Without a Whisper. Directed by Katsitsionni Fox. New York: Women Make Movies, 2020. 27 minutes.

Warrior Women. Directed by Elizabeth A. Castle and Christina D. King. Los Angeles: GOOD DOCS, 2018. 64 minutes.

Centering Indigenous Women in the Struggle Against Settler Heteropatriarchy

Both Without a Whisper and Warrior Women discuss and illustrate North American Indigenous women’s roles in the governance and political organizing of their communities. They showcase how despite or in spite of the pressures and influence of settler heteropatriarchy, Indigenous women continue to be central pillars of their communities, playing a principal role in decolonization and resurgence efforts. Engagingly told through their personal stories and (especially Warrior Women) full of humor, the films also offer an education on the histories behind the specific women and their communities. As such, the films introduce a number of interrelated issues to explore the intersection of gender and Indigenous sovereignty in a way that is accessible to wide audiences.

Without a Whisper tells the story of the role of women in Haudenosaunee governance and the contemporary efforts to regain both the specific practice of these roles as well as the traditional gender balance in the community more generally. The film follows a few women involved in the revitalization efforts. As the film is only twenty-seven minutes long, it can be screened and discussed within class time. A class made up of two consecutive periods would work best, allowing enough time to discuss both the content of the film itself and relate it to the larger themes it addresses.

Warrior Women tells the stories of Madonna Thunderhawk’s and her daughter Marcella Gilbert’s lifelong struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, which have included, among other things, Madonna’s involvement in the Occupation of Alcatraz (1969-71) and the Occupation of Wounded Knee (1973), as well as their shared participation in the Survival Schools (1970s-2008) and the No Dakota Access Pipeline—or #NoDAPL—camps at Standing Rock (2016). The film also gives some attention to what it means to be a mother participating in political struggle, and how the struggle is passed on intergenerationally. At sixty-five minutes, it might be screened in a longer class session, but it is likely best included as a homework assignment or through a special screening outside of class time.

For a class discussion, different aspects from the films can be lifted out and discussed separately, or one can lead a more general conversation on the role of women in historical and contemporary Native politics. As such, these important films could serve as an introduction to or illustration of different themes, as indicated in the preliminary list of suggestions that follows.

Educators could screen Without a Whisper for a session on governance within an Indigenous Studies course and combine it with, for example, an excerpt from David Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark’s American Indian Politics and the American Political System (2017), which discusses the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy as a case study in its chapter “Original Indigenous Governments.”

Taking a different approach to Indigenous governance and politics, Warrior Women could be taught in an Indigenous studies, history, or ethnic studies course session on Indigenous activism by focusing on the American Indian Movement and its intergenerational reverberations in combination with excerpts from Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior’s Like a Hurricane (1997), for example. Similarly, it would be relevant to a session on #NoDAPL and the historic relations that informed it, in combination with excerpts from Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon’s edited collection Standing with Standing Rock (2019) or Estes’s monograph Our History Is the Future (2019).

Focusing specifically on gender roles in Indigenous governance and the detrimental effects of settler heteropatriarchy and the subsequent (ongoing) struggle against it, either film (or both) might be taught with Audra Simpson’s “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty” (2016); Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill’s “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections Between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy” (2013); and/or excerpts from Joanne Barker’s Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (2017) to discuss the gendered effects of settler interference with traditional governance structures and/or the struggle for decolonizing Indigenous governance and resurgence of traditional practices.

In a critical anthropology course, Without a Whisper could be discussed in relation to early anthropologist of the Haudenosaunee Lewis H. Morgan’s work, perhaps to explore, for example, how Morgan’s Eurocentric analysis misunderstood the Haudenosaunee governance system as well as the long-term effects of his erasure of the roles Haudenosaunee women has had.

Warrior Women would work well in a session on decolonizing education or on practices of living sovereignty in the face of settler colonial oppressions through a focus on the Survival Schools or the boarding school system. This theme could be discussed in combination with excerpts from Julie Davis’s Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities (2013).

Including both films in the same course could facilitate a rich, productive discussion of the variety of roles Indigenous women can and do take up as political actors in their communities and in the decolonization and resurgence struggles against settler heteropatriarchy. Their accessible, sometimes humorous storytelling invites the audience into relationship with the women and their lived experiences. In this way, viewers are encouraged to contemplate how they relate to these stories and events and consider the role they might play to support the work of these women.

Dr. Laura M. De Vos is an assistant professor in the American Studies Program in the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with an academic background in North American Indigenous studies, US American literature, and gender studies. Laura obtained their PhD degree at the University of Washington in Seattle, where they initiated and helped create a Graduate Certificate in American Indian and Indigenous Studies which is now being offered (since January 2020). Their current book project, Voorbij Winnetou en Pocahontas (“Beyond Winnetou and Pocahontas”), is a Dutch-language trade book aiming to make their research accessible to a wide, Dutch-speaking audience. Laura's academic work has been published in Transmotion and Settler Colonial Studies. Their article "Spiralic Time and Cultural Continuity for Indigenous Sovereignty: Idle No More and The Marrow Thieves" received the 2020 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Academic Essay. They are now a submissions editor for Transmotion: Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies. Laura is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar.