Navajo family brings story of resistance to Black Hills Film Festival

Still from the documentary film "Bad Indian: Hiding in Antelope Canyon," which will screen at the Black Hills Film Festival on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024. (Courtesy photo)

Until recently, many members of the Tsinigine family lacked details about the life of their ancestor, Hastiin Tadidinii, which translates from Navajo (Diné) as "Corn Pollen Man."

Family lore told the story in broad brushstrokes: He was strong, respected by his people and shot to death by white men.

But big pieces of the story were missing.

What they found when they set out to learn more – a journey aided by a Diné journalist investigating boarding school abuses – was a medicine man and community leader tagged by the press at the time as a "renegade Indian" for his refusal to submit to the federal government's reservations and boarding schools.

In other words, they found a hero.

'Bad Indian: Hiding in Antelope Canyon'

The film about boarding schools and their impact on the Tsinigine family in Arizona will screen at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, in Hill City during the Black Hills Film Festival. A Q&A will follow. For a full schedule of films and events, visit blackhillsfilmfestival.org .

South Dakotans will soon have the chance to see the Tsinigine family's story of resistance on the big screen in the documentary "Bad Indian: Hiding in Antelope Canyon."

At the Black Hills Film Festival, which begins Sept. 27 in Hill City, Logan Tsinigine and others from the crew will be on hand for a question and answer session. The film is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29.

Tsinigine and his family run a company called Taadidiin Tours, guiding visitors through the painted rock formations of Arizona's Antelope Canyon. "Taadidiin" is a nod to Hastiin Tadidinii, who was Logan's great-great grandfather.

Tadidinii was among the Diné who escaped "The Long Walk" of the 1860s, a forced removal that pushed around 10,000 Indigenous people hundreds of miles across New Mexico. He hid in Antelope Canyon, performing ceremonies for prisoners and aiding those who fled or were freed. His killing in 1916 was sparked by his decision to pull a daughter from a boarding school, prompting a directive from the school's superintendent to bring him in, "on a stretcher, if necessary."

Today, the boarding school era is widely regarded as a stain on American history that ripped apart families and left generational scars on Indigenous people across the U.S. and Canada. Some children were beaten and berated for speaking their own language, and some children who died at the schools were buried in unmarked graves.

The movie tells the story of Tadidinii, but also serves as an exploration of the ways the boarding school system and its abuses have colored the last century of Indigenous history.

Tsinigine has never been to South Dakota, but he knows the state is full of people who have their own family histories of forced removal and boarding school abuse .

In a recent interview with South Dakota Searchlight, Tsinigine said he wants to hear those stories as he tells his family's own.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to tell this story in a documentary format? How did this project come about?

We've been collecting Tadidinii information for maybe 10 years. We had heard oral stories from our elders about who he was and what he did, but as we got older, it's one of those things where you're trying to just know more about who you are. He was almost supernatural, from the stories on how big he was, how strong he was, but we didn't have that much information other than the stories. There was a journalist, Alastair Lee Bitsóí, who is in the documentary, and he got a lead about this man who was having issues with the boarding schools, that he was murdered, and that his family is still around. So he contacted us.

We had a sit down with him, and he published an in High Country News . He was basically the catalyst for all of this. Other people started coming to us with information, just different tidbits, and all of a sudden we had just this giant drop box of information that we were trying to figure out what to do with it. At one of our family get-togethers, someone brought it up and said, "This is enough for a documentary."

In the film, you talk about Tadidinii as a leader, as someone to look up to, but there's very little about him online. How well-known is this story?

Where we lived, in that era of the early 1900s, was one of the most remote areas in all of the United States. And we are finding that we are the most documented family out there.

We were down at the University of Arizona about three months ago, and a woman from a trader family had written her master's thesis and included the Grand Old Indian in there. Then we found "The Vanishing American," which is a (1925) novel by Zane Grey, and he mentions my family story in that book.

When the University of Utah was doing archeology work down in that area, Professor Byron Cummings (d. 1954) also documented his interactions with my family. In October, in California, one of the descendants of the traders from the area is going to be doing a presentation called "The Grand Old Indian," and it's about us. So as you go through, it's amazing that all these other people documented their interactions.

So there's information, and there are people who've been uncovering this stuff, but it's not necessarily widely known, even in your neighborhood?

It isn't, because our elders, they always talked about sad times like "let's just let it go. You can't change it. Don't dwell on it." But us, being the generation that we are, we're so curious, and everyone's wanting to know more.

Now we have younger people in our family looking at several different things in his life. We actually have the indictments (in the murder trial), the investigation, and almost all of the court files. It was huge on the reservation, and the papers were afraid of an uprising, a sort of a revolt. Then people on our side said, "no, it really wasn't that bad," and it was kind of like a smear campaign to make him seem like this larger-than-life criminal. But on our end, it was just like, "no, he was just responding to things that he thought weren't correct." Some of that was digging up our historical sites, some of our burial sites. He didn't like that. And then there was the abuse in the boarding schools.

In South Dakota, we've had a lot of controversy over how to incorporate Native American history and culture into social studies curricula. Do you see films like yours playing some role in influencing the history our kids are exposed to?

I think, as with all other movements, that once you get enough information that you can make a curriculum and teach with it, and have it be fact-based, that it helps out. The issue that we have is that we're oral-based. You don't have your bibliography with all these things and where it came from. The difference in our story is that we were very documented. We can reference those things, and we've actually created a bibliography. It's going to take time, because that's not traditional academia. But as you go forward, it's just one of those things where once we start writing it, and then the generations behind us can start referencing that, it'll legitimize it eventually, however long that takes.

You say in the film you'd like viewers to take a more curious approach to Native history and culture. What else might you hope that viewers, maybe specifically in South Dakota, take from this film?

After the Phoenix film festival, one of the people that went to the screening came up for a tour, and I didn't realize he recognized me or had even seen the documentary. But he sat down by me on the bench, and we had almost a 45-minute conversation.

He was apologizing, because his family was actually part of the assimilation movement. And I explained to him that I have no hard feelings, there's no animosity, there's nothing. We don't want to make people feel bad. We're just talking. And I said, "our conversation here, I feel like that's healing." And we connected. We just talked about different things, and we ended up talking about our kids and what they're doing.

For me, that's where this is going. Hopefully it brings more people together, rather than disagreeing with the history or talking about who's at fault. In my view, it's just history, and we review it and learn from it.

I was really struck by the discussions in the film about canyons and mountains as churches, and that really reminded me of the Black Hills and their importance to our folks up here. Can you talk a little bit about the role your company plays in educating visitors on the importance of spaces like these?

When we have visitors come, our tour guides try to pack as much culture and history into the tour as we can, to go along with the cool Instagram photos and the amazing colors of the rocks. So we tell them about who we are, the things that we've done, and talk about the four sacred mountains, and that we're still here, in that perimeter. A lot of times they have other questions, and we've actually had people that have come like three different times, wanting to learn something else, or hoping to learn more.

That's just kind of the role we're taking. Ours is more of a cultural tour than just a sightseeing tour now. There's some people that couldn't care less about the rocks, or their pictures. We've had prayers with some of our guests down there, like, "can we hear a prayer? Can we hear a song?" And we've had people break down and cry, all sorts of stuff. We have engagements, proposals down there. So it's changed into this whole big thing, rather than just getting this cool picture.