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142 NINE Sharing the Kitchen Naturally Native and Women in American Indian Film vicki: Courtney, these are your great grandparents. courtney: Wow! I didn’t even know I had any. —Naturally Native Following a title that reads “1972,” in the opening shot of Valerie RedHorse ’s Naturally Native, the camera zooms to a folder containing adoption papers and to a black-and-white snapshot of two girls holding a baby. A male voice-over informs the viewer that in 1972 the children are up for adoption. From the voice-over, the viewer learns that the “real mother” has died: “It was the alcohol that killed her” (Naturally). Like The Business of Fancydancing and House Made of Dawn, among others, Naturally Native takes as its point of departure the death of Indian characters who will nevertheless have significant roles throughout the film. The opening scene at the adoption agency is merely the first instance of how Naturally Native makes explicit, self-conscious use of photography to challenge the legacy of Native Americans in photographs as objects without context rather than fully contextualized as subjects. The black-and-white still represents “living” Indians and makes explicit that although the mother has died, the children survive. Moments after this introductory sequence, the viewer discovers that the photograph is of the film’s three adult leads, taken when they were children some twenty-six years before the film’s present action. The film’s use of the photograph to anticipate its subsequent focus on the adult presence of these three women is thus similar to the use of photographs in The Exiles and Medicine River, for example. Such use of a photograph provides the Native filmmaker one method of talking back to a history of visual (mis)representation and appropriation. The opening anticipates the film’s final scene when Charlie (Charlie Hill), the Viejas museum curator, shows the sisters a photograph of their grandparents. Vickie’s daughter Courtney also looks on: vickie: Courtney, these are your great-grandparents. courtney: Wow! I didn’t even know I had any. (Naturally Native) Naturally Native 143 That is, she had not known of them because her mother Vickie herself had not had access to knowing them until this moment. The curator has the film’s final words as the group stands looking at the photo album, words spoken to Courtney (Courtney Red-Horse Mohl): “Welcome home,” he says. In this way the film comes full circle, beginning and ending with snapshots. In the beginning, before the film’s present action, they are young girls forced to leave their reservation home, and by the end of the film the community brings the adult women back into its fold. They are home. Naturally Native tells the story of the three women as they attempt to start their own business producing and selling health and beauty products based on tribal recipes. The eldest, Vickie (Valerie Red-Horse, also writer, codirector , and coproducer), is married with two children and is living in the suburban house she and her sisters have inherited from their non-Indian adoptive parents. The other two sisters, Karen and Tanya, are single. Karen (Kimberly Norris Guerrero) has just finished her mba and is looking for a job; Tanya (Irene Bedard) has had a short career as a model and actress. Both are living with Vickie, her husband, and their two children. The plot consists of a series of the women’s encounters with various potential moneylenders as they seek funding to start up their business. After three dead ends, they return to their roots on the reservation, where they and their parents are remembered and where they receive a loan from the Viejas tribal council. The film follows the brief 1972 backstory of the opening sequence with another title “present” and a scene throughout which Vickie’s husband, Steve Bighawk (Pato Hoffman), walks through a crowd with his video camera , filming a poolside party in celebration of Karen’s earning her degree. The film immediately puts a video camera in an Indian character’s hands, and as in The Business of Fancydancing, such a move makes explicit from the outset that Native people are in control of the filming and the telling of the story. There is an immediate acknowledgment of the existence and importance of visual sovereignty. At the same time that it demonstrates who is in control of the camera, the scene calls immediate attention to the artifice of film. That is, the...

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