Tonight on PBS

As part of Native American Heritage Month the PBS show Independent Lens will be premiering the documentary Miss Navajo at 10pm eastern time.

Synopsis:
For the past 50 years, the Miss Navajo Nation pageant has celebrated Navajo women and traditional values, language and inner beauty. Held over a five-day period at the annual Navajo Nation Fair, contestants are required to showcase skills that are crucial to Navajo daily life, including sheep butchering, fry-bread making and rug weaving. Through interviews with new and previous pageant contestants, Miss Navajo reveals the importance of cultural preservation and the meaning of being a woman in Navajo culture.

Crystal Frazier, a twenty-one-year-old Navajo woman, lives on the reservation in Table Mesa, New Mexico. Living in a house without running water, Crystal helps care for her family’s livestock, makes a weekly trip to the well for water and does a share of the cooking. A tomboy and former high school basketball champ, Crystal is confronted with a new set of challenges when she decides to compete in the 2005–06 Miss Navajo pageant. She acknowledges her own shyness and says that participating in the Miss Navajo contest would probably be a good experience. Miss Navajo follows Crystal’s journey leading up to the competition, while former Miss Navajos share their own memories of the pageant and what it meant to them. Each previously crowned “queen” also experienced life on the reservation and faced the challenges of working as a leader in the preservation of their culture.

Conceived as a “celebration of womanhood” by filmmaker Billy Luther—whose mother, Sarah Johnson Luther, was Miss Navajo Nation 1966–67—Miss Navajo offers a different take on what it means to be beautiful, exploring tradition in Diné, or Navajo, culture through one woman’s quest for the Miss Navajo Nation crown.

Trailer:

Music Monday

She gives me a hat tip for giving her the idea for the so-called iPod Shuffle of the Week...well, I'm givin' a hat tip to Melessa for giving me a better name and a regular day to do it on!

I debut for your blog reading pleasure:

Music Monday

1. Do It Again. Point of Grace
2. This is Worth Fighting For. The Ink Spots
3. Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The Andrews Sisters
4. Real Emotions. Los Lonely Boys
5. My Toy Soldier. 50-Cent featuring Tony Yayo
6. A Cold Heart Turns. Rebecca St. James
7. The Love He has for You. Point of Grace
8. I Walk the Line. Los Lonely Boys
9. Mrs. Morgan. DC Talk
10. Men's Grass Dance. Eagle Claw

Now, I swear I put the first 10 songs that came up, and I definitely had it on shuffle...and that's what so weird. 2 Point of Grace songs, 2 Los Lonely Boys songs.

But, by far the weirdest of all are numbers 2 and 3 because those are both Big Band songs from the World War II era (hey, I grew up with my grandparents)...and what's on tv right now? Ken Burns' The War on PBS. I tell you it's just plain freaky!

The rules, for bloggers who want to play:
Get your iPod or media-player of choice set the thing to shuffle, then post the first ten songs that come out. No cheating, no matter how stupid it makes you feel!

Thanks Be to God and Boomer Sooner!