The Dull Knifes

Short Synopsis

Guy Dull Knife Jr., a Vietnam veteran, artist, single father, and modern-day Lakota Sioux leader, invokes his family legacy to help raise his 13 children on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of America's poorest communities.

Description/Treatment

PROJECT SUMMARY

The Dull Knifes is a feature length documentary that tells the story – past and present – of a Native American family that has battled to survive on Pine Ridge in South Dakota for over 130 years. It is a family with a rich history that stretches back over five generations, a story itself emblematic of the broader story of the Native American people. The Dull Knifes have been both warriors and peacemakers and have played critical roles in preserving the Lakota culture and defending the Pine Ridge Reservation from destruction through the generations. And, like the very greatest American families, the Dull Knifes have continually answered the call of their people, their land, and their country.

The film will tell us how Guy Dull Knife Jr fought in Vietnam and how his father survived the horror of the trenches in the First World War. We will learn how his grandfather George Dull Knife toured Europe with Buffalo Bill but returned home to find his people denied their culture and language. We will learn how his great-grandfather Chief Dull Knife fought bitterly for the survival of his family and people, leading them on a desperate, 600-mile trek through the Nebraska winter, pursued by starvation and the US Cavalry. This documentary tells the multi-generational saga of a country, a people, and a family in search of its identity, dignity and pride;it is a tale of survival that is extremely relevant at a time when native cultures the world over face annihilation in the face of a dominant,westernized culture.

Today Guy Jr, aged 63, is the current family elder and is a well-known Lakota artist who paints and sculpts - artwork which has been shown in galleries across the country. He has been courted by art collectors and even American Presidents. Guy is also a father of thirteen children and is currently raising seven of them on the family plot outside Kyle on the Pine Ridge Reservation. This documentary film will follow him over the course of a year as he raises his kids there. With unemployment at 89% on the reservation, more than half the population in Pine Ridge live below the poverty line, and youth suicide rates are ten times the national average. It is one of the poorest places in America, and a daunting place to raise a family. Bringing up his children in this environment represents as great a challenge as that faced by any of Guy Jr’s ancestors – a legacy of defiance and survival that stretches back all the way to Battle of Little Bighorn.

Guy Dull Knife Jr. is fighting back by teaching his children the spiritual way of life that has sustained the family in the past. This youngest generation have already lost childhood friends to alcoholism, drugs, suicide and gangs, but their father is teaching them to use their strength of family as a weapon against the despair and poverty that surrounds them. Understanding how and whether Guy is succeeding in this struggle is the central focus of our film. Guy feels that family – shared experience and communal support – is the answer to navigating the challenges of life on the Reservation today. And he also feels that the key to keeping his family together is by using the traditional way of life to inspire the younger generation– not just through overt traditions like the sweat lodge and the Sundance and learning the Lakota language, but also the more subtle ones: a system of values, a way of resolving problems and of celebrating life, the land and the community. For Guy, so many of the problems facing the younger generation of Lakota Indians today stem from a loss of identity; “The kids are growing up not knowing who they are”, Guy tells us. He feels that the historical and continuing attacks on their culture, language, and identity, have been extremely effective and have fractured his people. He is trying to combat the effects of these attacks within his own family by giving his children a strong sense of identity and a great knowledge of their past. 

The coming year will see Guy Jr. embark on an artistic project which will bring this past to life, undertaking a study of key turning points in his family’s history. He plans to produce a series of more than a dozen paintings and will start this fall. Our film seeks to capitalize on this, both observationally documenting the creative process, but also because we are proposing to use Guy’s artistic endeavors as inspiration to tell the history of the family in an unusual and refreshing way – using graphic animation produced by leading Native American artists/animators to illustrate the key historical sections of the family’s story. This is dealt with in more detail in the narrative treatment section.

Overall we feel that this film, given the great many difficulties that face people on the Pine Ridge Reservation, will provide a positive and refreshing take on dealing with these well-known problems, something which is not only overdue, but urgently needed. By making the Dull Knife children a focal point of the film, Native American children across the country will be able to see people they identify with, kids who are dealing with the same problems they deal with, and who have found a way to navigate the challenges they face. This is something that Native American kids do not often have the chance to see on television or in school, and we feel that PBS, with its broad reach and educational priority, is the ideal forum for the Dull Knife family to tell its story. The film reflects on a method of dealing with social ills of relevance not only to the Lakota people and Native American families but across the country, from the Reservations to the inner-city, across communities and ethnicities. We hope that The Dull Knifes will have a profound impact on both Native and non-Native audiences, inspiring, educating, and creating dialogue within and between them.

NARRATIVE SYNOPSIS

The Dull Knifes is feature length documentary which weaves together two very closely related stories: the first, of a father and his children struggling to overcome incredible challenges, and the second, of the extraordinary family history that has become a guiding force in their lives.

The present tense narrative will follow the contemporary tale of the Dull Knife family on Pine Ridge for one full year, beginning in the Fall of 2010. This present tense story will unfold naturally and will be shot in purely observational style, the year providing a significant period of time through which to view the family, allowing for organic story development amongst the film’s principal characters. This observational section will form roughly three quarters of the body of the film, and will follow the individual storylines of the principle characters, patriarch Guy Dull Knife himself (63) and the cast of children, including Tara (16) George (14), Jeffrey (10) and Daniel (8). Over the course of the upcoming year, several of these children are coming of age in different ways.  

Tara Dull Knife, fiercely proud of her family history, admits her family’s heritage sometimes causes jealousy. Kids pick fights at school and she’s had to battle bullying. Despite this she’s one of the most promising students of her school. She is struggling to fulfill her full academic potential in her final High School years whilst battling the bullies, petty jealousies, and other social problems at school.  Younger brother George is dismissive of kids who get involved with gangs. He’s found meaning in his life following his father’s Lakota spirituality. George will do the Sundance next year with his father for the first time. Already he helps prepare the sweat lodge, having been involved since he was four. Nevertheless, will spirituality and tradition really be enough to keep George from the drugs and alcohol that so affect his peers as he continues into his teens?

The youngest Dull Knife children are Jeffrey and Daniel. Jeffrey was born disabled; the family was told he would not live to see his fifth birthday. Now ten years old, he’s still going strong, flourishing in a loving and supporting environment, despite his obvious difficulties and the worry of on-going hospital treatment. Critical operations are scheduled ahead. In the coming year, Jeffrey must move up from junior high school and his condition means that he may need to transfer away from his brother Daniel to a school for children with special needs. Daniel, the youngest member of the Dull Knife family, is showing a strong talent for art and is being nurtured by his father. Daniel’s big challenge is to learn Lakota and Guy has also set himself the task of teaching him over the coming year.

For Guy Jr., the upcoming year will be as emotionally grueling as it is rewarding. If raising seven kids wasn’t challenge enough, as an artist, Guy has set himself one of his greatest creative challenges – painting the family history. This endeavor will be used as the film’s key unifying element and will directly connect the present with the past, enabling the film to weave in and out of the history of the family and, thereby, the tribe. Using Guy’s key pictures as inspiration, his paintings will be brought to life in the film through simple yet imaginative animations that we will commission. We are currently in the process of identifying Native American animators with whom we will collaborate. We envisage that the animated sections will be roughly one quarterof the completed film.

Guy's art project will work on multiple levels. The project will be a huge artistic achievement in itself, and our cameras will follow every aspect as he delves deep into his family history, researching, sketching, and painting scenes from his family’s past. Inevitably he will draw his children into his quest, teaching them about their legacy and gaining new perspectives by discussing their thoughts on what it means to be a 21stCentury Dull Knife.

On another level, the project will tie the past to the present, making it real and relevant to the Dull Knife family story in the way that Guy hopes to do for his kids. The film will not take a linear line back through this history but be cued directly from Guy Jr’s paintings and his own storytelling. In this way the film’s historical sections will evoke the Lakota oral and pictorial storytelling traditions, transmitting history to the audience as it is passed down to Guy Dull Knife’s children, and as it was to Guy himself. These layers of family history will reinforce the present tense themes of the film - family, fatherhood, identity and cultural survival - emphasizing the parallels of the historical struggles with the present day ones.

Overall, we see The Dull Knifes feature documentary as a film ambitious enough to span the scope and scale of a Native American tribe’s history as seen through one of their most remarkable surviving families, yet at the same time be a film that is both intimate and moving, following the complex nuances of daily life, exploring those most universal of themes, family and parenthood, while providing a much-needed forum for voices which have been silenced historically and drowned out by contemporary society.