Dr. Jennifer Machiorlatti Receives Gender Scholar Award

Dr. Jennifer Machiorlatti, professor of communication in the School of Communication at Western Michigan University, is the 2015 recipient of the WMU Women's Caucus Gender Scholar Award.

The award recognizes one College of Arts and Sciences faculty member who “demonstrat(es) excellence in gender-related research and scholarly activities,” according to the caucus. The caucus gives the recognition annually to someone who advances research in gender studies. The Gender Scholar Award prize is $1,000 and the recipient is asked to present her or his work to the WMU community.

Machiorlatti is being recognized for her work with indigenous women filmmakers and her related research on media, women and storytelling. Machiorlatti will present a showing of her documentary on Native North American media storytellers, “Matriarchal Voices: Indigenous Women in Cinema and Digital Media," on Tuesday, March 31, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in 1025 Brown Hall.

“I’m really happy to receive this award on behalf of the ally-building I’ve experienced during the decade and a half I’ve been working in this area of study and on the documentary,” said Machiorlatti.

“Matriarchal Voices” is a culmination of work Machiorlatti has been researching and developing since her Ph.D. program, when she began to examine the difference between women filmmaker story structures and mainstream story structures.

“There are a lot of differences,” she said. “There’s often a community women, and none are the central character -- instead the films hinge on the voices of multiple women in a circular structure. It breaks the 3x, formulaic, mainstream structure.”

As Machioratti continued to explore women filmmakers, she began to focus in on native american, first nation and indigenous filmmakers. The more she became interested in the subject, she realized there was a major hurdle.

“No one had written a book about native women filmmakers and there wasn’t a lot of attention given to them, either,” she said. Machiorlatti began to spend hours in the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington D.C.,  a part of the Smithsonian, watching movies that weren’t a part of the mainstream but that told the story of North American native nations and tribes.

In the next few years, Machiorlatti continued her research and interviewed people whenever she could, while teaching in Canada and as she continued her professional development. It was when she was granted sabbatical in 2010-11 at Western Michigan University that she was able to put her research, her video interviews and her concept together into “Matriarchal Voices.”

“I loaded up the car with my film equipment and drove to four different provinces in Canada and 12 different states in the U.S.,” she said. “An outsider isn’t trusted at first -- it took a lot of time, learning the right etiquette and developing trust, before I was able to put together the film.”

Machiorlatti originally envisioned the documentary to be a series of films -- she said she thinks the series will end up being a two-part or three-part series when completed. But, she’s also learned through her process that there’s only so much she, as an outsider, can do to develop the indigenous filmmaking community as an ally. The women she’s interviewed for the film have encouraged her to explore her own “fractal lineage,”  and find her own roots, as a descendant of Italian immigrants.

“I think it would be interesting,” she said. “I don’t know much about my past or history and I think the idea of immigrant culture, to leave a homeland come here and feel displaced, is fascinating.”