Last fall, IU’s College of Arts and Sciences welcomed Rachael Nez, a filmmaker, academic, and teacher from the Navajo reservation who is also a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowship enables Nez to conduct their own research into Native American and Media Studies, while teaching and lecturing, remotely, at IU Bloomington.
At IU, Nez is teaching a broad audience. During the fall 2021 semester, they taught a virtual eight-week undergraduate course on contemporary issues in Native America. “A majority of the students hadn’t been exposed to Native communities, so I wanted them to walk away with a familiarity with debates in Native and tribal communities on issues like sovereignty, tribal enrollment, and murdered and missing indigenous women,” they said. This semester, Nez is a guest lecturer in several courses for The Media School.
Nez’s award is called an Emerging Voices Fellowship because it empowers young scholars at the forefront of their fields to bring their voices to academia. The fellowship’s name is especially apt, because Nez’s mission—both academic and personal—is to preserve the voices of indigenous people as they are expressed through their Native languages.
I started to see the invisibility of Native people. So, I began to make short films about Navajo people.
Rachael Nez, Emerging Voices Fellow
As a child, Nez, a member of the Navajo Nation, wasn’t aware that indigenous languages were threatened. Growing up on a reservation in Arizona, they were wholly immersed in Navajo language and culture. “My parents spoke Navajo on a daily basis. My grandparents, my aunts, all my immediate family spoke it. It was just there. I didn’t know that outside of the reservation, there were no Navajo speakers.”
That realization struck Nez when they went to the University of Arizona to study media arts and moviemaking. “I started to see the invisibility of Native people. So, I began to make short films about Navajo people. As I progressed, I asked myself how I could use the media tools that I’d become experienced with to help not only my community but other communities.”
“Today there are hundreds of Native American languages in various states of revitalization, preservation or maintenance,” Nez explains. For example, while some 170,000 people still speak Navajo, there is only one known speaker left in the entire world who speaks the Nisenan language of northeastern California.
Nez has made a short documentary about that surviving speaker, Alan Wallace, and his efforts to pass on the Nisenan language through a dance and performance program aimed at young people.
In addition to teaching and lecturing, Nez is using the fellowship to begin to plan how they might create a central hub for the varied media content that native communities are now producing. Another one of Nez’s short documentaries looks at KTNN 660, a 37-year-old radio station based in Window Rock, Arizona, known as “The Voice of the Navajo Nation.” The station broadcasts in both English and Navajo.
Nez, who earned a Ph.D. in Native American Studies at the University of California - Davis, has also led workshops for tribal elders across the United States, Canada, Hawaii, and Australia to teach them how to use digital tools to tell their stories in their own language.
I’m always keeping in mind how I can bring my skills and knowledge back to community members.
Rachael Nez, Emerging Voices Fellow
As the parent of a 9-year-old child, Nez knows the struggle to keep a language alive in a place where there are few local speakers. Nez points out to their daughter that she needs to learn Navajo so that she can speak to her cheii—the Navajo word for grandfather—who knows English but prefers to speak Navajo. Nez wants her to understand that she enjoys a freedom her grandfather didn’t have: “I remind her that when Cheii was her age, every time he spoke Navajo in school, he got punished.”
On a trip to see the redwoods in northern California, Nez urged their daughter to greet the ancient trees in Navajo. “I told her to say, ‘Yá'át'ééh,’ which means hello, to the trees. They had probably seen Navajos thousands and thousands of years ago, and this could well be their first time hearing the Navajo language again after so many years.
“While my research and media work look at how indigenous communities use media, storytelling, art, and performance to preserve their languages, I’m a community person, first and foremost,” explains Nez. “So, I’m always keeping in mind how I can bring my skills and knowledge back to community members.”
Watch Nez’s short films about efforts to preserve Native American Languages.
Story by Julie Gray
Photos by Rachael Nez
