BRATTLEBORO — Over the past few years, the Rotary Club of Brattleboro has built film festivals around international themes to help those in need.
This year, the club has shifted its focus back to the United States, and a place with socio-economic conditions that rival the worst that can been found in the developing world.
It might seem strange that the club's fourth annual International Film and Food Festival - scheduled for Sunday, March 3, from 4 to 8 p.m. at the New England Youth Theater on Flat Street - is focused on Native Americans.
But club president Marty Cohn said he was so shocked at the conditions at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that he wanted to do something.
The statistics are shocking.
There are about 40,000 members of the Ogala Sioux tribe living at Pine Ridge, a reservation on two million acres. About half of the residents are younger than 18, and nearly 70 percent of that number live in poverty.
Unemployment is in the neighborhood of 80 percent. The annual per capita income is about $4,000.
Life expectancy of 55 for men and 60 for women falls about 20 years short of the American average.
Infant mortality is twice the national average. The suicide rate is 72 percent higher than the national average. Alcoholism is about nine times the national average.
But Cohn said he was struck by the strength of Native American culture in the face of such grinding poverty, and the determination to protect and preserve that culture.
A big part of the glue that holds together Pine Ridge and the rest of Great Sioux Nation living in South Dakota is a nonprofit radio station that is the region's primary source of news, information, and entertainment.
KILI-FM is celebrating its 30th year of broadcasting. It signed on in 1983 as the first American Indian-owned radio station in the United States, and Cohn said that it is the one of the region's most important cultural institutions.
In recognition of that role, Cohn said proceeds from the club's film festival will benefit KILI.
Two feature films directed by Chris Eyre are featured in the fest: Smoke Signals (1998) and Skins (2002).
Smoke Signals might be described as a road movie, as two young men, the stoic Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and the gabby Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams), who live on the Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation in Plummer, Idaho, journey to Phoenix to collect the ashes of Victor's father, Adam Joseph (Gary Farmer).
Twenty years earlier, the infant Thomas-Builds-the-Fire was rescued from a house fire by Victor's father. He sees him as a hero, but Victor only sees the alcoholic who got thrown out of the house by his mother and fled to Phoenix. The death of Adam Joseph forces both young men to confront the life of a complicated man and sort through the myths and realities of what really happened the night of the fire.
Skins is a story of two Sioux brothers. Ruby Yellow Lodge, the younger brother, played by Eric Schwig, is a tribal police officer who often strays beyond the legal boundaries of his job. Mogie, the older brother, played by Graham Greene, is an alcoholic Vietnam combat veteran who was wounded three times and who hasn't recovered from the experience.
The film, which is set in a thinly-disguised Pine Ridge Reservation and was actually shot there, is much darker and violent than “Smoke Signals.” Given that “Skins” makes prominent reference to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, which took place at what is now Pine Ridge, and the presidents carved into the Mount Rushmore, a monument built on sacred Sioux land that's seen as a literal “in-your-face” to the Native Americans slaughtered in the westward settlement of the United States, it can't help but be edgier.
Sandwiched between these two films is a Native American meal featuring foods and recipes from Pine Ridge, including “Grandma Connie's Buffalo Feast,” “Blueberry Wojopi” (a pudding of mashed, cooked berries), “Three Sisters Vegetables” (maize, beans, and squash - three traditional staples of the Native American garden), and fry bread, which is a cousin of the fried dough you'd see at a fair, but has as many variations in its recipes as there are tribes in North America.