The Filmmakers

Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan directed and produced "A New Frontier," which premiered at the American Indian Film Festival in 2009. She was a panelist at the American Indian Film Institute's Native Women vs. Hollywood Stereotypes and was a featured artist on the PBS Reel Native program as part of American Experience's "We Shall Remain," a five-part series documenting the history of American Indians after the arrival of Columbus.

Valarie has been working independently as a director and producer on several projects, including a documentary on the Mechoopda Indians of California. She holds a doctorate in public health from UC Berkeley and attended film school at Stanford University and the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. Valarie is an Assistant Professor in the Native Voices Documentary Film Program at the University of Oklahoma. She and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Tvli Jacob, a member of the Choctaw Nation, has worked as a cinematographer on several documentaries, including America's First Horse, a supplemental documentary for the motion picture Hidalgo. He co-produced and shot the film Silent Thunder, which received funding from Native American Public Television and aired on PBS.

Tvli was a runner-up in the NBC/Universal Comedy Short Cuts for a short film he shot and produced called Mac vs. PC with a Native Twist. He has written spec scripts for the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live and CBS's The Mentalist. Tvli shot and produced for PBS's web program ReelNatives, an outreach program for Native Americans to learn the craft of filmmaking and create their own stories through motion pictures. He was a previous recipient of the ABC/Walt Disney screenwriter scholarship. Tvli earned a degree at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas in film and television production where he made his first short film. After graduation, he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.