The documentary “Who She Is” just took home the Heartland Emmy Award for the “Best Documentary - Cultural” category. The film came out in 2022 and humanizes the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Crisis (MMIP) on the Wind River Reservation.
“Who She Is” uses animation to tell the story of four women: Sheila Hughes, Lela C’Hair, Jocelyn Watt and Abbi Washakie. As Northern Arapaho co-producer and co-director Jordan Dresser explained, it’s not just about what happened to them. It’s about how they lived, who they were and what they loved.
“We really wanted to highlight their lives and that's the focus,” he said.
The documentary team collaborated with the families of Washakie, Hughes and Watt to tell their stories, and worked with C’Hair directly. C’Hair is the only woman featured in the documentary who is still living today.
“ Thank you to the families. We worked so closely with them and we wouldn't have done it in any other way,” said Sophie Barksdale, the film’s other co-producer and co-director. “ The way Jordan and I wanted to approach this project was always going to be deeply collaborative and always had to be done walking alongside the families.”
Dresser said winning the award is a big honor and helps to spread more awareness about the issue.
“ There's some people who haven't had their lives touched by MMIR [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives], but this is a way for them to have an entry point,” he said. “In watching the film, they could say, ‘Okay, I know these women and I know their stories.’”
The Removal of the Not Invisible Act Commission Report
Dresser said it’s also time to move beyond raising awareness and hold lawmakers accountable around the issue.
“We really need legislation that protects these individuals and funding opportunities and the things that are needed to help mitigate the problems that we have,” he said.
Dresser served on the Not Invisible Act Commission a few years ago, alongside other tribal leaders, federal agencies, families and survivors. The commission was created by the Not Invisible Act, which was passed by Congress in 2020, and the group was tasked with creating a list of recommendations on how to best address the MMIP crisis.
But that work hit a snag when the Trump administration took the commission’s report off the internet this year, even though he signed the act into law in 2020 alongside Savanna’s Act, which sought to improve the federal response to the MMIP crisis.
“ Some of us have physical copies of that report, but you can't find it anywhere online and that's huge,” said Dresser. “If you're wanting to say that you support this, but then yet you want to erase that, that makes no sense at all.”
A press release from the 2020 signing states the following: “These two bills reinforce many actions the President has already undertaken to fulfill his promise that Missing and Murdered Native Americans are no longer forgotten.”
Taking the report offline was part of a broader effort by the administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion materials and policies from federal webpages. But Dresser said tribes don’t fall under that umbrella, given their status as sovereign nations and their government-to-government relationship with the United States.
“That needs to be honored as opposed to basically erasing not only a key report, but erasing all those voices and all those victims,” he said.
Barksdale echoed Dresser’s sentiment and called the report’s absence a “crushing blow” to the MMIP movement.
“It's a report that exists, it's going to take a click of a button to put it back on the website and be accessible for people to be able to engage at a wider level, which is important,” she said. “The grassroots community groups are doing what they can, but it has to be a systemic change to really make an impact.”
Both filmmakers advocated for people to reach out to their representatives and tell them to make the report available again. Other members of Congress have already asked the Department of Justice to restore the document, as reported by the news outlet The Imprint.
Dresser also advocated for updates to the Tribal Law and Order Code on the Wind River Reservation, which is adopted by both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. He served as the chairman for the Northern Arapaho Tribe from 2020 to 2022.
“I think it's adding things such as wording for human trafficking, wording for those different [crimes], because I don't think it exists in there,” he said. “Those are really key things as well.”
What’s Next for “Who She Is”
Both Dresser and Barksdale reflected that the Heartland Emmy Award serves as a sort of bookend for the film’s journey. It’s been broadcasting nationally on PBS for the last year and screened at national and international festivals, including the Native Spirit Film Festival in London, the Worldwide Women’s Film Festival in Scottsdale, Arizona and the Wyoming International Film Festival in Cheyenne.
“ We've had some stations now committed to an encore broadcast. Wyoming PBS is going to play it again [in November],” said Barksdale. “We hope this continues because it is such an important story and these women's stories deserve to be heard and seen.”
She added that there are more community screenings of the film in the works. That includes a talk and showing at the Central Wyoming College Intertribal Education and Community Center on Sept. 10, in partnership with the Riverton Museum.
Barksdale shared that some young people at past screenings said they want to make their own films about the MMIP crisis.
“ Being able to see Jordan [Dresser] as a Native filmmaker and seeing the success that he has brought to the industry and to Native stories, that's amazing for young folk to see themselves up there and know that they can do it, too,” she said. “There shouldn't just be one Native filmmaker. There should be many.”
Dresser thinks he’s one of the first Arapaho tribal members to win any sort of Emmy and said he wants to see the field of storytelling continue to expand.
“ The hope is that we have more Native storytelling and more Native people going into storytelling, whether it be films or newspapers or photojournalism or podcasting,” he said. “I'm just hoping that they do it and it inspires them to not only do it, but also do it in a good way, because it's very important that we tell our stories.”
Dresser just finished co-producing a new documentary called “Generation Warrior,” which debuted at Central Wyoming College earlier this summer and follows eight Native youth from the Wind River Reservation over four years. Barksdale is currently working on a film about Wyoming veterans and what it’s like for them to come back home. The two hope to collaborate again together soon.
