Monday, April 5, 2021
Tiffany Sia + Sky Hopinka
Last fall, when it became clear that theaters in New York might not fully re-open for some time, we turned to a number of artists, writers, and filmmakers we admire and asked, simply, “Who would you like to talk to about cinema?” For Tiffany Sia, the answer was Sky Hopinka. “I immediately thought of you,” Sia wrote in a DM to Hopinka, proposing to “be in conversation with you about your films and unpack their meanings, in thinking about landscape, placehood and identity vis-a-vis colonialism, and put some of these ideas in motion between Indigenous and diaspora discourse.”
The subsequent discussion was recorded this past October. Though originally conceived as an audio interview, we decided instead to transcribe the conversation, which can be found below. For those interested in learning more about their work, we highly recommend both Sia’s current show at Artists Space and Hopinka’s debut feature maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, which is now screening at Metrograph.
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Tiffany Sia:
Sky, thank you so much for agreeing to do this podcast with me, and also thank you to Ed and Thomas for having us “at” Light Industry. I was really thrilled to sit down and get to talk to you about some themes that resonate for me in your work and are also stuff that I’m dealing with in my work.
So I like to begin talks, especially when they’re recorded via video or audio, by situating the audience where we are right now, physically. So it’s 8:14 AM my time, and in Hong Kong right now it’s a sunny 75 degrees. Where are you?
Sky Hopinka:
I am in New York City right now, and it’s 8:14 PM and it’s not sunny. It’s dark. But it’s kind of nice and fall-y.
TS:
Have the leaves turned yet over there?
SH:
Yeah.
TS:
What does it look like? Does it look very autumnal?
SH:
It does. There are some holdouts that are still green, but there are some golden brown, red leaves. It’s nice.
TS:
So in preparing for this talk, I re-watched your films, some of which I had seen earlier in the summer for the first time after you sent me some links, and I listened to some interviews that you’d recently done. During this talk, I wanted to pick around various themes, but in essence, I’m really interested in unpacking the notion of the landscape film and how you interpret the landscape film vis-a-vis colonialism, and what place-hood and land politics mean for you.
Before we begin, I’m going to give some context from my background for the audience, in terms of my subjectivity in asking these questions. I am a Hong Kong diaspora person. I was born here, grew up in the colony, but moved before the handover, and I am an American citizen. I also want to hold a disclaimer that I’ve read some of these titles as text only, and I’ve never heard them pronounced. So part of this might be a bit of a language lesson, also, in chinuk wawa—if you could help correct my pronunciation on that... Did I say that right?
SH:
Yeah, “chinuk wawa.”
TS:
Okay, cool. I wanted to begin with Dislocation Blues, thinking about trauma and the body. The first line that you begin with is, “I stopped thinking about my body there.” This is Cleo [Keahna], the person you interview in the film, talking about Standing Rock. Could you talk a bit about that particular quote, and what it meant to be making a protest film that resisted a lot of the tropes of the depictions of Standing Rock?
SH:
Over the course of the interview that I did with Cleo, when they said that, I just thought it was clearly beautiful, and it captured a lot of the essence of how I felt about a lot of stuff there, after being there for some time. It was like no experience we’d ever experienced before. And it allowed us to reevaluate how our bodies exist in the landscape, and also how they exist in our minds. The tensions that one carries when moving through these different landscapes are not part of our Indigenous people’s landscapes or our different Indigenous communities. It’s akin to code-switching, just more in the body, as a kind of tension, how one carries oneself, or how one remains alert.
There’s something about being around Indigenous people, for me, and perhaps for Cleo, that allows us to be able to relax in a certain way and to breathe in a certain way, and to move through these different roads in a different way than what we’re accustomed to. And I think that Cleo really talked about that beautifully, in terms of forgetting about one’s body or viewing one’s body in a different way, and asking different questions about how we exist in this country, or on these reservations, or on these roads. When they’re talking about the physical infrastructure of the camp, and how the roads don’t line up with western colonial American ideas of roads and great patterns, that means something different. That’s been something that settlers have to come to terms with, or have had to navigate—or negotiate—how the infrastructure of a place is, in some ways, the physical embodiment of a culture, of civilization.
TS:
There’s this sense of dislocation that happens when Cleo talks about the settlers’ conception of space. When Cleo comes into these spaces, they’re surprised at the features that they don’t have, features that they’re accustomed to. That is the very fabric of a colonized space, enacted physically. That’s so interesting that you pose that as intertwined with bodies and how they relate to each other, especially in the camp. And people who are in the camp who are non-Indigenous, who are also part of the movement, they are addressed in this line: “They want the same thing, we want the same thing. Here inside the camp, they are brother and sister.”
SH:
That was one of those things that Terry was talking about, the other person that I interviewed. This really captured a lot of these feelings and a lot of these tensions in the camp, as well as outside of it. You see a wasichu person, you just call them DAPL workers.
Once you go an hour north, you’re in Mandan, and you’re in Bismarck, two cities in the middle of North Dakota, and seeing how differently people look at you, and non-Natives being made more aware of how white people look at you; it's so apparent and so aggressive. It’s just further underscoring the sense of mistrust, a sense of wariness around, I guess, an open community and a closed community. The openness of Standing Rock was one of those things that were very inviting, but the atmosphere was also skeptical and wary and concerned with infiltrators and DAPL workers who come in and try and get the lay of the land.
TS:
Was there a lot of paranoia around infiltrators?
SH:
Yeah, that’s actually what Terry was talking about at the end of his interview. He was the person that you just hear in this film; you don’t see him. I remember we were sitting at the top of the media hill and he was following some workers around because he was working security detail. He was talking about how after I’m done talking to them, someone’s probably going to come up and talk to him, and see who I was, and ask what I was saying.
TS:
That is so universal, I feel, across so many movements. When you’re so close to the front lines, there is so much of that fear of double agents. There are different names for it in different places: foreign influence, outside agitators... My joke about that was that our own ancient ideas and the legacy of activists who came before us are the real “foreign influence.” It’s a foreign influence in the form of a haunting.
But the situation does create so much suspicion and fear. It’s interesting that Cleo says something about how that time has been viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but in fact, it was really complicated and you can hear it in their voice, I think, how traumatized they are or were. I could hear it, at least, where I identified with it.
SH:
Yes, because that was really the point of the interview. It was maybe an hour-long interview, and that was the point where I think we really reached the gist of why we wanted to talk to each other in a certain way. A lot of it was just thoughts processing or saying yeah, even three months out, I feel nostalgic for this. Or I’m confronted by my own skepticism of my nostalgia. This is the idea that Cleo mentions: where things you were nostalgic for a week ago have already shifted into stories that become mythologized in a certain way. We start to become skeptical of that mythologization of these stories—especially the ones that you participated in and experienced—while they become part of a greater narrative, a more collective narrative around what had happened and what it meant. I think it’s only human to try to understand history through the stories that we tell ourselves, or that we experience, or we try to relate to others.
TS:
In terms of telling the story, what you do is also so much about creating interventions, trying to dislocate a sense of place through sound. There’s a lot of non-diegetic sound, for example. Could you talk a bit about your use of opacity, and the ways in which you, in telling these stories, enact different forms of intervention to make a film that’s for other Indigenous people? And also how that is an act of concealment or protection sometimes, when making stories that register to non-Indigenous people, specifically white people.
SH:
Opacity is something that I do think a lot about, especially as a way to define or describe, I guess, the legibility of the work, or how it’s read by an audience that it may not be intended for. But then the thing about opacity, too, is it’s only opaque if you’re looking at it from the outside. One of the things that I try to foster is a relationship to an audience that specifically shares an Indigenous perspective, or a Ho-Chunk perspective, or the perspective of all these different communities that I intersect with. In some ways, the opacity is created through disregard or neglect of a Western or a white audience. I feel like if I was trying to make something that was purposely opaque, then I’d still be prioritizing a white gaze by working to obfuscate it. So opacity feels like a byproduct of focusing on this specific Indigenous audience and treating them with care and priority, rather than a non-Indigenous audience, a non-community audience.
TS:
To me, your film is not opaque. It is the clearest vision that I feel like I’ve seen in looking at Standing Rock. I’ve read a lot of texts about it and obviously experienced it through the digital trail—the image trail of the news and social media—and I think that’s something that’s also touched upon, perhaps, in the documentary via Cleo. They’re so clarifying in giving language around this, in talking about how there is something quite universal about being part of prolonged, direct action. All of these elements are at play in many different places whenever you have these types of “folk infrastructures” being built by all these people who don’t know each other, and who all want the same thing, and who all share the same vision and dreams.
SH:
Oh, definitely. In that regard, Cleo defines a sense of an audience—people who can relate to the things that we were talking about and talking through, whether they’re Indigenous or not. Some of the responses I’ve gotten to the film have been more like a self-blinded opacity, or a screen that one puts in front of one’s expectations about what a documentary should be, or what it should touch on, or topics that it should forefront, and that wasn’t what I was interested in doing at all with this film. It is very clear about being a process and being about those experiences. The expectations of an audience that they are being taught something, or being given a history lesson, or a context—I think these expectations are alienating. It’s self-selecting alienation, maybe?
TS:
It’s also something about your films and also something in, is it [maɬni] pronounced “moth-nee”?
SH:
Mm-hmm.
TS:
maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, that’s your latest feature that’s at Berwick right now. In a recent interview, you talk about what it means to be creating a new territory through your films. There’s something both historical about it, where you look to the past in thinking about Indigenous legacy and politics, but there’s also trying to situate how Indigenous people are living currently, today. So I was wondering if you could talk about this notion of creating a new territory through the intervention of the landscape film.
SH:
Even in just trying to find different ways of talking about land—that either are commenting on the colonial baggage that they carry, or trying to eschew some sense of ownership or propriety around lands—definitely I was thinking about territory, territorialization, deterritorialization, and what the possibilities are when that “de-” is placed in front of that word. That opens up new possibilities for new or more interesting or more relevant relationships to the land, to take place or to be enacted upon, especially how one views one’s place within the landscape or these different territories, whether they’re physical territories or emotional or mental territories, or territories of the body and how you fit into the world.
And I guess that touches back on what we had talked about in the first part of this conversation—about one’s body difference and how one’s body is its own territory that one has a certain sense of ownership or agency around, now more so than ever. And how that interacts with a physical space that is still part of the colonial relationship to land and ownership, whether it’s in a trust or a federal trust or fee simple trusts. They’re all terms in the U.S. for the government’s relationship to Indigenous lands.
What are the ways that we’re told we should relate to the land, and what are the ways that we don’t need to? Or how to unlearn those ways... We had talked a little bit earlier, about how part of Indian extermination in this country was removing Native people from their lands, from their traditional homelands, to someplace else, because there is this assumption by anthropologists, and so by government agencies, that Indian culture is tied intrinsically to the land and it cannot exist without the land. But there are plenty of examples of tribes in this country who have existed despite the forced removal—the Cherokee, Winnebago, or Mohegans. Any number of tribes, they’ve survived and they’ve thrived and they’ve existed in the land that they’ve been removed to. So, in that way, that is at once counter to this colonial notion, and these colonial attempts to find legitimate ways to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
TS:
That part is a particularly radical reckoning in terms of rethinking the relationship to land. It’s something that I think about a lot in terms of being a diaspora person—many generations, actually, because my great grandfather was a coolie and captured and shipped to Malaysia—so there are many dislocations that I think about, and a lot of other diaspora people think about. So for example, what does that mean in terms of severance in culture? These are threads that are not one-to-one with Indigenous politics. But there are so many similar layers, I think, when we are cut from the same continuum of colonialism. Colonialism is a global project of violence, of economic takeover and militarized takeover.
So the one film that really connected those parts to me, was—okay hold on, this is the part where you’ll have to tell me how to pronounce this. Kunikaga Remembers Red Banks, Kunikaga Remembers the Welcome Song?
SH:
Yeah. You were close. “Kunikaga.”
TS:
There is the recurring line that you have, and this also plays with how you deal with text in your films, with different subtitles in chinuk wawa and then also in English, depending on whoever the speaker is, and whatever language they’re speaking. And then there’s the line that you write across one image: “He wore a grand robe of China damask. No sooner did they perceive him had the women and children fled.” And for me, that moment was the thing that connected our geographies together—that this colonizer, of course, is part of this continuum of goods and trade. And you also film or got some footage, I’m not sure which, of a textile, of a robe, this China damask, as an example of the kind of textile that would have existed during that time.
SH:
Yeah, that footage was shot in this museum, I forget what it’s called. MoWA? Museum of Wisconsin Art, maybe? It’s in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is the site of Red Banks, right around the area. Jean Nicolet, a French explorer or fur trader, I forgot what he did exactly, but that’s what he wore when he landed on the Banks and met my tribe for the first time, with two pistols in the air like Yosemite Sam. This takes place on the site of our creation story, but with Jean Nicolet being the first European to set foot in what is now known as Wisconsin. It’s ostensibly the Wisconsin creation story.
I was interested in these dual myths or these dual narratives around what it means to arrive at a place, or what the beginning of some place looks like. But then also how it’s reflected upon in the contemporary moment, which is what sets up the film with me and my grandmother talking over the phone, and her recounting the story of this place, her memory being kind of foggy about what happened there. And also how she names a place Mogésuč—Red Banks—it’s an important place for us.
So I am trying to find these different avenues or these intersections of what it means to create something, but also what does it mean to welcome someone or be welcoming to people? That relates, too, to this other quote that I’ve heard by Vine Deloria. I’m going to butcher it or paraphrase it, same thing. But it’s something like, “Indigenous creation stories aren’t concerned about when things happen in a place, but they’re concerned about what happened there.” What happened in this space will continue to happen in this space—the sites of these stories are continually activated and creation isn’t just the beginning, it’s a constant process that never really ends ’til it ends, I suppose. Those different ways of looking at the time, and how time also isn’t as definite as... how naming something in a creation story locks one into a certain framework of time and creation, and what the past looks like, as opposed to the past interacting with the present.
TS:
That has a lot to do with how you deal with memories and dreams, and how you handle memories in your films as both present facts and eternal ones. There’s also this dealing with citations that I think is so interesting, the ethics of citations. The way, I think you had mentioned in a film—and I’m forgetting which one this is, so I apologize—you mentioned at the end that you’re quoting the text of a colonizer or settler who’s telling the stories of Indigenous people. And there’s a queasiness with citing that, you mention. Am I describing that correctly?
SH:
It sounds like I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become.
TS:
Yeah. Yeah. And so the handling of that in I’ll Remember You As You Were, not as What You’ll Become—I think you were saying that some of those stories weren’t supposed to be told at the time that they were told?
SH:
Yeah. The text comes from two different sources. One is called The Road of Life and Death, which is [Paul] Radin’s account of our traditions and beliefs and ceremonies around reincarnation. The other is his larger report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1915, I believe, just called The Winnebago Tribe. This is what our name was formerly, as given to us by our enemies. Even the title is The Winnebago Tribe, and we call ourselves Ho-Chunk. It’s these different ideas of naming oneself, but also presenting a sense of authority around oneself, or how we interpret that authority and then refer back to it.
Even with those texts, I never finished reading The Road of Life and Death because I just didn’t feel like it was for me. Because there are ceremonies and certain protocols for knowing this information and Radin just blows right past that, and his informant, who was a convert to Christianity, felt comfortable explaining those things. But then also there are stories, too, that Radin’s informant didn’t tell everything right, or he left things out, or he said a bunch of things the wrong way, in some sense to preserve the integrity of that information.
Whether it’s lost or not, that seems to be the concern of anthropologists, but not of the tribe. Because it’s one of those things where it’s like: are we really going to tell you what we know, everything we know? And that lack of information, and that opacity in the relationship when the anthropologist is asking questions, is often seen by anthropologists as ignorance or forgetting, or just not knowing. Because they can’t take the leap to suppose that people just don’t want to talk to them.
TS:
As simple as that.
SH:
That has a lot of ramifications in terms of how archaeologists and anthropologists view tribes in contemporary society. With this film, there were certain parts that I felt comfortable utilizing as a way of reclaiming that text and that space for Ho-Chunk purposes. It was mostly the descriptors about our belief systems that I thought were insightful or that I thought were beautiful or poetic or something that I could relate to, just with my own experience with my family. And then being able to reshape it in the form of Effigy Mounds, which are these large mounds that are scattered all over Wisconsin, and our tribe are the ancestors of the Mound Builders.
That’s one of those things, too, where in the late 1800s, white farmers and archaeologists said that Ho-Chunk were too backwards and savage to have built these sophisticated mounds, and since we couldn’t possibly have built them, we must have come from somewhere else and just squatted. That has a lot of ramifications, not only in how we view ourselves but also in how the state views us, and what that means for NAGPRA concerns, which is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which allows remains, graves, artifacts, ceremonial objects, to be returned to tribes from which they were stolen.
So to deny ownership or deny that we were the Mound Builders cuts us off from a lot of those things. A lot has been done in the last 20 years to fix that, but still, those sort of narratives persist, and me trying to reclaim Effigy Mounds in the same stroke as trying to reclaim some of this text was a way to try to find different ways to relate to these words that were written.
TS:
Even the role of the interpreter and what that means, right? You talk about the fact that you’re not an interpreter, but you are a filmmaker. Like in the film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, the role of language and the idea of translation is something that weaves through it. And then something you say that struck me was in the film, is it “wawa”?
SH:
[Correcting pronunciation] “Wawa.”
TS:
Wawa? Okay. That means “trade” in chinuk wawa?
SH:
No, that’s huy-huy.
TS:
Oh okay, that’s huy-huy. You talk about how it helped you see language in an unspectacular way. So I’m interested in what that means for a language to be unspectacular. Or when is it spectacular? When is chinuk wawa a spectacular language, what does that mean?
SH:
I may have been a bit more bold in how I described it in 2013 than I am now. And by bold, I mean the unspectacular aspect of it. I guess the thing that I was interested in was just how to look at the quotidian usage of this language, rather than imagining it to exist in places that are giving chiefly speeches or in a monologue or in some sort of dialogue. Rather, it’s just these two people that are trying to trade some fish and trying to get a deal, and it’s very quotidian, it’s very mundane, it’s every day. And that is what I was interested in, how language is used, because then that could reflect the actual day-to-day usage of it. Especially for a language that’s in the midst of being revitalized and its speakers are growing, there’s a certain amount of... Not fear, but preciousness around language revitalization.
And I say that very generally, but it’s in the way you want to say things perfectly, and you want to say things correctly, and you want to say things the way that your grandmother or grandfather said them. You want to have that accent, want to pronounce everything just right, but you can’t get to that point without making a lot of mistakes, without mumbling through these words and probably borrowing some intonation from English, if English is the first language that you learned how to speak. Or whatever language that you grew up speaking or whatever accent you grew up having. That’ll impact a language because there’s no way that you can speak the same way that your great-great-great-grandparents spoke. And I think that’s okay, not creating this hierarchy of them being the true speakers and you being the lesser-than speaker, existing in the shadow of their experience. Because however the language exists and is used today is what is going to give it life and allow it to continue to shift and evolve and change, through the course of five years, 10 years, 100 years. Just trying to give it the chance to change and allow those different things to affect it along the way.
TS:
Right. I know you filmed some of those exchanges. I guess there is also an autodidactic aspect, as you’re all teaching yourselves this language through text. Do you employ any old recordings of elders speaking so that you can preserve the accent? I’m curious what kind of strategies are employed to preserve the accent, for example, or to get as close to the accent as possible?
SH:
Well, we’re not learning through texts. The person that taught me, his name’s Evan Gardner. He learned from Henry Zenk, who you see in wawa, and whose voice you hear in the 80s in Anti-Objects, when he was learning from Wilson Bob, like in 1983. So a big part of my friend Evan’s pedagogical method is learning in the language without translating, and also without writing. And I feel like that really preserves a lot of the shifts that happen, for better or worse. Maybe there’s two different dialects now between Grand Rondes, which is the reservation 50 miles away from Portland City Center, and the dialect of Portland.
And I don’t think I would want to learn a language without having someone to talk to. A really big part of teaching people is just making sure that they have the tools to be able to teach what they learn and what they know, and also it being about communicating with other human beings. Because I could learn a language by myself, but then I would just be collecting it. I wouldn’t be helping it survive. Listening to those recordings that are featured in Anti-Objects was huge for me just because I was fluent at that point, but I had also never heard these texts. I’d only seen the transcriptions that were used as teaching materials in some of the chinuk classes, and some of which I really liked and enjoyed, particularly the exchanges between Wilson Bob and Henry Zenk. Yeah, as I said, Wilson was the last speaker of this language, or the last fluent speaker of this language, and Henry was his student. He was doing his dissertation on chinuk wawa and when Henry learned the language from Wilson. After Wilson passed away, he by default became one of the last speakers.
So encountering his recordings allowed me to hear Wilson’s voice. I’d never heard it before, but it also allowed me to hear the relationship between these two men and how they joked and how they laughed, or how Wilson sounded when he was tired and wanted to go to sleep. Or how he was cooking eggs and wanted to see if Henry wanted one. Those are the moments that I think are beautiful because they show the language living in a way that is unspectacular. It isn’t about the performance of the language or saying everything right. It’s about mumbling through something and maybe your teacher teasing you a little bit, but also helping you out.
TS:
The trade aspect, too. The very functional aspects. I’m communicating, I’m trying to live my life while speaking this language. I thought it was funny, in a recent interview you mention a [white] critic who was on a panel with you and said “I want to be othered.” I thought it was so funny, this idea of just making the kinds of films that otherize white people, or otherize other non-Indigenous people, too, and what it means to have different audiences for you, in terms of making these films and talking about these languages. You’re contributing something that’s very clear, for me, at least, when I watch your films.
You’re part of COUSIN collective—to me that’s very much part of the duty of somebody who is trying to assemble a contemporary canon and continue a legacy of a culture. And then on the other end, there’s also signaling to people outside of that process, maybe people who are part of your community or who can relate to that desire, who feel otherwise otherized.
SH:
I guess I’ve been thinking a lot, too, recently, about who relates to these films, who doesn’t, and how they respond to different people in different ways, and also how I view them now—I wrote the earliest one when I was twenty seven years old—and hoping that they offer something for someone. Also thinking about these different points of conflict, or whether it’s someone not liking them, or that I’m wrong in how I approached something formally or conceptually. That opens up a conversation, and opens up something that’s generative of that sort of discourse, rather than me just trying to say this is the way. Because that’s the last thing that I want to do.
TS:
I recently read this text about exilic television as a ritual genre for Iranian communities in Los Angeles, by Hamid Naficy [The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles]. He describes the approach to the analysis of television adopted by Iranian communities in exile and considers exilic television as a genre with its own televisual flow. The television becomes a vehicle through which this exile subculture and its members collectively, or individually construct themselves. And also this particular television genre catered for these communities has its essential role in actively evolving a community, who are living in the liminality and anarchy of exile that both produces and consumes this media.
That text brought up for me the act of spectatorship itself being a kind of a direct action—a very different one, obviously, and one that is much slower and probably takes a lifetime. But it is about constructing identities through watching and consuming information, I think, within a community. And from each other.
SH:
Yeah. How to relearn how to be who they are. Or who they want to be.
TS:
Yeah, who we want to be. I wanted to ask about your chapbook, Perfidia. Could you talk a bit about that?
SH:
This is a text that I have been working on for about two years now. I started with short passages that were about all of these different things that I was thinking about, but didn’t really want to talk about directly. So I started writing, and just led myself into more of a poetic sort of prose that felt fun to indulge in. It felt like that play with language was something that was not a break, but different from thinking about chinuk or thinking about Ho-Chunk, just taking a step back and swinging towards English for a little bit, and then swinging back into chinuk for maɬni. Over the course of a year or two years, it slowly grew into 14, maybe 13, different paragraphs or cantos that I felt were starting to touch on something that I’d been thinking about for some time: what sort of relationship do tribes today have to France, Spain, England, Portugal, wherever? These different colonizers wreaked so much havoc on this landscape and then retreated and left the Americans here. This is a long history, especially with the Spanish, with the English—so do they still think about us? And how that, we were at war, aligning in some ways with the relationship or—It’s like how you think about your ex sometimes, wondering if this person still thinks about you.
It started out as a little bit of a joke, but then it grew into something a little bit more serious, in thinking about how there is a lot of neglect, and there is just a lot of ignoring Indigenous people in this country and the histories that had happened, and the violences that were enacted upon Native people. Whether it’s [Lord] Amherst, the person that the city and college of Amherst are named after, who enacted biological warfare and gave smallpox-ridden blankets to the tribes in certain areas, trying to decimate them, or the Spanish mission system in California, which enslaved many Native people, even if they were counted more as just “forced labor” or peons who were just part of the Church. There’re histories that are forgotten or overlooked, or whitewashed. I just tend to think about it. I think a lot of Native people do.
TS:
And is Perfidia a reference to that Andrea Bocelli song?
SH:
It’s a standard, I guess, but actually the song that I heard and fell in love with was the one by Xavier Cugat, which was in Days of Being Wild.
TS:
Of course, yeah. The last line of that song translated goes something like “Who knows what adventures you’ll have, how far you are from me?” It’s exactly the sort of weird, uncomfortable line, in thinking about colonial past and mapping that onto desire.
SH:
I hadn’t even thought about it. Yeah.
TS:
It’s about distance. It’s about receding away from someone now. And at the end of the song. There’s something so queasy in the question that you pose, but at the same time, I think it’s so essential because of the queasiness of it. How uncomfortable it is to be thinking about the colonizer in kind of an erotic relationship. It being not consensual, it being a very violent affair, and it being essentially an entanglement. In creating that question, I think you ultimately pose, what does it mean to decolonize? And I think about this question all the time, and I think it’s invoked in these really facile ways in popular discourse. And by popular discourse, maybe I mean Twitter sometimes.
You talk about K. Wayne Yang’s iconic essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” which specifically talks about decolonization and those politics in the U.S. I resonate with that essay very much because I feel like there has been this getting away from what colonialism actually means, that somehow even when we’re talking about it now, we’re actually not talking about it.
SH:
Mm-hmm. It’s hard. It’s so hard. But I mean, it has to be, because there’s so much toxic learning that we’ve all learned, and ways of thinking about the world we live in and how we move through it that need to be unlearned. Or be learned! I don’t know. But yeah, with something like this, it’s part of this process of asking questions, and the dialect and discourse that I’m interested in having isn’t so much about trying to find an answer, but rather... I don't know. Am I interested in that? It’d be great to have an answer.
TS:
You also mentioned to me about older-generation Indigenous scholarship that talks about how land isn’t connected to culture. That goes back to what you were saying before, these ideas being used to justify the removal of Native people from their homelands and to encourage assimilation. So again to bring it back to relocated Natives who maintain their culture and identity in spite of the loss of land.
SH:
It’s speaking to land as a metaphorical space, rather than as an essentialized tenet of being “Indigenous” to a landscape or a location, which was part of the directive of something like the Indian Relocation Act that encouraged Native peoples to leave their reservations and go to the cities. The thought by the government being that once you got the Natives to leave their homelands they’d lose all sense of their identity and abandon their cultures. That didn’t happen but also adds another layer of complexity to what Indigenous Identity looks like today.
TS:
I was wondering if you could talk through some of your installation works, too. What types of considerations do you have when you’re throttling between these ways of presenting your filmic works and also to have them presented as multi-channel work. What does it mean to think spatially about films that are themselves about spatiality and the politics of spatiality?
SH:
It’s the depth of the space, but also the breaking away from temporality—as chronology—and thinking about time in a linear fashion. I think the thing that I first started thinking about with these spaces was time. Can you watch both channels simultaneously? Or do you have to make some sort of concession to see both screens at the same time? Or is it impossible? And those choices that someone has to make in terms of how they spend their time or what they give their attention to, not trying to punish the viewer for the wrong choice, because there isn’t a wrong choice. And then how attention is one of the markers that give space its weight. What you can gaze at before your eyes is what’s yours, in terms of manifest destiny or something. Like the wild frontier, as far as the eye can see. And so how to fuck around with that, with time. And with the tension.
TS:
Could you talk a little bit about COUSIN collective, too? When did you start it? I know all of you; I’ve met Alex [Lazarowich] in person, but I have never met Adam Piron. And obviously, I know Adam Khalil [as one of the producers of his film Empty Metal]. Could you talk about what it meant for you guys in terms of putting this together?
SH:
When I first started making experimental films, and they started playing at experimental film festivals in probably 2014, I remember early on I met someone and they were like, “You need to meet Adam Khalil, if you don’t know Adam Khalil.” I was like, “Cool.” And then the second person said that, and a third person. Everyone was just like, “Do you know Adam Khalil?” And I was like, “No.”
So when we finally met, I met him and his brother [Zack] over the phone, and it was really great to find other Indigenous folks in this country, in the United States, who are thinking about experimental cinema, in similar ways, not exactly the same way. Just considering it in ways that often felt lonely for a time. A lot of it was just us finding each other in all these different circles where we often felt alone or felt like the things we were interested in weren’t really that supported by the mainstream or the powers that be.
That was one of those things that felt really natural, and one year we were all at the Flaherty Seminar together. This was three years ago now? I forget. Time goes by so slow. Two years ago? Some time ago, and it’s just us bonding together for the course of a week. Adam Piron was there, visiting. Khalil was a fellow and Alex was a participant. And yeah, we’d always end up hanging out at the end of the night, way late in the night, and it was just the four of us hanging out and talking about all this stuff and talking about what we want to do and about Native cinema and how we want to support each other.
So it’s really nice to find a space where none of us felt competitive with one another, but we just wanted to support one another, to support others that are doing these sorts of things, working with Indigenous film that isn’t following a conventional documentary or narrative film path, but rather looking more towards experimental, the avant-garde, installation, shooting on 16mm or whatever. The things that are hard to get support for. Especially in the United States. It’s a bit different in Canada, but still. I think that there’s a gap in both countries in a lot of ways, where there isn’t a lot of support for Indigenous artists who are making work that doesn’t fit cleanly into the art world or cleanly into the independent film world.
TS:
Right. Yeah, you’ve talked a bit about the burden of representation, also?
SH:
Mm-hmm.
TS:
And that seems clear to me, also, in the kind of motivations of the COUSIN collective and trying to create that as a dispersed collective process.
SH:
Yeah. And we’re not a collective that makes things together. I guess we’re a collective that just tries to do things together. Whether it’s trying to find ways to financially support artists, and offering these grants or fellowships. So I’m not actually sure what the official language about it would be. Another thing we’re hoping to do is having some sort of symposium or some sort of gathering, some sort of seminar, where we can see each other IRL and talk about these things together and have those conversations. So it’s just trying to build community and make space for artists that need support. Like, how can we use the things that we’ve done and the privileges that we have to give back to this community and to support others as they’re moving through these different realms?
TS:
I wanted to end on a bit more abstract note, about how dreams guide your films. I guess they’re also connected to memories. In a sense, COUSIN collective is trying to will this dream of the burden of representation that you are all working on collectively. As a collective, it’s all about creating this infrastructure, but you’re all doing it in very different ways. What is the role of dreams in your films and your work?
SH:
I think on all different levels of the definition of the word, whether it is something that I actually do dream at night, and I remember when I wake up, and either how it’s an affirmation or offers a different question about how I approach my work or live my life, or see the people that are gone. Dreams offer a similar sort of guidance in ways that reflect my beliefs. In another register of the word, too, it’s just what are these ideas and what are these hopes that we have?
And I think with these films, too, I never really know what shape they’re going to take or what they’re going to look like, but I always have an idea of what I want them to feel like, or what I want them to reflect, and the thing that I can’t describe. I want the films to be that description and to be the thing that I can’t say in words, or that I can’t see in waking life. How can these things, how can these films, how can these writings reflect? How can they do the work that they have to do without me getting in the way of them?
Above image: Sky Hopinka, Dislocation Blues, 2017