Day Five!
Dozens of Lac Courte Oreilles community people, including many of the elders we interviewed, showed up for the premiere. They were not disappointed. The videos looked GREAT!!! We were all very proud of what we learned and the stories we told. We hope other LCO people will think about global warming and what it might mean to our community. It’s a little scary, but several of video stories talked about what we can do to slow down global warming. So that made us feel good to know that we can do something about the problem.
Also in the audience were a newspaper reporter from the Sawyer County Record and Sue Benson from the Cable Natural History Museum, who invited everyone to the exhibit opening of Paradise Lost: Climate Change in the Northwoods. Ms. Benson told the audience that she would like to include the camp videos in the exhibit, which will travel to Milwaukee and Chicago after its run in Cable. That means tens of thousands of people could see our stories. Wow!
Day Four
It’s crunch time. The groups worked really hard today to put their video stories together… arranging interviews, video clips, background audio and music. Some of the musical compositions didn’t really work once the video was strung together, so a few groups went back to their musical pieces and re-did them to create the right mood.
Everyone has a pretty good idea of what their stories are intended to convey. Now it’s just putting the pieces together before tomorrow’s 3pm premiere. Our friends and families are coming to watch, so it should be exciting.
Day 3
Patty prepping two elders for
interviews.
We
looked at the interviews we shot yesterday and they
all turned out!!! The video looked good and the audio
was crystal clear. We now have all the pieces we need
for our video projects. It’s hard to decide what to
put in and what to leave out. Our brains are crammed
with so much information!
We had a frustrating hour because of some computer
glitches, so we moved to Plan B and started editing
on back-up laptop editors. But we’re starting to put
pictures with the words and we can sort of tell how
it might look when it’s finished.
Tomorrow we finish our scripts, record our narration,
and really get to work on editing it all together!
Here's
a clip of a group practicing their lines, "What can
we do?". I think we'll use the final take.
Day Two
After
our discussion about the regional affects of climate
change, we broke into groups and talked about the
questions we would ask our elders and scientists from
the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission
(GLIFWC). All the groups planned to ask general
questions about Ojibwe life and climate change, but
each group had a special focus: plants, animals,
water, and culture. We are working with storyboards,
which are basically outlines with sketches.
We were a little nervous watching the weather. Rain
was moving in and we had planned to do our interviews
outside.
Our first elders, Alberta Fleming, Louis Gouge and
his brother, Bill arrived about 2pm. Sure enough, a
light rain was falling, so we interviewed Mrs.
Fleming inside and the Gouge brothers outside in the
gazebo. All of the elders talked about how they’ve
noticed that nowadays the winters are milder and the
summers hotter than they were when they were younger.
Louis Gouge told us that he didn’t think the fish
were as plentiful as they used to be. We interview
two more elders tomorrow.
The GLIFWC scientists arrived at 3pm. They included
Karen Danielsen (Botanist), Matt Hudson
(Environmental Biologist), Mark Luehring (Fisheries
Biologist), and Reggie Cadotte (Policy Analyst). They
all expressed concerns about climate change and
talked about how it may affect the natural resources
of the Ojibwe. But they also pointed out that we
can’t know for sure if the changes we see are because
of long term global warming or weather patterns that
happen in cycles.
We have a few more interviews tomorrow. We’ll be
capturing the portions of the interviews we’ve shot
on video and deciding which ones we’ll use. Our
storyboards will help guide us as we start putting
the pieces together.
Day One of 2008
Welcome Back!
Our day began with introductions and an Ojibwe blessing from our cultural director, Gordon Jourdain. There were some familiar faces from last year’s camp, including four older campers who became junior counselors this year. Mariah, Donny, Roger, and Tony are mentoring the younger campers and sharing their media “know how.”
This
year’s theme is climate change. Biologist Terry
Daulton explained how greenhouse gases get trapped in
the earth’s atmosphere. She did this through a couple
of fun games. Here’s us trying to “save the earth” by
working together as a team to move the fragile earth
to safety. 
click the photo for video
In
another game (kind of like “Red Rover”), some of us
were greenhouse gases and others of us were sunbeams
trying to bounce off the earth without getting
trapped by the CO2 and Methane molecules. Then we did
an experiment with baking soda and vinegar. We mixed
it in a beaker, shook it, and then used the carbon
dioxide to blow out a candle. It actually worked a
couple of times. (click for video)
Greetings
to our Nipmuc Friends!
Camp instructor Patty Loew told us about another
group of tribal kids from the Nipmuc Nation in
Massachusetts who do a media camp like ours. She said
they use digital cameras and interview elders, like
we do, to gather oral history. Here’s Kelsey greeting
our Nipmuc friends in Ojibwe and telling them about
our Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation.
Time
to Get Technical
Today we learned how to compose music using Sony’s
ACID music software. It took us maybe five minutes to
learn. It’s really easy. What’s really cool is
there’s a CD of Native American music loops, so we
could put together drums, rattles, flutes, and
vocals.
Over lunch we watched some other videos about climate
change. That gave us ideas for our own projects. We
learned how to use the cameras and played around with
them after lunch. The rest of the afternoon, we met
in our groups to come up with questions for our
interviews with the elders and scientists tomorrow.
We’re going to ask the elders about the changes
they’ve seen in their lifetimes and how connected we
are to the plants and animals that might be affected
by global warming. Then we’ll ask the scientists
about what they think might happen to these resources
in the future.