Native Wisdom: The Peoples of Eastern Oregon (2020 | USA | 56 minutes | Tim Keenan Burgess & Lawrence Johnson)
The land and its peoples are changing, but by keeping traditions alive and seeking the wisdom of tribal elders, the Indigenous peoples of Eastern Oregon are working hard to stay connected to their cultural roots and keep their habitat intact and healthy. This is the main thesis of Native Wisdom, which moves like a very brief survey course through lots of examples bearing out this central premise: a Native “hotshot crew” of firefighters re-introduces the “controlled burn” concept to combat forest fires. An artist packs celebratory love into her public artworks inspired by her tribe’s ancient legends. A dammed river is revived to flow again, and bring with it its native marine life. I learned from this doc about the concept of “first foods” – an Indigenous historical understanding of the edible bounty of the earth, with a name forming an obvious corollary to the idea of the “First Nations” (another term for Indigenous peoples).
Native Wisdom: The Peoples of Eastern Oregon is structured like a documentary television show, complete with a narrator host who introduces himself along with “this is Wisdom of the Elders”. After a brief trip down a Google rabbit hole, it seems like this is actually a part of a documentary film series, and Wisdom of the Elders is a larger nonprofit organization that collects and organizes the stories of elders of various Indigenous peoples, although none of this is clear within the text of the film or its Local Sightings page description – as a newcomer approaching what I thought was a standalone documentary film, I found this format to be confusing and even somewhat off-putting, although it does help to explain its sub-one hour runtime.
City By The Sound (2021 | USA | 70 minutes | Kolby Rowland)
Kolby Rowland’s experimental documentary is presented as a series of vignettes, which don’t seem to have a lot to do with each other except that they all take place in and around Seattle. Their tones vary wildly – some are sort of mystical and reverent; some are more at home in a slacker-comedy register; some are simply straightforward footage of structures or landscapes around the city. There’s a commercial parody, a dreamy description of a childhood event that could be a memory of alien encounter, and a brief interlude with the rapper Nacho Picasso (recorded, not seen); they’re all tied together by an urban explorer (with a cool headlamp built into their beanie, where can I find one of those?) who seems to stumble onto a portal into these multiple dimensions or experiences. Chapter titles and end credits are presented in the kind of Gothic font often seen in tattoos and car decals, and to be honest it makes half of them unreadable.
If there’s a point being made, however obliquely, it’s probably about gentrification and the changing face of Seattle, although the recurring image of the “Sentinels” confused me. Their appearance instantly reads “tech bro” – two young men with matching neon yellow hoodies riding around on hoverboards (the real present-day self-balancing rideable thing, not the retro-futurist fictional thing) and inserting themselves into others’ business – but it feels like their job is protecting the city from evil or chaos (such as the real estate agent in that commercial parody), so it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on there. With such disparate tones all woven together, it’s hard to come away with any certain feeling, like many experimental docs seem specifically constructed to evoke – but as a representation of one person’s subjective experience of their hometown, it does make some sense.
Native Wisdom and City By The Sound played in-person on prior dates at the Local Sightings Film Festival, but are both available virtually until midnight at the end of tonight, September 26th.
Follow other updates from this year’s festival via our Local Sightings 2021 coverage.