Jason Corwin: Indigenous Land Rights & Responsibilities
This learning guide provides a brief overview of Jason Corwin’s work. It includes discussion questions to guide conversations and activities for students and learners of all ages.
Created by: Tyler Dorholt, Sankalp Gautam, Leila Moghadasi, Sarah Nahar, and Brice Nordquist
Environmental Storyteller Spotlight: Filmmaker Jason Corwin
A citizen of the Seneca Nation (Deer Clan), and a lifelong storyteller and maker, Dr. Jason Corwin is also the founding director of the Seneca Media & Communications Center and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Buffalo. Corwin has produced both short and feature-length documentaries, many of which engage with Indigenous ways of knowing, social/environmental justice topics, and the multi-layered aspects of sustainability that are both visibly and invisibly entwined in our lives. His work as an educator is broad and immersive. Having worked closely with groups like the Green Guerrillas Youth Media Tech Collective, Corwin’s work highlights the potential of digital storytelling to foster knowledge retention in youth and community. This is work that encourages deeper connections to nature, creating both a stronger sense of empowerment in storytellers and thus a more robust entry point for creating positive change in communities.
Understanding the Environmental Story & Issue
Environmental Documentation: Indigenous Land Rights and Responsibilities
In the last decade, there has been a new wave of deep and widespread Indigenous uprisings, specifically an invitation for everyone to learn from Indigenous Peoples how we might save our planet. It the face of our shared climate crisis, it clear that there is pressing and consistent work to do, and the work of Indigenous storytellers, like Dr. Jason Corwin, help clarify just how to get that work done. Corwin is part of a growing movement of people who embody the ways in which storytelling and education create opportunities for individual and collective survival.
Corwin at Seneca Media & Communications Center
It should come as no surprise that there are never-ending and ever-changing environmental threats in our society. For Corwin, digital storytelling–what is often referred to as ecomedia–reminds us to turn toward our environment, to actively document our changing relationship to land and the environment. For many Indigenous Peoples, a shift from a rights-based framework to a responsibilities-based framework is key to this overall shift of values. Rights, defined as permissions and allowances guaranteed to all people in a society, are centered in an individualistic worldview.
Rights are claimed by or bestowed upon individuals in the context of a nation-state. Since access to basic resources and services in a society is often connected with having the rights (human or civil) to those services, many groups have built social movements in order to gain and maintain them (for example, the civil rights and women’s rights movements). Rights provide support to humans, but they do not protect the environment around an individual human or group of people. While human rights and civil rights movements make sense in the context of an unequal society, a ‘rights framework’ only gets us so far.
A ‘responsibilities framework’ comes closer to articulating how mutuality and reciprocity can be cultivated within thriving social and natural ecosystems. Yet the conversation about rights is so ubiquitous that some Indigenous leaders hope to extend rights to nature in order to point toward this idea of responsibilities, while still speaking a language that colonial legal frameworks understand. This is called the rights of nature movement. They argue that nature, like human beings, has rights that must be respected and protected.
Responsibilities are fluid, they are dynamic—we have to be in relationship with one another and with the more-than-human to understand and act on them. In order to have a relationship, we need to take time to be together. Stories help build and sustain relationships, and relationships can be some the most powerful antidotes to reliance on fossil fuels, military security, and endless economic growth. Rights are about us, responsibilities are about every living being.
Finding ways to undo the damaging rights-based individualistic thinking which has shaped Western societies will take time. We are moving into an age of restoration, as scientist, professor, and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says. Restoration is happening through land justice projects and decolonization efforts. In addition, more education institutions are returning to value traditional ecological knowledge. At this time, stories guide our way home..
Jason Corwin on Filmmaking and Indigenous Knowledge
As a disciplined and collaborative maker, Corwin uses multiple approaches to storytelling. He has said of his work that it is “situated at the confluence of Indigenous ways of knowing, environmental education, and digital media. It highlights Native peoples' and communities' work to achieve narrative sovereignty, sustainability, and environmental justice.”
Corwin’s recent feature-length film, Denying Access: NoDAPL to NoNAPL, chronicles the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and Seneca Territory to oppose Dakota Access and Northern Access Pipelines. The film was co-directed by Tami Watt, a Content Producer at the Seneca Media and Communications Center. It was officially selected for the Haudenosaunee Film Festival, NatiVisions Film Festival, the Syracuse International Film Festival, and the International New York Film Festival
The direct correlation between Indigenous storytelling and environmental activism is not so much a correlation as it is a coexistence. A grappling with the non-stop environmental threats. Stories help surface the imagery that impacts action, and just in being told they become a live document of engagement. For example, in The Flickering Flame–The Life and Legacy of Chief Turkey Tayac, Corwin helps share the story of a man who led the Piscataway Indian Nation. The combination of music, interviews, archival still shots, and stories-within-stories helps resurface the influence one man had on revitalizing the culture and world around him.
Choosing what to place in the frame, choosing how to align the story, is critical to tackling the diverse threats of the environment. There is no set way to capture stories, especially when other voices come into view. Storytelling is its own form of community engagement and thus it means leaning and learning outside one’s reach. For Corwin, this has involved in-depth research, communing with and educating youth–putting cameras in their hands–and, ultimately, embracing the kinds of consistent change that reframe what a story can be about.
Some Terms to Know
Indigenous: originating or the first people who lived in a place.
Worldview: attitudes, values, stories and expectations about the world around us, which inform our every thought and action
Restoration: returning something to its original level of flourishing.
Rights of Nature movement: a strategic effort to expand a human rights-based framework to more-than-human species.
Reciprocal: referring to something that is a mutual action or relationship; not unidirectional.
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Adopted in 2007, it is a list emphasizing the inalienable human rights of original peoples of the globe, and calling on nation-states to recognize tribes, nations, and Indigenous peoples within them.
NoDAPL: DAPL refers to the Dakota Access Pipeline that passed through Standing Rock reservation lands after being moved away from settler lands in Bismarck, North Dakota. The “No” relates to the many people who opposed putting a new pipeline in the ground and water.
Discussion Questions
What counts as an environmental responsibility?
What are the different ways we see ourselves in relation to our environments and the humans and non-humans that comprise them? How can we use these relationships to determine our responsibilities?
Upholding responsibilities is easier when we have habits to remember them by. What are some habits you think could help people remember our environmental responsibilities or remember and respect our relationships with humans and non-humans?
What stories are often missing when we think of our environments and of environmental activism? What are we missing when we overlook these stories?
What might it require for you to be in deeper relationship with those to whom you feel the most responsible, and with those who have responsibilities toward you?
Are social justice struggles and environmental justice struggles different? If not, why not? If so, how so?
Activities & Prompts
Below are writing prompts and activities for learners of all ages.
Watch and Discuss
Isolate a scene from Denying Access: NoDAPL to NoNAPL.
How does Corwin use the medium of film to convey his message in this scene? Think about how Corwin’s use of cinematography, editing, sound, and information within this scene–how does each impact the effectiveness of his storytelling? What is he able to do within the medium of film that he wouldn’t be able to do in another form such as a photograph, a painting, an essay, a newspaper article, a nonfiction book, a novel, a poem, etc
Writing Prompt
How might you write this scene (and/or its message) differently in another medium? Pick any medium you want and imagine trying to create the same effect Corwin does. What can the film do that your medium can’t?
What can your medium do that the film can’t? Every medium has its limits, otherwise each could go on forever. Think about what Corwin includes versus what is not included in the film. What does the film start to be about that you could pick up on to extend its stories?
Sometimes the action that is documented is the story. Equally so, story becomes its own form of action. Think about an event you felt compelled to participate in. What is/are the stories you could make from that? If making a short film or video project, where would you begin? What would you need? Who would you wish to include and why?
Changing Values To Survive and Thrive
Almost every time local Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons speaks, he tells stories. Stories of abundant fish, of lacrosse’s origins, of the struggle to pass the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations. His stories often include an analysis of what is happening now, in and to our world, and how ongoing colonization has resulted in poisoned water, endless strife, and unbridled consumption. Lyons asks questions like, what might yet be our future if we change our values so that we can survive and thrive on planet earth? How can we imagine moving from reliance on fossil fuels, military security, and endless economic growth to a society that focuses on cultivating reciprocal relationships between humanity and every other species?
Writing Prompt
Consider both Corwin’s film and Oren Lyon’s teachings. What does our future hold? What path are we on, and how might we change our values, both individually and collectively, to survive and thrive. Lyons invites us to understand that we are “the younger siblings” on Earth and to live in a way that honors how much has evolved before us. How can we live in a way that recognizes how much we have to learn from our “older siblings”?
A Filmmaker's Lens
Why does Corwin choose to tell the story in Denying Access: NoDAPL to NoNAPL through documentary? What can a documentary achieve that a fictional story can’t? How does Corwin construct a narrative through the documentary? Does he tell the story chronologically from beginning to end? Does he jump around in time? Does he use a voiceover to convey to the audience what he wants them to understand from the footage, or does he let the footage speak for itself? Does he juxtapose certain shots, and interviews in order to direct us through the story he’s telling? Why might he do or not do any of these things, and how might they impact the overall goal of the documentary? Remember, documentaries often have explicit intentions. They want to teach us something, show us something they think we need to know, create a particular outcome in the real world based on what they expose within the documentary. How is Corwin constructing a particular narrative in order to accomplish this?
Writing Prompt
Imagine you are a documentary filmmaker. What story would you want to tell through film? And how do you imagine using that medium to tell it?
Maybe you already take videos or photos on your phone or camera. What are you drawn to document? Look through some of the photos and videos you’ve taken in the past, and consider what stories they tell. What story do you have to tell? How would you share that with the world?
Selected Additional Resources
YouTube
The Peacemaker’s Journey and the Great Law of Peace shares the history of how the 1000 year-old Haudenosaunee participatory democratic governance began and is sustained.
Books
A History of Native American Land Rights in Upstate New York by Cindy Amrhein analyzing the descriptive ‘transactions’ of the land between European colonizers and the Haudenosaunee.
Podcasts
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery examines the impact of the 15th century Christian doctrinal justification for colonization, and the legal, mental, religious, and cultural frameworks it creates.
Websites
Interactive Map of Indigenous Lands Find out whose lands you are living on.
Articles
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples This version is a guide made especially for youth.
