The Cultural Conservancy - Media Trainings in Digital Storytelling, Oral History and Community Based Ethnography
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| Filmmaker Esther Figuroa with Paiute elder at workshop at Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, Arizona |
“Media is shaping how the future is seen and how the past is remembered. Those with the power to create images, sounds, and words have the ability to influence norms, values, customs, attitudes, and language.” China Ching
TCC offers media trainings to tribes, organizations, and individuals so that they can learn to document, preserve and create stories, history, songs, personal narratives and language using new media tools such as digital audio, digital photography and digital video.
We tailor our media workshops to any level from beginners to advanced and welcome participants of any age, from young adults to elders.
Depending on the needs of the community we deliver trainings that can be one-day to four-days long. By the end of a workshop participants may create a short video or a longer documentary.
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| L. Frank photographing in community garden for media workshop at Round Valley Indian Reservation, California |
Our trainings can cover:
- Digital Storytelling: basic, intermediate or advanced media production and post-production with audio, photography and video. Skills taught include camera shots, angles, and movement, storyboarding, lighting and sound (using various kinds of microphones), and digital editing with i-Movie, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop.
- Media Literacy: understanding message, target audience, representation, and production techniques and values.
- Oral History: creating an oral history project, interviewing techniques and protocols, interviewing in a native context.
- Cultural Protocols: creating culturally relevant release and informed consent forms.
- Purchasing Equipment: we assess and suggest the most appropriate media kit that may include audio, photography and video equipment.
- Creating a Media Lab or Studio: equipment care and storage, inventory and security, access and collaborations.
- Creating a Digital Archive: storage medium formats and backup, indexing and cataloging, access agreements.
Once we deliver a workshop in your community we can provide ongoing consultation and training via telephone, Skype or Tele-conferencing.
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| Media trainer China Ching (right) teaching editing to participant |
To bring a media training to your community, please contact us for workshop rates and ways to collaborate with fundraising to cover the costs. Email: nicola@nativeland.org or call our office at: 415/561-6594.
To see trainers bios please go to TCC Staff and Trainers
Other trainings TCC offers:
- Media Distribution - promoting your communities’ films and media through Internet, film festivals and media distribution channels
- Advanced Oral History methods – interviewing and transcribing
- Cultural Assets Mapping – use oral histories to assess community resources
- Language Trainings – documentation and Total Physical Response (TPR) learning
- Environmental Knowledge –Watershed and Foodshed mapping; documenting history of the land, place-names, and ecological changes
- Healing the Wounds of History – healing intergenerational trauma
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| Workshop Participants learning Photoshop |
On The Importance of Training Native Filmmakers:
By China Ching (TCC Media Trainer)
We live in the first moment since the dawn of mass media that individuals have the ability to produce media, to contribute to the dialogue in their homes, communities, cities, and countries, and by extension, to influence the culture that surrounds them. For Indigenous communities, many of whom have only seen their culture and history recorded by outsiders, the ability to author, shape, and direct media environments means an opportunity for self-determination and self-definition; increased access means an opportunity to promote, renew, and enrich Indigenous cultures from the inside.
To fully support the development of a new generation of Native filmmakers and to sustain the creation of tribally-based field ethnography, comprehensive editing techniques must be learned by Native filmmakers. While “perspective” can be created with a camera, meaning and content are created in the editing room. In order to present a true tribally-based documentation of a community’s history and culture, the essential choices of what to include (and almost more importantly, what not to include), in what order and what manner, and for what audience must be informed by Native knowledge. In this way, Native filmmakers are simultaneously preservers, propagators, and protectors. Native filmmakers must be versed in a variety of editing strategies and techniques and understand how to present information to both Native and non-Native audiences.
Quotes from two young women who took TCC’s media training:
“The overall outcome is far greater than anyone could have expected. By expanding on what we learned in a short time, we can begin to document our cultures on the inside. There is no equivalent of an inside perspective on current realities and issues in Indian Country.”
—Cara McCoy (Chemehuevi)
“I really benefited from your workshop, it gave me a more broad look at film editing and that has really encouraged and excited me to continue on this venture.”
—Bridget Sandate (Chemehuevi), Former Miss Chemehuevi