Camille Manybeads Tso

Camille Manybeads Tso (Navajo) is a fourteen-year-old filmmaker who learned the art of film through the Indigenous Youth media literacy collective, Outta Your Backpack Media.   Camille has worked with OYBMedia since she was 9, and is currently the youngest youth mentor. Camille formed Halne’e (Storyteller) Productions in 2008 to make the film, “In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman.”  Yellow Woman is Camille’s first big production.   It started as her 8^th grade project, but soon grew into something more meaningful.  Camille conducted the interviews, researched the time period, and wrote a script of re-enactments.  She recruited her family to help her make costumes, direct, film, act, sing, and edit. The results are a beautiful film of the power of reclaiming oral histories.

 “In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman” is a 26 minute Docu-Drama about a young teen Navajo girl who finds her own strengths through making a documentary about her Grandmother and their ancestral history.  She imagines what it would be like to be her Great-Great-Great-Grandmother, Yellow Woman, who lived through the Navajo Long Walk of 1864 - 1868.   The re-enactments were performed by the descendants of Yellow Woman and filmed in many of the places where the historical events actually took place.