Shot before, during and after 9/11, Steve Bilich's experimental short documentary Native New Yorker took several years of filming with a 1924 hand-cranked Cine-Kodak camera. It follows Shaman Trail Scout 'Coyote' as he takes a journey that transcends time, from Inwood Park (where the island was traded for beads and booze), down a native trail (now “Broadway”), and into lower Manhattan (a sacred burial ground, now including the newest natives of this island empire). 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, Bilich's film remains as powerful and relevant as ever.
As noted in a 2019 study by Barnard College titled A Tour of Native New York: “Broadway was originally a footpath in Manhattan, created by Native travelers. This trail, which ran along the length of Manhattan Island, originally connected different villages to one another and eventually became the road traveled by colonists.”
Bilich’s film acknowledges this Indigenous history, and the relationship between Native Americans and colonists, via Coyote’s journey. As Coyote encounters the smoldering World Trade Center towers, Bilich challenges in apocalyptic fashion the conflict between who can be considered the “American native” as opposed to the “foreign intruder.”
Bilich's film won the top documentary prize at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. GME President Jon Gartenberg worked as a programmer at Tribeca from 2003 to 2014, and is responsible for including Bilich’s film in the festival's lineup. In an interview from the festival that year, Gartenberg spoke about his reasons for selecting Bilich’s film:
It's not formulaic or routine or glossy at all. This is not a film that was going to get anyone an agent or a Hollywood deal; it's a very personal film, and that's the first thing that impressed me about it… Native New Yorker also fit[s] into what I call the tradition of the city symphony films. These were silent films that showed the life of a city from morning to night. Steve's film is more structured geographically, from Upper Manhattan to Lower Manhattan, and so, to me, it's a city symphony functioning on a spatial level… On a social and political level, the film equalizes, in a sense, the death and destruction caused by the terrorist attackers on 9/11 [to] the historic displacement and death[s] of Native Americans by occupying Europeans centuries earlier.
Bilich's film features a memorable soundtrack by composer William Susman, who later included his score for the film on his album Music for Moving Pictures. Of his score for Native New Yorker, Susman remarked:
The layering of rhythms and the incessant pulsing of the music reflects the energy and the many facets of the city as well as the motion and pace of the images created by Steve Bilich. In addition, the "flicker" caused by the use of the silent film-era camera suggested the tempo and pulse of the music... The music that I composed... approaches the film with my sound and rhythm tendencies which blurs the sense of time. We hear the haunting sounds of Native American chanting, as well as Middle Eastern vocalizing, representing characters, actions, and events both on and off screen. The breathy sounds of the native flutes are emblematic of the life force present and shared by all cultures.
