ONEIDA, N.Y. — The TOUCHY part of the Oneidas' animated short was depicting how the raccoon, after playing dead, gobbles up all the cute dancing crawfish celebrating his demise.
The filmmakers showed the raccoon's feast as a cloud of mayhem. But there were arms flying out, tiny arms from those adorable crawfish, a detail that risked being far too graphic for kids. And captivating them was the idea of telling an old tribal tale in a way that would teach new generations its message: that even if you're a cute little crawfish, you'll pay a dear price if you boast, and lie . . . as one crawfish did by claiming to have slain their predator.
But the flying arms were edgy, and fun, in a 21st century way. So Dale Rood and his crew left 'em in and began submitting the eight-minute “Raccoon & Crawfish” to festivals such as Moondance. "Oh, yeah, wow, that was a strange animation," recalled Moondance's executive director, Elizabeth English, who hesitated to take the short because one of her goals is promoting nonviolent conflict resolution.
You don't get many tribes submitting films, however, so she waited to see how an audience and jury reacted to the end, in which the raccoon sits satiated, while inside his swollen belly one crawfish lectures the boaster, "You are a liar!"
That's how "Raccoon & Crawfish" won Moondance's Sandcastle Award for best animation a year ago, and by now it's been screened at 64 festivals around the world and won 13 awards, and there soon will be more animated shorts telling legends of the Oneida.
Uses for casino profits
When gambling began transforming Indian communities, there was opposition within many tribes from elders and others who said casinos would desecrate traditions. Gambling proponents would argue that there did not have to be a conflict -- that casino profits might help carry on traditions.
Two decades later, it's happening -- the slot machines indeed are funding efforts to preserve tribal history and culture, often through film.
UCLA-trained Sandra Johnson Osawa, a member of Washington's Makah tribe, has produced a documentary on Native American prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, funded by the area's Muckleshoot Indians, and is helping Oklahoma's Miami tribe use gambling income to document its tribal language, whose last speaker died in the 1960s.
