Documentary work includes more than film. What does it encompass?

Documentary work includes oral history. It includes documentary, photography, journalism. It includes the kind of historical work that you and I also do, in that we gather up pieces of life experience and stitch them together in a way that makes coherent sense.

Because if any of us actually looked at our lives, the order of them on a daily basis, the things that happened to us in our communities, none of it would seem to make much sense. So documentary work involves anyone who enters into that messiness of everyday life, whether it is in the past or the present, and says, “We are going to put this into a narrative form that interprets.” Documentary work makes meaning out of what otherwise might get lost. In the biggest picture, we are all searching for truth or searching for justice. We're searching for acceptance. And many of the things that happened to us in our daily lives, do not add up to truth, justice, and acceptance, so documentary work offers the ability to come in and gather up what does happen, and make meaning out of it.

Film, audio-visual, or live-action filmmaking is just one strand of that work.

What drew you to documentary filmmaking?

Before I realized all the different career options available to me, I sought out education as the primary way in which to make Native people visible in mainstream American culture.

Growing up in a place away from my tribal community and then moving into predominantly white institutions, I constantly got the “what are you?” question—in high school but especially once I went to college outside of the South. I would start to answer that question and then discover that the person who was asking me had no idea what I was talking about. No idea. They had zero concept of the fact that Native people even still existed and instead had absorbed this persistent belief that we all had died out. That ignorance shocked me. It represented such a divorce from my lived experience and that of the people who made up my life. The shock produced an urgency to ensure the visibility of Native people as contemporary actors and stakeholders in our society.

I was attracted to documentary work first. Film, and work on visual storytelling, came second for me, because it did not exist as part of my lexicon. Nobody in my life or my community had a similar career; my parents did not even think it was a career, so I began with what I knew: reading, writing, and education. However, I quickly realized that there were documentary filmmakers who needed historical thinking skills. Harvard [where Maynor Lowery earned her BA] was a wonderful place to access resources. As a college student, I did an internship as a research assistant for a documentary filmmaker. Gradually, working with him, I began to realize that film was a viable way to communicate who I am as a Native person, but also who we as Native people—members of 500-plus tribal communities—are. In other words, I did not come to this work through just seeing film around me; for me, it was more material. Having the experience of working with a filmmaker helped make it possible for me to envision myself in that role.

You just fell into the internship? You did not go looking for an internship in filmmaking?

Yeah, I just wanted to get out of the dining hall where I had been working as a dishwasher. The internship was serendipitous. I am not one of the folks who had a super eight camera when I was 13 or saw Star Wars and felt the pull. I just saw a gap, a need for more knowledge, and wanted to meet that need by amplifying people's lived experiences. Working for and then with a filmmaker, I discovered that film offered a way to reach a broader audience. Quickly from there, I began to realize that there existed programs, like Stanford's, in documentary filmmaking where I could go focus on embedding visual storytelling in real-life experiences. After that, it was just putting one foot in front of the other.

You mention that you met people in the 1990s who had internalized the century-old rhetoric that Indians had died out or disappeared. Do we still see that idea circulating today? Has there been shift over the last few decades, and, if so, do we ascribe it to successful drives for visibility, to political exigencies and pressures? To something else?

All of the above. Many forces come to into play in a transformation, and, as academic historians, we have an obligation to find those many forces. We cannot always reconcile their coexistence, but we can put them in a sort of sequence, which helps us understand each force's relative importance.

Today's increased visibility of Indigenous people is the product of 131 years of efforts, since Wounded Knee and Indigenous people responding to that massacre by saying, “Our story is not over.” This has been the continuous, strongest, and most persistent force: that of Indigenous people saying, “I'm just refusing to agree that our story has been told and that our story is over.” There exists a power in Indigenous people saying again and again, “No, we are part of your future.”

Other forces matter, too. Affirmative action contributes; you and I are both affirmative action babies, so we like to think that we're part of that story. Also, the proliferation of social media and streaming over-the-top television: Would the shows “Reservation Dogs” or “Rutherford Falls” be part of our media landscape right now if it were not for over-the-top TV? Probably not. Also, the economic opportunities provided by gaming have made a huge difference. In places where Native people existed but had been ignored, now they cannot be ignored. Eastern Mississippi. Western North Carolina. South Florida. Connecticut. Remote patches of California. I could go on and on. All these places where Native people had been told that we did not exist anymore, folks keep demonstrating, “Nope. Look, here's a casino. We exist, and we are in charge of this region's or subregion's financial security.”

With the 2020 decision McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court has put a checkmark next to some of that visibility and vitality. The decision says not only do Native people matter as members of American society, so does tribal sovereignty. It, too, lived on after 1890.

So much of this conversation engages matters of narrative and storytelling: more narratives, better narratives, narratives that offer a richer rather than a familiar story. Documentarians tell stories, as do historians. What can documentaries do that historians might not?

Let me a make a quick clarification. Many American viewers, including many professional historians, assume that when you say “documentary” you must mean a film about the past that tells the story in a particular kind of way with talking heads who create that narrative. Those people are often experts, frequently historians. That is not the type of documentary that I enjoy making the most. The ones that I have been most engaged in producing are ones that are about contemporary issues produced in a cinéma vérité style where the production crew is immersed in the world of the characters. The documentary subjects are real people, not fictional characters, but real people who partner with us in creating a coherent narrative around their lives.

Viewers can see this in Road to Race Day, a film series about NASCAR, or in the Private Violence film that I co-produced. The film In the Light of Reverence has some talking heads, but it's not really about the past. It tackles a very current contemporary issue.

Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary that seems to me informed by historical methods. I have a faith, I suppose, in the practice of taking disparate pieces of evidence and trying to reconcile them. So, for example, when we are in the archive and see three newspaper reports alongside of each other, all about the same incident that have completely different descriptions of that incident, that's just a routine experience for historians. The historian James Goodman was the first person to show this to me as an undergraduate: we do not get upset or troubled when accounts differ. You see this often in oral history. But you also see this in the cinéma vérité documentary world all the time when someone expresses a point of view that totally contradicts something that another person said earlier. You might be hearing expressly different versions of the same thing.

When you're doing a cinéma vérité documentary style, you are always trying to reconcile and judge and assess contradictory information the same way that historians do in the archive. In short, I think of it less as a storytelling style that the two forms offer up for comparison than a method. And the method is very resonant.

When I think of trying to juggle and reconcile many, contradictory perspectives, I compare it to family dinners where multiple siblings are telling the same story and have completely different takes on that story just because they're different people.

And because they had different experiences of the household. Yes, that metaphor works. Methodologically, in both cinéma vérité documentary work and historical analysis grounded in oral and written primary sources, you know that interpretive conversations are taking place in similar households where people are going to draw very different conclusions until you tell their own different kinds of stories about what happened, so you have to capture as many of those stories and conclusions as possible.

I do not want to overstate the connection between documentary work and history; the tools of these things are very different. Academic history takes place within an historiographic conversation, which is deeply important to the rigorous work of history. Documentary work does not always take place in a kind of tradition, or its tradition is very form based. So there's a tradition of cinéma vérité which I learned in college coursework and then quickly put into practice. I don't talk to documentary filmmakers on a routine basis who are so drawn to that tradition that they are speaking back to it in the same way that historians do historiography. Documentary makers, we don't just go back and watch someone like the great filmmaker Frederick Wiseman and say, “So Frederick Wiseman played with this technique, so I'm building on that by doing this.” That type of formal dialogue would seem ridiculous because there is so much malleability and flexibility in the form, and we can do all kinds of things without explicitly referencing previous conventions and forms. So, in that way it may be more exciting or somewhat more accessible, in some ways, than academic history.

Does documentary work feel freer than history or just different?

Different. It just feels different. Different obligations because you are not dealing with dead folks; people have to watch what I produce. In documentary work, you are often talking about the person as if they're not there, and then you have to then show that work to them. You may not then be in a position to change it because this person has a particular kind of relationship to the material, but so do you. So I would just say it's different. It's challenging in some ways.

I am working on a project right now with a museum that has us editing together existing footage. I don't have a talking head or anyone coming in to say what it all means. That is freeing, actually, compared to historical work where the author must knit it together. This way juxtaposes a lot of different perspectives and then allows the viewer to draw on them. In history, we rarely leave the readers to draw their own conclusions, but the purpose of the museum project is for the viewers to do so with the filmmakers simply doing a lot of aggressive suggesting.

I would find it stressful rather than freeing. As much as I endeavor to capture a multiplicity of voices in my work, I suspect I am most comfortable with my authorial voice being the loudest.

This explains why I have continued to maintain a consistent interest in both arenas and why as a historian I have written outside the academic monograph or scholarly article form quite a bit. In order to maintain engagement with the huge responsibility that we assume when interpreting something for someone else, in order to just stay with that work, I have to give myself opportunities to do other things with my voice. Also, as scholars of color, we have been raised with the assumption that our interpretive voices are irrelevant or that we don't have them, or that they're undesirable or make people uncomfortable: so many points on the spectrum of, “You can't do that, and here's why.”

As a child of Jim Crow, I have been raised with this idea that there are 30 more reasons why I can't or shouldn't use my interpretive voice than there are reasons why I can or should. So, living in areas of genre and form that disrupt set boundaries enables me to remind myself that, “In fact, Malinda, your ancestors did all of this so that you could use your voice in spite of all of these other forces saying not to do it.” But I have to develop a specific practice around using it.

My understanding of my own practice came in waves. It came in 2020 when George Floyd died. Before that, in 2017, I was finishing my book The Lumbee Indians and using forms not squarely within the academic monograph tradition. I was already pushing back in writing my second book, but I only recognized this as intentional on my part after George Floyd died. At that point I realized, “Oh, there is a reason why I have never felt comfortable in one or another of these creative or academic intellectual discourses of which I have been part.” It was an “I'm not crazy!” moment. I realized that it is not that something is wrong with me; something is wrong with the expectation that we would have only one way of expressing ourselves.

Perhaps that explains the appeal of many of the interdisciplinary programs that surround, bolster, and enable what do. It is almost as if we award ourselves courtesy appointments in the things that are interesting to us.

Yeah, I think so. For example, ethnohistory has nurtured and created a dialogue between anthropologists and historians and, in so doing, generated a compelling method of investigating the past of American Indian people and communities. If that did not exist in history, I don't think I would have a PhD in history. Instead, I probably would have a PhD in some aggressively interdisciplinary field. I work as if I have a courtesy appointment maybe not in anthropology, per se, but certainly a courtesy appointment in the interdisciplinary study of history.

With boundaries come labels. Do you think it means something to carry the label of a southern filmmaker or an Indigenous filmmaker? What would you want those, or other, labels to carry for you?

If I could invent a label, that would be a place-based filmmaker. The thing that means something to me about being a southerner is that I was raised in—and continue to perpetuate by my affiliation with this region and my study of it—a deep value on the particulars of location and the cultural meanings that people attach to location historically, as a matter of memory, and intergenerationally. To be from some place is something that, in the United States context, has been written out of our national narrative. We talk about “a nation of immigrants” and have embraced the idea that we all hail from somewhere else. This does not work for Indigenous people, of course, but rhetorically we are all supposed to be from somewhere else.

Yet in the South, because of the way that anti-Black racism and colonialism converged here, we place a persistent value on being from somewhere. Perhaps a county, or a town, or a different political affiliation behind that sense of from. It also has to do with status: class status and belonging to certain kinds of elite groups in a particular locale. Of all the subnarratives of American history, southern history holds fast to this belief that the power of being from somewhere continues to matter.

Scholars and storytellers have a great deal work to do to unpack this belief and the reasons for that tenacious hold. It is not natural. It comes very much from loss. The Myth of the Lost Cause, for one thing, represented a key stage in the evolution of white southerners’ belief in the power of being from somewhere. However, other things predate the Lost Cause in shaping the power of being from somewhere. I wrote an article called “The Original Southerners” for Southern Cultures that argues that the power comes from being Indigenous and being in the South: it comes from Indigenous people. These origins have gotten overlaid and written on top of. Folks tried to erase the idea's Indigenous roots with the Confederacy, with enslavement, with the Lost Cause, but the persistence of the power of being from somewhere still remains, primarily, in the region's Indigenous people.

So, I always will be, by virtue of my birth and the continued existence of a community to be born from, an Indigenous filmmaker. That label means something because of the persistent power of being from somewhere more than the unity or purity of the category itself, but when we see evidence of that persistence, we must honor the existence of that category of “Indigenous.” Place-based, southern—these are other descriptors which have layers that they acknowledge and layers that they erase or pave over.

The South is an idea or label that, for better and worse, seems deeply attractive to people. It attracts so much that it repels sometimes. In our field of history, we have colleagues who have dismantled that category of southern history; we have people working really, really hard to get rid of it. We also have people who have worked hard to transcend it. And then we have people like you, Crystal Feimster, or others who are actually making the category into something useful and meaningful. Rather than dispense with southern history as a category, I would want my graduate students to go read work pushing at the boundaries and put it in dialogue with Glenda Gilmore and C. Vann Woodward or even Ulrich Phillips. I would have them put it dialogue with these keys works but understand the South as inherently global and know that it always has been, even way before the arrival of Columbus.

Have you ever read Barbara Ransby's glorious biography of Ella Baker? She opens by recounting an interview with Paula Giddings where Baker kept pausing to ask Giddings, “Now, who are your people?” I have always loved that query because it is a question about place that does not rely on place.

This stands as a core question of Lumbee identity because it is a question about history but also about the present. When I have asked folks, “Who's your people,” I have encountered many white southerners who said, “We ask people that question, too. How is it different when y'all ask it?” In my experience, when white folks say, “Who's your people,” what they want to know is, “Do we let you in the door?” So I answer, “Well, when we ask, it's not about deciding whether someone is white or not. Nor to determine whether folks have the appropriately elite class status to be in this church or country club or whatever space is being gate-kept. We ask as a tool to belong and to assess belonging, not as a tool to exclude.” When it's a category that matters to Black southerners, it also has that quality of inclusion that speaks very heavily to place—as in, “What are the landmarks of your family history, and do they match up with the landmarks of my family history? And can we bring these together to understand both of us as members of the same community?”

I think of you as a music-infused person. Does music play a role in your community? Your craft?

My second film was about Lumbee music, and, yes, I guess you could call me music-infused. I always think with music, and I always listen to music. I was trained as a classical violinist, and I grew up as a singer. My family is full of gospel music. Singing it, playing it: I come from a group of natural musicians. I would call my first husband, Willie Lowery, the Lumbee national poet. He was a remarkable, stunning songwriter, and when he was living, music was part of my daily life.

I have struggled to find a way to access that knowledge for an audience of historians. I have written about music, but I also have put it down, in part, because I want to reach historians interested in music beyond a kind of performative space through which we can understand individuality. So, for example, I would not want to do something on the Rolling Stones or their drummer, Charlie Watts. That kind of project does not interest me, although he was an amazing, brilliant person. Instead, I would love to know more about those communities who brought about the forms that a drummer like Watts was interested in moving into his very prominent style of rock and roll: I want to trace how genres get placed on communities.

What are you listening to these days, and what are you reading?

What am I doing besides doom scrolling on Twitter? Because I feel distracted these days, I access a great deal of content through social media, and I access the content of people who do not necessarily have huge national followings. I follow spoken word poets and musicians like Shirlette Ammons as well as Cortland Gilliam, a Black poet and graduate student at the University of North Carolina who does important, fascinating work exploring Black identity at Carolina. I'm always going to read James Baldwin, so sometimes it's less about someone new than who has sustained you for a long time.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass offers a great introduction for people who want to know about Indigenous knowledge grounded in plants. Broadly, I have grown interested in work identified as science or falls into a geography-adjacent space. I read a magazine called Emergence Magazine. It can get a bit New Age-y, but it showcases nature writing that goes beyond just Thoreau at the pond. Emergence publishes eclectic voices in their interaction with the natural world. Because the crisis of climate change is aggressive and concerns everyone, I keep trying to access perspectives about the natural world that are grounded in Indigenous knowledge or help shed light on what enduring lessons of the natural world that we can use and keep with us and maintain. Some of that also goes to religion pretty quickly. Just like I read and reread James Baldwin, I read and reread the psalms in the Bible. They are a set of texts I was raised to value, and every time I read them, I notice something new spoken in them about the natural world. From there, I would go to some iconoclastic voice like John Trudell and his “Take Back the Earth” Thanksgiving Day speech from 1980. I find his words so relevant today, his words and Octavia Butler's.

Because I live in Atlanta, I am listening to a lot of dirty South hip hop. I identity with its sensibility. As scholars of color navigating historically white institutions, we sometimes have to put ourselves in someone's face: “I am here, and you have to deal with me! You. Have. To. Deal. With. Me.” There's something about hip hop in this moment, in this place, that gives off that energy. Also, I like audio books and have been listening to Barack Obama's A Promised Land.

This conversation began with documentary work and ended with an account of your listening. Thank you for taking the time to stitch up some of the pieces of our experience in a way that makes coherent sense.

I am glad we had a chance to talk.