NEW YORK (AP) — Lorie Lee Sekayumptewa, a former administrator with the Navajo Nation Movie Workplace, remembers seeing Robert Redford at conventional cultural dances on the Hopi village of Hotevilla in New Mexico. It was greater than 30 years in the past and he was serving as government producer of the 1991 launch “The Darkish Wind,” a drama about Navajo life.
Redford stood out for his Hollywood seems to be and for his un-Hollywood conduct, from his earnest need to be taught extra in regards to the tribe’s religious data to his visits to the Navajo Nation, the place Sekayumptewa’s father served because the dean of scholars on the tribal faculty and would present Redford’s films on the scholar union constructing.
“Even at home, he would bring that camera and film home to us, put up a sheet and we would invite our neighbors and the kids and we would all be there in our living room, watching these movies,” the 54-year-old Sekayumptewa, who’s Navajo, Hopi and Sac and Fox Nation, mentioned of Redford.
“We were all fans.”
Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89, was hardly the one liberal activist to emerge out of Hollywood, however few matched his data and focus, his humility and dedication. Fellow actors and leaders of the causes he fought for spoke of his unusually deep legacy, his battle for Native Individuals and the atmosphere that started on the top of his stardom.
Within the mid-Seventies, across the identical time he was showing in such blockbusters as “The Sting” and “The Approach We Have been,” he immersed himself within the rising environmental motion. He efficiently opposed an influence plant being inbuilt his adopted state, Utah, and lobbied for the landmark payments the Clear Air Act and the Clear Water Act. He additionally joined the board of the non-profit Pure Assets Protection Council, the place he remained a guiding power as much as his demise.
“His legacy was extraordinary,” says NRDC CEO and President Manish Bapna. “One of many issues that was most extraordinary about him was that he understood the facility of storytelling. He may speak about local weather change and the toll it was inflicting on individuals and communities — the fisherman dealing with rising seas, a household fleeing for his or her lives from a raging wildfire. He would document messages, give talks or converse in entrance of Congress.”
Bapna final noticed Redford a couple of months in the past, after they dined in New York Metropolis.
“He chose his words carefully, and every word he said was profound. He said we must continue to find ways to tell stories that reach people,” Bapna mentioned.
Redford had a longtime affinity for the atmosphere. After rising up in Southern California within the Nineteen Thirties and ’40s, he was disheartened to see Los Angeles rework after World Warfare II right into a mecca of air pollution and site visitors jams. Within the early Sixties, when he came across Provo Canyon, Utah, throughout a cross-country bike journey, he was so awed and invigorated by the panorama that he ultimately settled within the space.
Entertainers over time have come to establish and, be recognized with, a given trigger: Harry Belafonte and civil rights, Paul Newman and nuclear disarmament, Jane Fonda and the Vietnam Warfare. Redford, as a lot as anybody, helped make the atmosphere a difficulty for the Hollywood elite, whether or not for Fonda or Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Leonardo DiCaprio, a fellow NRDC board member who known as Redford’s demise “a huge loss to our community” and cited his legacy an actor and activist.
“More so than anything, he was a staunch environmental leader,” DiCaprio mentioned Monday.
In 2013, Redford joined with then-Gov. Invoice Richardson to create the Basis to Shield New Mexico Wildlife to battle efforts by a Roswell, New Mexico, firm and others to slaughter horses. The next yr, the inspiration reached an settlement with the Navajo Nation to handle hundreds of untamed horses on the reservation and hold the animals from being despatched to slaughter homes.
For Redford, the wild horse was consultant of the American West. His advocacy additionally was channeled by way of the nonprofit group Return to Freedom, Wild Horse Conservation. The group posted on social media Tuesday that they have been heartbroken.
“We have all lost an irreplaceable artist, activist and environmentalist,” mentioned Neda DeMayo, founding father of RTF. “Robert Redford was and is an iconic and inspiring human being forever interwoven with the beauty and majesty of the West. I feel very grateful to have known him and to have had his support.”
Redford’s activism prolonged to a few of his movie initiatives, whether or not the probes of the political system in “All the President’s Men” and “The Candidate” or the drama “The Milagro Beanfield War,” during which a neighborhood resident fights an actual property mogul for management of his land. His remaining work was “Dark Winds,” an AMC present that premiered in 2022 and is predicated, like “The Dark Wind,” on the fiction of Tony Hillerman.
John Wirth, the collection showrunner, mentioned that “Dark Winds” wouldn’t exist with out Redford, who served as an government producer and appeared in a brief cameo that aired earlier this yr. The present, Wirth mentioned, offers audiences a glance into the Navajo group, with actors and writers largely holding Native identities.
Redford “endeavored to give people a shot at making art, you know, where they maybe hadn’t had the ability to have access to mainstream media.”
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Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Itzel Luna in Los Angeles; and Sian Watson in London contributed to this report.
