Amateur Film, Cultural Memory and the Visual Legacy of the 1920s Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial

Abstract

This essay considers amateur cinema as a site of Indigenous history and counter-memory, one capable of activating meanings that challenge notions of home movies as being films without public value. The amateur films were made by an American geologist, William Wrather, at the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico, in the late 1920/1930s, and they interweave footage of Wrather’s family with recordings of the parade and dances. I explore how Wrather's memory as a seeing subject creates space for reevaluating these films through an Indigenous frame of reference, subsuming his memories into a dynamic new “memoryscape” of cultural history.