His name is Mato Nanji (“Standing Bear” in Nakota). His band is Indigenous.
Forget the image of flutes, drumming and screaming eagles soaring over a canyon. The songs of this singer-songwriter-guitarist will never be played inside a New Age bookshop. That’s because Nanji, a proud Nakota from the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, isn’t […]

As Ringo Starr once opined, “You got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues.”
Hokay, so he’s hardly an authority being  a white dude from Liverpool, but the sentiment is well taken. The blues is not pretty. The blues is badass. The blues is a music that reverberates from the swamps of […]

They call themselves “hobbyists,” an odd term, even derisive if you think about it,  but keenly apropos considering what it is they do.                                                                                  “Hobbyists” have an interesting approach to enjoying a culture not their own.  They capture and cage it—feasting on the traditions of the “other” with ravenous delight. Not unlike like collecting […]

Cree actor Nathaniel Arcand is a busy guy. I know this to be true because every time I talk to him he is actively pursuing a new challenge beyond seeking roles that break with hackneyed film portrayals of Native males. Sure, he's worn his share of buckskin and feathers onscreen, but he's also played a kickboxer, curling champ, amiable repairman, rodeo […]

The first time we spoke more than a year ago, Turquoise Rose  director Travis Hamilton said he hoped people would leave the theatre asking, “What Navajo made that movie?”
Travis Hamilton isn’t Navajo—hell, he isn’t even Native. But audiences who’ve seen his film, even Navajo audiences, are leaving the theatre asking that very question.
Perhaps this explains the […]

Theresa McGraw is gone, but her voice is finally being heard.
The young Ojibwa girl was one of  thousands of Aboriginal kids during the 20th century the government snatched  from their homes and forcibly placed in residential schools in a grotesque effort to assimilate Natives into Euro-Canadian society. The house-of-horrors terror experienced by these children—from culture shock, profound […]

George Angelo, Jr. is not fickle, which is to say, he’s a filmmaker and has been for longer than  many of his peers in the Native  film community have been alive. 
Thirty years ago, Angelo was an anomaly. You could count the number of Indian filmmakers on one hand and still have fingers left.  When employed […]

Forget the whole sad man behind the happy face, because Charlie Ballard isn’t   a sad man. No, he’s not clownish either, but he is funny and has been funny for a long time. (His mom told me so).
You see, Charlie Ballard is a comedian. A Native comedian. A  gay Native comedian. Yah, I know, maybe […]

He has a face-you-won’t-forget.
Whether strutting his stuff in The Lone Ranger  and American Outlaws,  taking   on edgier roles in The Doe Boy, From Cherry English, and Johnny Tootall, or doing comedy in this summer’s Canadian television series, Moose TV, one thing’s for sure.
Cliché aside, there’s something about  Cree actor Nathaniel Arcand.
Where he’s from, where’s […]

Indians are funny. Forget stoic. Forget the stern image of the Native peering into the horizon or the pathos d’jour shown ad nauseum in documentaries.
Indians are funny. Which is why Cree producer Ernest Webb, co-founder of Montreal-based Rezolution Pictures, developed the idea of Moose TV  with his wife, Catherine Bainbridge, more than six years ago. […]