“At the Level of Ideas”: Locating Compatibilities between Indigenous Documentary Film and Indigenous Research in the American Indian Tribal Histories Project

Abstract:This essay locates shared protocols, procedures, and practices between Indigenous documentary filmmaking and Indigenous research methodologies in order to understand how studying intersections like these might contribute to the development of theory and method in Native American and Indigenous studies. Indigenous documentary film and Indigenous research occupy separate areas of inquiry infrequently cross- referenced in scholarship, but strong family resemblances between them exist that signal mutual relevance and utility with the potential to open new channels between heretofore distinct fields. The central case study of the American Indian Tribal Histories Project is an interview conducted specifically for this essay with Northern Cheyenne filmmaker Francine D. Spang-Willis on the AITHP and the two series of documentary films on Northern Cheyenne and Crow histories and cultures that accompany it. This essay presents the interview in full in order to place the process Spang-Willis developed to complete the American Indian Tribal Histories Project into conversation with the work of Indigenous research scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngati Awa/Ngati Porou), Shawn Wilson (Cree), Jo-Ann Archibald (Sto:lo), Margaret Kovach (Cree/Métis) to show how Indigenous documentary filmmaking enacts and performs instances of Indigenous research methods just as Indigenous research methodologies can be utilized to develop techniques of reading and critical analysis suitable for the Indigenous arts and humanities.