Telling the tale The Narragansetts’ side of the story BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Bearing witness The curse of social invisibility comes up a lot when speaking to the makers of In the Shadow of the Crow: The Legacies of the Narragansetts. "The Narragansetts, the Native American people, are invisible to the students — they don’t even know they exist," said its director, Leslie Langley. "They didn’t even realize there was a reservation here," added Alexia Kosmider, the producer. They were speaking at the University of Rhode Island’s Providence campus. About 10 years ago, the two of them took the same URI course on Native American literature, and for the past five years Kosmider has been teaching that same course each spring in Providence. When she asks incoming classes who among them knows a Native American person, the vast majority say they’ve had no contact, have never met one. "Ninety percent — unless they were Native Americans or lived in South County, no one knew there was a reservation, a federally recognized tribe in Rhode Island," Kosmider, said. "And that made me distraught." As a result, her approach in teaching the course has been to do more than rely on books — she also conducts field trips to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum over the border in Stonington and to the Narragansett reservation in Charlestown. However, "I said they’re not getting it — I’m sending them to powwows but they really need to see a film." With one exception, existing educational films were centered on Native Americans of other areas, mainly the plains Indians. At first, an application for seed money for the film, a grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, was almost rejected. A documentary on the Narragansetts had been done in the 1980s, the filmmakers were reminded. But in that documentary, historians were the talking heads, and the proposed film would use Indians themselves as authorities. "It’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done — writing a book seems easier," said Kosmider, the author of Tricky Tribal Discourse: The Poetry, Short Stories and Fus Fixico Letters of Creek Writer Alex Posey, a 1998 hardcover publication that resulted from her URI doctoral dissertation. Langley has a background in making videos, including one that got an Emmy for Outstanding Public Service Announcement, so she was a good person to tap for such a project. Langley said that what made the project come alive was the smoke shop incident. "It was, to me, such an outrageous thing that happened to these people," she declared. The incident took place in July 2003, 13 days after the Narragansetts began selling tax-free cigarettes on tribal land in Charlestown. State police stormed the shop and arrested eight members of the tribe, some of whom resisted. The filmmakers went to a protest rally. "We got excited, because we saw this as a connection to the civil-rights [movement]," Kosimer said. They obtained television footage of the raid from channels 6 and 10 and taped their own interviews on the subject, including with Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas, one of those arrested. Eighteen months later they have a video film about 75 minutes long, which updates the tribe’s situation, such as the ongoing resentment it has faced over the prospect of a casino. Langley sees controversies over the tribe coming down to money. "Not allowing the Narragansett people the ability to be self-sufficient, whether it be through that little smoke shop or a large casino — for some reason, the state of Rhode Island does not want that to happen. And I think it has to do with money. They do not want the Narragansett people to have their portion of the pie." Although the point of view of the documentary is clearly that of the tribe, the filmmakers say that they called the governor’s office 10 or 12 times to request a spokesperson, but were unsuccessful. They will include a disclaimer to that effect in the final cut. One consequence of controversies in the news about the Narragansetts, whether over the police raid or casino prospects, is that awareness about the tribe increases. The filmmakers discussed meeting four young Narragansett men whom they spoke with both before and after the post-raid rally. "They dress like you and I, and so people would just assume that they were just young men of color," Kosmider said. "After the rally — they had Narragansett T-shirts on — people were [gesturing] thumbs-up, saying, ‘Go for it!’ People on the bus were starting to recognize them." And if this documentary has enough screenings and gets into enough classroom courses, recognition might become even easier. — B.R.

There are many things to learn in the simple, unpretentious documentary, In the Shadow of the Crow: The Legacies of the Narragansetts. Designed mainly for classroom use, the film delves into the history of the tribe more thoroughly than schoolbooks do. It tries to convey a sense of what it’s like to be a Narragansett today, in the aftermath of the smoke shop incident two years ago and many Rhode Islanders’ resentment over the possibility of a casino.

Made on a shoestring budget of a few thousand dollars pleaded and granted here and there, this isn’t the polished sort of documentary you will see in a film festival, but it is informative.

The past is prelude to the present, so the right historical detail can inform current events. For example, the animosity between the state of Rhode Island and the tribe gains dimension when you hear an 1880 state report bragging that "their extinction as a tribe has been accomplished," that no tribal members are left. We learn that despite such government efforts, the Narragansetts re-tribalized in 1934. In 1978 the federal government granted them sovereignty as a tribe, along with the 1800-acre Charlestown reservation.

School students are taught that Roger Williams was fair to the tribes he met here, but few know very much about King Philip’s War and the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, which has been relegated to the "unfortunate incident" dustbin of history. But the film succinctly gives the event context and detail.

The background of the massacre involves Metacom (King Philip) forging a tribal confederacy a few years earlier. His son, the sachem Canonchet, didn’t join the alliance until the British put him in an ethical dilemma. They demanded that he hand over all Wampanoags in his territory, whether participants in the war or not, which would mean their being shipped to the West Indies as slaves. Canonchet’s message to them: "No, not a Wampanoag or a paring of a Wampanoag’s nail." So all women and children were sent into the Great Swamp for their protection, and about 1000, including women and children, were killed in the sanctuary. Genocide continued — though the documentary never uses the word — and in a few years only about 200 Narragansetts from a pre-war population of 5000 to 7000 survived.

The 2003 smoke shop incident is central to the documentary, as it is to the tribe today (see sidebar). Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas was among those arrested. On camera he compares his people being arrested on land "sacred to us" to synagogues being invaded by state police. He says he had to talk two members of the tribe, depressed over the incident, out of suicide.

Pam Ellis, a lawyer specializing in Indian rights, says in the film that the smoke shop raid has widespread interest to tribes elsewhere, because the controversy addresses "understanding the nature and scope of tribal sovereignty." The legal question is whether the state needed federal authorization to go onto reservation land, and both sides were arguing the issue in federal court at the time. Ellis says she understands that the tribe would have yielded to federal authority but not to state authority.

In the aftermath of the 1988 Federal Indian Gaming Act, which gave theoretical rights for the tribe to have a casino in Charlestown, the prospect could have been the subject of a full-length documentary in itself. But the film keeps that mostly in the background, focusing instead on what it means to be a Narragansett in such contentious times. Darrell Waldron, executive director of the Rhode Island Indian Council, speaks not only about racism from outside the tribe but also a "pecking order" within. "Everybody needs somebody else to pick on," he says. "This one’s too black to be native, this one’s too white to be native . . . ." A Narragansett and Wampanoag couple, Michael and Gunise Bliss, tell how their 10-year-old daughter stopped dancing and "went out of the circle" at a powwow ceremonial dance when she was accused of being "a wannabe." They go on to talk about the values of being traditional. As Guinise declares, "We know who we are."

In the Shadow of the Crow: The Legacies of the Narragansetts can help the rest of us come closer to that understanding.

In the Shadow of the Crow will be shown at the following times and places:

On Sunday, March 13 at 1 p.m. at Brown University’s Smith-Buonanno Hall, Brown and Cushing streets, Providence

On Friday, April 8 at 6 p.m at Rhode Island Indian Council, 807 Broad Street, Providence.

On Monday, April 18 at 7 p.m. at the URI CCE campus, 80 Washington Street, Providence.