I was going to be late instead of not bring that chicken to the lady's house.

I would have gotten in trouble, but at least I had the Chinese food.

It's important. I mean, it becomes like not an exchange.

It's much more than that. I mean, like, people all over the world make film that way.

But that's maybe not the best we can do.

Thinking about it deeper and making it worth more, you know?

Sorry.

All my relations.

Welcome back to another episode of All My Relations.

We hope you've been enjoying our live episodes that we recorded at Santa Monica College.

And today we have another great conversation with Cherokee Nation Director and filmmaker, Britt Hensel.

We talk storytelling, community, and what it means to move through these artistic spaces in a good way as a native person.

Yeah. And Mategan, I thought this conversation in this topic was really important because it's something that plays out in both of our work in such different ways.

And we're both storytellers, but in different mediums and spaces.

But in both of our work, there's so much that we see extracted from community by non-native researchers, writers, filmmakers, photographers.

And the relationships are just so harmful that come out of those extractive storytelling approaches.

And so being able to talk with someone who thinks about it in a very different way and approaches it in a very different way, I think, is super important.

And Mategan, I know that's something that you think about constantly with your work.

Well, you know, the ethics of journalism, the way that we approach storytelling in a western way when we think of intellectual property or copyright law, you know, those are fundamentally at odds with our indigenous value systems in the way that we would traditionally tell stories.

When I was a young person graduating from college and I had just like taken all of those classes from all non-native people, I certainly didn't go about it in a good way with my first projects as a documentary long form photographer.

You know, I definitely made a lot of mistakes. And it took me like a decade of re-evaluating my approach and the way that I chose to share agency with my subjects.

The way that I chose to give stories back to community and the stories that I chose to tell in the first place have to be rooted in community value systems.

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