I watched a good movie called Skins the other day, it's about a the relationship between two brothers who're born and raised on the Pine Ridge rez.
As a fiction snob who spends a lot of time thinking about narrative and story it's not a very good movie. The plot is disjointed and strange and the tone whiplashes from fairly serious stuff to being a goofy comedy to being a sappy melodrama. Though the core narrative about these two brothers is good. One's a straightedge cop, one's an alcoholic on his last leg. They fight a lot. They love each other. It's a family story.
But, more importantly, as someone who has visited Pine Ridge, and who has known native people, there's an element of the film that's very true to life to what life is like on the rez. I mean, it's a movie, but reservations in general and Pine Ridge in particular are impoverished legacies of the time white settlers put all the natives in concentration camps that a lot of native people are still stuck in today.
I mean fuck, look at this shit . In the '50s they built a dam on the Missouri River to build a power plant and create Lake Oahe. As a result the Standing Rock Reservation was flooded, losing their most valuable farmland, the wiki says whole towns are underwater. They never received compensation. And that's not to mention the pipeline protests.
I watched a good movie called Skins the other day, it's about a the relationship between two brothers who're born and raised on the Pine Ridge rez.
As a fiction snob who spends a lot of time thinking about narrative and story it's not a very good movie. The plot is disjointed and strange and the tone whiplashes from fairly serious stuff to being a goofy comedy to being a sappy melodrama. Though the core narrative about these two brothers is good. One's a straightedge cop, one's an alcoholic on his last leg. They fight a lot. They love each other. It's a family story.
But, more importantly, as someone who has visited Pine Ridge, and who has known native people, there's an element of the film that's very true to life to what life is like on the rez. I mean, it's a movie, but reservations in general and Pine Ridge in particular are impoverished legacies of the time white settlers put all the natives in concentration camps that a lot of native people are still stuck in today.
I mean fuck, look at this shit . In the '50s they built a dam on the Missouri River to build a power plant and create Lake Oahe. As a result the Standing Rock Reservation was flooded, losing their most valuable farmland, the wiki says whole towns are underwater. They never received compensation. And that's not to mention the pipeline protests.