It’s our job to film people and to make them fully human in the eyes of others, to help them to be part of a dialogue that creates change.
Introduction
Ramona Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. I first encountered Emerson’s work when I saw a trailer for The Mayors of Shiprock, a stunning documentary film exploring a group of young Navajos’ engagement with their small New Mexico community. I’ve grown increasingly enamored with Emerson’s devotion to telling complex and personal stories regardless of their sell-ability. Emerson features youth activists fighting bordertown violence, Navajos who are also doctors, lawyers, or forensic scientists, and women taking back their power. Her desire to create space for marginalized people to share their own stories, whether in film or in writing, is the animating principle of every project she undertakes. By looking beyond the interest of mainstream media, she aims to question and redefine the expectations of Native cultural identity.
Emerson has over two decades of experience working as a professional videographer, writer, and editor. She’s been an Emmy nominee, a Sundance Native Lab Fellow, a Time-Warner Storyteller Fellow, a Tribeca All-Access Grantee, and a WGBH Producer Fellow. Emerson currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her husband/producer Kelly Byars run their production company, Reel Indian Pictures.
My mom and grandma were strong women, but I had never seen any Navajo film that wasn’t about a great man or a medicine man. I wanted to tell stories about awesome women.
Interview
Miranda Perrone: When did you know storytelling would be your life?
Ramona Emerson: I never thought of myself as storyteller, but I grew up watching movies with my mom and grandma. My mom is also an artist, she’s a painter, so I always knew the artistic lifestyle. We survived from her art, but we lived pretty poor because her work wasn’t necessarily what they call Indian art; I remember being young and a lot of people assuming from looking at her paintings that she was a non-Native man. So when she would show up, a lot of people were put off, or shocked, or amazed. She suffered for that, she wasn’t able to sell her art well, or to get a following—she was an Indian artist making the wrong art in Santa Fe.
I didn’t question that much as a child, but eventually it had a huge influence on me. When I was 15 or 16 I stopped taking the fact that most of the Natives I saw in films were on horseback in Monument Valley as a joke and began to process ideas of racial equality. I’d been aware that Black characters were treated the same way—they were usually in jail, or slaves. This question reminded me of my mom’s experience: How do we see ourselves verses how do other people see us? I started to read books about theory and to really think about these questions. That’s when I got irate: when I understood the racial history of film and art, and that people of color are misrepresented because they’re not being represented by themselves. Once I started to pay attention, I knew: that’s what I want to do.
Miranda Perrone: Create space for people of color to represent themselves?
Ramona Emerson: Yes. And women. To help marginalized groups get out of the expectations of how they should be seen, and to create our own image. Witnessing my mom’s painting work had a huge effect on the art I choose to produce. As a Navajo woman, a certain thing was expected from her; back then, they expected her to be a weaver, or a jeweler, or to feature a certain subject matter in her paintings, like a big flock of sheep, or a hogan, or Navajos in the sunset. But that whole idea of creating art for other people to sell, of falling into what other people think you should be, that was just something my mom was never interested in. I took a lot of inspiration from that.
Miranda Perrone: As a woman specifically?
Ramona Emerson: Actually, all of my stories so far (until The Mayors of Shiprock) have been about women—a wildly overlooked population. Men are the focus of a lot of things, and I think that’s a colonial view—to look at everything, including Indigenous cultures, through a male lens. Men are given a lot of power; my stories are my way of giving the power back to the women, of letting them tell their stories and run the show.
It also grew out of the way I grew up, in a household full of women where we did everything ourselves. We didn’t have some guy around to do anything. If something needed to be done, well guess what, we did it. My mom and grandma were strong women, but I had never seen any Navajo film that wasn’t about a great man or a medicine man. I wanted to tell stories about awesome women. These are real stories from real Native women, and it was important to me to give them a chance to be part of the stories we tell. To be the story. Because actually, before white men came in and told our men that they were in charge, the women were in charge here. My stories seek to give this back, to make sure people know that women have power, that women are strong, resilient, and talented. I’ve used stories to help people to meet some of the extraordinary women I know.
Miranda Perrone: That’s beautiful. How did you settle on film as your primary medium?
Ramona Emerson: As far as storytelling goes, I always loved the movies. Still, I didn’t know what I was going to do once I got into college after graduating from a very competitive Catholic preparatory school. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. Then my mom took me to see a Spike Lee movie and the cinematography caught my eye—the way he created motion within the frame while you and the subject remained still, but the world moved around you. There were also these crane shots, and floating shots, shots where people were walking down the street but it looked as if they were just floating. I guess I’d never noticed you could do that, and that different kinds of shots create different kinds of psychology. I thought, “That is just so interesting that you can do that, that you can psychologically affect people just by mounting the camera in a certain way or by framing the shot differently.”
Miranda Perrone: What was it like when you began to work in film?
Ramona Emerson: I’ve realized that Hollywood is a fickle place. It really doesn’t matter how talented you are or how hard you work; it’s about who you know and what kind of connections you have—like most things.
It brings me back to my mom and to what she went through. It demands the question: What do you want to do? Do you want to have success, do you want to have that feather in your cap, knowing you have to sell yourself out to get it? Is it worth turning away from the reality of where you really want to go? Not for me. You have to pick your battles, and I quickly realized that fame and fortune and having Hollywood people being excited about your project is not the end-all and be-all. In fact, it undermines being able to freely choose the stories you tell.
Hollywood is a strange world, but I also know there are still so many stories that need to be told. There are documentary projects I’ve begun that I know I need to do, and I will. They’re important, and they’re controversial, and people won’t want to fund them, but that’s fine. I’ve dealt with that for a long time; I’ll keep finding ways to tell the stories that need to be told.
It’s our responsibility to make this art so that the world can see us outside of this box that they’ve created.
Miranda Perrone: What kind of stories need to be told?
Ramona Emerson: Where are the stories with a Native doctor or lawyer? We know these people exist, they’re part of our families and our communities. But the film industry seems to be happy to keep us in that box of living on a reservation and living in poverty, of not having a good education. While that is true in a lot of cases, there’s also a whole other part of me, and of Native culture, that’s contemporary, a part that I don’t think people tend to be aware of. People don’t realize there are women out there running businesses who are sharp as a whip, but that’s what made me realize that we need to expose this by telling stories that reflect what we see, even if it’s something that the financiers don’t understand or don’t want to fund. It’s our responsibility to make this art so that the world can see us outside of this box that they’ve created. That’s how it started for me, when I asked myself why this hasn’t already been done, why we’re perpetuating these stereotypes. It started with a need to change this idea.
Why do people want these conforming, mainstream stories? I often get told that in my stories there’s not enough conflict. My hackles go up because I know that means where’s the poverty, where’s the alcoholism, where is that white eye in the sky? The rule of thumb is that 10 to 15 percent of poverty porn is necessary to get the audience to care, to feel the tension. I got tired of asking for money in this context, and we sometimes end up just doing post-production funding after editing the whole project ahead of time ourselves.
Miranda Perrone: How have these internal and external expectations influenced your work?
Ramona Emerson: The idea of being a Native or Navajo filmmaker as opposed to just being a filmmaker weighs heavily on me, and the same goes for being a Native writer as opposed to just being a writer. This kind of thing is never really an issue unless you’re Brown or you’re Black and then you’re not just an author anymore, you’re a Black author, or a Mexican author, etc.
It’s very difficult. It’s a double-edged sword. You’re always going to be given that peg, whether it fits or not. But in the end it doesn’t matter—it’s part of who I am. I am Navajo, I did come from that world, and if that’s what you want to see when you’re introducing me or whatever, that’s fine.
Still, when people are looking at you, they expect a certain thing. Why do Native-written books about alcoholism take off and garner attention in a way that raw memoirs from a single Native mother don’t, even if they’re on the bestseller list? People want to hear about pow wows and shamans.
Photo courtesy Reel Indian Pictures.
Miranda Perrone: Is this what you mean when you say you want to “redefine the expectations of Native cultural identity?”
Ramona Emerson: Yes, exactly.
I’ve tried to do this, for example, in the film The Mayors of Shiprock. It’s about young Navajos working to help their community in Shiprock, New Mexico even though most other people have written it off. With The Mayors of Shiprock, I hope not only to tell a nuanced story that reflects a complex reality, but I also want to make all the old Navajos around the reservation who are sitting around doing nothing feel like shit. I do! I want them to see these Native kids who have nothing, who have no money, but who get up every day and find ways to make their lives and their communities better.
If you want to make change, make change. There’s no excuse why you can’t. I wanted the community of Shiprock to appreciate and love these kids too, because often even in their own community they were being dissed. There was a “why me” syndrome running rampant there, and I hope our film can reenergize some people, even give them a kick in the butt.
But as time went on, I realized that the project went even further than that. We were doing a new thing in documentaries: creating a positive story in a circular story structure. Making a film that starts here, goes around, and then comes back to here. This made people think I was a bad film maker, and that I didn’t know about story structure.
“I know all about your story structure, I’m telling you about Navajo story structure,” I said. There’s a method to the madness—things start at home, and then they come back. You always come back to where you started. Home is where your umbilical cord is buried. No matter how big your head gets, or how much money you make, you always come back. That’s the story for me, that’s the story of a culture, of our culture, and telling it that way became extremely important, even subversive, to me.
Miranda Perrone: But you haven’t stuck to “just” filmmaking, have you?
Ramona Emerson: I’ve actually been writing just as long as I’ve been making film. The difference is I never thought of myself as a writer until recently. In the beginning, it was easier for me to tell a story with images than on paper. I used to call myself a lazy storyteller for that reason, I would have rather picked up a camera and be done in five minutes than write a 20-page essay to tell you the same thing.
But as I got older and more involved in the film industry, I became exhausted from working so hard with so little support. I felt kind of cheated by the whole process, like the film world had abused me, and I was tired of all the fake crap. I got really despondent. So I started picking up my writing again, and I don’t know what happened. I started writing these short stories, and people kept encouraging me—I was blown away that people were actually interested in what I was writing about. The stories I started telling about myself morphed into little chapters here and there that eventually turned into a book during a low-residency program at the Institute of American Indian Arts that I attended.
All of the sudden, I was invited into the world of the written word, into an intellectual world that I really enjoyed. It was like my brain was getting massaged, and I was getting the intellectual stimulation I could never get in the film industry where it was constant strife, misrepresentation, and trauma. Entering the literary world and spending time with great writers, listening to their stories, it totally changed my mindset. I realized that in this medium I can tell any story I want, and I don’t need a budget. No one tells me, “Hey, you can’t put that in there, it’s not in your budget.” I could make up a new world with utter freedom to tell the story I wanted to tell, and it didn’t matter if it ever got made into a film or not.
I think we were supposed to have 50 pages of our novel at the end of that MFA. I had a whole book. That’s how much inspiration I pulled from there.
I found that using words in this way gave me the freedom to go so much deeper into how it feels to be a Native person living in a contemporary society.
Miranda Perrone: What other differences have you noticed between writing and filmmaking as storytelling mediums?
Ramona Emerson: Even though I may only need five minutes to shoot a film scene, I’ve realized how much can be missing from those five minutes that a 20-page story could tell in a way that simply doesn’t translate to film. Written work can include so many more details and nuances about the character, where they come from, and why they are a certain way—details that you can’t put into a film in the same way.
I actually started to study how books are turned into movies and realized over and over again that the book is so much better! This made me so excited that I started siting down in the evening to write after everyone went to bed. By one in the morning, I’d have 20 pages that just poured out. My writing began to take over every moment; even though we were making films and doing other projects, I was constantly thinking about my book and about how my characters were developing. I found that using words in this way gave me the freedom to go so much deeper into how it feels to be a Native person living in a contemporary society. My book tests the whole theory of why we don’t truly see contemporary Navajos, and it allows me to work to change that.
Miranda Perrone: Can you tell me more? Or are you sworn to secrecy?
Ramona Emerson: I’m writing about a Native woman who works in forensics. The book grew out of my own experiences with the same job: the first few years were scary, and my grandma always wanted me to come home and see the medicine man. Despite this, as I got further into the work and spent more time focused on documenting everything correctly, the bodies became an image. It’s work, and it becomes that.
It was only later that I realized I could write a book about this. First I thought I’d make a documentary about Navajo cops dealing with seeing dead bodies, but then I thought no, I know this story and I’m going to write this book based on my own experience. I wrote what I know, because I knew that there were very few other Navajos who could or would write this book. So I wrote it, and it’s called Shutter. It’s the first book in a trilogy, and it will be published with SOHO Books in 2022 before being adapted into a screenplay.
In Farmington, there’s a high school tradition called rolling where students pick up Navajos, give them a few beers, and then throw them off a cliff. I’m not kidding.
Miranda Perrone: Wow. Are you satisfied with the final result?
Ramona Emerson: It was important to me to share a contemporary story of a Navajo woman living today. Being Navajo is a small part; the book is about a woman and her work. That’s what’s different. It’s not about creating a Navajo persona, or about delegating myself to show a certain way of life for a woman. I have a responsibility to Navajo people, and to all people, to tell the truth. I want people to see that Navajos are dynamic and that they do a million different things. I show some of them. If I had more money I’d show a lot more, but this is what I could afford.
Miranda Perrone: Are there any other projects you’re working on?
Ramona Emerson: I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate right now. We’re working on four different films. One that I’m particularly excited about is a docu series that only recently got funding, though I’ve been working on it for ten years. It’s about bordertown violence in the Navajo Nation, centered on four communities: Winslow, Farmington, Flagstaff, and Albuquerque. These four bordertowns depend on the Navajo Nation but treat them terribly. From police brutality to unresolved murders and rapes as well as environmental racism, the police just don’t care when things happen to Navajo people.
In Farmington, there’s a high school tradition called rolling where students pick up Navajos, give them a few beers, and then throw them off a cliff. I’m not kidding. And people just don’t care, that’s what it comes down to. Our series is focused on the people who are fighting to change things, it shows how people in these communities are working to protect lives and support equal access to basic human rights.
These stories aren’t poverty porn, people know about that, but they are about how people are making solutions. We all know what’s happening, but how can we fix it? How can we help in a permanent, forward-thinking way? It’s our job to film people and to make them fully human in the eyes of others, to help them to be part of a dialogue that creates change. No one needs pity, they need change.
It’s a tough film to make. And the camera work is taking its toll on my body. I’m almost 50, maybe it’s a good time to move further into writing.
Miranda Perrone is a writer, philosopher, map-maker, and outdoor educator with an MS in Environmental Science and Policy and a BA in Philosophy. Issues related to climate change, animal rights, and the preservation of wild places are of particular interest to Miranda, whose varied work seeks to connect and inspire in service of socioecological change. She edits Terrain.org’s podcast series, Soundscapes.
Header photo of Shiprock by Rick Fox, courtesy Shutterstock.
