Cree singer and songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie was already a public figure internationally known for her anti-war activism when she appeared on Sesame Street, with frequent segments on the show from 1976-1981. She reached a huge audience; by 1979, nine million children watched the show daily. Although Sainte-Marie isn’t often included in histories of Indigenous visual media, she should be—her screen work was ubiquitous, easy to see, and part of a massive surge in public television programming in the United States. Drawing on the history of Indigenous screen images and public rhetorics of Indian child welfare, Hearne tells a new story about Indigenous women’s short-form media activism in the 1970s, centering an Indigenous televisual imaginary that
connects instruction with care.
Joanna Hearne is the Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where her research focuses on Indigenous media studies, archival recoveries of Indigenous presence in cinema history, and contemporary digital storytelling and animation. She also served as the founding director of the Digital Storytelling Program at the University of Missouri and is the author of two books—Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising—and co-editor of the new collection The Films of Wallace Fox.
This talk is the first in a series on De-Centering Film, Television, and Theatre.