I like postcards: their weight and texture, the handwritten greetings on them, the evidence they bear of having traveled—these residues of memory. A postcard can be a low-stakes and carefree way of staying in touch or a platform for a serious message, sent to us by people we feel close to or distant from. This is why I like Sky Hopinka’s films, because they feel like carefully crafted postcards—not necessarily from any particular location, but from an indefinite, yet richly evoked somewhere.
Throughout his work as a filmmaker, artist, writer, and teacher, Hopinka explores the terrain that lies between land and language, and the ways that Native peoples have traversed it over generations. His films map the distances and the relationships between individuals, without providing a way to fully triangulate their point of origin. Hopinka doesn’t over-explain or distill the “essence” of Native identity for non-Native audiences. Instead, he situates viewers within spaces of meaning and cultural depth that must be consciously worked through.
This year, Hopinka will receive the Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which honors filmmakers working outside the boundaries of conventional narrative feature filmmaking. According to Jessie Fairbanks, SFFILM’s Director of Programming, the presentation of Hopinka’s award will take place “in conjunction with a screening of his experimental documentary maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020), which was originally slated for the cancelled 2020 SFFILM Festival, [and] a second screening of select shorts that I curated with Sky, especially for SF audiences.”
On the occasion of this career achievement, I spoke with Hopinka about how his practice has changed over the years, his approach to pedagogy—as it relates to language and film—and the work he’s been doing with Cousin Collective, amongst other topics.
Emerson Goo: You often grapple with issues of colonial knowledge extraction from indigenous communities. I wonder if it’s frustrating to be asked what your films are about in interviews, a form of conversation that kind of has an ethnographic feeling to it.
Sky Hopinka: I don’t get tired of it. I believe in the term experimental, in the broadest and purest sense of the word. These things I’m making are experiments—attempts at conveying things that are challenging to explain in traditional ways and that we often expect cultures outside of a mainstream Western frame to be engaged with. Like the work, I can be a bit abstract and poetic. There’s things that I’m trying to work through myself.
I’m appreciative of the time that an audience is willing to spend with the work. They’ll have questions about things they might not understand right away, or questions related to an experience they have, about Native culture or their own backgrounds. I really am appreciative of the Q&A space, or the conversation space, to unpack the things they relate to in my work, but also to steer them toward conversations I want to be having, rather than ones that are expected.
EG: I like how your work embraces non-fluency, being in the position of a learner of a language. Someone who is a student of something is not going to take for granted what people who are fluent in that thing might take for granted.
In wawa [2014], you have the Chinook Wawa dialogue subtitled with the different translations for each word, overwhelming the image. Instead of the seamlessness of a single, fluent translation, you have this possibility space of non-fluency. Does thinking about the process of learning in your films influence your pedagogy as a professor, and vice versa?
SH: wawa was very reflective of the way that I began to understand pedagogy through learning Chinook Wawa from my language teacher, who is featured in the video. Going through the education system in the United States, you’re not informed about how teachers are teaching you. My teacher wanted to teach not just the language, but the tools he was using. [He introduced me] to this concept of scaffolding, beginning with foundational concepts and then building on them in a guided and directed way.
In wawa, it’s [about] introducing elements to an audience, how to build upon them, and how to convey the questions that I had during that time around the responsibility of teaching and learning endangered languages. [Scaffolding] encapsulates how I think about the editing process, and how to teach an audience to watch the film in the first few minutes—to point toward the things I’m talking about without necessarily having to go into a culturally-specific level of what I’m doing.
[When] teaching film, I think about what it means to employ these techniques and translate that to a film. It changes from class to class, year to year, student to student. It’s an ongoing practice of refinement and understanding what you’re trying to communicate, whether [through] teaching or through a film.
EG: What languages are you fluent in, which ones are you learning, and which ones do you want to learn in the future?
SH: I’d say I’m fluent in Chinook and in English, still learning Ho-Chunk, and as far as what I want to learn, that’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years. I need to settle on something soon.
EG: Is filmmaking a process of language learning, in terms of finding a visual language?
SH: Absolutely. I had a professor who encouraged us to find a lexicon for our work or our thinking. I think about the lexicon that I’m making with one piece and how that fits into a broader body of work. Or if I do a formal technique in one film, how it can be used in another film to expand the possibilities of what it’s doing. It’s [about] how to move and pivot around the shape of a thing that I’m trying to describe.
EG: In Visions of an Island [2016], you visit Saint Paul Island, where they’re working to revitalize the indigenous language there, Unangam Tunuu, using this language learning method called Where Are Your Keys? (WAYK). I was surprised to learn that it uses gestures based on American Sign Language. Do you still facilitate classes using this method and teach it to others?
SH: I don’t, it’s been a number of years. I miss it every day. I don’t teach Chinook or teach language as often as I would like. When the pandemic hit, it fell to the wayside. Thinking back on my late twenties learning Chinook and how important it was in my life to be a language teacher, I’m always thinking about a return, what that looks like for me now and what it [could] look like in the next 5 or 10 years.
I actually had lunch with some Native students a few weeks ago, and I got a chance to teach them a few initial rounds of Chinook through WAYK. That was really fun, because I hadn’t done it [in so long]. With upcoming projects where I want to incorporate Chinook, the question is always, how can I incorporate this method in the filmmaking practice?
EG: When people discuss the usage of Chinook Wawa in your films, they often don’t mention that it’s originally a pidgin, made of bits and pieces of other languages. There’s this idea of language not having a pure origin, and instead being a record of interactions between cultures.
SH: That’s an interesting point, because there’s different perspectives around where the language comes from. [For] certain native people that grew up speaking the language 100 years ago, it’s an older language that was already creolized pre-contact. You talk to certain white linguists and anthropologists, it’s a pidgin that was manufactured by the introduction of white settlers in the 1800s. You have this idea of provenance and legitimacy, where describing it as pidgin can be a denigrating way of saying “This isn’t a ‘real’ language,” which I don’t believe in.
It’s complicated because most of our languages began as a pidgin in some form, or as a vulgar form. English has many French loan words and the influence of the Norse points to a long history of language shift and evolution. Language reflects the people that are speaking it, whether [during] Viking raids in England in the 700s or 800s, or during the Norman [Conquest]. What’s exciting in Native languages is this idea of language shift, especially when it comes to endangered languages. We’re faced with the questions: How do we revitalize this language? Do we speak it as we spoke it 100 years ago? Are students that are learning it—who might be in their 20s or 30s or teens—going to introduce English inflection and intonation and grammar and loan words? Does that make the language less pure?
I don’t think that it does, personally. If you want the language to live, you need to let it adapt to the people that are utilizing it, and let it reflect the lives they live today. There are concepts in language that reflect how people understood [the world] ages ago, when those concepts were being introduced to it. I think a lot about how Chinook is changing, as well as Ho-Chunk and how it’s part of a larger Siouan family of languages that has shaped cultures over the years.
EG: In maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, you’ve got two protagonists, Jordan Mercier and Sweetwater Sahme, who are on their own journeys with language. I was a little surprised that it wasn’t as visually experimental as your short films.
SH: When [filming] people, I tend to pull back from abstraction. Even with Dislocation Blues [2017], it felt like [abstraction] wasn’t needed, and that the thing that I was trying to experiment with was more the documentary form, and the expectations around that form. With that film, I cut out where people were telling stories, and [focused more on] reflecting on the stories that they told. That was the realm of abstraction. With maɬni, the question was how to retell this [Chinookan origin of death] myth [without doing] a reenactment or narrativization of the myth. I look at how the myth told ages ago affects people that live today.
It relates to how I learned Chinook too. My teacher told me, “We’re going to pick one thing to work on, and I’m not going to give you a whole bunch of grammar concepts and vocabulary that can overwhelm you. Once you learn that thing, then you can learn something else.” It’s being methodical, and not trying to do everything at once. Oftentimes I’ll just pick one or two things that I really want to play around with. [In maɬni] the soundscape was a site for abstraction, as well as the broader question of how to bring these two people together through a myth.
EG: There’s multiple layers of subtitling in your films. There’s text at the bottom, in the center of the frame, or James Benning-like scrolling text, as in Fainting Spells [2018]. How do you use subtitling as a creative practice?
SH: That’s changed over the years. With wawa, [the subtitles were] questioning the site of authority and who determines how to translate something. In maɬni, I was trying to create a non-hierarchical way of viewing Jordan, who’s speaking Chinook, and Sweetwater, who’s speaking English, and to present them evenly in that you hear Jordan speaking Chinook and you read [him] in English, and you hear Sweetwater speaking English and read [her] in Chinook.
There’s different purposes for different works. This new film I’m working on, Powwow People, I’ve been going back and forth about subtitling it. There’s an issue of legibility, because people are speaking in accents, [but] it can be a bit insulting subtitling a native person speaking English with a rez accent with English subtitles. It’s like [you’re implying] no one can understand them. It denotes a hierarchy around what’s good or bad English. [I want to] force people to pay attention to what this person is saying.
But what am I trying to focus an audience toward? I’ve been thinking I might subtitle the whole film with English subtitles for legibility, because I feel like the things that they’re saying are more important [to understand] than any commentary that I can offer around how they’re saying it, or how I want an audience to relate to them.
EG: Could you share more about where you’re at with Powwow People?
SH: It’s been a long time in the making. When I started making films, I always wanted to make a powwow film. I grew up powwowing. Around 2019, 2020, I started getting going with it. But the pandemic derailed the schedule that we had. [We] finally got to shoot it in the summer of 2023, a three day powwow we put on ourselves. I worked with a DP for the first time, trying something new than with maɬni, where I did everything on my own. I was grateful for the crew and the producers that I worked with. They’re all friends. I wanted to work with more people, but still have that sense of comfort and autonomy that I’m used to.
The last year and a half has been a slow, slow edit. It’s hard to go through all that footage. But we have a fine cut now, it just needs tweaking. I’m happy with it and how it’s come together. It really is reflective of my love for the [powwow] space, but also [complicates] ways of engaging with it. It’s more of a vérité style documentary than experimental. But again, that's a question of, what is the realm for abstraction, if not a visual one or a sonic one? For me, it’s just the weight and power of the space, and how to translate that for an audience that might not be familiar with these spaces, [without] didactic exposition.
EG: Like you’ve said, English subtitles often default to this prescriptive, “standard” English that doesn’t reflect how people speak. It’s funny when I watch a TV show filmed in Hawaiʻi and someone is speaking Pidgin [Hawaiian Creole English], but the subtitles are very proper English. They remove all the nuances, and I struggle with that as a deaf person who can speak Pidgin.
Deaf people have a relationship with language deprivation that is similar in some ways to Native experiences of language deprivation under settler-colonialism. Hearing educators used to think deaf people had to speak oral language or they’d be socially and intellectually stunted. Deaf kids were forbidden to use sign language, made to feel ashamed and beaten for it, and even shipped off to residential schools where they were forced to speak. There’s generational trauma attached to this.
I don’t know sign language fluently, since I was mainstreamed into hearing schools. I struggle with feeling too deaf for the hearing world, but not linguistically knowledgeable enough to be culturally Deaf. Talking to Hawaiians, I know they also have these experiences of not knowing what is supposed to be your native language. Your films provide a space where I feel more comfortable with being a novice, because we’re all on this journey of mastery.
SH: In language classes that we would do with WAYK, I remember my teacher Evan would always say, “We’ll all get there together, but not at the same time.” That always stuck with me, because it makes space for people to go at their own pace and to find their own motivations and relationships to fluency, and a sense of agency as well. Not feeling rushed, but feeling propelled.
EG: I want to talk about your visual language. One thing that pops up across your films is you re-filming an image, whether it’s on a TV or a laptop screen, and turning this image into another surface within the frame. Why are you drawn to this act of re-filming?
SH: It usually starts with me trying to fix something technically. The first time I did it was in Visions of an Island where there’s a scene of Casey [Boyette] sitting on the couch, and a laptop in the corner. I liked that shot and that framing, but we were watching The O.C. and that was playing [from] the computer onto the TV. I was like, “I don’t want The O.C. playing there.” I sized down this image of flowers and put it [on the computer screen], and had Greg Fratis [Sr.]’s voice playing as though it were coming through the [TV] speakers. That was fixing a problem of not having the image on screen that I wanted.
The next time I used [this technique] was in Dislocation Blues, then in Fainting Spells. In Dislocation Blues, Cleo [Keahna] and I kept missing each other in Standing Rock. We couldn’t interview in person, so I was like, we’ll Skype. Necessity begets a lot of different opportunities, creatively or conceptually. With Fainting Spells I wanted to use footage of Jordan [Mercier] walking through this controlled burn in Oregon, but I shot it on my phone and it was really shaky. I was like, “If I film it off the TV, it’ll look less shaky.” I was trying to make it look more stable, but through that, I got over my insecurity about the bad quality of the footage and ended up incorporating [the raw footage into the film]. I did it on Sunflower Siege Engine [2022], where I wanted to be in conversation with these older movies and histories.
EG: That’s a good segue into one of your most striking visual motifs, the use of auto-stabilization as a way of warping or destabilizing the image. I guess that’s another thing that comes out of the necessity of trying to make your footage work.
SH: So many things are me trying to get the image to look right. I’ve leaned into it over the years, coming from a place of insecurity where I didn’t go to a film school in undergrad, just for my MFA, and there was always this idea that I’m not doing [things] the right way. I would always try to fix things [in post], but then learned how to be open to those weird things that happen when you turn on the stabilizer and the image goes haywire. It’s a conversation, seeing how something formally can speak to something conceptually, and how the conceptual idea relates back to the formal one. I like seeing what’s possible technologically and what that might stimulate or trigger in [my] imagination. I love the idea of [using] footage that might seemingly be useless, and working it in such a way that it becomes part of the conversation [of the] film.
EG: Another important facet of your practice is the way you provide opportunities for Native filmmakers through Cousin Collective.
SH: We began Cousin Collective as a way to speak to some of the loneliness that you feel being Native in spaces that aren’t quite made for you, and that you don’t really have a history in. How to get a foothold, if what you’re doing is outside of conventions. There’s not a lot of support for experimental film in this country, and there’s even less support for indigenous experimental film. We’ve been lucky and humbled to get support [over the] last five years from different partner organizations. We’ve always tried to not grow beyond our means, to do things that we’re capable of in terms of our size. It’s just the four of us, really [Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Adam Piron]. Adam Piron is such a force in getting things done. We also think about, what does the future look like? Is this something that we want to sunset in a few years? Is this something that we want to continue to grow or hand off?
We just did our first 16mm film workshop in Hawaiʻi, and that was a result of this [Hawaiian] intensive that Sundance did. We were exposed to really amazing filmmakers. [We wondered] how can we do workshops here? How could this be a pilot for workshops in different parts of the country or the world? It’s the thing I was talking about, you pick one thing [to start with]. Incremental but deliberate growth, without burning ourselves or anyone else out.
EG: I already heard about the workshop from Tiare [Ribeaux] and also Taylour [Chang, two of the participants], but could you share what the aim of the workshop was?
SH: We haven’t done a workshop before, so the aim was to see, what is it like? Again, we weren’t trying to do too much. We kept it small, four participants. We wanted to work with people that had an understanding of cinematography, so not starting from scratch. We provided all the film and the cameras. The idea was, here’s four rolls of film—go shoot. And the questions we’re trying to answer are, what are effective ways of teaching? What are the students like in terms of their skill level? How does it work getting films from Hawaiʻi to New York or Los Angeles, to a lab? What infrastructure is needed for people to develop 16mm film on the island, what access do people have to cameras? What access do we have to Bolexes to lend to people? Do people want to learn how to hand-process?
When we come back for a more intentional, “proper” workshop, we now have four people that can help us teach others. It’s this idea that you make teachers to make teachers, which is also very WAYK. A lot of questions are floating around, but this felt like the first step in figuring out how to answer them.
EG: You’re thinking about how to develop a sustainable infrastructure. Is there more of an infrastructure in the film world or the art world to sustain the things that you want to do?
SH: Yes and no. Each of these spaces offer their own structures and systems. It’s [a matter of] picking the thing you want to work through. In the mid-2010s I became interested in the gallery space, in multi-channel work, and in photography. A gallery space felt more open to those mediums and modes. A video installation up for a month offers a different way of interacting with the piece than watching it on a Friday afternoon at a film festival. For me, what’s exciting is how to put different works or artists in conversation with each other in one space simultaneously, rather than through a series of [film] programs.
I love cinemas and I love black boxes. I don’t think it’s an either/or question, it’s just which space is right for the thing that you’re doing.
EG: I love I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become [2016], because I love Diane Burns and her sense of humor. Your films are funny in an understated way, in that a lot of the speech in your films is very colloquial, coming from family and friends and the good times we have with them. Would you make a more overtly comedic film in the future?
SH: Good question. I put little jokes in the films, but more for myself, where a sound hits with a certain beat or a certain movement on screen. I like being playful in the edit. Being explicitly funny feels hard… I like working with people that are funny or have jokes that they tell. I’ve always said I wanted to do a rom-com, so maybe in the next few years that’ll happen.
EG: Lastly, for a long time your Instagram bio was “I love malls.” Why do you love malls?
SH: Actually, it still is, but it’s “I like malls.” Because I like malls. These places that are seen as tacky or low-class or obsolete, you [come to] like them, and the mixture of high and low[brow] things. I have fond memories of going to the mall as a kid with my family, my auntie. I’m fascinated with the idea of the commons, these non-places that become hubs for community. What does a town square look like in real life these days? In some communities, you go to a mall and you just see a bunch of elders sitting in the food court drinking coffee. And I think that’s beautiful. I like these spaces that are about people being together even if they’re apart.
maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore screens Thursday, April 24, at BAMPFA. Sky Hopinka will be in attendance for a pre-screening conversation with scholar Beth Piatote. Sky Hopinka: a proposition of memory, a selection of Hopinka’s short films, screens Friday, April 25, at the Marina Theater.
