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How Can I Keep on Singing?
| Length: | 56 min |
| Released: | 2001 |
| Ages: |
High School College Adult |
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This evocative film is a tribute to both the pioneering and Native American women in the West at the turn of the last century. Their stories offer glimpses of everyday life, and help recover the historical contributions of women. Striking images of the landscape are woven together with historical photographs and re-enactments of women's daily activities, and an unforgettable musical score.
The women and girls who cooked, cleaned, taught, did laundry and milked the cows endured unbelievable hardships. In Jana Harris' story "Cattle-Killing Winter" a settler woman describes the terrible blizzard that hit in the winter of 1889-90. In a particularly poignant story, a mother tries to teach her eldest daughter how to run the household as they lie buried in an avalanche.
In another segment of the film, Mourning Dove of the Colville tribe writes "My birth happened in the year 1888...I was born long enough ago to have known people who had lived in the ancient way, before everything started to change." While describing her love of the summer gathering expeditions, she also conveys her experience in a residential Indian school. Acclaimed Canadian poet Jeannette Armstrong of the Penticton Indian Band takes us on a berry picking expedition with three generations of Okanagan women.
The women and girls who cooked, cleaned, taught, did laundry and milked the cows endured unbelievable hardships. In Jana Harris' story "Cattle-Killing Winter" a settler woman describes the terrible blizzard that hit in the winter of 1889-90. In a particularly poignant story, a mother tries to teach her eldest daughter how to run the household as they lie buried in an avalanche.
In another segment of the film, Mourning Dove of the Colville tribe writes "My birth happened in the year 1888...I was born long enough ago to have known people who had lived in the ancient way, before everything started to change." While describing her love of the summer gathering expeditions, she also conveys her experience in a residential Indian school. Acclaimed Canadian poet Jeannette Armstrong of the Penticton Indian Band takes us on a berry picking expedition with three generations of Okanagan women.
"…19th century Pacific history serves as the medium through which to deliver the hard-won strength of pioneering women. Recommended." MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship
"The coupling of Jana Harris' sensitive poetry and first-class photography has resulted in a beautiful, thoughtful and evocative film...It should be required viewing in every Western history class."
---Sue Armitage, Professor of History, Washington State University
" ..informative, eloquent, and visually captivating. The verbal and visual portraits of Western women's lives presented in the film brings home again how courageous, expansive, and downright exhausting those lives often were."
Linda Karell, Professor of Literature, Montana State University
"The coupling of Jana Harris' sensitive poetry and first-class photography has resulted in a beautiful, thoughtful and evocative film...It should be required viewing in every Western history class."
---Sue Armitage, Professor of History, Washington State University
" ..informative, eloquent, and visually captivating. The verbal and visual portraits of Western women's lives presented in the film brings home again how courageous, expansive, and downright exhausting those lives often were."
Linda Karell, Professor of Literature, Montana State University
Western Literature Conference, 2001
National Women’s Studies Association, 2001
National Women’s Studies Association, 2001
