English professor LeAnne Howe is taking her show on the road quite literally this fall, shifting her venue, if only temporarily, from the classroom to television and movie theaters.
Howe, who is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma as well as an award-winning author, playwright, and scholar who teaches in LAS's American Indian Studies program and in its MFA creative writing program, will premiere, show, and broadcast her new documentary, Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire, at various locations around the country and on public television.
Most PBS affiliate stations will air the documentary during November. (The U. of I. PBS affiliate, WILL-TV, will show it at 9 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 17) The film will premiere on September 29 and 30 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. A special screening will then be held on campus on Thursday, Oct. 26 in Room 66 of the University Library, 1408 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana. Screenings and openings have been scheduled all around the country, Howe says, including in California, New Hampshire, and Oregon.
Howe is both the screenwriter and narrator on Part 2 of the 90-minute Public Broadcasting Service documentary. Part 1 is titled "Indian Country Diaries: Seat at the Drum," and it features journalist Mark Anthony Rolo (Bad River Ojibwa) and his journey to Los Angeles to speak with some of the thousands of American Indian families who were relocated from poor reservations to cities in the last half of the 20th century.
Ten years in the making, the documentary takes Howe to the North Carolina homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians "to discover how their mix of tourism, community and cultural preservation is the key to the tribe's health in the 21st century." Along the way, Howe, who appears as a character throughout the film, says she seeks to reconcile her own "complex identity" as the daughter of a Choctaw woman and a Cherokee man she never knew. Howe describes the film, with which she was involved over the past four years, as "both a national story and a very personal story for me." "It's a journey of trying to understand who we are, where we come from, where we are going. As such, I believe that the film will speak to mainstream audiences everywhere."
She also says the documentary, which is a co-production of Native American Public Telecommunications and Adanvdo Vision, is unique in at least one aspect. "American Indians filming American Indians on this large of a production scale for a national audience is a first." Howe also wrote and co-produced the documentary "Playing Pastime," about American Indian fast-pitch softball and its role in community and personal survival. Three-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker James Fortier was her co-producer. She and Fortier have just entered Playing Pastime in the American Indian Film Festival, which will be held in San Francisco in November. Howe is founder and director of WagonBurner Theatre Troop; her plays have been produced in California, Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. A professional writer for 25 years, she has read her fiction all over the United States and been an invited lecturer in Japan, Jordan, Israel, Romania, and Spain. Howe's first novel, Shell Shaker (2002), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her collection of poetry, Evidence of Red (2005), received the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry in 2006. Miko Kings, an Indian baseball novel set in Ada, Okla., in 1903 and 1969, is forthcoming this fall.
Howe came to Illinois in the fall of 2005 to help create its American Indian Studies program. She says arriving on the campus while it was in the midst of its charged public debates over keeping its "Chief Illiniwek" has been momentous. Having just left a teaching post at the University of Minnesota, home of the oldest American Indian Studies department in the U.S., also has been remarkable. "Coming from the oldest and best to the most fragile and youngest American Indian Studies program was a big step with lots of challenges, lots of excitement, and great potential. I am delighted to be here."
