By Tom Wyke for MailOnline. Deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest, the indigenous women of the Ashaninka tribe gather together, nervously making final checks to their appearance before one of the most important festivals of their lives. Dressed in finely beaded decorative outfits, each woman appears confident and proud of their tribe's historic heritage as well as their own physical appearance as they await to compete in the Ashaninka tribe's 44th annual beauty contest. Their flawless skin is dotted with the fine red marks of a dye, extracted from a local spice known as achiote.

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The Kitchen Sisters. It's early August, and the girls are taking part in a four-day coming-of-age ceremony revived in the s by the Brave Heart Women's Society. With American and European contact, many such societies and ceremonies have been lost in the past years. So we symbolically set up one camp a year and have the girls come in for four days. In traditional Yankton Sioux culture, everyone had a niche, a role. Thunder cracks in the distance as the girls, dressed in long skirts and tank tops, unroll the canvas tepee. This is where they will sleep together, away from the rest of the camp. Hurry up girls -- before the rain comes!
I looked through thousands of old photos, trying to imagine the world of the characters in my new film " Moses on the Mesa. Photographs from over a hundred years ago can open an amazing portal into the history. But photos don't tell the whole story, and so much of what happened back then is hard to stomach. But I wanted to share some rare visions of Native American women and children especially because not only is history of that time is not usually told with honesty, but it rarely tells anything about the most vulnerable. Behind the history of Chiefs and the struggles of the Native Americans to preserve their lands, their way of life and just to survive, there were women and children. Pretty Nose, a Cheyenne woman. Photographed in at Fort Keogh, Montana by L. Early s.