Cultural Enrichment

Young women who participate as contestants in the Miss Navajo Nation pageant must demonstrate proficiency at butchering a sheep. The activity is among those presented in a documentary that invites a not-so-flattering comparison to far less culturally rich mainstream beauty contests.

Miss Navajo was directed by Billy Luther, whom Dr. Kristin Dowell, a professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University, met when both were interning in New York at the Film and Video center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“The Miss Navajo competition is an event that represents the strong role that Navajo women play in maintaining Navajo culture,” Dowell wrote in a review of Luther’s film that assessed its value as a teaching tool. “What clearly emerges from the voices of the women in the video who have participated in the competition is their pride in the opportunity to represent the Navajo Nation.”

For over 20 years, Dr. Kristin Dowell (above) has helped facilitate the work of Indigenous filmmakers who want to tell stories in ways that honor their cultures and ancestors. Among those filmmakers is Billy Luther. Dowell uses his 2007 documentary Miss Navajo, which follows Miss Navajo Nation contestant Crystal Frazier (next page), as a teaching tool in her classrooms. Photo by The Workmans

Dowell notes the significance of sheep to the Navajo people, explaining that they are considered a form of wealth and were traditionally owned by the women of the clan.

The documentary’s opening scene focuses on Miss Navajo contestant Crystal Frazier as she undergoes questioning by former pageant winners, who speak in Navajo. It is a test for which Crystal, lacking fluency in her heritage language, is unprepared.

Luther’s project incorporated Dowell’s principal passions — for culture, for language and for film as an impactful storytelling medium.

For more than 20 years, Dowell has worked to facilitate the work of indigenous filmmakers who, like Luther, want to powerfully tell stories in ways that honor their ancestors and cultural ways of life.

“But,” Dowell quickly adds, “it’s not just about the past; it’s about creating empowered futures for the next generation of Indigenous people.

“There is a wide misconception and stereotype in mainstream media relegating Indigenous people to the past. People will write in the past tense about them and not understand that today we have 574 federally recognized tribes. Each one of them has its own distinct heritage, culture language and system of governance.”

Identity, Dowell said, is deeply connected to the themes filmmakers present and to the languages that Indigenous people have traditionally spoken.

“If you lose a language, it’s not just a vocabulary or a collection of words that is lost, it’s a mindset,” she said. “It’s a worldview, and it’s a way of engaging and interacting with the world. Indigenous languages have ecological knowledge that is contained in them. I think there are a lot of things that are lost if people don’t have access to technology and the ability to record their stories in the way they want to record them.”

For seven years, Dowell taught at the University of Oklahoma, an experience she is glad she had.

There, she worked closely with a student group, the American Indian Student Fellowship. She was part of a department that had a Native American languages program and offered courses in five different Native languages along with a master’s degree in language revitalization. At OU, the connections among culture, language and worldview were brought to life for Dowell in an impactful way.

For more than 20 years, she has collaborated with artists and filmmakers in Vancouver, which is a hub for Indigenous filmmaking. There, she met Lindsay McIntyre, a woman of Inuk and settler Scottish descent, who is an assistant professor of film and screen arts at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

“She uses some pretty amazing techniques such as scratching film,” Dowell said. “She makes her own 16 mm film with handmade silver gelatin emulsion, which is really astonishing. She is very committed to analog filmmaking practices.”

Closer to home, Dowell has served as a co-facilitator of a community-driven oral history project in Miccosukee, Florida.

“Community members wanted to do the project, and I have the equipment and the time to help them accomplish it,” Dowell said. “They identified who they wanted to interview. A local resident, Leonard Forbes, did the interviews, and I helped record them.”

Photo by The Workmans

Designated a Florida Heritage Site in 2004, Miccosukee has a complex history. Dowell has assisted residents with documenting local traditions and observances including Emancipation Day, African American rural lifeways, agricultural practices, the role of churches, and the history of segregation and civil rights activism in the area.

At FSU, Dowell serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, which was established in 2023 in partnership with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The center’s director, Dr. Andrew Frank, has written extensively about Seminole and Muscogee Creek history.

FSU’s Student Union features a mural painted by Seminole Tribe of Florida artist Erica Deitz. Dr. Kristin Dowell serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, which was established in 2023 in partnership with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Photo by Saige Roberts

Going forward, Dowell said, the center will recruit and support Indigenous students, support student research and organize public programming. At this writing, a physical space for the center is being prepared.

Toward the end of last year, Dowell was finishing her second book, Digital Sutures: Family and Cultural Memory in Indigenous Women’s Films, under contract with Wayne State University Press. The book analyzes how Indigenous women filmmakers have redefined film genres, such as stop-motion animation, handmade cinema and experimental documentary, to enliven family histories, ancestral knowledge and cultural memory. The book emphasizes the central role long played by women in Indigenous media production.

Dowell, who is descended from Irish ancestors on her mother’s side, also curated an exhibit of contemporary Irish art that opened at FSU’s Museum of Fine Art in January. It marked the first time that Irish art has figured in a show at the museum. For some of the artists involved, it has been their first experience exhibiting work in the U.S.

Méadhbh O’Connor. Studio shot, 2023. Preparations of Biosystem ahead of the forthcoming exhibition at MoFA. Living orbs made with air and soil-based plants, preserved and living mosses, and other mixed media. Right: Dr. Kristin Dowell helps set up the exhibit of contemporary Irish art she curated at FSU’s Museum of Fine Art. Photo courtesy of Méadhbh O’Connor

Dowell has begun to develop collaborative relationships with native Irish speakers and artists that she believes will lead to more curatorial projects and a stronger relationship between FSU and Ireland. She noted that FSU is scheduled to play Georgia Tech in a football game scheduled for Aviva Stadium in Dublin on Aug. 24.

In connection with the art exhibition, a panel discussion open to the public will be held at the Museum of Fine Art on Thursday, March 28, at 6 p.m. The event, supported by a grant from Florida Humanities, will focus on Indigenous language revitalization and will feature Everett Osceola of the Seminole Tribe of Florida; Dr. Jennifer Johnson, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma; and Manchán Magan, an Irish writer and documentary filmmaker. All three speak their native languages.

Dr. Mary Linn of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage will moderate the discussion. For more on the panel, see bottom of this page.

Dowell is herself learning the Irish language, which has been deemed endangered by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Her maternal grandfather, with whom she was close, knew a few Irish words and expressed a desire to learn more but never had the chance.

“I feel like I am carrying his dream forward,” Dowell said.

The COVID-19 pandemic had the effect of making volumes of curriculum and instruction available digitally, including the opportunity to learn Irish.

“Now is the time,” Dowell coached herself. “If not now, when? I’m in my mid-40s and the older you get, the harder it is to learn a language.”

Learning Irish, she said, has changed her life, personally and professionally, and has enabled her to view the world in a new way.

“English and the Irish language are polar opposites in every way,” Dowell has discovered. “The grammatical structure is different. The Irish alphabet has 18 letters. Irish has sounds that you don’t have in the English language. In Irish, you cannot say that you have something. If you were to try to say that you have a car in Irish, you could say tá carr agam, but really what that means is the car is next to me. For the sense of ownership or possession, there is no direct translation.”

Photo by The Workmans

Dowell described Irish as a “very relational” language.

“The presumption among Irish language speakers is that you are friends,” she said. “It encodes a way of interacting with the world.”

One of her Irish language teachers told Dowell, “The Irish language found you.”

“And it found me at the right time,” Dowell said. “I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much if I had started taking it 20 or 25 years ago.”

In the intervening years, she had experiences including seeing Native American students interviewing their elders in their Native language.

“There are a lot of parallels between the history of language loss in Ireland and factors that have contributed to language loss within Indigenous communities in North America. In both places, there has been a resurgence in interest in creating language programs and curriculum and immersion schools, and in finding ways to encourage and support native language use.”

Whether organizing Indigenous film screenings, assisting with local oral history projects, supporting Indigenous language efforts or curating Irish art, Dowell acts as a facilitator who creates opportunities for people to tell their own stories and extend their cultural heritage into the future.

A Discussion About Language

Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Art will host a panel discussion focused on Indigenous language revitalization on March 28 at 6 p.m. The event, supported by a grant from Florida Humanities, is free and open to the public.

Photo courtesy of FSU MOFA

↑ PANELIST – Everett Osceola is a citizen of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and a member of the Bird Clan. He was born on the Hollywood, Florida, Seminole reservation. He graduated from Valencia Community College with an associate degree in psychology and has worked for various departments within the Seminole Tribe of Florida, including Seminole Broadcasting, Gaming/Casino, and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. While working for the museum, he learned the art of storytelling and became an outreach specialist. In 2014, Osceola was appointed cultural ambassador for the Seminole Tribe of Florida by Chief James E. Billie. He is recognized internationally as an expert on Seminole Tribal culture.

Photo courtesy of FSU MOFA

↑ PANELIST – Dr. Jennifer Johnson is a citizen of the Seminole Nation and a descendant of the Sac & Fox Nation. She was an elementary school teacher on tribal reservations in Arizona and Florida. In 2010, she was honored by the Seminole Nation for her efforts in language revitalization as the first recipient of the Heritage Award. Johnson was a co-founder of the Pumvhakv Immersion School, a language learning school for early childhood through college students within the Seminole Nation. In 2017, she testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee on Appropriations in support of funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research interests include the history of education in Indigenous communities, Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous knowledge systems. She was a 2020 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow.

Photo courtesy of FSU MOFA

↑ PANELIST – Manchán Magan is a writer and documentary maker. He writes for The Irish Times on culture and travel, presents a podcast, “The Almanac of Ireland,” and is author of the award-winning, best-selling Thirty-Two Words For Field, and Tree Dogs, Banshees Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature. His latest book is Listen to the Land Speak. He has made dozens of documentaries on issues of world culture. He lives in an oak wood with bees and hens in a grass-roofed house near Lough Lene, County Westmeath in Ireland.

Photo courtesy of FSU MOFA

↑ MODERATOR – Dr. Mary S. Linn is a linguist and curator of language and cultural vitality at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She heads up the Language Vitality Initiative that focuses on collaborative language research, training communities in language and cultural documentation, and evaluating the impacts of grassroots language revitalization efforts. Before joining the Smithsonian in 2014, she co-founded the Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair and the Oklahoma Breath of Life as curator of Native American Languages at the Sam Noble Museum.