EVERETT – The spotlight was on Aaron Jones, 13, and he shifted from one foot to another.
“Um, thanks,” he said, and thrust the hand-held microphone back toward the podium onstage at the Historic Everett Theatre.
He and his brother, Derek Jones, 17, collected their armfuls of awards and hurried toward a small keyboard at stage left. Derek sat down and began playing a musical diversion during intermission at the first-ever Tulalip Film Festival awards ceremony.
For many American Indians, attention from the world outside the reservation boundaries can be fearsome. Mainstream video cameras capture poverty, suicide or corruption.
When Indians turn their own cameras on themselves, the picture is very different.
The 20 films submitted to the Tulalip Film Festival, which ended Friday, refused to gloss over the challenges on reservations, but they didn’t abandon their characters there.
In one film, young Indians escape to Montana’s backcountry for a leadership camp. In another, women discuss how they look and feel different than non-Indians.
Puppets share the tribal legend of “Deer and Changer” in both English and Lushootseed, the traditional language of the Tulalip Tribes.
A boy’s father turns to alcohol to cope with the death of a friend.
One by one, stereotypes of tribal culture are challenged.
“By charging the youth with the skills necessary to tell their own stories and to put those images out in the media in our own way, the broader public will see native persons the way we see ourselves, with all the cultural complexities,” American Indian filmmaker Tracy Rector said.
Rector is director of Longhouse Media/Native Lens, a Seattle-based nonprofit that trains American Indian teenagers around the state in digital film. Her organization submitted three of the festival’s 20 films.
The Tulalip Film Festival was born out of a conference that suggested that distance learning students use digital media to submit projects and connect with their professors. Daniel Jones, Tulalip site manager for Northwest Indian College, discovered that students could learn filmmaking skills with the same technology.
Jones received a $15,000 grant from the Tulalip Tribes to help fund a week’s worth of filmmaking classes for 25 students. Students also took a drum-making class. The drums were featured in several of the films they created.
Both of Jones’ sons, Tulalip tribal members Aaron and Derek Jones, participated in the class.
“I just picked up a camera in March and started filming,” Derek said. “I continued that with this class.”
Sam Longoria, who has worked on Oscar-nominated movies during a long career in Hollywood, volunteered to help train the students. Longoria, who has a home in Lake Stevens, said he wanted to help because his first feature film was shot on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation south of Seattle.
Stephen Jiminez, an instructor at Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, also taught the students.
On Friday, several of the students gathered at the Historic Everett Theatre on Colby Avenue to see their work on the big screen. There were technical hiccups and muffled dialogue, but also a deep sense of pride.
Their lives, for so long mundane, joyful and sometimes painful collections of daily tasks, were suddenly in the spotlight.
“Often times communities don’t want to air their dirty laundry, but when it comes from the youth, the youth are honest by saying, ‘This is my story, this is who I am,’” Rector said. “Once they’re able to express that and acknowledge who they are, both good and bad, they’re able to move on.”
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