Indian spirit in Russia

Dr Beatrice Medicine

It may not have been the Academy Award for best picture but adjunct professor Beatrice Medicine is pleased with her 1998 honorable mention from the Society for Visual Anthropology of America for her film Seeking the Spirit. Says Medicine, a Lakota from Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota: "That's good for our first attempt. We were competing against professional filmmakers." She's proud of her first effort. "It's really quite a film. I've always wanted to make films and now I've started."

The story? A group of Russians who gather every year for 10 days to live like North American Indians. Medicine first heard of the "teepee camp" in 1992 when she was lecturing in Lithuania. She returned a few years later to film the event. "The next year we filmed my own people, the Lakota, watching this and reacting to it because most of the people in Russia identified themselves as Lakota. We interviewed the Lakota people about what they thought of this and we put the two things together."

Medicine says the Russians have been gathering annually for about 15 years. In early summer, just outside of St. Petersburg, 300 people gather from all around Russia to live in teepees and perform dances and rituals of North American Indians. Most of the participants use the Lakota people to imitate. They learned about the North American Indians from books and films. Many Russians have learned to read English and they translate every book they can get their hands on, says Medicine. "The singing was surprisingly like Indian singing and the dances were what you see in a movie," she says.

"They looked to North American Indians as an example of cultural survival and the survival of native religion in their time of suppression. They were fascinated by how the people, inspite of all the pressures to conform, still maintained their identity, their language and their belief systems. What motivated these people was their search for something to believe in."

Medicine was the first North American Indian the Russians had seen and she felt welcomed at the teepee camp. To this day, Medicine stays in touch with her new Russian friends. She sends clothes, books and non-perishable food items when she can.

Currently, Medicine is concentrating her research on gender studies and health education in North American Indian culture. She is looking for an aboriginal distributor for her film and she hopes to continue her filmmaking in as yet unexplored areas.