This week’s inspiration comes a little late for the Super Bowl, but is an advocacy piece put out by the organization Change the Mascot. Set over a progressive yet simple guitar and vocal instrumental piece, it features still and motion imagery of Native Americans in a variety of historical and contemporary settings, narrated by a (assumed to be) Native American voice who calls out words that describe the Indian identity.
The imagery and the descriptive words that accompany it illustrate the broad and diverse range that is the American Indian experience, all over the United States and Alaska. On a personal note, I spent nine months flying small planes for an air taxi service in Bethel, Alaska, in the heart of Yup’ik (Eskimo) territory, and it was one of the most incredible periods of my life.
As the piece picks up the pace, the imagery becomes almost too fast for our conscious minds to process and transfers into the subconscious, until the final montage of images is just a blur (the last of which is a close up of eyes looking directly at the viewer). And then the narrator says, “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one thing they don’t . . . .” and the music stops with the imagery replaced by a still shot of a Washington Redskins helmet sitting on a football field. The narrator doesn’t need to finish the sentence, which makes the statement that much more powerful.
It’s interesting how they scattered old and new material throughout the piece, rather than starting with more archival materials and building to the present day. I wonder how the piece would be different had it been put together with more of a timeline structure. I do like the call to action at the end, because (similar to my post this week) it has a purpose in giving the viewer a chance to act by participating in an online discussion or learning more about the issue, something I think is an increasingly important component in the digital era, since it’s fairly easy to start following a social media account for updates or sign an online petition, and if that can help, that’s a wonderful thing.
A great call to action from changethemascot.org.
Do you have any idea where the non-archival footage came from? I wonder if the producers made a call to the activist community, or if they went out and filmed themselves. It seems like this could have been a really successful crowd sourcing-esque project if it was the former! I think it demonstrates how a great concept can unite different images and voices.