This project is an important part of the greater Native Daughters project (which I designed/am designing). The goal here is to present these young girls’ experiences in a truthful and sincere manner. And, after struggling with devising a way to present my interviews, I figured that there was no better way then to have them speak for themselves.
At the end of the day, I decided to attempt an experimental approach by cutting up each interview by responses to each question and structuring the site in a way that would allow the user to “interview” the girls. This process has some pros and cons as it allows the user to interact in a personal way with the girls and explore the wide amount of content, but at the same time some of the big moments from the interviews can be missed by taking the wrong turn in questioning.
I ended up submitting “Voices: The Girls of Santee” for a journalism competition, so I’m holding off from tinkering too much more on the project. You can see the current project here.
Another project we’re still putting together focuses on a group of girls from Macy. At the start, both of these projects had the same idea: interview a bunch of Native American girls with a standard set of questions in order to get some candid and honest reactions about life on the rez. But, as it goes with all journalism, the direction the project took once we hit the ground went in a completely different direction.
The Macy interviews were much more rushed than the Santee ones and, as a result, feel more coherent. So we put them together in a more straight-forward way. The video below focuses on the question “What do you want?” It’s pretty rough at this point, but stay tuned for a tighter version in the coming weeks.
Voices: Umonhon High School – What we want from Matt Buxton on Vimeo.
