When Anne Coventry first envisioned helping children in her summer job, she didn't imagine they would be 2,400 miles away and a world apart.
Coventry, a Town of Chevy Chase resident and rising senior at Georgetown Day School, originally planned to be a camp counselor at her high school this summer. But when that job didn't pan out, Coventry remembered a fondness for photography she developed during a sophomore year class, and decided to see if she could land a job as a local photographer's assistant.
That's when she connected with Rebecca Drobis, a photographer who works on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, near Glacier National Park and the U.S.-Canada border. Drobis, a Washington, D.C. resident who has taught at Westland Middle School and Westbrook Elementary School in Bethesda, travels to the reservation during summers to teach photography at the Boys and Girls Club, and has also begun teaching photojournalism at Blackfeet Academy, an alternative high school there.
Inspired by the idea of giving young people on the reservation both material support and the means to achieve artistic inspiration, Coventry has begun collecting unwanted cameras from local residents to send to the students in Drobis' class, since in a typical photo class of 20 they may only have four or five cameras available.
She hopes to visit the reservation sometime this summer or later on to meet and work with the kids she is helping.
"I'm now being given the opportunity to help someone else get involved in something creative that I really like," she said.
When she first heard about where Drobis worked, Coventry pictured mournful, listless children in stark black-and-white photos. But Drobis' pictures of young Blackfeet on her Web site changed Coventry's mind. Many of the images display children in motion, such as girls pretending to ride a miniature plush horse in the middle of the road or roaring past drab pre-fabricated reservation houses on a purple bicycle. Another child is dressed up in a colorful outfit and receiving daubs of white face paint in preparation for a tribal celebration.
"The kids are so colorful," Coventry said. "They have a certain energy about them that comes across clearly in the pictures."
Even with interested and motivated children, nurturing a creative impulse on the reservation can be a difficult task for a variety of reasons, some of which include a high rate of alcoholism and a job market where many can only aspire to work at a gas station.
"Everyone knows someone in their family who's been killed by a drunk driving accident," Drobis said. "It's not like here, where on your career day at school, some father is a lawyer and a mother is a surgeon."
But the problems facing a teacher like Drobis run deeper. She recalled a field trip to Glacier National Park with young Blackfeet students, and that one of them continually asked "Where's the park?" even though they were in the middle of it. When she told him this, Drobis said the boy responded by asking where the swing set and slide were.
"They really don't spend time outdoors," said Drobis, who gets partial support for her work with the Blackfeet through a grant from the federal government. "The unbelievable irony is that I don't know how many people a year make a pilgrimage to Glacier National Park. A lot of these kids have never really been into the park."
Ultimately, Drobis says her classes and the power of the camera have allowed interested students, used to playing video games or watching TV, to put ancestral ties and history "in their terms."
She said that Coventry, meanwhile, has also truly "invested" in the project and also hopes that Coventry is able to go to the reservation at some point. So far, Coventry has only been able to collect a handful of cameras, although she said it doesn't matter if the cameras are digital or older versions. But she said the summer won't be the end of her involvement with the project.
"It's not just going there and donating anything. It's taking time out to try to give them something interesting and creative to explore," she said.
