Community Story and Film: A Catalyst for Connection
－Exploration of the Process of Community Based Filmmaking and Working with Indigenous Communities in Alaska
 Location: Alaska, USA
Presenter: Wendy Erd
Permanent address: Box 736, Homer, Alaska, USA 99603
Tel 907-235-8891
E-mail:wendyerd@aol.com
Focusing on a recent collaboration in the summer of 2004 between a small museum and a tiny Alaskan coastal village of Altuiiq people, we watch the community based video, Let It Grow Back (Kiputmen Naukurlurpet), , and explore the community based video process itself as a catalyst for community reflection and connection. The idea for the film began with one villager who desired to tell the story of what happened to take their indigenous language away and what they might do to revive it, and evolved, through the making of the film, into a community dialogue.
Community Story and Film will actively share the process involved in making a collaborative documentary. From examples of our work to ideas from the workshop participants we are to explore listening for initial seed ideas, gathering materials, following story threads, developing theme based log notes, collaborative choosing of clips to create a storyboard, building the rough draft and the final steps of community feedback to the final film.
Let It Grow Back
DVD/NTSC/22min
There were all kinds of history about the villages, the people, but nothing on where we started loosing our language, where we came up against this wall.
—Herman Moonin Jr.
The indigenous Alutiiq language hangs in a frail balance for survival between a handful of fluent elders and a mix of ambivalent and interested youth in the small coastal Alaskan village of Port Graham. In a story that mirrors similar tales of language loss among indigenous peoples worldwide, villagers were punished in school for speaking in their first language, Alutiiq. Following a small museum’s focus on exhibits that are story-centered and co-developed with its local communities, staff traveled by small boat to the village of Port Graham, to ask villagers what stories they wanted to share about their culture and their community. Herman and others wanted to tell what happened to their language and look at ways they might bring it back. In the summer of 2004, this idea blossomed into a collaborative film project between the village and the Pratt Museum. Working together, gathering images, memories and stories from villagers of all ages, from fluent elders to new learners, the goal was to co-create a 20-30 minute collaborative community based documentary film. Let It Grow Back （Kiputmen Naukurlurpet）, became a process for discovery, a vehicle for villagers to voice their keen sense of loss and anger, and a catalyst for discussion among elders and youth.
Our people need language to be grounded to our culture it is very important, otherwise you have a spirit out there that is not at peace. To be really grounded you need your language, to be who you are, what you are, that is how important I think our language is.
—Walter Meganack, Jr. Alutiiq elder
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