SSIFFF 2018 Filmmaker Newsletter #3

This was originally sent out in the Southern States Indie FanFilmFest newsletter in September 2018.

Dodging Bullets breaks new ground in form and in its subject matter. The filmmakers offer a series of largely episodic stories, intimately documented, about Native American individuals who have been impacted by ethnic genocide in the United States. These episodic narratives are joined narratively in an analysis of how each of these events has contributed to an ongoing experience of unresolved historical trauma for many in the Native American community, in which many traumatized individuals and communities epigenetically transmit unresolved trauma to future generations…

An interview with Bob Trench, a non-Native and one of four co-directors of the feature documentary Dodging Bullets

IME: The term “genocide” is one most Americans like to apply to Nazi Germany among others but a growing number are facing the fact that our country committed genocide as well, and that it’s repercussions are very much alive still.

BT:  When I was in my teens, I drove alone out to Wounded Knee, South Dakota in order to see life in Indian Country. At the memorial, I got out of my car to experience a part of history that I knew little about. I had grown up in the 60’s and my understanding of Native American history was primarily based on two men; Christopher Columbus, who was portrayed as a great man who deserved his own holiday and Jim Thorpe, a sports hero and one of the only Native American biographies found in my grade school library. Little did I know that my lack of knowledge could have gotten me killed. While at the Wounded Knee memorial, i was chased at gun point by three men for just looking around. I have often thought to myself that I dodged a bullet that day.

I ran across a man named Raymond White Tail Feather in Montana and when I told him about my experience at Wounded Knee, he told me that I was naive not to understand why this happened and that I needed to learn the truth for myself. Not the “truth” taught in history books, but the truth about: first contact, relocation, the Dawes Act, and the boarding school era. He said only until I learned about these events, would i be able to understand why i was chased at gun point.

It is well known that Native Americans have endured horrible traumas in their collective history that they are still working to overcome. This film hopes to build an understanding that the struggles the indigenous people of North America face today may be caused by the trauma that their ancestors faced many generations ago. It has only been recently discovered that traumatic events of past generations may cause epigenetic changes in the DNA and those DNA changes are passed down from generation to generation.