Link to Original Censored News Article

By Brenda Norrell || Censored News
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

ROCKY RIDGE, Navajo Nation -- It is a story that the United States does not want to be told. Now, with authentic images and story, a young Navajo woman is telling it. Camille Manybeads Tso was 13 years old when she wrote and directed the film "In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman." She tells the story of her great-great-great grandmother Yellow Woman, as told to her by her grandmother Mae Tso.

Mae Tso tells how the young Navajo women, with their babies, were constantly on the run from the Calvary in the 1860s, hiding in the caves and rocks of Black Mesa. Then captured and forced on the Longest Walk, they were driven at gunpoint across the swift Rio Grande. Babies and elderly were swept away. Eventually after the harsh imprisonment at Fort Sumner, N.M., Navajos returned to their homeland.

In this brilliant work of film, a young Navajo woman has come forward to reveal the genesis of Hitler's concentration camps.

Link to Original Arizona Daily Sun Article

Link to Article in USA Today

Hillary Davis Sun Staff Reporter | Posted: Friday, June 11, 2010 5:10 am

Camille Manybeads Tso of Flagstaff is much too young to have ever known her great-great-great-grandmother, a warrior known as Yellow Woman.

But her family’s strong oral tradition has kept the 14-year-old connected, and her passion for filmmaking brought the esteemed ancestor to life in a way that has resonated around the world.

Camille began researching her family history last year for an eighth-grade project. She was thinking of making a five-minute short, but instead got a 26-minute docu-drama, “In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman.”

The project earned a screening at one film festival. Then another, and another. It brought home one award, then another and another. And it gained her admission to the prestigious Idyllwild Arts Academy, a selective boarding high school for gifted teens in the arts.

Link to Time For Kids Article "Sharing Her Family's Story"

October 26, 2010
Sharing Her Family's Story
Teen filmmaker Camille Manybeads Tso talks to TFK

BY SUZANNE ZIMBLER

When Camille Manybeads Tso was 13, she decided to make a movie about her great-great-great-grandmother, a Navajo warrior known as Yellow Woman. In the 1860s, Yellow Woman was one of many Navajos who were forced to leave their land in Arizona and travel hundreds of miles on foot to New Mexico. Yellow Woman survived, but many people did not.

Camille's movie is called In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman. It has been shown in more than 30 film festivals, and has won nine awards. Camille, 15, talked to TFK about her reason for making the movie and her plans for future films.

TFK:

Before you began to work on the film about your great-great-great-grandmother, did you already know her story?

CAMILLE MANYBEADS TSO:

I had grown up listening to the stories of my family. I'd heard about the story of my great-great-great-grandmother, but I didn't realize that it was that close to me. I thought, "It happened a long time ago, so it doesn't really matter now." It all seemed very distant from my life.

Inside NAU  Northern Arizona University

http://www4.nau.edu/insidenau/bumps/2010/12_15_10/tso.html

By Julie Lynn Bergman

December 15, 2010

With a background in environmental and indigenous issues, Rachel Tso's decision to pursue NAU's master of arts in sustainable communities just made sense.

"The program gave me a lot of freedom to design what I wanted to learn and take classes from multiple disciplines like history, anthropology and communication," Tso said. "The required classes that I wasn't as excited about turned out to be the most meaningful of all—they really opened up my eyes to new ideas which then snowballed into my thesis."

Her unconventional thesis is actually a film documenting a "place-based media arts" demonstration project—a film documenting the making of a film—showing how to put technology in the hands of youth for them to use it to learn more about their communities and the environment. An accompanying handbook shows educators how to implement "Place- Based Media Arts" into their curriculum.

"Placed–based media arts" is a term coined by Tso to describe her process of working with students to create media arts that help to "generate and sustain community histories, address language loss and build intergenerational relationships."

But for her thesis, Tso decided to bring the project even closer to home. She gave her then 13-year-old home-schooled daughter Camille an assignment—to interview a community elder and create a media project about what she learned.

Link to original Navajo-Hopi Observer Article

S.W. Benally
NAVAJO HOPI OBSERVER
09/21/2010 4:51:00 PM

Rachel Tso is the facilitator of a new media literacy program at STAR school aimed at helping students illustrate the Navajo peacemaking system on film.

FLAGTAFF, Ariz. - Thanks to the Navajo Peacemaking and Safe Schools Project, Navajo students are helping pilot a media literacy program at the STAR School. The students work under the direction of filmmaker/writer Rachel Tso.

Tso finished setting up a state of the art, self-contained media classroom "in a box" last week, including a professional HD camera.

"We could film Star Wars with this if we wanted," Tso laughed.

Tso is working with seventh and eighth grade students on a film illustrating the Navajo peacemaking system, including an adaptation of the process by Dr. Mark Sorensen, director of the STAR School, that he calls "Playground Peacemaking.

"The film will be distributed to schools and YouTube so that the whole world can access this unique information," Tso said.

Tso's interest in filmmaking and television was piqued when she starred in a children's television pilot in Florida as a clown at age 17. This led her to the environmental communications department at Antioch College in 1992, where she made several films.

"My senior project was a 30-minute documentary on the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute called "Crimes Against Humanity (1994),' she said.

Tso learned about the relocation issue through Antioch's cooperative learning program.