Filmmaker Jared Jakins said he has “always been drawn to communities or individuals, especially in the American West, that aren’t [represented] in the mainstream.”
That idea — prompted by a 2017 article in The Salt Lake Tribune — led to his documentary, “Scenes From the Glittering World,” which debuted in May on PBS’s “Independent Lens” series and is now available to stream on the PBS.org website.
The film tells the stories of three Diné teenagers — Granite Sloan, Illi ‘El’ Neang and Noah Begay — in “one of the most remote public schools in the country,” in the Navajo Nation.
Sloan, who was a freshman when the movie was filmed in 2019, said he hopes that people who watch the documentary can understand “how Native American people live on the reservation, what we go through every day. Compare it to the cities and how it’s not easy to live there.”
(Sorø Films) Ilii Neang (right), a freshman at Navajo Mountain High School, teases her brother during production of "Scenes from the Glittering World," a new 80-minute documentary film.
At the time of filming, Navajo Mountain High School had 30 students in attendance. Though Jakins originally set out to create a film about the school’s robotic team, his focus shifted as he began to live in the San Juan School District. His film, in the end, shows a coming-of-age story set against the realities of living on a reservation.
Shots of the teens pursuing their hobbies — such as video games, drawing and sports — are contrasted with shots that illustrate a host of problems: The lack of educational resources at the school, difficulty with introducing more modern issues to the Indigenous community such as LGTBQ acceptance, the accessibility to running water and stable electricity, and the shutting down of the school’s basketball team because there weren’t enough interested students interested to form a full team.
The documentary also helps conceptualize the generational trauma Indigenous people have endured. At one point, Neang is talking with her grandmother, Avis, who shares stories of attending an Indigenous boarding school — where if the students spoke even one word of the Navajo language, they were forced to chew on a bar of soap.
Leroy Bedonie, the Navajo language and culture teacher at NHMS, says 95% of the students at the school don’t know their language at all. Neang shares in another scene that not a lot of people her age practice or know the culture because they find it “embarrassing.”
Jakins said it was crucial to capture this variety of scenes. As someone outside of the reservation and Indigenous community (he was born in South African, and immigrated to Utah at a young age), he wanted to make sure to do so authentically.
(Sorø Films) Noah Begay (left) and his father have a discussion outside of Navajo Mountain in the new documentary film "Scenes from the Glittering World."
He did so by first approaching the elders of the community.
“The chapter presidency explained what we were up to,” he recalled. “I spoke for many hours with them about what their concerns might be and what we were hoping to accomplish.”
When the elders agreed, Jakins then gathered seven people, made up of members of the Diné and other Native American tribes, to form a cultural advisory board.
As Jakins’ team began editing the film, Jakins said, the board members weighed in every step of the way. The primary producer, Dr. Roni Jo Draper, a Yurok woman, help guide the film team to make sure they were asking the correct questions.
Another thing that made a difference, Jakins said, was that “we really tried to involve Granite, Noah and El with what they wanted their stories to be and how they wanted those things to be filmed.”
Jakins also consulted with Bedonie, who invited the film team to attend his class every day.
It’s there that the filmmakers learned of the Navajo creation story, which was a primary influence on the film’s title.
In Bedonie’s class, Jakins said, they learned about the “importance of the four levels of creation, or the four worlds” which are represented by sacred colors: Blue, yellow, white and black.
“The fourth world, the white world, is called the glittering world, according to Mr. Bedonie’s Navajo class,” Jakins explained. The story and the colors are used to bracket the beginning and end credits of the documentary.
