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Georgina Lightning began her career in Hollywood in 1990, the same year the film Dances with Wolves hit theaters. For nearly two decades, she acted in television and in films; Older than America (2008) is her directorial debut. We interviewed Georgina while she was in Missouri to screen the film as part of the Citizen Jane Film Festival and visit elementary and undergraduate classrooms to talk about filmmaking and Native history. In one fifth grade class, which had been studying the history of Native boarding schools, she introduced herself to the class and asked "Do you know what genocide is?" They did not, and she helped them understand this history by telling stories about her parents' generation and their traumatic experiences with residential schools, before showing the trailer for Older than America. We heard later from members of this class that her talk was the most important moment of their fifth grade year. Later, University of Missouri undergraduate students were equally riveted by her discussion of Hollywood casting practices and her own growth as an actor and then director in an industry that all too often writes Native roles and perspectives out of scripts.
Lightning, born in 1964, is a member of the Samson Band of Mushwatchees Cree from Hobbema in Alberta, Canada. She moved to Los Angeles in her twenties to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and has had roles on television programs-including Walker, Texas Ranger, The West Wing, and Blackstone-as well as feature films such as Johnny Greyeyes (2000), Christmas in the Clouds (2001), Backroads (2003), Dreamkeeper (2003) and Ghosts of the Heartland (2007). She also supported the emerging careers of her three children-Cody Lightning, Crystle Lightning, and William Lightning-who are active in the industry as performers. Yet after her own extensive training in acting and theater, she found it "disheartening to go into the film industry" ("Guided") due to the small range and general paucity of roles for Native performers, as well as the racial politics of casting that can be limiting for Native actors. Finding work and agents willing to cast her in anything but explicitly Native American roles was a struggle. In response, she broadened her activities from acting to work as a producer, director, cultural advisor,...