‘What is the Value of Human Life?’ is one of four short films that are part of The Human Project, a film series that utilizes narrative film, animation, teaching and historical examples to explore culturally relevant questions about dehumanization and what it means to be human.

After the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I counted back the years to the first school shooting I was aware of. It was nearly 20 years prior at Columbine High School. I remember having just moved to Los Angeles and flipping through my mental Rolodex of dorm friends – was anyone I just graduated with a Colorado Native? Did they go home for the summer? Were they or their families affected?

Social media was not a powerful tool at that time, and now Parkland students are making strides online with their own journey to reform through digital media. Mobilizing thousands across the country to support common sense gun laws, they mirror the youth I dreamt of being — the activists of 1968 Berkeley and New York City.

Around the same time I started thinking about a John Legend video for “Penthouse Floor” I had produced a few months prior that addressed our country’s polarizing political divide. The video garnered numerous remarks online and I further realized our need for entertainment – it’s an approachable means of expressing opinions of conflict. Perhaps members of those online audiences may not feel comfortable speaking their opinions in public, and instead, they activate by becoming living room advocates.

In the process of seeking support for the production, I learned the TOO MANY BODIES team had two degrees of separation from a fatality of the Santa Fe High School shooting, and I personally had one degree of separation from a Columbine survivor. I only learned of my colleague when she revealed her PTSD was ongoing due to the event nearly 20 years prior, and it wasn’t something she revealed to too many people.

What happens to the families who have lost loved ones? What happens to the community members who were witnesses? What happens to the survivor with life-changing PTSD? What happens to the onlooker who doesn’t know how to help?

Film and movement were always my go-to therapy, and TOO MANY BODIES brings the two together as a means to express something that is as important to my soul as is being an American. The music video is partnered with a website for survivors, advocates, and loved ones. We hope to point audiences in an introspective direction that will in turn ask them to rethink and/or activate as advocates for common sense gun laws.

The power of art as a seed for discussion is necessary. I hope you and fellow artists join me in having those hard conversations using art as an instigator, in turn strengthening the progress of our community and our country.

“We have been dodging bullets for generations”
Naawakamig (Dennis Banks), co-founder of the American Indian Movement

When I was in my teens, I drove alone to Wounded Knee in order to see life in Indian Country. At the memorial, I got out of my car to experience a part of history that I knew little about. I had grown up in the 60’s and my understanding of Native American history was primarily based on two men; Christopher Columbus, who was portrayed as a great man who deserved his own holiday and Jim Thorpe, a sports hero and one of the only Native American biographies found in my grade school library. Little did I know that my lack of knowledge could have gotten me killed. While at the Wounded Knee memorial, I was chased at gun point by three men for just looking around. I have often thought to myself that I dodged a bullet that day.

Three years ago while researching diabetes in the United States, I ran across a man named Raymond White Tail Feather at the Dakota Trading Post in Poplar, Montana. We talked for over an hour and during that time, I told him about my experience at Wounded Knee. He told me that I was naive not to understand why this happened and that I needed to learn the truth for myself. Not the “truth” taught in history books, but the truth about: first contact, relocation, the Dawes Act, and the boarding school era. He said only until I learned about these events, would I be able to understand why I was chased at gun point.

It is well known that Native Americans have endured horrible traumas in their collective history that they are still working to overcome. This film hopes to build an understanding that the struggles the indigenous people of North America face today may be caused by the trauma that their ancestors faced many generations ago. It has only been recently discovered that traumatic events of past generations may cause epigenetic changes in the DNA and those DNA changes are passed down from generation to generation.

Just as Raymond White Tail Feather gifted me this journey, diabetes clinician Cheryl Bighorn-Savior’s gifted me the story about her brother in Poplar, Montana and it became the first step on my journey that led me around North America from Santee to Browning to Red Lake. My adventure will never end, because it teaches historical life lessons that a non-native must learn in order to understand what the First Nations people have to do to survive.

Dodging bullets is metaphorical, yet it is part of life in Indian Country. When you are marginalized and damaged, health and social issues come at you from all directions. The survivors are like a character in “The Matrix”; they work to protect their Spirit while flexing and bending out of the way of denigrating bullets in order to survive.