Interview with Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene: social justice activist and photographer from the Leech Lake Reservation
Illustration by Beyond the Clock Storyteller + Illustrator-in-Residence, Nhatt Nichols
Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene was a featured Rural Rockstar guest for the November 2023 Beyond the Clock online event. Beyond the Clock is a monthly digital learning exchange and happy hour for rural connectors and cultural workers hosted by Department of Public Transformation and Voices for Rural Resilience, in partnership with the Rural Assembly.
Below is an interview between Storyteller + Illustrator-in-Residence Nhatt Nichols and Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene following the November event WITH a deeper dive into her work.
Illustration by Beyond the Clock Storyteller + Illustrator-in-Residence, Nhatt Nichols
About the artist:
Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene is a Social Justice activist and BIPOC Photographer from the Leech Lake Reservation. Her powerful images reveal the unscripted poetry of our human world. Her creative design in her art is extremely important, settings and composition of her photos make you focus on the subject of the matter. Ne-Dah-Ness is a social activist through art and has a unique way of reaching people through the vision and ‘voice’ of her lens. Her talent is well known internationally and in Indian Country. She is regularly sought out to photograph important events and specialized photoshoots. Her creative intuition and mastery of the camera has Ne-Dah-Ness rising quickly to the top of the competitive field of photography.
a conversation between Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene and Nhatt Nichols
Nhatt:
You talk a lot about your relationships with your subjects and spend a lot of time considering how you're telling a story. Is that something that you knew you wanted from the beginning? Or is this something that you've developed as you've continued working?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
It's something that I developed through working.
Not everybody has the same opinions, and not everybody's teachings are the same. Especially when you do Native American culture. I more or less try to stick to Anishinaabe ways because I'm familiar with them. There are more than 500 tribes in the United States, and we all have our different cultures, traditions, and ways we were taught. They're not all the same; that also goes for our cultural teachings and symbols. In one tribe, a horse might be sacred, but to another, it might not. I have to be careful about that. When I first started, I was always thinking that everything was just one way, and it's not.
Nhatt:
You mentioned that you are working with activists instead of models and build deep relationships with them. Do you like a more collaborative approach?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
I do. They get to know you, feel more comfortable, and feel themselves in front of the camera. Almost anybody can come to my shoot and feel like they're okay. I think that it’s important to make them feel more comfortable.
Nhatt:
Thinking about what you said about tribal symbology, it must take a lot of trust to work with somebody from a different tribe. Do you do a lot of pre-planning before shoots with models?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
I don't. Sometimes I'll vision something. And I'll try to call who's available to me, but I'm so far out in the middle of nowhere that it's hard to ask somebody to come without funding. So, most of these projects are not paid. They're my projects that I have to pay for.
Nhatt:
It's always like that interesting balance, figuring out how to work on projects that really feed you creatively. Are you able to balance your personal projects with the commercial work that you do?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
No. During the spring and summer, I'm really booked, and those are the times I would like to do my personal projects as an artist. People call me in, which I don't mind. It pays for my bills, but in the wintertime, November through March, I have nothing. And a lot of the models that I work with don't want to come out into negative 20-degree weather. It's hard to make that balance.
Nhatt:
That's an incredible challenge. I hadn't thought about how much the weather would determine what kind of work you can do.
Ne-Dah-Ness:
I could probably travel, but I'm a single mom, and my boys go to school full-time. So it would be hard for me to get out of here. Even if I did go to warmer states, where there are other reservations, I'm never able to.
Nhatt:
In the summer, you’re a full-time mom, photographer, and artist. And then, in winter, it's nothing. there needs to be some way to balance out the year. Are you able to spend the slower months planning?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
Not really. I try to do everything month by month. At the beginning of the month, I'll have nothing. But then a day later, I'll have my entire schedule filled.
Nhatt:
You mentioned that you've been working with a mentor; how did you meet your mentor
Ne-Dah-Ness:
I was working with my ex, he had a community center in North Minneapolis. So even before I had a DSLR, I put up some pictures in the community center's back areas. There was somebody there from an orchestra who was a full-time photographer, and he was looking at my images on the wall. He was like, ‘These are really good, are you the photographer? My buddies, there's about five or six of us. We have a studio over northeast, and we all share and collaborate together.’ He invited me over, and that's how it happened.
Nhatt:
Is there a resource that would have been helpful when you were getting started?
Ne-Dah-Ness:
One of the hard things for me to do was keep up with all the actions that were happening since a lot of my photography is activism. And it's still hard to do.
Some people just assume that you're going to be there, so you get overlooked. If there was somewhere where people could find a way to invite photographers or see who was going to be at this action. That's one thing. Actions don't last that long, but they're really important.
Follow Ne-Dah-Ness on Instagram @nedahnessgreene.
Many thanks to both Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene and Nhatt Nichols. Beyond the Clock is made possible with support from the Rural Assembly, in partnership with Voices for Rural Resilience.