The television documentary maker Michael Barnes, who has died aged 86 of a heart attack, opened a window on the lives of those suffering injustice, discrimination and neglect.
For Navajo: The Last Red Indians (1972), which Barnes produced and directed for the BBC’s Horizon series, he spent six weeks in northern Arizona on the Navajo reservation to discover how the largest surviving Native American tribe was trying to hold on to its culture and beliefs while contending with threats such as coal-mining ravaging its land. Footage of a medicine man staging a healing ceremony sits alongside film of Navajo people navigating the “white man’s” hospitals and schools.
