7 thoughts on “Storytelling With Te Ata (2016)

  1. Q’orianka Kilcher actually played Pocahontas in The New World – she was excellent. Looks like this is a film I need to see. Thank you!

  2. #$%%^& I’m not Chickasaw, nor am I familiar with their clothing, so I don’t have much to say about the leather regalia.* I do want to know why is she randomly wearing Seminole style clothing, complete with patchwork?! That’s one of our distinctive features, and I have no idea why a Chickasaw woman would wear it.

    I do like the elk teeth on the brown topped dress. Very posh.

  3. Whoa! I never heard of this film, but I definitely want to check it out! It looks great! Like someone else mentioned, I saw this actress in The New World, and I really admired her talent and beauty. In your post you mentioned thinking that her Broadway stage costume was probably correct because of the involvement of the Chickasaw Nation in the filming. I’m going to (kinda) disagree with you on that. I think it’s a 50-50 chance of being either a “correct” version of Chickasaw clothing OR a “correct” version of an “Native American Broadway costume” of that era (which, sadly, is probably exactly like an “Native American Broadway costume” of today’s era). For the rest of the scenes in which she’s in Native clothes, like you, I assume they’re “correct.” These kinds of stories are so important. Thanks for letting us know about this film. Also, if you’re interested, Sidedoor (the podcast for the Smithsonian) did a story last year (I think) on Native American storytellers and storytelling. It was really interesting, and the corresponding exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian was very good too. The exhibit is probably virtually available on the web!

  4. Thank you for alerting me to this film. Definitely going to watch. Still, I am just waiting for the cultural backlash over an actress of Peruvian-Swiss-German descent playing a Chickasaw Native American. Just joking. I loved her in ‘Pocahontas’.

  5. This looks pretty dang good! It’s sadly rare to find movies about Native Americans that don’t fall into the same tired old stereotypes.

  6. Here’s a picture of Te Ata in one of her performance outfits, which shows that the production actually got it pretty close: https://www.hppr.org/post/anniversary-chickasaw-performance-fdrs-white-house

    That doesn’t of course necessarily mean that Te Ata’s outfits were 100% traditional. A tradition of costume is much more easily broken than a tradition of storytelling and music, especially in an age before everybody had access to a camera. If the Chickasaw had been bullied or persuaded into ‘dressing like civilised people’ in, say, the 1850s, (I don’t know they were, I’m just hypothesising here) it’s quite possible that when she started performing at college she had only a vague notion of what Chickasaw women used to wear, and just made her best shot at what she thought it might have been, perhaps using elements from other tribes’ costume that had survived into the 20th century to help out.

    There’s also a good possibility that directors and producers said to her, ‘Sorry, love: white Americans know what they think a ‘squaw’ looks like, and they aren’t going to pay to see you unless you conform to their stereotype. Show them something they’re familiar with’.

    Also, she learned and performed other tribes’ songs and stories too, didn’t she, so perhaps she did deliberately mix those other tribes’ styles into her costumes; which would account for the Seminole elements Saraquill mentions.

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