About the Project:

 

Inspired by an Indigenous resilience to violence, settler allies, Jessica Larrabee and Andy LaPlant from the music group She Keeps Bees, and Mallory Amirault, teamed up to collaborate on their politically driven song “Greasy Grass”, recalling The Battle of Little Bighorn.

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The involvement of youth is a fundamental component in the creation of this project and is a sentiment shared by all contributing collaborators. We believe our generation is responsible for providing spaces and opportunities for youth to engage and exercise their creative and cultural voices while creating work that can foster sincere symbiotic cultural relations between people and the land and to instill this for future generations. To do this, we offer our service in the form of education and through this project, the arts. Working with Shannon Less, the English department head and Kyle Ross from the Aboriginal Education Enhancement program at Britannia Secondary School, my team is facilitating a day-long research field trip to our student-led film set, where students will have the opportunity to meet with successful musicians, participate in conversations centered around urgent socio-political subject matter (oil & water) and participate as actors. We believe this immersive form of education can help to nurture young minds with expanded encouragement to realize their own potent power.

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As a music video, Mallory Amirault, band members, Jessica Larrabee and Andy LaPlant from She Keeps Bees and students from Britannia Secondary School interrogated their relationship to oil, emphasizing the power that exists within our youth, the water, the land and its resources.

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As emergent artists, we want to gain broader experience working with people from diverse creative/cultural backgrounds as well as building our professional resume and relationships. With that in mind, we’ve been able to partner with HAVE Culinary Training Society, a culinary school that provides food service job training and culinary placement opportunities to people who experience barriers to employment. The students at HAVE volunteered to make the chocolate bullets for our video, as well as cater the field-research trip where we will be hosting approximately thirty people. After meeting the students, everyone is excited to have an opportunity that offers experience working with culinary arts in a field outside of the culinary world and building their resume. While at the end of this project, we’ll have a film to show, the real work lives in the conversations, interactions and engagement with each other and what we learn from those experiences and learn about the collaboratively dynamic environment that film provides.

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In Summary | From the Director:

 

Initially, this project followed the concept of “eating the bullets of warfare” to highlight an Indigenous resilience to violence as it relates to oil and water. Moving forward to the technical rebar of this concept, I quickly realized its strength was on paper as a metaphor, rather than its symbolic rendering on screen. Thinking of the film as a poem, I worked to refine the elements already embedded in the project and in our props to push the concept into something metaphorically stronger for the screen. The peaceful confrontation against oil and the affirmation of water was upheld, as our consumptive relationship between these two resources was distilled into a shot list that allowed for the lighting and props to do the heavy conceptual lifting.

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Also benefiting from this shift in visual rendering, was that the youth visiting our set were able to have complete creative license regarding how they interpreted their own relationship to oil and/or water on screen and allowed myself and my cinematographers to support their creative choices. Watching them critically interpret complex socio-political subject matter (oil and water) into a creative concept was encouraging and rewarding both personally and as a director. Perhaps it was because of the subject matter we were undertaking, but everyone on set seemed to tap into the importance of what we were doing and held such benevolent energies in their commitment to see it through. There seemed to be an unspoken collective sense to hold both playfulness and professionalism on screen and off, making our time on set together a heartening experience. It was a complete joy to work with everyone involved and I hope there will be many more projects in the future that are inspired to uphold diversity as wholeheartedly as this one did.

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From Jessica Larrabee of She Keeps Bees:

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Coming together to work on this video, Jessica shared how she came to learn of the Battle of Greasy Grass and her feelings of discomfort given the one-sidedness of American histories.

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I was introduced and wanted to learn more about Native American history after reading Black Elk Speaks. I took it with a grain of salt since its controversial for being an account from a non-native and not necessarily reflective of Lakota beliefs. Around that time, I watched the PBS series We Shall Remain, which astounded me. How we as Americans benefit from stolen land as a result of what was essentially the American Holocaust, as the nazis used the Native American assimilation camps as a model for concentration camps. The historical narrative Americans have inherited is one-sided, narrow and self-serving. I didn't learn much of anything about Native cultures in school.    

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As a song-writer, an emphasis of oral histories seemed to resonate with Jessica and allowed a more nuanced understanding of her own intentions when it comes to music and song-writing, especially as she explores the Indigenous history that goes amiss in most American minds and education. 

 

The tradition of Native oral history and the US government's account of this battle are different. Oral historical accounts are creating more accuracy. Recently I found Custer's death and body mutilation are contested. Unfortunately, I misplaced an account of removing Custer's eyeballs, because I can't find the source for the image I used.  I think this proves my American unconscious colonialism ruining my honest intention of wanting to learn and share this history. The song Greasy Grass came to me from the shock of trying to process my country's shameful history. I thought the story of the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore are important and needed more attention, as I never knew how we acquired it and the audacity of carving our leaders faces into such a sacred place.  

 

When the students at Britannia Secondary School arrived on set, She Keeps Bees played a private set for them, including their political songs Washichu and Greasy Grass. The band spoke with the students about the importance of digging deeper into our shared histories and the ways in which we can creatively respond to the violence that often resides there. To wrap up our time on set, She Keeps Bees brought out some badass Standing Rock merch for the students with the following information: 

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The anniversary of The Battle of Greasy Grass is June 25-26.  The Protect the Sacred stickers I shared with the students are from this guy Aaron Huey who organized the Amplifier Foundation and shot the video posted below about the anniversary. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-battle-of-little-bighorn-was-won-63880188/

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