Miami University · 2021, 2022
Ethnographic Documentary, Indigenous Climate Change
An ethnographic documentary bringing an Indigenous perspective to climate change, through interviews with Miami Tribe elders.
Role
Researcher & Documentarian
Client
Miami University
Year
2021, 2022
Focus
Ethnographic Research, Documentary, Climate
Overview
Seven Generations Forward is an ethnographic video documentary describing an Indigenous perspective on climate change.
Through interviews with Miami Tribe elders and original musical variation, it explores a journey of indigeneity through the lens of historical sovereignty and survivance.
Context
Created in 2021–2022, the project set out to bring Indigenous voices to the forefront of climate-change discourse, a conversation that often excludes the very people with the most grounded data on how the climate has changed. This community has witnessed and documented environmental change over the last two hundred years, change rooted in colonialism, whose destructive efforts disrupted long-standing relationships with the land and set off the domino effect now termed "climate change." Their relationship with the environment goes well beyond the surface: they have preserved the names of each Indigenous plant species and their interconnected relationships with the community, with animals, and with one another. As the documentary details, when one part of that web is affected, the entire web of relationships is affected. Even the trees and plants themselves are named in the credits, an act of agency and respect borne of that attention to relationality.
Impact
An ethnographic documentary that brings an Indigenous perspective into climate-change discourse, framing solution development through historical sovereignty and survivance.
Approach
Conducted ethnographic interviews with Miami Tribe elders.
Wove original musical variation into the documentary's narrative.
Edited interviews and footage into a film exploring sovereignty and survivance.
Lessons learned
What I'd carry forward.
Minority voices belong in the discourse, they're potential goldmines for innovation and solution engineering.
Indigenous communities hold knowledge that isn't being used but could greatly help efforts that affect us all, like climate change.
Indigenous knowledge is multifaceted and goes beyond storytelling, it carries information-rich density through language, cultural knowledge, and the intergenerational transmission of that knowledge.
For UX: this taught me to look beyond surface-level qualitative research, to dig deeper and question not only the people I interviewed, but the definitions and biases I didn't know I was carrying.
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