Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Every year the MacArthur Foundation announces a new class of MacArthur Fellows. It's also commonly known as the Genius Grant. The foundation gives a substantial no-strings-attached award to about two dozen exceptionally talented individuals each year. We've been featuring some of these newly designated geniuses here on the show.

Sky Hopinka is part of this year's class of fellows. Sky is an artist, filmmaker, and storyteller who's a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a the descendant of the Pechanga Band of the Luiseño people. He blends abstract sounds, bright imagery, and text, and captures the histories and contemporary experiences of Native peoples. Sky is assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College, and he was doing that job when he got the big call.

Sky Hopinka: I was just getting out of a faculty senate meeting at Bard and just about to start my 10:00 AM class, and I got this phone call, and I answered, and was completely floored.

Melissa: Did you still go to class?

Sky: Started about 15 minutes late, but we just-- tried to collect myself and went through the day.

Melissa: I want to talk about your work because it's fascinating, but if you had to describe it, how do you talk about what it is that you create?

Sky: First, I think of them as documentaries or as ways to work through what film and do what it can mean in a nonfiction form. I try to do that poetically with abstractions, with different things that you might see in a documentary, but apply it in a way that is reflective of an indigenous context and also trying to understand what that even means. What is an indigenous context? What's indigenous film? And really what do these things have the potential to be?

Melissa: You asked my next question which is what does it mean to say an indigenous context?

Sky: For me, it begins in specificity to my family, to my tribe, to my clan, to where I grew up, and where I've lived throughout my life. I have a pretty unique upbringing, but so do so many other native peoples in this country and that's the thing about it. There is no singular essentialized idea of what it is to be native, what it means to be indigenous. For me, focusing on the things that are specific to my upbringing, my family, our beliefs, that's a place to begin with asking that question.

Melissa: Will you share a little bit of your growing-up story?

Sky: I was born in a small town called Ferndale, Washington, about an hour and a half north of Seattle. I was raised by my mother and my grandmother and my auntie. We were a pretty close family growing up. My dad was around, but he wasn't too present. His tribe was from Wisconsin and my mom's tribe was from Southern California. It's very much a product of this indigenous diaspora throughout the US. Growing up in Ferndale, I was surrounded by family and that really shaped how I view the world and how I moved through the world, or how I think that I do in so many different ways.

One where my indigenous tribes aren't from the region that I grew up, and also, family who's part of these different communities and I'm not. There's the idea of being in a homeland, being a guest, being a visitor, and really having those questions in my head from an early age what does it mean to move around the country and beyond different indigenous homelands and be welcomed by different native peoples?

Melissa: As you're describing this childhood, I can hear some resonance of that in this story you're telling about these multiple overlapping identities and positionality within place.

Sky: Absolutely. The films are ways for me to describe the things that are indescribable, that I can't quite put words to, and that goes into different ideas of language and translation. I didn't grow up with my heritage languages, Ho-Chunk or Pechanga and I learned Chinuk Wawa in my mid-twenties. There's always this disconnect of trying to understand how to translate your life in an English context, in an American context, and really seeing how things are hard to translate or don't translate.

For me, the abstractions are really reflective of me trying to convey that sense of curiosity about who I am and how I fit into this world and all the beautiful things that go along with taking joy in your own culture, but also the shame that is imposed upon you by the world that we live in.

Melissa: The Chinuk Wawa language is core to your work. You speak, you teach, and it's also core to this feature-length film. Can you talk a little bit about how you make use of the language?

Sky: Yes. I first started learning it around the same time that I first picked up a camera and tried to learn how to make films. I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and I wanted to learn my heritage language like Ho-Chunk, but that's 2,000 miles away in Wisconsin, and so I met a Chinuk Wawa teacher and he taught me the language and in turn I taught others and helped organize language nights and helped try to work with the tribe to support their language program. This film was called Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore.

Melissa: Can you tell us about Kicking the Clouds?

Sky: Yes, Kicking the Clouds is my most recent short film. I started making it when my mom texted me asking me if I knew how to convert cassette tapes into digital. I said, yes and she says, "I have this tape it's from your grandma, so I want to convert it before it gets damaged." I was like, "Oh, wow. Yes, amazing. Send it." It was this 30-minute language lesson that my grandma conducted with her mother, my great-grandmother, and I had been looking for a reason to make a film about my hometown Ferndale for a while.

This was a way to have a conversation with my mom about my grandma and to film around this place that I grew up, which was definitely cathartic to work through this piece and to also ask these questions about how do I want to present my grandmother who's very close to me to the world when they don't know her? She went through a lot of hard things in her life, but I didn't want that to be the thing that defined her. I wanted to acknowledge those things in whatever way I could, but I just wanted the world to know her as the person that I knew.

Melissa: Can you talk a bit more about this challenge of the representation of trauma and ensuring that you acknowledge without making it the center and the entirety?

Sky: It was always really important for me to recognize and understand the work that has been done over the last 100 years, but it was also important for me to understand that there's more ways to expand on this idea of who we are and how there's different elements of who we are that have yet to be explored. I think a lot about those resistances or just the burden of representation. If a non-native, non-indigenous audience only sees us processing our trauma, then that's what they're going to ask us to do.

Sometimes our traumas for us to process by ourselves or with who we want to. I really don't think that art exists in a vacuum, work exists in a vacuum, and the things that I do is connected to all the other work that all other indigenous people are doing.

Melissa: Do you have plans for how to make use of at least some of these resources?

Sky: I've been trying to wrap my head around that. Definitely, pay off my student loans. [unintelligible 00:07:07]

Melissa: [laughs] Oh, that's a good one.

Sky: There's some people that I want to support and help out and there's some films that I want to make. I think the biggest sense that I get from this is just the sense of relief, of just the minor stresses that comes with [unintelligible 00:07:24] survive in the world that we live in and it's financial, but it's a relief

Melissa: Sky Hopinka, 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Thank you for joining us today.

Sky: Thank you.

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