First Nations artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) creates video, photo, and text works that center around his personal relationship to Indigenous homeland and landscape. He also highlights language as a container of culture, through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. 

Hopinka switches between languages in his meditative pieces that focus on native beliefs about how individuals experience time, how we connect to the land, and the effort to bring forth ancient forms of wisdom that helped Indigenous Peoples thrive on this land before First Contact. 

Hopinka uses new and old technologies to express a sensitive, delicate aesthetic. He builds layers of meaning through a collage of imagery in color and black and white, using historic photographs as well as footage from his daily life and experiences with friends and family. He honors Indigenous social spaces such as pow wows that anchor his stories about the diverse First Nations peoples who lived and managed North America for thousands of years.

In his work I’ll remember you as you were, not as what you’ll become, 2016, Hopinka documents a road trip as the sun rises in the east, and a pow wow, its images of dancers abstracted with the jingle of dresses and the call of the emcee in the background. We see a First Nations woman comedian/poet talk about her world. And we see words floating, like talisman or symbols, etching the shape of a mythical being in a black sky. 

Language is a key component to this work. Hopinka has studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River Basin of Oregon and Washington states. This cultural area is known for its rich landscape of salmon, and the efforts of Indigenous activists and environmentalists to restore the natural flow of the Columbia River, so important to the livelihood of its people and the salmon that sustain them.

Hopinka reminds us that there are tangible reminders of the peoples who lives in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans, and that honoring these ancient cultural traditions should be an important part of our cultural reckoning in this unprecedented period of change.

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