One of the many Native journalists who attended this year’s Native American Journalists Association Conference in Phoenix was Nancy Marie Spears of El Reno, Oklahoma.
Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma
In February, the United States passed the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19. The pandemic has hit Indigenous communities particularly hard. In some tribal nations, the virus has taken first language speakers and the culture bearers who hold knowledge that marks the tribal nation s identity. That s especially true for the Kiowa Tribe in Southwest Oklahoma.
Vernon Cy Ahtone, a Kiowa elder and culture bearer, has some insight into why tornadoes happen. Tornado happens because Saynday was coming along one time and he saw all these things going on and he didn t see many more. And so there was this one particular place that he wanted to concentrate on. So he sent a big wind to them.
March 15, 2021
Tom Hanks gets his picture taken with the Kiowa cast and elder Dorothy WhiteHorse on the New Mexico set of “News of the World.” (Photo courtesy of Lynda DeLaune)
“I can look you in the eye and just about tell sincerity in somebody,” said Kiowa elder Dorothy WhiteHorse DeLaune, who built an enduring friendship with a young German actress on a New Mexico movie set.
“I knew she was a special child, there was nothing snobby or anything,” WhiteHorse, 88, said of Helena Zengel, who was 10 at the time. “If she found me on the set, she’d come over and get her little chair and sit with me.”
Universal Pictures
by Rebecca Keegan
January 23, 2021, 10:00am PST Paul Greengrass’ drama, starring the actor as a post-Civil War CNN, has all the hallmarks of a classic Western, but its message of hope amid turbulence proves to be timely.
After he finished his most recent film,
22 July, about a family caught up in right-wing extremism and the domestic terrorist attacks in 2011 in Norway, Paul Greengrass was plagued by a question. The world is so bitterly divided, Greengrass says he asked himself. What is the road out of this going to look like for our children?
To find the answer, Greengrass ended up looking backward, to a story set in post-Civil War Texas, the backdrop of his latest film,