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.

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.

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.