Documentaries

Documentaries have always been important to me. I'm not really sure why, but they've always seemed interesting to me. Personally I love ones that tackle controversial issues like activism. That probably has something to do with the fact that my dad was an activist. He was very involved in the American Indian Movement, which as a national organization was put on the FBI watch list. Many radical organizations were put on that list in the 70s, which is when they were most active. 

I have a poster for a documentary hanging in my room. The Documentary is called Incident at Ogala. It is the story of Leonard Peltier. In 1975, 2 FBI agents were killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation. This occoured only a few weeks after the Occupation of Wounded Knee, which was a peaceful protest where we occupied wounded knee to remember the famous battle. The Documentary tells the story of what really happened that day, and how Leonard Peltier was falsely accused.

The poster actually belonged to my dad, but I took it when I went through his old posters over the summer.

Documentaries are important. They show lives that we might not get to see normally, and they raise awareness for issues that the general public doesn’t tend to think about. In a way, documentaries are their own kind of activism. They come in and show what is really happening, and can be built in a way that exposes things people may not have thought about, or that they were misinformed about by mainstream media.