Indigenous People & Nature in Film

In this assignment, my hope is that by engaging in real critical analysis of a movie representations made by indigenous people themselves (either actors, or writers, or directors, or producers), we can challenge some of our assumptions about indigenous views of nature and perhaps deepen our understanding of what the human-“nature” relationship ought to be. I also want to see you practicing your written communication skills and attempting to make a meaningful argument that’s written in a form that is a pleasure for the reader to read.

A Critical Humanities Essay
One of the most common ways that humans make their worlds meaningful and intelligible (making sense) is by making and talking about various kinds of art. Mass media art, such as movies, are often seen as mere entertainment or meaningless trifles. But they are in fact reproducers of ideologies and cultural codes, and as we interact with and participate in meaning-making with movies, we continue the process of “constructing” the world we live in. In the University tradition, the Humanities (art, literature, music, dance, theater, philosophy, history, etc.) has been where we engage in ongoing arguments about the world and values and perspectives. We can critique and evaluate; have aesthetic experiences of beauty and pleasure; be moved and motivated to act; and generally ask the hard, unanswerable questions that humans tend to ask.

Components of a Good Humanities Essay
Remember that an “essay” is an attempt or a try to understand and explain and communicate something. In a university context, your essays should have a central idea that you’re trying to convince the reader (a thesis) and you should support your reasoning with logic and evidence (in this case, direct evidence from the movies themselves). Here your main goal is to think about the larger issues of our class — nature & culture — through the medium of movies, by interpreting and critiquing. You should let go of some of the bad ways you’ve been taught to write in the past (namely, five paragraph essays, which were designed simply to make teaching writing efficient, NOT to make you good writers), and instead focus on

your voice (how the reader experiences you as they read). Depending on your topic and argument, your voice might include details and perspectives from your home culture. Work to find the balance between being present as the writer in the text on one hand (most readers appreciate this), and being solipsistic or narcissistic on the other hand (most readers hate this).
style (word choice, imagery, sentence structure, the beauty and pleasure that a reader will have reading your essay)
argument (how you build toward or around your main point to convince the reader with evidence, details, and logical reasoning)
structure and organization (what order do you put things in that is both most convincing and most pleasing for the reader)(Note: There is no one right way to structure an essay—but it does need to make sense to a reader, so that is your main concern. Here are some examples of possible essay structures from different cultural norms of argumentation:
an American style, with a thesis up front and then building your case with evidence;
a European style presents a problem or question up front and then gradually answers it, with a thesis at the end;
a Chinese style, which moves in and out and around in a circular fashion moving back and forth between thesis and evidence repeatedly to build the argument;
one possible Indigenous style builds an argument in narrative form; etc.)
coherence (how do I make my essay a unified whole, where every piece is related to each other and to the overall point I want to make). This is ultimately the most important quality of a complete essay, and gives the reader the sense of having interacted with a satisfying read, a whole work with meaning.
Prompt
Narrow down your specific thesis and argument from this broad topic: What can be learned about indigenous people’s perspectives (cultures) on ecosystems (“nature”) from film representations? Write an essay that explores your answer to this question by comparing and contrasting two of the three indigenous films we watched for class (note: not the documentary about representations). Use the concepts and skills you’ve gained in Weeks 1-3 and from the mini-lecture on Representations.
Details
Be sure you’ve watched at least two of this week’s assigned films and have taken notes on them as you’ve watched them (excluding the documentary from Monday).
Support your argument with specific details from the films you analyze, ranging from lines of dialogue, to descriptions of images and sounds, to the raw materials of filmmaking (lighting, color, composition, framing, etc.).
Cite the films (good-enough citations are contained in teh syllabus and modules) and any readings or PDFs you use, using minimal parenthetical citations.
I do not grade on length, but on quality. That said, generally speaking, a paper like this will be somewhere between 3 & 5 pages for most students, using normal fonts and margins, double-spaced.

Required film:
**Embrace of the Serpent (2015, dir by Ciro Guerra)
**Spear (2016, dir by Stephen Page)