Little Caughnawaga: To Brooklyn and Back

The scouts

Everyone expects a doc about Mohawk identity to genuflect toward trauma and resistance—Tarbell instead gives you the unglamorous, stubborn dailiness of women holding a diaspora together, which is somehow more radical than the obvious move.

A formally elegant treatment of a specific historical moment and community, positioning itself within documentary lineages of social portraiture while respecting the archive and oral tradition with equal weight—the kind of considered structural choice that announces a filmmaker thinking about form and responsibility together.

The decision to move fluidly between Brooklyn and Kahnawake rather than treat them as separate narratives creates an invisible architecture that holds the whole film together, and that geographic-spiritual shuttling does more storytelling work than any voiceover could.