Changer: A Handtelling is an innovative Deaf-centric and Native-centric filmed performance with Deaf Native storytellers performing the Coast Salish myth of Changer in Native and artistic sign language. It is the next evolution of an original play by Fern Naomi Renville (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) and Roger Fernandes (Lower Elwha S’Klallam, Makah).

Helmed by Deaf director Howie Seago, CODA filmmaker Kyle Seago, and Native filmmaker Raven Two Feathers, Changer: A Handtelling is a cinematic take on Coast Salish origin stories. Filmed on the traditional lands of the Lower Elwha s’Klallam Tribe, the narrative follows mythic characters into a future transformed by tribes exercising sovereign treaty rights.

(Howie Seago, US, 2021, 70 min, in American Sign Language & English)

James Castle is an artist, born profoundly deaf in Garden Valley, Idaho. He spent his life drawing with soot and spit, and painting on recovered cardboard and paper. At the Institution for the Deaf and the Blind of Gooding, he suffered the abuses of oral pedagogy which forced the Deaf to speak and prohibited sign language. James’s work is now exhibited in museums in the United States, Europe, Japan, but do we remember that he was Deaf?

Brigitte Lemaine, who was raised in sign language by Deaf grandparents, goes to meet James’s descendants. On the way, she visits the James Castle Collection & Archive, the James Castle House, and specialists in Deaf Culture. Brigitte identifies themes in James’ work showing that being Deaf is a unique way of seeing and thinking about the world.

(Brigitte Lemaine, France, 2020, 82 min, in American Sign Language & English)