Dodging Bullets

Americas fickle love affair with Native Americans is limited to revisionist stories of passive Indian maidens like Pocahontas and Sacajawea or fierce doomed warriors like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Worse, the modern stereotype America has about Native Americans is limited to the oppressed drunkard or the fat casino cat, neither of which deserves understanding nor empathy. No matter what kind of image is evoked, you cant win if youre Native: A successful Indian exploits the American way by not giving back his fair share and a downtrodden Indian cant pull himself up by his boot straps no matter how much government assistance hes given. Native Americans are blamed for not taking responsibility for the plight of their people and told that they dont deserve help or money despite the fact that Native Americans have the highest poverty rates and the lowest access to health care of any race in the United States. But when we look beneath the stereotypes and understand the issues and statistics of whats really happening in Indian Country, the truth is surprising, complex, and frustrating. There are spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds experienced in large numbers of the Native American population and these hurts have a name, Historical Trauma. The theory of Historical Trauma stemmed from research done by Dr. Maria Yellowhorse Braveheart in her own community during the 1980s. Dodging Bullets, confronts Historical Trauma head-on through interviews and discussions with young Native Americans whose lives are stricken by plights known to be effects of Historical Trauma. The film explores research professionals whose work helps develop a better understanding of Trauma, how it relates to Native Americans specifically and provides insight into ways we can improve the outcomes of Native people dealing with these challenges. The individuals shown in the film come from a variety of social and economic backgrounds: for example, a middle-school student living on the poverty stricken Blackfeet Indian Reservation battling an addiction to meth, a hardened enforcer of the A.I.M., who has leaned the importance of love late in life to a successful author/professor teaching the Ojibwe language to university students.