Entertainment

October 16, 2009

Frances Slocum reaches the big screen

Well-known local story to be shown as docudrama at New York film festival

By Mary Therese Biebel mbiebel@timesleader.com
Features Writer
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The story of Frances Slocum, a 5-year-old Quaker girl who was kidnapped by Delaware Indians from her parents’ Wilkes-Barre home in 1778, is already well-known to history buffs in Northeastern Pennsylvania and Indiana.

It has the potential to reach a broader audience next week, when the locally produced docudrama, “Frances Slocum: Child of Two Americas” is screened during the New York International Independent Film Festival.

“We are just delighted to be screened down there. They have films from all over the world,” said Bill Bachman, a Penn State/Wilkes-Barre communications professor who produced the 80-minute movie.

The festival, set for Oct. 22-29, includes at least 200 films. The one about Frances Slocum, who grew up to marry a chief of the Miami tribe in Indiana, will be shown at 4:10 p.m. Oct. 24 in the Village East Cinema on Second Avenue in Greenwich Village. (For tickets, see www.nyfilmvideo.com.)

“I think it’s such an important story to keep alive,” Bachman said.

“She was one of the greatest matriarchs at the end of organized Miami tribal life. She didn’t die until 1849, and she was revered as a very intelligent woman until the end.”

Slocum was known among her adopted people as Maconaquah, or “Little Bear Woman.” Her biological family, still thinking of her as Frances, found her when she was a grandmother and by then, she didn’t want to return to white society. One reason for that, Bachman said, is because “she had seen some of the abuse of Native Americans by the American military.”

Bachman, who spent five years researching Slocum’s story, said local folks who don’t travel to New York to see the film can catch a screening in the Marywood University’s Comerford Auditorium at 7 p.m. Nov. 2, which is the anniversary of Frances Slocum’s abduction. Tickets are $10.

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