Directed By: Anne Makepeace
2010 | 56 min
United States

Saturday, November 12: 3:30 pm

Kaufmann Theater
Filmmaker in Person | New York Festival Premiere

Hyannis. Narragansett. Sippewisset. Shawmut. Chappaquiddick. Algonquin. These names litter the signposts of New England and are spoken with little thought to their origins. For Native Americans, these words are all that remain of languages that once rang out across the Massachusetts seaboard. Anne Makepeace, director of Coming to Light (2000) about Edward S. Curtis's photography of western tribes, follows Martha's Vineyard islander Jesse Littledoe Baird, who was called by a vision to return the Wampanoag language to its people. Baird reconstructs it using the only tools available, a Bible translated into Wampanoag by the British missionary John Eliot and official deeds, letters, and petitions of the colonial era, which form a collective history of how the tribe's land and culture were stolen in the first place. Laced with evocative silhouette animation, We Still Live Here shows how the Wampanoag people have resurrected a part of their culture with the very devices once used to defeat it.