Now Available for Streaming & DVD: "IMAGINING THE INDIAN: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting"

The reigning Super Bowl champion Kansas City football team will be defending their title in Las Vegas this Sunday at Super Bowl LVIII. What's indefensible is that same Kansas City team, with the tacit approval of the NFL, will once again be allowed to flaunt its name and logo that many Native Americans find offensive.

Directed by Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg) and Cheyenne filmmaker Ben West, Imagining The Indian is a comprehensive look at the movement to eradicate the words, images, and gestures that many Native Americans and their allies find harmful, demeaning, and offensive.

The film examines mascoting issues through archival footage and interviews with those involved in the fight. It shows how teams such as the Kansas City football team has refused to consider a change and brings a new attention and urgency to the issue.

"The movement to get sports leagues, intransigent owners, and rabid fans to grasp the offensiveness in Native-themed team names, images and longstanding gestures – and harder yet, scrap them entirely – is the central subject of Ben West’s and Aviva Kempner’s pulsatingly argued, wide-ranging, and occasionally seething documentary.
Viewers afterward will hopefully think twice before casually tossing around the slur representing Washington D.C.’s football team until just last year. But learning that over 2,000 high schools across the country still using Native-themed mascots – all those R-words, Indians, Chiefs and Braves – gives the viewer a sense of the deep entrenchment for this disgraceful slice of symbolized history, which has been shown in studies to directly impact the mental health of young Native peoples everywhere."

- Los Angeles Times

IMAGINING THE INDIAN:
THE FIGHT AGAINST NATIVE AMERICAN MASCOTING

Directed by Aviva Kempner & Ben West

95 minutes | color | English | 2022
© Copyright 2022 The Ciesla Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

Featuring
Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Suzan Shown Harjo Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
Olympic Gold Medalist Billy Mills
U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo
Broadcasting Legend Bob Costas
National Museum of the American Indian Founding Director Emeritus W. Richard West Jr
U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin
& many more

Director Bios: Aviva Kempner & Ben West

Aviva Kempner

Washington, DC based filmmaker Aviva Kempner (Co-Director, Co-Producer) makes award winning documentaries about underknown Jewish heroes and social justice for over 44 years. Kempner completed A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings (2023), which chronicles the heroism of the two Ciesla Foundation namesakes, Helen Ciesla Covensky and David Chase—siblings who survived the Holocaust separately and managed to reunite after the war. She is presently completing a documentary on screenwriter and political activist Ben Hecht in 2024. Kempner is also making Pissed Off, a documentary short exploring the struggles faced by female lawmakers in Congress who advocated for potty parity in the United States Capitol In 2019, she premiered her fifth commercially-released film, The Spy Behind Home Plate (2019), which is about baseball player and OSS spy Moe Berg. Her other films include Rosenwald (2015), a documentary about how Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington in establishing over 5,000 schools for African Americans in the Jim Crow South and supported major African American artists and intellectuals, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (2009), about Gertrude Berg, who created the first television sitcom; and the Emmy-nominated and Peabody-awarded The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998), about the Hall of Famer who faced anti-Semitism during the ’30s. Both Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, and Hank Greenberg grossed over a million dollars at the box office and are highly ranked, along with Rosenwald, on Rotten Tomatoes. She also produced the award-winning documentary Partisans of Vilna (1986), about Jews fighting the Nazis.

Ben West

Ben West (Co-Director, Co-Producer) (Cheyenne) is a freelance writer/producer, filmmaker and a consultant with the Ciesla Foundation. He spent many years in television production at Carsey-Werner Mandabach LLC, and has worked on feature films for companies like Mandalay Pictures, Telenova Productions, and outlets such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is currently developing content for television and film. In addition to his endeavors in entertainment, he is Cheyenne and an advocate for Native American rights. West was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and is a graduate of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. In 2023, West founded Rena Flying Coyote Collective, a non-profit dedicated to telling the stories of Indigenous peoples through film, television, and the arts.