Producer-Director To Screen New Video Documentary: "The Oneida Speak"

Independent producer-director Michelle Danforth, an Oneida Indian from Green Bay, Wis., will screen and discuss her new television documentary, based in part on recently discovered oral histories of the Oneida Nation, on Sunday, August 3, 2008, 1 p.m., at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, 3001 Central Street, Evanston.

The video, The Oneida Speak (2008, 56 minutes) includes on-camera interviews with contemporary Oneida historians, cultural preservationists, and elders, plus dramatic re-enactments of incidents related by Oneida elders who took part in a Depression-era oral history project funded by the federal Works Project Administration.
The documentary, also available on DVD, was a co-production with Wisconsin Public Television, in association with Native American Public Telecommunications.

The Oneida Speak blends traditional Oneida storytelling with modern media techniques to depict engaging personal accounts related by Oneida Nation elders during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The interviews were recorded in more than 100 handwritten notebooks, discovered at the University of Wisconsins Madison campus in the late 1990s. The notebooks contain stories of everyday life on the Oneida Reservation at the time of the project as well as stories about the Oneidas migration from New York State to Wisconsin a century earlier.

According to a written guide prepared for classroom teachers, Oneida voices, both historic and contemporary, tell their own . . . stories of loss and rejuvenation over the past 150 years.

The Oneida Speak is the outgrowth of a shorter documentary, also called The Oneida Speak, that Danforth produced and directed several years ago. The short was nominated for a regional Emmy Award in 2005 and received the Award of Excellence from the Indian Summer Film Festival in Milwaukee.

Admission to the screening is free with an entrance donation to the Mitchell Museum. Suggested donation is $5 for adults; $2.50 for seniors, students, and children. Maximum suggested admission per family is $10. For information, phone (847) 475-1030. On the Net: www.mitchellmuseum.org.

Event submitted by Eventful.com on behalf of natsilv.