The Frontlines of Freedom: A Conversation with Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler

Did you have in mind any other films that tackle this subject?

Peeler: Film-wise, it’s like Alan Pakula’s paranoid thrillers from the ’70s, and it kind of immediately felt like that. We would have a lot of conversations with our DP, Tyler Graim, and we would talk about long lenses that could make this feel like a surveillance movie. It’s not only a documentary about what’s happening but a documentary about these conditions that put Native journalists in this paranoia. Will they arrest me? Are they going to come in? Are they going to shut us down? Am I going to lose my job? What’s going to happen when I get pulled into a backroom meeting with a politician? That informed the lensing of the film—the desire to keep it in the vein of films like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View.

Landsberry-Baker: Whether it’s documentary filmmaking or journalism, it’s not impossible to come from outside the community and tell a great story in Indian Country, but it takes a lot of time and resources. It takes commitment. Our partnership was really a great example of allyship and working together. For the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and tribal media, it was also important to me to capture that Native humor and the human side of Indian Country. Showing that type of diversity in terms of how we are presented on-screen is something that I love about this film, and being able to screen it for Native audiences who are able to laugh at the jokes right off the bat with these subjects who have a sense of humor.

Documentary filmmakers have a long history of going into Indigenous communities and portraying them as being in a state of deficiency or extracting and misrepresenting cultural elements without the knowledge of their subjects. It’s part of a longer history of nonfiction filmmaking’s interactions with Indigenous communities that’s not particularly great, but it’s also a foundational part of American documentary. What are the ethics of working with a community, whether you’re from within it or from outside of it?

Landsberry-Baker: This is the same question that we get talking about journalism and who’s telling whose stories. I approached this personally, asking what were my ethical boundaries here. I kept going back to when I was a journalist and when I was a tribal media editor. My bosses were the citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. My filmmaking processes ultimately go to my responsibilities within this community. Am I responsible to the politicians? No, it’s the people. Being a Muscogee (Creek) citizen and also a filmmaker, I know this issue is important to my people. I’m a filmmaker, and I’m independent, and I can tell this story in a way that has not been told before. I built honest relationships with the politicians as well. Getting some of that access took a really long time. I’m sure some of them are not entirely happy with how they’re portrayed in the film, but I’ve tried to maintain those relationships with the politicians and the policymakers. Now there’s this road map for other tribes to follow, and it really makes the Muscogee (Creek) Nation the standard as far as having some of the—if not the—strongest free-press protections in Indian Country.

Peeler: Graham Brewer is a Native journalist who has one sentence in the movie, but we had this incredible two-and-a-half-hour interview with him. One of the things that he told us in the interview was this story about an editor calling him up about what should be put on the cover of whatever magazine for Native Heritage Month. His response was you should just show us being normal, modern people. That became a real guiding light in a lot of the creative decisions and ethical decisions that went into the filming. I was really cognizant of being an outsider white filmmaker having a hand in shaping a Native story. Being a film nerd knowing the history of documentary filmmaking, I found it really interesting to be both a white filmmaker coming into a Native community and someone collaborating with a Native filmmaker to make a movie about her own community. I think for me, as a filmmaker, it was an interesting process that taught me to defer more than impose. As an editor, you’re constantly trying to impose structure, impose meaning, impose emotion, or pull emotion out of a scene. A lot of the time it was like, let’s just let this play for as long as we possibly can and give everyone the fullest platform possible.

In a really interesting way, your film points to the possibilities of when an Indigenous filmmaker uses cinema—something that has largely been used against them from its inception—as a tool, and what can happen when they take charge of it.

Peeler: It does. On paper, it does sound great to be inverting the negative history of the Indigenous-centered documentary or of the white lens on Indigenous subjects. But even though the end product of the film seems like we knew what the movie was about, we never did, and we never did know what was going to happen. That all came together very late in the filming and very late in the editing process. It kind of just naturally arose that that was the track the film was on. There’s an element of not going in with a plan or an intent, at least when it comes to the outsider, white point of view. It was helpful to just go along this ride with Becca and Angel as our guides and just be there for it and not walk in with a preconceived idea. I would say for a long time that it sounded like it was going to become a Supreme Court movie or an election film—maybe something more legislative in focus, because there was a long period of time when nothing happened with the constitutional amendment vote. The film is a bit of a perfect storm where actual major historic events happened, and we were able to hang on long enough to actually be there on the ground to document. Incident at Oglala, Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary on a conflict between the American Indian Movement activist group and the FBI, comes to mind. We just happened to be lucky enough to be present.

Landsberry-Baker: Not knowing that it would be a happy ending and not expecting it to be a happy ending so often, unfortunately, is typical when it comes to documenting Indigenous stories, especially when they have to do with policy. I was not thinking even at a tribal level that we would get free press back; I didn’t know that it would happen, especially when there were such powerful forces that were working against free press. That’s one of the things that I love about this film. I think this is such a perfect example of people exercising their tribal sovereignty. Ultimately, that’s at the heart of what I hope people will take away from the film. We know that each tribe within its sovereignty is going to approach free press in a way that works for them and works for what’s right for their citizens. Seeing how this can play out and how empowered our citizens are and can be, and using tribal media as a tool to do that, is part of the legacy that I hope this film is contributing to.