibilities for you to have this sort of emergence of Native film as a recognizable category?
GL: Well it's good to have a category of Native American cinema but we don't have an audience yet. We haven't crossed over, so it's not a very, I guess, successful category as far as media goes. We don't have any attendance. If ... you go to Sundance Film Festival, the Native program doesn't get any attention from the industry whatsoever. There's no media coverage. I mean, really what they're covering is--where is Paris Hilton. Who cares? Seriously. We don't get to see who's the next hot Native filmmaker out there. Sterlin's not on the cover of Filmmaker magazine as the hot guy at Sundance Film Festival. So commercial filmmakers have more or less taken over those independent film festivals.... We all have to work very hard at it. Dances with Wolves really changed things for Native America as far as film goes, because what that film did was reverse the perceptions of Native Americans, because Native Americans were seen in a positive light. We loved those Native American people. As non-Native people, we had people admiring. People were walking around wearing fringe coats and stuff like that, you know. Everyone and their dog started finding out that they were part Native American from some grandfather that passed on a while back. So you know it really promoted Native America as far as that goes.
And then Chris Eyre ... put us on the map. We now exist. Native filmmakers actually exist because of Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie with Smoke Signals.... There's been a lot that's happened since then, it's just that ... we've kind of stayed on an even playing field and we haven't grown beyond that yet.... I definitely want to hit a higher plateau. I want to be able to compete with filmmakers, not Native filmmakers. Just like in acting.... I didn't want to be an actor to be a Native American actor. I wanted to be an actor who happens to be Native American. But I'm an actor. That's my profession. And I want to be known as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, who happens to be Native American. As opposed to that little category--oh she's an Indian filmmaker, she's an Indian actress, you know. Those Indian actors only play on buckskin movies anyway, it's like leathers and feathers, and there's nothing to do there. You know? As women we want roles that are just as juicy and compelling as ... the male roles.
JH: ... You've mentioned that you had 20 years of experience in Hollywood before making Older than America. Could you talk a little bit about your experience as an actress in Hollywood and as a Native actress in Hollywood?
GL: Yeah, well I got there in 1990. Dances with Wolves was probably my first premiere that I went to. So it was just at the beginning of that whole deal. So there were a lot of people that came in town, there was a rush of people flocking to LA because they wanted to, you know, they wanted to be in the next Dances with Wolves kind of movie. So there was a lot of people that came there. I was studying though. I left Edmonton, Alberta, I was in the University of Alberta, their fine arts department. I transferred after one year. It just wasn't enough for me, the type of program I was in, so I transferred to Los Angeles. I was in the repertory company. I got to play some of the most amazing female roles.... There were 167 of us the first year, 62 of us that made it to second year, and 15 of us that made it to third year, because you have to make the cut. I was the lead ingenue, so I got to play Sam Shepherd, Brecht, Shakespeare. Really awesome female roles that were complex and they were very challenging and satisfying as an actor.
Then ... I got an agent and I was very disheartened. It was horrible ... the roles that I'd audition for were--it's a female Native American woman, there's six lines in the whole entire movie and they have no substance to them whatsoever. Basically just stand there, you know, by your man, wear leathers and feathers and scream, yell, your baby's going to be killed, whatever. You know our history, so it was that. Actually you know Columbia's version of Geronimo? When I saw that script, when I read it there were two female roles in that thing. Then after they went through two writers, I think, they switched hands. Once they did their white washing of it, there were no Native American women in it. I mean, we just kept getting erased, there was nothing for us ... as Native actors ... and my agent wouldn't submit me for anything other than [that]. I was in this envelope that said Native American, you know. One of my friends would say, "Georgie, there's this awesome role! It's this woman who has this psychological problem and she's this and that." So I would go there and complain to my agent, "please submit me for that." But it doesn't say Native American. So what? Just let me have a shot at it. But they wouldn't even give me a shot.
So my kids--I got them an agent one year after I moved to LA.... My kids are crossing over, which we worked very hard to accomplish.... We've come a long way in the last 20 years from where I couldn't even get the opportunity to audition for something. ... Crystle [Lightning] gets to go in and audition for female roles. If it says female, unless it specifically says African-American or Caucasian, she gets to audition for it.
Caption: Georgina Lightning
Caption: Georgina Lightning on the set of Fantasies of Flying. Photo: John Spooner.
Works Cited
Beadling, Laura. "Indigenous Feminist Filmmakers: Shelley Niro, Georgina Lightning, and Filmic Representations of Gendered Engagement with Historical Trauma." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10, 2013.
--. "Guided by a Spirit in Her Directorial Debut: Dreamspeakers Film Festival." The Edmonton Journal 4 June 2008.
Kidess, Andreas. "Sawtooth Trailer." YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VVuaClQkqwQ. Accessed 4 April 2013.
Vasquez, Gordon. "Older Than America--Movie Interview--Georgina Lightning." Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Mar. 2008. Web. 2 Apr. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RozOQcApSwo
--. "Older Than America--Movie Interview--Wes Studi." Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Mar. 2008. Web. 2 Apr. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=v6xq7jbJ8LI
--. "Older Than America--Tantoo Cardinal--SXSW." Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 19 Mar. 2008. Web. 2 Apr. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VVuaClQkqwQ
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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
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| Author: | Hearne, Joanna; Foat, Lindsey |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Post Script |
| Article Type: | Interview |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2014 |
| Words: | 7580 |
| Previous Article: | "Miss Understood & Miss Represented": the film and story of our native women, an interview with Steffany Suttle. |
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