 live. This is the movie show. I'm Jay Fidel. George Kason can't make it today, but we have Stephanie Stowe Dalton as our co-host and movie reviewer. And we're going to review a movie that we were both impressed with. And that is Te Ata. And Te Ata is the stage name for Mary Thompson Fisher, who was a Native American Chickasaw from Oklahoma, from a small town in Oklahoma. Stephanie, you're simpatico with this movie because you follow Native American issues. Can you talk about your familiarity with Native American issues? Well, I worked on Indian reservations in schools as part of my research activities, and particularly in the Navajo Nation at Red Rock, excuse me, Rough Rock, and at the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. And actually, it was an extension of the work here in Hawaii that the Kamehameha Schools and Bishop's State supported to improve the performance, the academic performance of Hawaiian youngsters in the public schools. So the work that was done to promote their achievement in schools here in Hawaii was also then placed in Native American schools to see what the effects of it were there and that it wasn't just culturally dedicated, but it was a broader application to students in need. Well, the history of the American Indian is intertwined inextricably with the development of the country. And we forget that because I think we've been distracted by Hollywood and they have created a caricature of the American Indian through all the cowboy and Indian movies, which is not accurate. But when you start studying American history, you start examining all the various tribes and I should say the various cultures, Indian cultures around the country. I'm in Canada for that matter. I suppose you'd also say Mexico, but we have a special legacy of American Indian culture. And I think we have to appreciate that. We don't appreciate it enough. And this movie makes you stop and think, gee whiz, this is something I should know about. So I have to say it touched me. You want to tell the plot or we can share on the plot. Just generally, what is the story of Mary Thompson Fisher's life, Teata's life? Teata was obviously a remarkable child from the get-go. She was named by her grandmother, Teata, as the one who brings the morning. So the grandmother had a sense of this child's spirit in naming her the name Teata. She adopted as her stage name when she got to that point in her life. Yeah, so she lived in Oklahoma with her family and her mother was German and her father, of course, was Chickasaw. And they were members of the community there, the tribal community in Oklahoma. But Jade, as I recall, they came, not their ancestors, but in 1837, we had the Trail of Tears and they moved all of the Chickasaw people into Oklahoma from their original native land. So they didn't make that trip themselves, but they were the descendants of those who made that rough trip. And I think you mentioned that was as a result of one of our former presidents, Andrew Jackson, correct? He brutally moved the Indians out of Georgia and into Oklahoma, and that was called the Trail of Tears. And there was the Chickasaw, there was the Cherokee, and there was the Choctaw Indians. And I guess they all knew each other, but this was the Chickasaw Nation, so to speak, and it was a community. And they were very strong, very strong on family. It was such a kindly family, a family that was so sympathetic to her, to Teata. Mind you, the actress who plays the role is not an American Indian. She's a Peruvian Indian, and she is an extraordinary woman who had a certain amount of grace. Her name is Huryanka Kiltcher from Peru. And she's, you know, I mean, in a sort of international, multicultural way, an Indian way, she's really beautiful. And she had such grace in this movie. I would say that she was an important part of the success of the movie, and it won all kinds of awards this movie, which is something for essentially a historical documentary. So I think it touches you from the beginning to the end. But as you mentioned before the show began, there was violence and there was racism. Oklahoma has a special place in American racism. Seems like hard to stay, but he was, don't forget, you know, Oklahoma City, don't forget that town in or around Oklahoma City, which was burned to the ground with the Black community in 1920 or so. I think that was Rosewood. So Oklahoma has a special brand, and there were people in Oklahoma that didn't like Indians either, and you see that in this movie. They tried all they could to hold them down and to, you know, limit their options and to, oh yeah, and to outlaw their Indian culture, which I thought was really interesting. We didn't know that. This happened in Hawaii too. You know, there were moves after territorialization where the guys in charge were trying to hold the native Hawaiians down and outlaw hula, outlaw speaking of the Hawaiian language. It was really gross, and it happened here too. The same thing in Oklahoma. And so we here in Hawaii can appreciate, you know, what happened in Oklahoma with the Indians, all of them. But you mentioned before the show that there was violence. Oklahoma was not without violence, and we only saw a little violence in this movie. And that's okay, because I'm getting to the point where I really don't want to see violence in movies anymore. But can you talk about the hard times that she had? Well, I think that the movie was very soft on the violence. So it was intimated. So she had, they did expose, she did witness a murder. And of course, the family was concerned that, you know, repercussions. I think that's one thing that came across it. And at the end of the movie, there was an attack on the father and his store. But all through the movie, there was the intimation of the white man was going to visit violence upon these people, or get in there, or make them do things that they didn't want to do. I think there was an incredibly good scene of the leader of the group, the president of the nation, the leader of the Chickasaw Nation going, I guess, to Washington, where he met with the committee, where evidently, according to the treaty, they were owed some finances. And of course, the committee members were unwilling to give the Native Americans that money. And it was just in the sort of way that is so discouraging to see, because there wasn't a good reason for them not to give the money, they were owed the money. And yet, I think we've heard about this with treaties for all the time is that there would be these agreements and then the U.S. side wouldn't come through on it. But I mean, it is fortunate that the Native Americans had the paper that they had with the U.S. government, because that's one thing, I think that's one of the issues with the Hawaiian nation is that they didn't have paper with the U.S. government, whereas the Native Americans, so in the work that we know Senator Inouye did for the Native Americans and also tried to do for the Hawaiians, too, he was able to accomplish more with, for the Native Americans, because there is a paper trail. But it's something that was rarely respected and performed. And that was the case then for this Chickasaw Nation, they were expecting that leader to come back with money from that visit to Washington. And of course, he came back with that bad news. And in that way, we see the dignity and the patience that these people were able to muster in the face of so much destruction and difficulty. It was just incredible with all the hard work, because they said to the committee that the Native Americans the Indians were always, they're very familiar with hard work and making a living off the land. And as the committee had suggested to this leader that the Native, the Indians should pull themselves up by their bootstraps using that very, that very term. And they said they were quite familiar with making a living off the land and certainly seeing them have to endure that kind of treatment and live through it. You're right. It was an exploration of the character of the Chickasaw and other Indians. They were honest, they were hardworking. And as I said before, their families were so strong. And her family, Teyasa's family was so strong. They encouraged her in every way they could. They were like, you know, a funny thing, like an immigrant family, they had all these barriers and they had to run the gauntlet on so many things. And they got her into school, which was what, you know, her plan. That was the Oklahoma Women's College, which she was the first Indian ever in that school. She was born in 1895, that had to be in the 20s or so. And she died in, I think, 1995. She lived a good life. And she did well and got, she started deptlessly into acting. And her acting was really two kinds of acting. One was regular acting, like for Broadway. And the other was acting Indian parts to express Indian culture. And it was good at both, you recall? I do. And I think that it is also important to point out that her teachers should, two teachers, two women, who were very helpful to her. They saw that she was struggling and had dreams and had no way to know how to go forward. And at both those stages out of high school and into college, she got help because her family didn't want her to leave home. Because as you said, the family focus was the number one. That was there. The dad wanted everybody right there at home together and to love and work together. But she knew she had a gift and needed to go and do something about it. And she found these women, they found her to help her. Like in the college, she was the first native girl, native student. And the college was for women. And of course, the girls dissed her. I mean, it was that scene again where she was ignored and isolated, and it took a teacher there. It was the theater. The teacher was Ms. Davis, if you recall, played by Cindy Pickett. And she was a very powerful character. She understood that she supported she gave Tayada words of wisdom and encouragement and really was an important mentor for Tayada to take up acting and to realize her destiny. And then she went off and she was very successful when she, well, each time that that woman, Ms. Davis, she encouraged her to look to her heritage for her expression for what she would work on as an actress. She said, everybody does Shakespeare. Everybody is doing the same thing who come through my classes. Why don't you think about what you are and what you can bring to us from your background? And she did that. And I thought that that was an interesting theme because she was especially helped there. And then she was very successful in sharing and relating and bringing her classmates into what was her lived experience. But that ties into later when she went when she went on to work in New York, and she was trying trying out for all of the Broadway plays. The notion was this had to be in the 30s, the 40s, you know, there's no place like Broadway. She went to Broadway. She lived a life of poverty. She waited for years to get a part. She finally got a partner Broadway musical. And it was successful, successful musical. She wasn't the lead, but she was she she got notoriety. She could have gotten more roles out of that. But she wasn't satisfied with it. And it took her meeting a young not so young man, but a man who she fell in love with. And he was the one who'd taken an interest in Native Americans to and other cultures. He'd been studying, I think he was a professor. But anyway, as he was, and his name was Fisher, that and hence her married name, her ultimate ultimate married name was Fisher. It was Mary Thompson Fisher. And Fisher was he was prematurely gray. I don't know if that was, you know, the way he really was. But he was played by Mackenzie Aston, Clyde Fisher. He was, I guess he was a an academician. Yes. Yeah. And he cared a lot about Native Hawaiians, but he really cared about her. He was so tolerant and helpful. He backed her up and anything she wanted to do. He was the perfect husband for her really. Well, he recognized he recognized that she had something she had to do, that there was something she had to give. And she needed to work on that. But he guided her to like the previous mentor at her school at the girl's school, then he got her to understand why she was feeling so empty because she she didn't feel that she had had achieved or out of that Broadway role. And that's when he took her to to well, to an experience in a movie theater where they had a short on Cowboys and Indians and they were saying and it was very, very devastating for her to see that. She stood up and she had the leaves. She couldn't stand it. Too horrible. Yeah, that was awful. But he brought her around to understand that she was the one to bring all of that into America into mainstream America. She had the gift to bring that in a way to to share it for its beauty and and its value. And she did, she did. This actress did, even though she's not an American Indian, she understood Indian. And and in real life, Teata had a grace, don't you think? I mean, the movie accurately portrayed, I think, the grace that she had. He was the finest example of Indian culture and Indian sensibilities. We should appreciate it and cast aside the caricatures that Hollywood has given us over the years. These are beautiful people. Yes, yes. It's kind of like the hula in Hawaii. You know, you see the Hawaiians go into their performance of the hula and with their own language and music, and then the same way she did it, going into the performance in the costume of Native Americans and using her language and her song and drawing them on all the stories she had to to share because she had become the storyteller. She was Teata who brings mourning and she also brought the stories. It was really beautiful. And ultimately recognized by Eleanor Roosevelt, who caught wind of her and became, she became her friend. And Eleanor Roosevelt had FDR invite her to the White House, which was very touching because, you know, FDR and Eleanor especially recognized her her cultural value and purity. And so they had her sleep, you recall, they had her sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. She lived, she stayed at the watch, slept overnight. I haven't done that myself and I know you haven't, but that was really something. And even your brother hasn't done that. She was just sitting there in the Lincoln bedroom. Remember that? She was in the Lincoln bedroom sitting there on the bed or in the bed and she said, well, Mr. Lincoln, I don't know what you think about this, but I'm here. And I'm sure he was mightily. Well, it was very, it was very symbolic. Lincoln, you know, emancipated the slaves. Lincoln was there at the time, you know, the Indians were being mistreated and they were through the 19th century and well into the 20th century and maybe to some extent even now. But to be in the Lincoln bedroom was more than just to be in the Lincoln bedroom. There was this symbolic statement and Eleanor Roosevelt knew that and FDR knew that and they were very classy, very kindly and there was so loving of her. And later it said at the end, there were credits on the screen at the end. Eleanor Roosevelt had her also perform at their home, at their home along the river in New York at their mansion when they had the king and queen of England visit. So it was Queen Elizabeth's mother and dad, Queen Elizabeth II's mother and dad were visiting with the Roosevelt's at their mansion in New York. And so I had seen another movie where it was about Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt had set up this Native American performance at that time. I didn't know who Teata was, but it turned out that it was Teata. But what she was trying to do was introduce the king and queen of England to Native American music, song and performance. And in a way I think that Eleanor Roosevelt was a little bit cheeky or trying to be a little bit naughty in exposing the king and queen to that Native American culture that took them by surprise and especially the language and the music of the Native America. Clearly in that movie the king and queen never seen anything like that before. But they surely knew they were getting the best. That was really interesting to see those two things come together. Well I think her strength and she recognized it as you said. She was the storyteller and she had all these stories. The tradition of the Indians, you pass it on down the generations. And she had all these stories that she would tell and she had this kind of pantomime way of presenting it with bow and hour and clothing and special Indian clothing and gestures. It was almost like hula to express the stories. And as she became better and better at it and she realized her destiny, she became more captivating and people wanted to see her do that. And I think she went a long way to neutralize the negative impressions and caricatures that the country had locked onto because of the Hollywood rendition. So she did a lot to represent Native Hawaiian culture. On the other hand I would say that there weren't a lot of Teotas. She was really unique. And unfortunately you know even till today we see a character prevail, a caricature prevail. And I think we have to appreciate and this movie helps you do that, appreciate the Native culture, appreciate their grace and their character and their kindness. And the fact that we have not treated them well, we the country have not treated them well. There was a statute, I don't know if you recall, there was a statute that some of these anti-Indian bigots were relying on which it was a federal statute diminishing their culture, prohibiting their culture. And FDR, I'm sure at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, had that statute reversed, repealed. Okay, that statute you're saying, okay, I thought you were saying statute, no statute. So yes, they had outlawed in Oklahoma any performance. It's same like what the popes apologized for and in Canada that they did this with their first peoples. Just the brutal treatment of people couldn't speak their language. We did it in our Indian boarding schools too and trying to make the children white culture and to forget about their own culture. And it created tremendous distress and took away and lost languages because of it too. And people report on that as being really the nightmare part of their life. And some of those I've already, I think the Hopi's lost generations of children because they took the children away from their mases. And then when they came back or didn't come back, they lost the understanding about how to raise children. They actually did the children were gone for so long and they had no experience with them and they lost their parenting skills. And this has been tragic, the treatment. Yeah, tragic and it's the ultimate racism to destroy the culture. And there were people that were determined to do that in this country. So the United States has a very mixed bag on a history of racism. And we tend to think it's only about slavery. It's only about African Americans and the South. But no, no, it started out with Andrew Jackson and the likes in the early 19th century. Didn't say it started out. It started out in the 1600s with the African Americans being brought here to slave. But we were doing some of the things with the Indians. And Andrew Jackson did his fair share and there were people in this country who were very unkind. That's a very modest word for it. Very unkind to the native Hawaiians. And so we really have to get off that. We have to get off bigotry. That's what this movie is so gentile, so what's the word? It really impresses you and it reaches you about racism, about American racism. We really have had enough of that. Bigotry still lives in this country. We have to cut that out. And that's what this movie is saying. It's not just one group. It's many groups. And this just happened to be a group who we mistreated and then we forgot that we mistreated them. Mm-hmm. Well, I think too, for some reason, the appreciation for the complexity and the aesthetic and the beauty of the cultures, somehow that gets blocked. And that's what's disturbing about racism. It blinds people to what is standing. We're just right in front of them in beauty, like they say in the Navajo, walk in beauty. People walk in beauty. And that when you've got that racism screen up, that can't be seen. So to go to these dances at these pueblos when they have them in the summer for corn or rain or whatever. And to see the meticulous effort that they make and the community coming together to do these dances that everybody does the dancing. And they're simple steps, but it's absolutely very, very complicated in the history and the tradition is right there before you. And the challenge of putting that on and the prep for it because it goes on for hours, they have to be very much in shape for it. And you stand there and think, how could anybody disregard the capacity and the brilliance of these people that they can do this in the middle of the desert with almost no resources and yet come out with these incredible expressions of beauty through dance and song and the way they put materials. When I watched the movie the first time, I was touched emotionally by it. I could feel it in me. I didn't know these things and it taught me a lot and I was emotionally engaged with this movie. But then in anticipation of our discussion today, as I often do, I went back and watched the trailer so I could refresh myself on the default of the movie. And you know what? I was likewise emotionally engaged with the trailer. This is a very powerful movie and it deserves all the awards they've got. So if I give you one to ten, Stephanie, how do you rate this movie? Where? Is it one being the worst and ten being the best? Well, I'm going to say ten because I personally appreciated the way they handled the intimations of brutality and instead of coming full bore on that and putting us through some of the experiences all the way through, I appreciated the way they handled that the threat was there, the danger was in the air. And then the things that she actually had to act through were things of a social nature that were important to developing the plot. So I appreciated the way they handled all of that. So they showed all the potential danger that was there for a young a young Indian person, native person going through. I could feel the terror that people have, I'm sure, whenever they were put in situations like that or these powerful other people came around. I mean, I got that sense of it and yet she stood her ground in dignity. As you said, she was courageous and stood her ground. But for the people that suffered these situations, it must have just been terrorizing. Right. That was the exceptional thing about her. She stood her ground as a person, the real person. Te Ata had the ability to say no to people. He had the ability to avoid being manipulated and so forth. And that was a strong part of the real story. But the other thing that struck me, and I don't know how to express this, but the actress was so Te Ata. He was, he managed to make herself into Te Ata. He had, he had the grace of the character she was portraying. You could hardly take your eyes off her because she was Te Ata. And she expressed that culture. She expressed all those characteristics and character points so well that you thought she was really the person she was portraying. And Jay, we didn't say that she was not, she was turned down by the Carnegie Institute for their program. And what did she do? She didn't crumble. She got on a train and went to the school and demanded to be given a chance to display her skill, her talent. And she wouldn't take no for an answer. So that was really impressive for a young woman to do that. And she had the confidence to know that if she could show them that it would make the difference. And sure enough, they brought the whole committee in after she got in the way of anybody doing it. That was a very impressive part of the movie. And an impressive part of her character and her story. At the same time, Stephanie, there was a modesty. And still modest about it. Yes. Kindness about it, a sweetness, a purity. So she was, he had that, call it an Indian courage, but she also had an Indian kindness and modesty in patients. And it all came together in a very quality human being. And I think that's, I would also give it a 10, Stephanie. You think so. And as you said, it won many awards. So we're not alone in thinking about it being a very excellent performance and production. Very good. Thank you, Stephanie. Thanks for looking at it. And thanks for joining me on the show. And I hope George Casey watches the show at some time and appreciates our discussion here about Tehada. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.