When artist Dara Friedman ’90 strode in front of the Rosenwald Film Theater screen to introduce her documentary, “Sky Woman Women,” I thought I might be looking at the wrong person. This was no buttoned-up academic nor voice-over professional: Friedman was wearing an oversized black blazer and combat boots, with her kinky white-gray hair tied in an effortless knot at the top of her head. She looked not at the back of the room but at individual audience members when she spoke; I fought the urge to avert my eyes when she stared me down and began to talk about her piece.
Friedman went on to describe how, when working on a large-scale labyrinth installation in Buffalo, New York, she was deeply touched by the Indigenous people she encountered there. However, she remained perplexed by the dismissive stance the tribe held towards female storytellers, despite being a matrilineal society. Friedman heard mutterings of a Haudenosaunee (the name for the confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Indigenous nations) creation story involving a “sky woman,” but found it even more perplexing that this story, told so often by men, centers entirely around a divine woman making the first hominal strides from the sky world into our world.
Friedman began to see a new project unfolding before her: She would offer a platform for Indigenous women of all ages in the tribes to “unpack the teachings of the story at a personal level , unencumbered by patrilineal expectations. Her work touched me deeply; through multigenerational, inclusive storytelling, “Sky Woman Women” reveals how creation stories carry political and feminist lessons that disrupt our settler notions about Indigenous women’ s role in society.
“Sky Woman Women” is presented with no bells and whistles. Rather than a highly edited, documentary-style film about the life and stories of Indigenous people living in New York State, the film is composed of snippets and clips of women taking space to tell the story of their own creation. The storytellers bob and weave and often disagree with one another, yet the clips interweave to create a vibrant tapestry of the woman who fell from a hole in the sky world and created our world. Briefly, the story goes as follows: The world began not with conquest or dominion, but with a fall. It is commonly known that the star around which all the others rotate is actually a hole through which you can glimpse the sky world. Long ago, a pregnant woman from the sky world tumbled through the hole and plummeted towards a vast expanse of water. As she fell, birds flew up to catch her, softening her fall. They placed her on the back of a great turtle, which became her landing ground. Other animals gathered to help; they dove to the depths of the ocean to retrieve the mud that would eventually become the land of the Earth. Sky Woman gave birth to a daughter, who grew to womanhood on Turtle Island. When the daughter died in childbirth, her body brought forth new life: From her head sprouted corn, beans and squash—the Three Sisters that would sustain future generations. From Sky Woman’s fall, the Earth was made habitable and abundant.
I expected to be bombarded with facts and statistics about Indigeneity when I walked into the Rosenwald Film Theater; instead, I was presented with a filmed roundtable discussion so vibrant that I felt I could jump in at any moment. Without a narrator or an imposed narrative, the stories that the Haudenosaunee women told lived and breathed on their own.
It’s so easy to get lost in the academia of the documentary-style movie; even when I began to write this article, I was tempted to invoke and discuss political theories involving indigenism, but they felt so apathetic and removed that I couldn’t bring myself to. In the discussion following the film, audience members were eager to assign meaning to simple choices; there were a multitude of questions about what certain flashes of colors meant, or why imagery of trees and flowers showed up in the top-left hand corner rather than the top right-hand corner, and it all struck me as arbitrary. The beauty of Friedman’s work lies in its simplicity; the stories she highlights speak for themselves. This kind of simplicity that leads to a deeper understanding is true of the story of Sky Woman itself; its basic framework allows listeners and re-tellers to fill in details with their resonant personal experiences. I came into this film expecting high-seated academia and left understanding a little more what it means to trust in the act of free-falling. Just as Sky Woman tumbled through the hole in the sky, uncertain of what lay beneath her, I felt myself surrendering to the simplicity of the women’s voices on screen. No scaffolding of theory, no authoritative narrator, only the rawness of story. “Sky Woman Women” showed me the value of letting go of analysis and allowing meaning to arrive through experience. Dara Friedman, her spunky nature, her kinky hair, and her Doc Marten boots brought me to an understanding of Haudenosaunee creation stories in a way that Indigenous political theory texts never could have.