I would like to highly recommend Heather Ray’s Trudell airing on public television on April 11 (check listings for time). John Trudell is a spoken word artist and musician and Native American activist. His work is haunting, beautiful, gritty and intelligent. Heather’s treatment of his life and work can be described similarly.

Here is the description of the film that I wrote for the 2005 SILVERDOCS catalog where I saw the film and met the beautiful Heather Ray:

In 1969, when John Trudell heard that Native American protestors were occupying Alcatraz and demanding indigenous peoples’ land rights, he dropped everything, packed up his family and joined the encampment. While on the island, Trudell’s articulate voice attracted attention, becoming the representative of the protestors and the press covering them also embraced him. He refers to that time as his birth into activism, and the eloquence that emerged would continue as he spoke out on indigenous issues all through the tumultuous 1970s as the National Spokesman of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

After the tragic death of his wife and three children in a suspicious arson fire, Trudell turned his heartache into poetry. True to his calling as a speaker, he began reading his words with Native American chants. Later, with help from Jesse Ed and Jackson Browne, Trudell crafted his spoken word poetry into musical compositions. His work again transformed, Trudell himself had changed from activist to philosopher.

Heather Rae’s biopic weaves archival imagery into interviews with Trudell’s friends, such as Robert Redford, Bonnie Raitt and Wilma Mankiller. Rae also creates an impressionistic visual canvas for Trudell’s poetry and music, infusing the whole with the spirit of the man and his influential work.