Since early 2000 I have built a documentary filmmaking practice working in and among Indigenous and urban communities dedicated to environmental justice and protection movements. During my time as faculty at The Evergreen State College, a small liberal-arts university in the Pacific Northwest situated among biodiverse forests, I couldn’t help but feel the connection between humans and their environment. Documentary methods encourage a process of discovery, development, gathering, analyzing, and presenting that centers inquiry and observation. In my yearlong and multi-quarter courses, I was able to apply these methods to increase student interest and engagement with critical issues facing their generation and our planet.

Over the past decade, I began to notice how students express fatigue when it comes to climate change and learning about environmental catastrophe. As a generation that has been raised with a barrage of evidence that the world is increasingly less habitable, many students express feeling like they are powerless to change the future. This belief is further reinforced by a mainstream media that often promotes how little can be done to prevent the destruction of our planet and humanity. Documentary filmmaking and community engagement can counter this sentiment—film is a natural medium to combat environmental malaise as it provides a framework for students to find their role in efforts to engage with the ‘real world.’ In addition, documentary filmmaking offers positive ways to support front-line communities who have no choice but to dedicate to social and environmental justice work as they face corporate exploitation, community extinction, or genocide. As part of community engagement, a film has the power to center themes and important topics of discussion and student involvement. Students gain inspiration from successful short and long form projects made in partnership with people engaged in environmental movements. Nonfiction is inspiring in that it grows audience awareness, informs or shapes public policy, and even supports environmental restoration and recovery. The classroom is a laboratory for empowerment and change, and sharing models of successful media approaches, field practices, and engagement practices forms a critical core of my pedagogy.

One example of bringing the field to the classroom occurred while I was co-teaching with experimental animator, Ruth Hayes, in the yearlong, full-time Mediaworks program at The Evergreen State College. Ruth and I were interested in focusing our theory and practice course on encouraging students to engage with community media making. We began fall quarter grounding students in concepts around ethics, collaboration, and understanding the role each person can play in a larger movement or project. We received funding to create a fall symposium that served as a case study and kickoff to our yearlong theme. I built on prior connections in Indigenous and environmental justice community work to organize the Waters Connect Us symposium—a three-day event featuring Indigenous community members, environmental scientists, and filmmakers who have dedicated themselves to protecting water in their communities and regions.

A key aspect of successful student engagement with an event involves including diverse courses and programs that intersect with the specific themes and ideas examined. In this case we invited faculty and students from Environmental Science, Visual Art and Media, Indigenous and Native Studies, Geography, and Health disciplines who all participated in the curriculum planning and attended the symposium. As part of the discovery process, students across this wide range of disciplines conducted research on the themes, ideas, and panelists. We set up an online platform with readings, videos, and information about each participant and included a survey for them to submit questions in advance. An advanced student was hired to coordinate this aspect, which provided her an experience in planning and engagement. Our panelists included a community expert from Squaxin Island involved in food sovereignty and cultural preservation, an elder from Navajo lands with lifelong experience protecting Diné water and lands from coal mining, a female filmmaker from Lakota territory whose documentaries speak to the youth about Lakota social justice work in their homelands, an Indigenous water protector from the Columbia River, a Pacific Northwest filmmaker who documented the largest dam removal in the nation, and a water scientist and faculty at Evergreen studying the formation of rivers at Mount St. Helen after the volcanic eruption. The panel was moderated by Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a Lakota artist, musician, radio host, and alumnus of Evergreen. The intersectional event featured many opportunities for students to form connections between their field of interest and the work being done by the presenters. In this way, students found themselves in this work, inviting them into it in ways they could understand.

Figure 1. Panelists at the Waters Connect Us Symposium

In the process of developing the Waters that Connect us event, we solicited student volunteers from across the attending courses and these students served as liaisons between their peers and participants. By offering moments for students to interact informally with the presenters they were able to form relationships that extended their learning. Relational work is an important aspect of combating apathy and angst. Although this took planning, coordination, and multiple follow ups, the engagement with ten other Evergreen full-time courses/programs ensured that participating students and faculty could make clear connections to the symposium themes of Indigenous water protection, using media as a tool of environmental justice, and presenting methods of positive allyship. In addition, these activities increased student investment in the symposium and provided low-stakes opportunities for students to practice their networking skills, encouraging them to reach across the often invisible silos that exist in colleges and universities. As a faculty mentor, it’s important to create opportunities to participate in informal networking for students whose generation may be more comfortable interacting online than in person. In this sense, community engagement is an active step in combating environmental malaise through actions. For many students, these interactions served as bridges to issues and topics they would explore in their group work the remainder of the year.

Figure 2. Attendees at the Waters Connect Us symposium

Our symposium centered the power of activism, Indigenous practices, and media in water protection and restoration work to showcase how environmental protection work can be successful. Moderated by Tiokasin Ghosthorse, I was confident that he could focus an engaging conversation based on the topics and questions students submitted. With over 200 students, faculty, and community members in attendance we were able to reach a vast and diverse population in a powerful conversation around solution-based water protection work. We ended the event with time for student and faculty questions that directed the themes and ideas back to their classroom material. The event was documented by the campus media staff, and this allowed us to expand our audience beyond the symposium. (See the Evergreen Youtube channel “Waters Connect Us” linked here too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBBMtMwTG_0). Students were assigned reflection and analysis papers to form clear links between the content to the work back in their classrooms. In their event reflection papers Mediaworks students evidenced the impact film and community connections had on their learning and engagement:

Following this experience, I noticed students not only had an enhanced understanding of crucial ecological and environmental justice issues, but also an increased sense of agency with regards to how they could respond to their individual feeling of environmental malaise and become an agent of change in the world.

Students continued into winter quarter with a framework for developing short community-based documentary and animation moving image pieces. They formed small cohorts and developed moving images, sound, and animation projects in service to a community group or organization (using a broad definition of community). A vast array of topics were explored that ranged from feminism, identity, social justice movements in immigrant communities, salmon restoration in rivers, and support for community-based local organizations. Students created three short projects in collaborative groups that were presented in an end of year public screening. In their student evaluation writing, the Waters Connect Us was often cited as an inspiration for this winter and spring quarter student work.

Suree Towfighnia (she/her) is a social practice filmmaker and educator originally from Chicago, IL. Her work centers environmental justice and human rights issues to strengthen narratives, inform policy, and support historically misrepresented communities. Suree directed the award-winning Public Television documentaries Crying Earth Rise Up (2015) and Standing Silent Nation (2007) which helped shape policies on water protection and industrial hemp respectively. Suree produced Haskell Wexler’s final documentary, Four Days in Chicago, about 2012 NATO protests. Her current work includes Nurturing Roots, a collaborative animation and documentary project with Oaxacan coffee growers and If We Film It, It’s the Truth, an examination of the role documentary plays in Indigenous resistance in southern Mexico. Suree has taught media theory and production in the U.S. and Cuba, and full-time at the Evergreen State College from 2017-2023. Suree currently lives in Colorado with her family and is a video production professor at Metropolitan State University Denver.