CILAS Event: Owners of the Water: Conflict and Collaboration Over Rivers Film presentation (35 minutes) and Q & A session with film maker Laura Graham

Date: Monday, March 28, 2011

Time: Time: 4:00-5:30 pm

Place: Weaver Room, Institute of the Americas Complex, UCSD

A unique collaboration between two indigenous filmmakers and an anthropologist, OWNERS OF THE WATER is a compelling documentary with groundbreaking ethnographic imagery. A central Brazilian Xavante, a Wayuu from Venezuela, and a US anthropologist, explore an indigenous campaign to protect a river from devastating effects of uncontrolled Amazonian soy cultivation. Xavante and Wayuu are nationally and internationally prominent political actors and both face challenges over water. OWNERS highlights a civic protest showing strategic use of culture to bring attention to deforestation and excessive use of agritoxins in unregulated soy cultivation. The film features a diversity of Xavante opinions and evidence that non-indigenous members of the local population both support and oppose indigenous demands. The film showcases indigenous efforts to build networks among different native peoples and across nations.

The film results from long collaboration between anthropologist Laura Graham and Xavante and more recent collaboration with Wayuu. The Association Xavante Warã, a Xavante organization that promotes indigenous knowledge and ways of living in the central Brazilian cerrado (a spiritually and materially integrated space that Xavante know as ‘ro) and conservation of this unique environment, invited Graham to tell the story of its campaign to save the Rio das Mortes. David Hernández Palmar, a Wayuu (Iipuana clan) from Venezuela, accompanied Graham to meet the Xavante and learn about their struggles over water. After the trip the Xavante and Wayuu filmmakers and the anthropologist made this film based on the ethnographic footage of their intercultural encounters.

Laura R. Graham is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on two prominent and especially politically engaged lowland South American indigenous groups, the Xavante of central Brazil and the Wayuu of Venezuela and Colombia. Her work emphasizes native peoples' use of new media technologies, activities in national and international arenas, and advocacy. She was the past chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human Rights (CfHR) and chaired CfHR’s Task Group on Language and Social Justice. She served as consulting anthropologist on several documentary films on Wayuu and Xavante peoples. She is the author the of Performing Dreams: Discourses of immortality among the Xavante of central Brazil, and has written numerous scholarly articles. The ethnographic documentary film, Owners of the Water: Conflict and collaboration over rivers, is one of several collaborations with Wayuu and Xavante filmmakers.

For more information on upcoming events, please go to:
http://cilas.ucsd.edu/events/lectures/