Filmmaker follows Trail of Tears with Native American

Murphy The hardest thing is realizing the Trail of Tears is very difficult to follow. The maps aren’t clear, and we didn’t see signs for trail until we reached Kentucky, where a lady gave us a map.”

This is Doug Shaw, a Christian filmmaker with Forthright Ministries International, commenting on the production challenges of his new documentary, Stories of Hope. Shaw has been working on this film for more than a year.

The pith of his project is to “bridge the distance between the white man and the Native American.” To accomplish this, he is traveling the Trail of Tears with Jimmy Muskrat, a member of the Keetoowah band of Cherokee Indians and the film’s protagonist.

Muskrat was among the first Trail of Tears riders commissioned from the Cherokee Nation in 1984. Shaw’s documentary is no small achievement, as the Trail of Tears – formed by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson – is 1,200 miles long and passes through nine states. During this trek, an estimated 5,000 Cherokee died and were left in mass graves along the way.

“We want to document the testimonies of Native Americans,” Shaw said. “Jimmy Muskrat said he felt a lot of anger. He told me he had seen firsthand what his ancestors have gone through.”

Shaw’s idea is to film Muskrat along the journey. He will also record the stories of any Native American who will talk with him along the way.

“This will be an incredible adventure as a Cherokee and a white man retrace this trail together,” Shaw said.

Bridging the racial divide

One of his goals is help facilitate a reconciliation between the two sides. The idea came to Shaw while he was working in India with the Sora people, a rural tribal group.

“I couldn’t find out anything about them except the negative stories I read in National Geographic,” he said, but Shaw saw a completely different tribe, rich with ancestral tribal beliefs.

“I thought, ‘Wow! There’s something to this.’ ”

When he returned home to southern Wisconsin, he lacked the funding to go back to India. But that didn’t stop him from talking about it all the time.

“Somebody came up to me in church and said, ‘God gave you a heart to go after Native American people,’ ” he said.

Shaw realized he held an interest in Native American stories from his childhood.

“In Wisconsin,” he said, “we had Native American burial grounds, and I was always hunting for arrowheads.”

Shaw met with a Native American pastor who told him, “Missionaries fly all of the world; but they fly over this great mission field,” referring to the Native American reservations. Shaw chased after relationships within the Native American population and discovered they were very different from what he had been taught.

Like the Sora people, Shaw felt he had only heard negative stories about Native Americans.

“I ask them the dumb white man questions,” he said with a laugh. “Like, we’re told natives are rich because of the casinos, but they’re not rich.”

Shatter myths, capture hope

Part of Shaw’s mission as a filmmaker is to shatter myths and capture the hope within the tribal nations.

“When I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, many people came up to me and were like, ‘Wow, you came looking for the good things going on, most people look for drug addicts and suicide,’ ” he said.

However, not all Native Americans were open armed.

“One of the first leaders I met, she was an elder, made it clear that she was not happy I was there,” Shaw said. “But in the end, she took me to a burial ground and invited me to come back whenever I wanted.”

It’s not hard to imagine Shaw, with his affable personality, warming a chilly reception. But he must overcome a larger obstacle that requires more than his genuine interest and concern for the subjects in his film.

‘Not trying to make money’

As the writer, director and producer of the film, he is one more white man in a long line of white men who wants to tell the Native American story. While he’s not appropriating, the story is still told through his lens.

“One of the things I’ve done from the beginning is that I’m not in the film,” Shaw said. “I may play the role of narrator, but the film is about the people I’ve met and telling their stories.”

His film is intended for a white audience.

“There are so many mistruths and misdirects about Native Americans,” Shaw said. “I want to go back and explain back to white people that we live in such a bubble, and we don’t know reservation life is like.”

His project loses the exploitation angle when he says, “My goal is not to make a ton of money off the Native Americans. That’s not it. This is what’s crazy about what I do, not trying to make money.

“The goal is just to tell the stories, to spread hope.”