On Tuesday nights on the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation, you’ll find everyone glued to their stereos listening to CKON Radio. They’re not listening to music or a talk show. They’re playing bingo.
“Radio Bingo” comes from filmmaker Shelby Adams. In roughly eight minutes, Adams tells the story of Radio Bingo, a program that runs Tuesday nights on the radio station located in Akwesasne, a Mohawk nation that straddles the boundary between Canada and the United States. Adams grew up on the reservation, and has been playing bingo on Tuesday nights for as long as she can remember.
“I’m actually half Mohawk, from the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation. I’m an enrolled member with the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe and the Mohawks of Akwesasne, and I’ve lived on a reservation my whole life,” Adams said. “And I’m still here.”
Every Tuesday, families and friends gather to chat, eat, and play bingo. But beyond the community aspect of the game, it also incorporates the Mohawk language in an effort to help keep it from disappearing completely. In her film, Adams weaves the importance of Radio Bingo with historical truths about the atrocities Indigenous people have faced in both the United States and Canada.
“Radio Bingo” will play at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival on April 27 at The Plaza Theatre. Tickets can be purchased online, but if you can’t make it out don’t worry – this may not be the last you hear of Radio Bingo. According to Adams, there might be a television show about CKON and Radio Bingo coming your way.
“My community radio station, they all have these great personalities and great on-air personas,” Adams said. “I always thought that would make a really good show or a feature film, or something – there’s something there.”
Ahead of the premiere, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Adams about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To start, I would love to hear about your history with filmmaking and how you got into the medium.
Shelby Adams: I started, probably in high school. We had performing arts, and I always loved everything about the performing arts, and acting, and singing, and dancing, and all that good fun stuff. When I got out of high school, I had a baby. So when my daughter was seven, she was like, “I want to be an actor. This is all I want to do, get me an agent.” And I was like, wow! I was pretty excited because I love that stuff.
We got her an agent and she started auditioning for all kinds of stuff – movies, commercials. I was getting a lot of scripts. Sometimes I would have to read her scripts and just see what it’s all about, and every time I would get a script that was Native American, had to do with Native Americans, Indigenous people, it was written by non-Indigenous people. And I didn’t like the scripts. I was like, this is not real. This is so stereotypical, and I hated everything about it because it wasn’t written by Native, Indigenous people.
From there, I started analyzing scripts and writing scripts.I just dove right in while she was doing all her auditions and stuff like that. But in the meantime, I always told my daughter – when she got older, in high school – I was like, you know, you can’t sit by the phone and wait for your agent to call with an audition. You’ve got to start thinking about plan A, B, and C, because you don’t want to be one of those starving artists, just sitting and hoping and praying for a gig. So she went to school, Syracuse University, for film production. In the meantime, we had opened up a studio on the reservation. I said, well when you’re done with school, you’ll come back and you’ll have a job.
She went to Syracuse University, got her master’s degree in film production, and that’s how we got started. First, we jumped into theater, then we jumped into film. We do everybody’s self tapes here on the reserve right now, and we do casting as well.
It’s funny, because she has her master’s in film production. So she was pretty much smarter than me, at that point. I actually went back to school. I was like, COVID hit – I’m going to go back to school. I went to Toronto Film School. I graduated there last year in the fall.
That’s awesome.
Adams: Yeah, it’s pretty good. Now I feel like I’m a good contender with her.
So your studio, Dreamcatcher Studio – was that created as a way for you two to work on your own projects together?
Adams: Correct. We wanted to work on our own projects. We wanted to just keep flexing our acting muscles and just keep the craft moving. Film, I was like, that was a no brainer. We’re going to do film because we were doing film while she was in school. It just made so much sense to go in that direction, and I’m glad we did because film is amazing. It’s fun, it’s collaboration. It’s everything.
Something you said earlier struck me, when you were talking about reading those scripts your daughter would receive and it being so obvious that it wasn’t written by someone who was Indigenous. What in particular sort of jumped out at you in those scripts that wasn’t authentic?
Adams: I think it was more when it talked about community. I’ve always felt like they were so stereotypical, and you can see it right in the writing. They’re cherry-picking all these stereotypical things, and it’s not right, and it’s not fair. There are so many good things that happened with us, and none of that is captured.
I almost felt like when my daughter was auditioning, sometimes I felt like she was passed over a lot. Sometimes the auditions would come in, and they would be like we’re looking for a Native American, but they would dance around it a bit. She would go in to audition for it, and then when the roll actually came out and we got to see it – a lot of times, we’d be like, oh who got the part? – and it would be a non-Native person who looked like a Native person. And she’d be so gutted by that.
Well, I’m glad you were able to start doing your own thing and hopefully help rectify that a little. With “Radio Bingo,” where did the idea for this project originate from?
Adams: It didn’t really originate. I grew up with my local radio station, and that radio station is actually our lifeline to our community. They keep us up to date on everything happening anywhere on the reserve. We could get all kinds of information, whether it’s a bear sighting, or we need to avoid certain roads – our radio station is our lifeline. But one of the things that our radio station does is we play Radio Bingo. We play Radio Bingo every Tuesday.
No one really knows when Radio Bingo started incorporating the Mohawk language. And that’s the unanswered question. I don’t even remember, because I grew up when the radio station first started – which I’m giving away my age [laughs]. We’ve played bingo for a really long time. Every time we play bingo, it’s like a family event. We’d all get together. It’s almost like a holiday, where there’s a potluck, we all come in, we all have some food and drinks. We sit around and listen to the radio, and play and gossip. It’s just like family fun time.
But at the same time, we’re learning this language. I always listen to the radio and I’m like, man, I just love everybody at that radio station. And I was like, I’m going to do a film on this topic one day. Because I really think there’s something there. Everybody there has these great personalities, there’s great characters. They’re just great, so it’s really a no brainer that I was able to come up with this film idea. It’s really a history lesson too, because we get into the government-run schools, the residential schools, the boarding schools in the states, and the Indian Day Schools.
You do thread that line with Radio Bingo and Mohawk language, and the Indian Day Schools and all that history. How did you work to thread all those aspects together in such a short film?
Adams: It was easy for me to thread them all together because it’s lived experience, right? It wasn’t something I had to think about. I know that we have a language problem. In my community, we are working really hard to get that language back. We’re not only playing Radio Bingo to help with that. We’re also changing all our street names, we’re changing all the businesses – the names of the businesses – we’re changing it all into the Mohawk language. We even have immersion schools that are completely in the Mohawk language. That’s all they speak. So we’re really doing everything that we can to get that language back that was stolen from us. So weaving that all in wasn’t hard because it’s lived experience. It just made a whole lot of sense. Especially with Radio Bingo. That comes from a happy place. Unfortunately, we had to go through this horrible thing and be traumatized, and that’s really the savior. The savior is trying to get our language back, because our language is the foundation of who we are. We need to get that language back.
This is a fairly light film that manages to deal with some heavy issues at the same time. I wondered how you went about threading that line between some of the darker subject matter, but still keeping it fairly lighthearted?
Adams: That was really tough for me. That was something I didn’t know I wanted to do, because I actually went to Indian Day School. So I understand all the trauma that goes with that. I was like, do I want to go there again? I had to think about it, and I was like – you know, this is a story that needs to be told, because you can’t find these stories in history books. You just can’t. I was like, how about if I tell it in a way where I leave my audience happy and smiling, and knowing that we’re going to be okay. Even though that sad thing happened to us, still at the end of the day, we can laugh and have fun and get through it.
Tickets for the April 27 showing of “Radio Bingo” can be bought here.
