[nativestudies-l] Miss Navajo Film on PBS Tonight

[Shelly Lowe]

Miss Navajo – A Documentary by Billy Luther

 

Tonight on PBS – 11pm EST local Hartford station

 

Other time listing at:

 

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/broadcast.html?station=WEDH
<http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/broadcast.html?station=WEDH&zipcode=0651
3> &zipcode=06513

 

For the past 50 years, the Miss Navajo Nation pageant has celebrated Navajo
women and traditional values, language and inner beauty. Held over a
five-day period at the annual Navajo Nation Fair, contestants are required
to showcase skills that are crucial to Navajo daily life, including sheep
butchering, fry-bread making and rug weaving. Through interviews with new
and previous pageant contestants, MISS NAVAJO reveals the importance of
cultural preservation and the meaning of being a woman in Navajo culture. 

Crystal Frazier, a twenty-one-year-old Navajo woman, lives on the
reservation in Table Mesa, New Mexico. Living in a house without running
water, Crystal helps care for her family’s livestock, makes a weekly trip to
the well for water and does a share of the cooking. A tomboy and former high
school basketball champ, Crystal is confronted with a new set of challenges
when she decides to compete in the 2005–06 Miss Navajo pageant. She
acknowledges her own shyness and says that participating in the Miss Navajo
contest would probably be a good experience. MISS NAVAJO follows Crystal’s
journey leading up to the competition, while former Miss Navajos share their
own memories of the pageant and what it meant to them. Each previously
crowned “queen” also experienced life on the reservation and faced the
challenges of working as a leader in the preservation of their culture.

Conceived as a “celebration of womanhood” by filmmaker Billy Luther—whose
mother, Sarah Johnson Luther, was Miss Navajo Nation 1966–67—MISS NAVAJO
offers a different take on what it means to be beautiful, exploring
tradition in Diné, or Navajo, culture through one woman’s quest for the Miss
Navajo Nation crown. 


 


More information at www.pbs.org <http://www.pbs.org/>  

 

 

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