It took a powerful, disturbing dream from which she awoke sobbing to convince Robin Charboneau, an Oglala Sioux and member of North Dakota’s Spirit Lake tribe, that “I needed to open my mouth, and I needed to speak.” So she let the documentary filmmaker David Sutherland follow her for more than three years as she struggled to raise her family as a single mother while confronting her alcoholism and the scars of being sexually abused as a child.
What she did not know was that her decision would temporarily cost her custody of her two children in tribal court, or that her teenage daughter would disclose that she, too, had been sexually abused — by her own father, a development that led to a federal trial and, for the filmmaker and the producers, ethical soul searching.
Read more about the documentary at the Bismark Tribune.