Jennifer Heuson

JENNIFER LYNN HEUSON, Independent Scholar, Princeton, New Jersey, was awarded a Fejos Ethnographic Film Fellowship in October 2016 to aid filmmaking on ‘Sounding Western: Aural Sovereignty in a Sacred Land.’ Located in western South Dakota, the Black Hills are home to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials, the town of Deadwood, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and the site of Wounded Knee, an enduring symbol of cultural genocide. Tourism is big business in South Dakota, and like elsewhere in the American West, it relies upon producing experiences that draw heavily from frontier histories and mythologies. But for frontier experiences to be sellable, they must sound western. In the Black Hills, Lakota peoples and lands are protected as valuable, spiritual silences and made inaudible by the noise and sound of non-Native culture. This film documents the stories of three Lakota artists using sounds to creatively resist, reconcile and navigate the challenges of contemporary tourism. SOUNDING WESTERN 2019, super-8mm film/digital video, 20 minutes Three Lakota artists navigate the billion-dollar tourist industry of South Dakota’s sacred Black Hills