Which stories get told? Who gets to tell them? Who gets to say how a person’s story gets told? Jean Donohue’s Native Daughter is an intimate portrait of CD Collins a farmer, writer and spoken word performance artist.
CD Collins decided to come back to her childhood home in rural Kentucky after spending thirty years in Boston. She is a recognized, successful writer and musician with three books, five albums of spoken-word with music, and known for being one of the first spoken-word artists in Boston. Even with success, there was something wrong. Her relationships seem to be stages upon which the same cycles of drama – anger, terror, and feelings of powerlessness are enacted over and over. Her health is deteriorating with more and more frequent emergency room visits, panic attacks, and adrenal failure. She is diagnosed with complex PTSD, but why? Is it the childhood trauma of being engulfed in a gas pipeline explosion? Or coming out in 1970s rural Kentucky, which was treacherous and life threatening.
She knew her little farm in Mt. Sterling was suffering too. As a teenager, she’d made a down payment of the farm with damages from the gas company. Now she struggles to keep the farm intact and learns the water and soil have become toxic from chemical-based farming. And, then there’s the AT&T rampage against her trees and subsequent lawsuit. Her land was suffering she was suffering.
This film shows how closely bound we are, whether we like it or not, to family, community, and the land. Even if we can’t come to terms with all of it, we can heal ourselves and the dirt we stand on. CD tries to re-imagines her life, find the inner strength to heal the wounds inflicted by family. Her challenge is to take back her power and birthright to be a free, whole human being living on a forgiving, loving planet. She returns to her hometown for solace, peace and family, but do they want her? This is a story about what happened.
Director Jean Donohue’s film is a biographical portrait told through words and music, an investigation into how stories are created and told. Donohue explores one woman’s lifelong journey for beauty, love, and survival. It examines how domination, abuse and post-traumatic stress works through one’s life. Native Daughter relies solely on the words, music and images of the artist. The film explores sexual identity, growing up queer and an artist in rural America, feminism, eco-feminism, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the cutting edge treatments for PTSD, and the profound and necessary endurance of the creative impulse.