WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES

a documentary film and photography project
[in progress]

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Headliner

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Video

We Are Not Your Savages is about how the myth of the American frontier and its contemporary iterations in American film, politics, and popular culture contribute to the marginalization of Native American people (particularly in the American West), create division among American citizens, and pose a threat to our planet and its fragile ecosystems.

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Text

Minckler Haynes 7 Headquarters Hotel Crow Chinese 1885 - unknown copyright.tif

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Image

Apsáalooke (Crow/Absaroke) people and Coulson (what is today Billings) residents at the Headquarters General Store. Circa 1885.

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Text

A Pervasive Myth

Lauren Hunley is a non-Native community historian at the Western Heritage Center in Billings, Montana. Lauren discusses why she believes the mythology of the American Western frontier is still so pervasive today in Montana. Later in the interview, Lauren talks about the challenges she faces as a community historian trying to educate a community that is still deeply invested in the mythos surrounding the West. Historical imagery without Native American perspectives, she argues, is partly why.

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Video

We Are Not Your Savages asks: how can Native American art, oral and visual histories, traditional values, cosmologies, and environmentally sustainable cultural and economic practices work to deconstruct the myth of the American frontier and offer a new (Indigenous) perspective on the American West?

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Text

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Image

Apsáalooke (Crow/Absaroke) Women, Whistler and Hits-The-One-Who-Rides-the-Gray-Horse. Circa 1898-1910. Photo by Fred. E. Miller.

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Text

We Are Not Your Savages has been supported by the Cornell Migrations Initiative and Mellon Just Futures Project, the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas, the Mellon Research Initiative on Racial Capitalism, and the Mellon Research Initiative on Feminist Arts and Sciences.

WE ARE NOT YOUR SAVAGES: Text