Shelley Niro

Kissed by Lightning

Shelley Niro

Kateri Walker, Eric Schweig

Mavis Dogblood is a Mohawk painter from Canada haunted by the tragic death of her husband, who was hit by lightning. She paints the stories he used to tell her, but she can’t come to grips with her loss. It is only after she drives to New York City for an art opening, traveling across what were her ancestors’ tribal lands, that Mavis reconciles herself to her new life.

Honey Moccasin

Shelley Niro

Tantoo Cardinal, Florence Belmore

This all-Native production, by director Shelley Niro (Mohawk), is part of the Smoke Signals new wave of films that examine Native identity in the 1990’s. Set on the Grand Pine Indian Reservation, aka “Reservation X”, HONEY MOCCASIN combines elements of melodrama, performance art, cable access, and ‘whodunit’ to question conventions of ethnic and sexual identity as well as film narrative. A comedy/thriller complete with a fashion show and torchy musical numbers, this witty film employs a surreal pastiche of styles to depict the rivalry between bars The Smokin’ Moccasin and The Inukshuk Cafe, the saga of closeted drag queen/powwow clothing thief Zachary John, and the travails of crusading investigator Honey Moccasin. This irreverent reappropriation of familiar narrative strategies serves as a provocative spring-board for an investigation of authenticity, cultural identity, and the articulation of modern Native American experience in cinematic language and pop culture.

The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw

Shelley Niro

MorningStar Angeline, Andrew Martin

An Indigenous woman reluctantly returns to her isolated reserve to help her father care for her bitter mother.

Overweight with Crooked Teeth

Shelley Niro

Explores and questions non-Native perceptions of Indians by asking pointedly: “What were you expecting, anyway? Sitting Bull? Chief Joseph… saying ‘the earth and I are one?’”

The Shirt

Shelley Niro

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Veronica Passalacqua

In "The Shirt" Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) artist and director Shelley Niro parodies the archetypal tourist tee-shirt from the point of view of First Nations Peoples as an exploration into the lasting effects of European colonialism in North America. Facing the camera directly and poised against the landscape of “America”, an Aboriginal woman with biker-like accessories bears a sequential series of statements on her tee-shirt that together comprise a discourse on colonialism. The darkly ironic and yet brutally truthful messages of "The Shirt" draw attention to the history of invasion that indigenous peoples have experienced in North America.