Matt Kliewer: 'It Takes a Lot of Empathetic and Compassionate Listening'

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to. [00:00:06] Speaker C: Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College Community College name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service. [00:01:07] Speaker D: It's not uncommon for students to assume that when scholars speak of texts, they're referring to written artifacts, novels, poems, essays and the like. It's certainly true that scholarship in the liberal arts often focuses on the written word, but one of the most exciting things about learning in these areas is the realization that anything subject to interpretation, be it a song, an image, a comic book, a film, or anything else, is a potentially rich text that can serve as a vehicle for pursuing meaning and understanding. My guest today is Matt Cleaver, a humanities instructor at Austin Community College and a scholar in the field of Native American and Global Indigenous literature, film and media. Matt and I will lead a discussion following a screening of the Jim Jarmusch film Dead man at the Austin Film Society's cinema on November 13th at 7pm Here we take the opportunity to discuss his field and work and to see what it looks like in real time by discussing a 2013's Rhymes for Young Ghouls, written and directed by Jeff Barnaby. The film discussion comprises the second half of this interview and delves into many of its plot points. [00:02:15] Speaker A: Spoilers lie ahead. Matt Cleaver, welcome to the office. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Hey, it's really good to be here. [00:02:27] Speaker A: I'm very glad to see you here. So I'd like to begin by maybe kind of prefacing something unusual about this conversation in that in addition to introducing you and your background, we're kind of promoting, effectively an event that you and I are co hosting in a few weeks at the afs, the Austin Film Society Cinema near the Highland Campus at acc, where we are going to be offering some remarks after a screening of the Jim Jarmusch film Deadman. What we're doing today is talking a little bit about your academic background, which I think leaves you well situated to talk about that film. But we're also going to kind of talk about a different film that I asked you to recommend that is relevant to your background in Native American studies. So just for folks listening to this, if it seems like we segue midway through this Conversation into a very deep dive about a film. This is by design. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I guess this is a good test of if folks like listening to us talk about some of these more out there films. Yeah. We'll be talking about Jim Jarmusch's Dead man, which is one of my favorite films. You say I'm well positioned to talk about it. Well, I guess we'll see. It is a really fascinating film in the circles that I run in and the academic circles of indigenous film. It's a really well loved film for a variety of reasons, but it has a pretty complex background and legacy as well in terms of its taking on that genre of the western, which has a really long and difficult history for a lot of people. But the film that I recommended that you watch, one, because I know sort of your taste in films at this point, and two, because in indigenous film circles, if you ask someone their favorite film, when you ask 10 people, I kind of feel like five people are going to tell you it is Jeff Barnaby's 2013 film Rhymes for Young Ghouls. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And I just got the opportunity to see this film for the first time last night, and I can't wait to discuss it with you. But before we do, I'd like to talk a little bit about you, the extent that you're comfortable. So you joined the ACC faculty in our humanities department in the fall of 2023, if I'm recalling correctly. Or was it 2024? [00:04:52] Speaker B: This is my second year here, so I believe that it would have been 2024. The years run together at this point. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah, they do. Okay. Yeah. You currently teach courses in the humanities, which is an interdisciplinary field, draws from all kinds of things. And so what you tend to find is that folks come to the humanities from a variety of different academic backgrounds. So I wonder if you might talk a little bit about your own. [00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so my background has also taken a few twists and turns down the road. I originally went to grad school. I did my undergrad at the University of Kansas, went to grad school at the University of Oklahoma, where I wanted to. This feels so stereotypical study Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, because those were the people that I really vibed with in undergrad. I come from an English literature background. And yeah, I went in, as I think a lot of folks in English master's programs do, with authors that I liked. And I started to, in grad school, just realize one, there's not that much desire for yet another person talking about Blood Meridian, but also just trying to figure out what impact my work might have. And with those two authors, again, it's a crowded field. I started to realize maybe not that much. So I was lucky enough that I had a professor at the University of Oklahoma, Cherokee scholar Joshua Nelson, as well as a cohort mate, Cherokee scholar Renata Ryan Birchfield, who kind of invited me into the field. And my sort of trajectory in Native American literature and Native American film can really be attributed to guidance and mentorship from both of them. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, an interesting thing stands out from what you just said. I can certainly imagine that if I were surrounded by scholars in some field surrounding literature, that the claim we don't need another person talking about Blood Meridian would seem like a completely coherent joke. And I imagine that some folks listening to this interview might get it because they're well familiar with Cormac McCarthy as being a highly lauded author. But I also suspect that there's a lot of people who might be scratching their heads saying, I don't get it. Because outside of literary circles, I imagine the opportunity to introduce this as a significant novel, one that is almost certainly open to profound scrutiny through the lens of Native American studies, would come as a surprise for folks. So do you ever find as a teacher that you have to straddle this line between coming from a perspective where what you're saying sounds old, hackneyed, cliched, but knowing full well that for your audience, your students, this is new, rich, exciting stuff? [00:07:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I find that particularly in these large humanities surveys that I teach. So much of Native American studies is going against what has been canon, what has been official history. But in humanities, and particularly with the kind of age groups that I teach, in the intro levels that I teach, students aren't aware of canon or official histories well enough to push back against them at this point, or if not push back, then kind of critically engage with them. So, yeah, a lot of the teaching that I do is sort of informational at first before it can be critical. So the idea that folks might not know about Blood Meridian before being able to more critically look at it and think about the scholarship around it is sort of. It mirrors the struggle that I have in my classes, which is information versus kind of critical interrogation. [00:08:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's always kind of struck me as one of the exciting but central challenges of teaching at a community college, which is that in any given classroom, you're going to find that there are students who are ready to discuss serious texts at a high level already, but in that very same space, folks who might need quite a Lot of supplementary introduction before they can get there. And making that time worthwhile and engaging for everybody in the room is something that I think is really distinctive in teaching in a community college setting. Yeah. [00:09:19] Speaker B: And I also love to be able to kick it to the students with that. Every class is unique and individual in the amount of, I don't know, prerequisite knowledge it can be referred to sometimes that they come in with. And certain students, based on their own personal histories, are going to have a lot more knowledge of specific cultural things that are covered or are not covered in the class. And I really like being able to kind of survey the class and let them take this journey through human culture from 37,000 BCE up to 1500 in this first section of humanities wherever they want and whatever kind of speaks to them. [00:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So you also kind of occupy an interesting space in instruction here in that you work a lot with our ECHs or early college high school students. So this is one of our dual credit programs where the majority, or in many cases all of the students in your class are going to be high school students simultaneously taking instruction with you. So I wonder, this might sound like something of a loaded question. What's it like talking about literature with high school students in 2025? [00:10:37] Speaker B: It does sound like a loaded question. Right. Because it sounds like I'm supposed to engage with the idea that this stereotype that I believe that there are studies to back it up, that students are just reading less. Right. That reading comprehension has gone down, and just reading in general is a thing of the past. One thing I like about ECHS students is I tend to find that not to be true. These are still folks who enjoy reading for fun. These are still professional students in a way that I don't think I've ever been since I left high school, where they kind of clock in at eight and they clock out at four. They have great study habits. They're still passionate about the things that they study. And I know a lot of students like, outside of high school are as well, but you really just feel the kind of like, early budding scholarship from this age group. And I don't know, they're little nerds, and I love that about them. And I think that those challenges that folks often kind of picture if they're not in a dual credit classroom tend to not hold up to. To the reality of the situation. [00:11:47] Speaker A: Yeah. In full disclosure, it was a loaded question. But in the direction that I kind of knew that already and was looking for some testimony from somebody who's in the room with them. But there is something that strikes me as interesting about literature in particular. Now, obviously, in a humanities class, you're looking at a much wider range of cultural artifacts than just literary texts. But something about literature in the high school space that I sometimes think about, and this will date me a little bit, is that I went to high school in the 1990s. YA literature was not nearly so prevalent or as established kind of as a genre or field as it is now. And so it seems like young people who want to read and like to read kind of have a universe available to them that sort of didn't exist maybe when I was in high school. And I wonder, one, if that strikes you as true, and two, if that affects what they bring to the table at all. [00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I do think that they have a lot more different YA novels and literatures to engage with, but I find that that doesn't end up applying in my class too much, because maybe that's just. Personally that I don't know if I necessarily believe in the idea of YA literature. I think that YA literature is any literature that young adults read. And occasionally I find that that genre talks down to the kind of themes or content that young adults might be ready for. For instance, my students just read the first canto of Dante's Inferno and loved it and engaged with it like they would Fahrenheit 451, which I think often gets categorized as. As young adult literature. And I'm so glad that young adult literature exists. And there's a lot of really good indigenous young adult literature designed specifically for students growing up in educational systems that don't tell indigenous histories. But at the same time, I think that students have a desire to read these more difficult and complex texts that reflect their difficult and complex existences in the modern world. [00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure. And I guess, you know, it's not surprising to hear that, given that part of the staying power of Romanticism, for example, is precisely that it's so exciting to young people. You know, it seems to be, you know, speaks to the idea that, like, of course, they still want to, you know, read Blake or. Or Dante or whatever. Right, yeah. So another. Another question then. [00:14:21] Speaker D: So. [00:14:21] Speaker A: So as I mentioned a moment ago, humanities, of course, is going to comprise a lot more than just looking at literary texts. So if I were taking a humanities survey course with Professor Cleaver, what might that kind of look like from week to week in terms of what we would engage with, how we'd look at it? [00:14:39] Speaker B: Yeah, this is an interesting question, because it's one that I constantly grapple with as a person with a pretty solid literature and film background. Those are the areas where I'm most comfortable. And since coming to ACC and teaching these survey courses, I realized that teaching what I'm comfortable with is not necessarily the point. It's to give students a kind of expanse of genres and mediums and histories and geographies to engage with. So if you are taking my Humanities 1301, which is Prehistory to the Renaissance, then we're going to start 35,000 years ago at the Chauvy Caves, and we're going to look at and analyze these ancient cave paintings, the oldest cave paintings that we've as humans found, almost twice as old as the other cave paintings that we found, which is mind blowing. And then we're going to transition into written literature, we're going to transition into architecture. My students just looked at Gothic architecture for the first time. And while admittedly I don't know as much about Gothic architecture as most Gothic architecture hobbyists, my students do. They have so many different interests and a lot of them want to be engineers. So of course this is the lesson for them. And I can give them a few key concepts and then just let them go and let them take it where they want to. So you're going to get art, architecture, literature, music, once we're able to kind of culturally transmit that to the present. And then eventually, if you are in my 1302 section, which is pre Renaissance to the present, then we get into some film once that becomes a more prevalent medium. [00:16:26] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, that sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, and, and, and it's, it's obvious just from the short description you've given that, that the goal here is not mastery. Right. It is not to, like, walk away with a comprehensive understanding of, you know, the totality of human culture, but, but rather to expand your perspective, get familiar with things you weren't familiar with, already dive deeper into things that, that you were. And so it makes sense. It's actually probably a good thing to have as a guide in this case, a teacher, somebody who might sometimes find that they're less familiar with the nuances of Gothic architecture than some of the people who they're presumably teaching. Right, yeah. [00:17:06] Speaker B: Who wants to sit through an entire Gothic architecture class? And if they do, then they definitely don't want me as their professor. [00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So as we start getting ready to discuss the film that, that, that you selected for us, and I should say part of the reason that I I like the idea of talking about a film with you is not just that it kind of prefaces what we'll be doing at our event at afs, but it can kind of give a mock example as to what it's like to discuss film as kind of serious text for discussion. So it's kind of like a mock conversation with. What it might be like in your. In your class is to talk a little bit about what it means to pursue Native American studies as a field of scholarship. What does that mean? What does it entail? [00:18:00] Speaker B: It's a question with a lot of complicated answers. This is a podcast. It's not a visual medium. So I'll go ahead and say I'm a white scholar studying Native American literature as a settler scholar, as they typically called in my field. And in order to engage in the field of Native American literature and Native American film and global Indigenous literature and global Indigenous film, to put it lightly, it takes a lot of homework. It takes a lot of engaging with histories that are not yours. It takes a lot of knowing what conversations are for you and what conversations are not for you. And it takes a lot of empathetic and compassionate listening to folks who know more about you, of which there are a ton. In my field, it takes a strong mentor, of which I have several, and it takes a kind of overriding belief in the sovereignty of Native nations and the sovereignty of Native art, all of which I've been lucky enough to have. It's a really rewarding field. And it's not just rewarding in that kind of after school special way. The art and film, the literature in films, specifically in my field that are produced by Indigenous peoples right now is just incredible. And it's such a gift to be able to study them and be in conversation with other scholars engaging with these texts. And it's a small enough field that often you get to engage with the artists themselves. One thing about Native American literature and film is just, you know, everybody who's doing the good work. So that is really great in terms of community building. And it's also really, really important for someone like me, who I've now been in this field, quote, unquote, for 11 years. It's a really good accountability mechanism. If I'm on this podcast saying things that are inaccurate, untrue, or just poor readings of things, I'm going to hear about it from some folks. And while that is intimidating for folks just getting started, hence the importance of mentorship, it's a really, really important thing in this particular field that you are accountable for what you say, you are accountable for what you add to the discourse. [00:20:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fascinating to me because it suggests something very different from other ways that I've engaged with. Stick with literature as the example because oftentimes if we're looking like, you know, we're reading Philip Roth or something in a literature class, like, this is like an untouchable figure who you are not going to have direct access to. And so what we're doing, it's not like fanboying out or something, but it's kind of like we're outside of the sphere of influence that we're talking about. But I hear you saying, like, no, the good work is very much happening right now and you are in conversation with the people who are doing it and who care about it. That makes it a lot more immediately alive, I think, than people might realize at first glance. [00:21:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it is invigorating. It's also a lot of pressure. Let's say someone puts out a novel that I don't particularly think is very good. This is an easy thing to handle in a lot of other fields. Right. You write an article, you're critical of it here, you can do that too, but you're going to get a phone call. And luckily I have not had those phone calls come in, but I know other people who have, and I just really appreciate how quick the feedback mechanisms are. At the same time, it's an incredibly generous field. Folks within Native American and global Indigenous studies just want folks to see and access their art and their criticism. And having been a kind of new person in the field, it's very welcoming if your intentions are correct and if you do the work. [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I imagine that that welcoming would apply and extend very much down to the students you're working with, to 16 year olds who are interested in Native traditions themselves. Right? [00:22:36] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Because interest in Native traditions, it intersects a lot with film. Much of what our students, who have had very little training in Indigenous histories, Indigenous cultures, through no fault of their own, through the larger United States education apparatus, get what they know about Native peoples from film and specifically from Western film. So again, the intersection between history and the art produced about a people in Native studies is kind of the Venn diagram is a circle in a lot of ways. [00:23:15] Speaker A: All right, well, that's very exciting. So I feel like the stakes for our conversation about this film have just been raised a little bit. Right. So I work in philosophy, which it's a large enough community that if I were to say something inaccurate about David Hume's epistemology. Certainly Hume himself is not going to come and give me a call and tell me that I'm wrong, but I imagine that, you know, nobody's going to care all that much to, like, correct me about it. But it sounds like there may actually be folks who would call us to account if we were to say, you know, egregiously mistaken things about the film or the themes we're about to discuss here. [00:23:56] Speaker B: I'll let you know if we hit the Reddit pages for sure. Yeah. [00:23:59] Speaker A: All right, Very good. Well, then maybe what I'd like to do before I turn it over to you to kind of situate the film that we're going to discuss here is just talk very briefly about how I primed myself for it and how that failed to prepare me for the experience. So I watched this film Rhymes for Young Ghouls last night for the first time. I will just say spoiler alert. I was delighted. I've been thinking about it ever since I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the film. And what I knew about it going in was that it was a film that was a period piece of sorts. Right. So it's set, if I recall, in the early 1970s. [00:24:43] Speaker B: That's right. [00:24:44] Speaker A: That it was a film that is situated in the middle of a Mi' Kmaq reservation, if I'm correct. [00:24:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So it is a Micmac film. It is situated in the midst of a fictional reservation, though, the Red Crow Mi' Kmaq reservation. [00:24:59] Speaker A: Okay. And that it was, you know, if I looked it up in IMDb, it says that it's a drama, horror, supernatural, indigenous film. Right. So I immediately can note. Oh, and it mentioned that it, a big plot point has to do with a residential school. So I'm coming to this with my paltry understanding of the history of residential schools in North America. But what I was assuming was that I was going to be watching a film that followed certain tropes, which, as a fan of horror, I'm kind of trained to look for. Right. Oh, this is going to be a ghost story movie, and it's going to be about a residential school. So what came to mind was something like the orphanage. Right. The Spanish film where, you know, we have, like, haunting that's situated in the horrors of the school. I think that that gave me kind of like, some interesting expectations, but they were interesting because they were violated in all sorts of ways. Right. There is horror situated within a residential school, but the vast majority of this narrative takes place outside of it. Right. We're left to kind of imagine a lot of what happens there. So that's basically a very long, long winded way of me saying that, like, I came to this film kind of blind and prepared myself, I think, in a faulty way. But we all kind of prime ourselves to watch a film and that I'm really excited to gain some perspective and maybe help to understand kind of my own responses to it. In conversation with you. [00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And you're talking about expectations coming into the film. Can I ask you about just your experience with Indigenous film in general before this? [00:26:44] Speaker A: Yeah, very good. So I. What I realized is that I have certainly seen films that attempt representation of Indigenous characters in, you know, positive, culturally positive ways. This might range from something as, like, commercial as moana, to representations of characters like the character of nobody in the film that we're going to talk about, Dead Man. Although, of course, in the case of a film like that. Right. Jim Jarmusch is not a Native filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I realized early on is I may well have seen a fair bit of Indigenous film, but I'm not sure where or when. Right. More narrowly, even in, like, the sub genres that I favor, horror, sci fi, that kind of thing. I know of a good number of films that will incorporate or maybe appropriate Native myths. There's like, an early 2000s film, Wendigo. I don't know if you've seen this one. That's. You can. You can miss it if you want. Right. But you can imagine it's basically, you know, a monster film, you know, that features this mythological figure, but that I had never actually been introduced to. An explicitly Indigenous horror film, if indeed it is, you know, fair to characterize this film in that way. [00:28:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And this brings up, I think, what a lot of viewers of Indigenous film encounter, which is that they. They haven't encountered much of it previous to whatever they're watching in the moment. The history of Indigenous film and particularly the concept of visual sovereignty, which we can talk about a little bit, or Indigenous people's control over how they and how their nations are portrayed, is an interesting one, because for the vast majority of film history, Indigenous people have been portrayed in a very specific way and through two very specific tropes. That of the violent savage, which we can think about in terms of old Ford Westerns, Stagecoach searchers, or that of the noble savage, if we want to think about something like Dances With Wolves. Right. I believe in 1999, we get the first big kind of intervention into how Indigenous peoples represent themselves in A commercially successful film. And that's Smoke Signals. Have you seen Smoke Signals? [00:29:26] Speaker A: I did see Smoke Signals back in the day, yeah. [00:29:29] Speaker B: A lot of folks saw Smoke Signals, which doesn't hold up for a variety of reasons that I don't super want to talk about on this podcast right now. But Smoke Signals does sort of change the landscape a lot. It is the first time that indigenous peoples can see themselves in a film directed by and written by indigenous people that ends up being commercially successful. And studios say, oh, we want more of this. Another really important intervention in that kind of visual sovereignty, I guess mission would be Atanajarat or the Fast Runner, Zacharias Canuck's brilliant, brilliant epic film. It's an Inuit film filmed entirely in their language, filmed entirely by a crew of Inuit people. And it's just incredible stuff. It is Visual Sovereignty 101. And then the success of both of those films, as well as the Lord of the Rings, which we can talk about a little bit later, really starts to build up these apparatuses of global indigenous film. It is clear that there's an audience for these films. It is clear that there's a desire to kind of correct some historical misrepresentations and just give the camera to the folks who have kind of been victims of the camera for so long. Then we get rhymes for young ghouls, which, although not a direct line from these two, I think absolutely belongs on any film syllabus that's talking about visual sovereignty and indigenous film. And as you rightly point out, one of the big interventions here is it's kind of genre y. It's multi genre, but it's recognizable as a horror film. It's recognizable as kind of the classic revenge narrative as well. It subverts some of those conventions, but it does meet audiences in some expectations that they might have, even if those expectations don't fit with the traditional violent or noble savage representations. [00:31:38] Speaker A: So maybe I'll just note here, for anybody who's listening. I think we're about to start talking very specifically about the film, so I cannot recommend highly enough. If you're interested in following the rest of this conversation, take a moment, watch the film. It's worth your time. I can. I can promise you this. [00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah. With some content warnings. Right. This is a film about abuse in residential schools and intergenerational trauma. There's a lot of violence in it. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Very realistic depictions of violence. [00:32:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's. It's a tough watch, but it is an incredibly important watch. [00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's a. There's a beautiful little bit of dialogue in a scene where Ayla, the central protagonist of the film, is either seeing or recalling a conversation with her mother. And they share this. This work of painting of visual art together. And in the scene, Ayla's mother is teaching her how to paint a headdress on a figure they're putting on a wooden door. And Ayla's very confused because she said, I thought that Mikmac don't wear headdresses. And her mother says, yes, but we're putting it on this one. And she asks why? And she said, well, because people, when they see this, they think it looks powerful. And Ayla says, who? And her mother says, oh, well, dumbasses mostly. Right. And I felt very, like, called out as the spectator of the film in this moment and asking myself, how much has the director intentionally kind of like, played with my own expectations of what power means? Or towards the end of the film, Ayla ends up having what looks kind of like war paint on her face. Right. Which me, as the bumbling new to the field viewer, thinks like, oh, yeah, okay, she's being the noble savage now or something like this. Where for all I know, that's the filmmaker saying, like, I put this in here because you are the dumbass. Right in this moment. [00:33:44] Speaker B: Yeah. I think that there's a lot of interesting things going on in that particular moment that you're talking about. One is tribal specificity. Right. Like Jeff Barnaby, the Micmac director, being like, hey, this is not a thing for my people. At the same time, it's also him saying, it's kind of cool though, Right. And it points to a sort of larger aesthetic of inter tribal. Yeah. Like film tropes, inter tribal resistance. So, yeah. While the Micmac don't wear headdresses, she. She does say, like, it is a powerful statement at the same time. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And it is kind of a cool painting they're making out the door. [00:34:26] Speaker B: Right? [00:34:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:27] Speaker B: And the war paint, I think that we can. As you. As you called it, we can talk about that a little bit in terms of film intertextuality, which I think that there is a lot of. Towards the end of this film, you've got Barnaby sort of engaging with films like Donnie Darko. You have him engaging with, I think, very specifically in Ayla's costume there, with films like the crow films that talk about the kind of nebulous border between life and death and this concept of the living dead, which I'm sure will come up a little bit more as the conversation progresses. [00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's funny. Now that I think about the rabbit costume that one of the. The young kids wears, I definitely see the Donnie Darko reference. So I was thinking. So throughout the film, Ayla, who has undergone a number of experiences that I think can readily be identified as traumatic. [00:35:25] Speaker B: Right. [00:35:26] Speaker A: She has these conversations with or visions of dead people, her relatives and such. The way that it's presented, though, like, I found myself wondering, like, this seems in some ways less like supernatural horror and more like magical realism or something, because the film treats these things as just, like, matter of fact. Right. They're not. Nobody's startled by or upset by any of these visions. And it just seems like this is kind of part of the way she experiences the world. [00:35:59] Speaker B: Okay. So immediately the indigenous film scholar in me perks up at this concept of magical realism. [00:36:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [00:36:07] Speaker B: Because that's not necessarily an applicable term here, although I do think that shades of it fit. Right. It's a good reading. A lot of what we're talking about here are tribal epistemologies, though, right? The idea that the dead can walk around are things that specific tribes believe. So not necessarily magical realism in the fact that an author is playing with something that they know to be fictional and inserting it somewhere where one would not expect in order to seem real, but actually engaging with tribal mythologies and epistemologies and stories and just portraying them to audiences who wouldn't be familiar with them, who, when they encounter them, of course, say, well, that seems fictional or that seems magical. But potentially, for indigenous viewers who share those epistemologies in their tribes, this wouldn't seem magical at all. Right? [00:37:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And the tone in the film doesn't treat them in that way. [00:37:06] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:06] Speaker A: I mean, the conversations that she has with her young brother who dies early in the film, they're not any really different in tone or affect than the conversation she has with her uncle or what have you in the film. That's really interesting. So in terms of this idea of visual sovereignty, there are some really interesting things that stuck out to me about kind of just some of the basic aesthetics of the film. So there's a very limited color palette. One thing that I noticed. [00:37:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:40] Speaker A: So not just the fact that it's. That it's situated in a geographic context where you have a lot of, you know, golden hues and browns and yellows, but even in, like, the prop design, like, her bicycle is a bronze bicycle. Right. The only, like, really colorful things that I noticed in the film were the. The stark red of the painting she's making with her mother and the refrigerator in her house, which is this, like, turquoise color. [00:38:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:11] Speaker A: And so I, I, you know, to what extent is. Is that color palette or that kind of, like, a visual setup, part of this. This visual sovereignty that you're talking about? [00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah. In terms of the color palette, I'm unsure what anything is supposed to represent. And knowing Jeff Barnaby a little bit, my guess is not much. He would probably just say, this is the fridge that we had. But I think that the elements of visual sovereignty that we can focus on here are sort of twofold. What happens on camera in terms of representation and then the production of the film itself and its kind of legacy in continuing visual sovereignty in other ways outside of the camera. In terms of representation on the camera, the figure of Ayla and the characterization of Ayla is one that. The importance of that kind of can't be overstated. It gives indigenous film also, like a thing called the ALA test, similar to the Bechdel test, of which to. I looked this up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the AILA test? [00:39:27] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. [00:39:28] Speaker A: So forgive my ignorance about the Bechdel test, but basically it's a short series of questions that can tell you whether you actually have, like, reasonably represented women in a film. Right. So are there two women who have a conversation where there are no men, where they're not talking about a man, et cetera? [00:39:46] Speaker B: That's exactly right. [00:39:47] Speaker A: And so really emphasizing. Right. This film rhymes for young ghouls. This is a recent film. This is what, 2013. [00:39:56] Speaker B: That's right. [00:39:56] Speaker A: Right. So we're looking at a film where this central protagonist, who's kind of new to the film canon, is kind of the figure that's being used to construct this question about whether we have a positive representation of an indigenous woman in the film. [00:40:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mentioned that kind of early history of indigenous film. I'll say there are not many strong women protagonists in that kind of early history of indigenous film, at least the ones that get commercially successful. Right there. There are, of course, many, many good indigenous films made between 1999 and Smoke Signals in 2013, which feature strong indigenous women protagonists. But Ayla is really the one that sticks with folks because, 1. Because of the way this character is written and filmed, she is central to all of the shots. And we can kind of think about the early voiceover where she really starts to control the narrative and how we perceive these early events of her life. And then, if not the most Famous. And the second most famous scene of the film, of her in the gas mask with her voiceover narration, trying to insulate herself from all of the abuse going on around her, the drugs, the. [00:41:13] Speaker A: Alcohol, which are present in almost every frame of the film. [00:41:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And I do think that that's probably something that we come back to when we talk about representation, because this might fit into some tropiness that we have grown accustomed to in indigenous film. But I think Barnaby actually handles this in a really smart way. But Ayla sticks with folks because she's the central character, because her voiceover guides us through the narrative, because she is absolutely the central kind of camera figure in a lot of our main scenes, but also because of the performance. This is really one of the major legacies of this film is Guanohari Devery Jacobs, who I believe is nominated for a Canadian Film Award for this portrayal. And this is her first feature film. [00:42:07] Speaker A: She's captivating throughout the entire thing. Yeah. [00:42:09] Speaker B: This film is brilliant, and it is brilliant behind the camera. That performance is incredible. If you are on the fence about whether or not to watch this, Deborah Jacobs is now in. In a lot of very important works of indigenous film. And this is. You can see why. Based on her first film. [00:42:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:31] Speaker B: There's a toughness to her, but there's also this incredible vulnerability that you can see almost through a gas mask. [00:42:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So here's a question with respect to sovereignty. You talked about visual sovereignty. A really interesting thing to me in the film had to do with the sound, specifically the music and the score, because the music in this film is almost entirely derived from African American traditions. It's blues music, and it's not Chicago. This is old down home blues music. Both in the score. Right. Which is music that we as the audience are privy to, but not the characters in the film, but also in the narrative. Like, when there's a party, they're listening to blues music. Right. And I just found that striking to me that this was kind of so centrally grounding feature of the film. And I wonder, like, what are your thoughts on that? [00:43:34] Speaker B: Yeah. I've actually never thought too much about the score or talked with many folks about the score, but I do think that we are talking about a film that engages with historical, collective, shared tragedies. [00:43:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:52] Speaker B: And produces what is, in my opinion, an incredibly beautiful and nuanced and painful piece of art out of it. So. So perhaps that's. That's Barnaby sort of mirroring that process of the Creation of blues music in this. In. In his first major directorial feature film. [00:44:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's. That certainly seems plausible to me. There's this kind of overarching question that I've had as we've been talking about this in the context of Indigenous scholarship, Native studies, which is that, you know, Aboriginal traditions in Australia, African Diaspora, Native American films, Pre Columbian films, we're talking about, like, vastly different traditions in many cases. And so here we're looking at Indigenous representation exclusively through the lens of Native American communities and first nations in this. [00:44:52] Speaker B: Particular case, because we are talking about the Mi' Kmaq and particularly this fictional Mi' Kmaq reservation in Canada. [00:44:59] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Yeah. So I do wonder. The tying of the music to this just seemed like a really interesting way of maybe, along with the headdress, kind of expanding the scope of this to thinking about. About Indigenous trauma, you know, much more broadly than just in the specific community that the film's situated in. [00:45:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It could be a sharing of a collective history and, of course, a complex history when we come to black and Indigenous shared histories. Tiffany Lathabo King's book the Black Shoals is a good one to read about this, but also there's maybe this idea of strategic essentialism that might come in here or, like, coalition building. Again, I have not thought too much about this score, but, yeah, that's a really interesting point. [00:45:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's also just some really damn good blues playing from the guitarist who they got for whoever did that. It was really good. [00:46:01] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:46:03] Speaker A: So there was another thing that really stood out to me in the film, which there's a scene where Ayla's grandmother, or rather the woman who she treats as her grandmother. Ceres. Is that her name? [00:46:16] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. [00:46:17] Speaker A: She tells her a story, and it's accompanied by some really beautiful and striking animation. But the animation was very distinctive in that it blended elements of the narrative that she's being told, which is a story about a wolf who comes upon trees. But all of the imagery is kind of corrupted by industrial imagery. Right. So the trees aren't trees, they're electrical poles. The wolf is this, like, mechanized kind of beast, all in silhouette. But even there, you can see that there's this weird hybridization of the story, which is presumably a very old story. We're told that this is a story that mothers pass down through generations with, like, industrial wasteland, essentially. And I wonder what you think about the choice to use that style in animation. [00:47:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really interesting choice because that animation doesn't really come up again, at least diegetically, like in the actual plot of the film itself. But throughout the film, we do see a lot of visual art and particularly like drawing. So it's not totally unexpected. In fact, we see Ayla drawing a lot. This is her main outlet that is productive in order to escape some of the things happening around her. She draws, she creates art. I find that students have a really difficult is not the right word, but they come to this particular scene with a lot of interpretation. And ultimately the wolf consumes itself. Right. The wolf walking around this industrial wasteland ends up consuming itself because it cannot find anything else outside itself to consume. So I guess I'm wondering how you read that particular scene, animation aside. [00:48:11] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, well, so I guess if I were to kind of expand on that, on that idea that you just shared. The. The people in the film are confined, right. To the reservation. Ayla says explicitly at one point. Right. That she. That it ends like there's. There's dirt roads that end at like open possibility or something like this. [00:48:34] Speaker B: Right. [00:48:35] Speaker A: But we don't ever see anybody leave the space, at least as far as I recall. Right? [00:48:40] Speaker B: No, we don't. And. And I think that this, this is an interesting point because definitely we get Ayla, who is a teenager at the time, talking about seemingly wanting to leave. Right? [00:48:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:53] Speaker B: But she can't. Everyone's stuck there. There's seemingly no opportunity except be confined to the residential school or pay a tax to the folks who run the residential school by selling drugs and doing various nefarious behavior to stay out of the residential school. [00:49:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:13] Speaker B: At the same time, there are older folks who seem to have the agency to leave, who choose to stay. [00:49:19] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. [00:49:20] Speaker B: We have the older man who seemingly kind of adopts Ayla towards the end of the feature. We have Ceres. So I personally read the idea that the dirt roads end at the reservation more as a kind of commentary from a teenager than a sort of larger commentary on reservations in general. [00:49:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, maybe. Yeah. I mean, it strikes me that it's interesting that Ayla would view the roads as ending there because she's clearly not somebody who's afraid of challenging confines. Right. She's got no compunction about breaking into a terrifying facility, helping people to break out of that terrifying facility. Facility. [00:50:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:02] Speaker A: The residential school is just a hostile, awful place where she feels, you know, it seems to feel comfortable, like going in and out of that at will. Right. For the most part. But not leaving the dirt roads. Right. And in the, in the reservation in the world that she lives in. Right. There is this kind of ubiquitous imagery. I mean, everybody has a Tommy Chong sized joint behind their ear in the film. Right. We see just about all the characters maybe except for Ayla, in various stages of inebriation, you know, on and off throughout the film. She wears the mask. She's trying to maybe protect herself physically from some of this. This harm affecting her. But this is, you know, a way that a wolf could eat itself. Right. It's, it's, it's self harm in the face of not having other options or not seeing other options. So this is maybe just me kind of tying back to the animation as a way of interpreting it. [00:51:01] Speaker B: Yeah. I think you could absolutely read this as drugs and alcohol are causing the Mi' Kmaq people to consume themselves in a way that lets them, quote, unquote, not escape. I think that you could also very easily view the residential school itself as the wolf eating its tail. This institution that just consumes and consumes and consumes until there's. There's nothing left. And ultimately that is what happens to the residential schools, Right. They consume themselves over a very long. [00:51:37] Speaker A: And horrible period of time. [00:51:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And instead of, I guess, us viewing the Mi' Kmaq folks as consuming themselves, and this is where we get back to this trope of substance abuse. Right? We do see it a lot. It is the reason for the first tragedy that we see. Ayla's brother is run over in a drunk driving accident. And it seems to consume, like you said, all of the characters, the Micmac characters, except for Ayla, she attempts to insulate herself with. With this gas mask and insulate herself from a particular strain of marijuana that she refers to as zombie. This is. And speaking of horror films, this is a zombie movie. And it is figuring out for Ayla at first how not to become a zombie like the folks around her, and then how to deal with the dead who walk around and deal with the legacies of those who walk around, even when those legacies have the power to find their way through whatever barriers you set up. [00:52:53] Speaker A: Okay. There's a scene, there's a very troubling scene in the film that I was interested in asking you about, because in terms of the historical context of when this film was released, it seems there's something that I'm trying to get my head around. So Ayla, in a sequence that might be a dream, it might be an actual experience that she has with being led by one of these zombies, comes upon a mass grave behind the residential school. This film was released in 2015, 2013. And my understanding is that actual accounts of evidence of mass graves of residential schools that people might be familiar with, that's actually found after the release of this film. It's not until 2019, 2021, that you start seeing accounts of these. But I get the sense from the film that it's like, but this is an open secret, right? This is, this is kind of part of the cultural understanding. Even if there isn't the evidence, the film presents this as sort of a fact. And I guess I was a little bit shocked. This shows my own naivete. I thought, oh, well, this film is probably responding to some of the discoveries of these mass graves. And I realized, oh, wait, no, those actually weren't discovered in the sense that we publicly know about until after the release of the film. [00:54:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And when we, when we say discoveries, I do think that that is what that ultimately means in this case is quote, unquote, official acknowledgement that these things happened. But that official acknowledgment that we're talking about is acknowledgement from the Canadian government and in this particular case of the, I believe, the 2022 massacre that you're talking about acknowledgement from the Catholic Church. But as you said, even when you say open secret, I don't necessarily know if that's the right word for it, because these are just things known to the people whose ancestors experienced the atrocities of the Canadian residential school program. [00:55:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:55:04] Speaker B: Now, I do think that there's a little bit of discourse that the 2013 film is engaging with in terms of the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, which I think most, most Indigenous critics, if not most, but a lot of Indigenous critics, including Glenn Coulthard in his book Redskin White Masks, would view as an attempt of the Canadian government to find the truth of the residential school programs while not entirely listening to those most affected by it, and then half heartedly reconcile those atrocities with the first nations people of Canada. That does seem to be part of what Barnaby is responding to. And one of the ways that he does that is that scene that is the most difficult to watch in the entire film. This discovery of the mass grave. That is the truth. It's the truth that we as the audience have to face. And it's ultimately the truth that Ayla has to face. She spends a lot of the film trying to avoid the residential school for obvious reasons, and really avoid engaging with the people around her. She is trying to protect herself and stay insulated. And the second that she finds this Grave. In this dream sequence, whatever we want to call it, she jumps into action. This turns into an entirely different film once Ayla is unable to avoid the history of her people anymore. [00:56:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it's. I recall in the opening sequence, Ayla and her brother, this is before the accident that kills Tyler, I think is his name. Her uncle is basically warning what will happen to them if they end up in that school. But the, the, the warning comes in the form of like a boogeyman tale that you might find in any, you know, number of traditions. And it's presented almost like the uncle trying to scare them. But later on, I think this scene that you're describing here, it grounds that horror in something very real. It makes it something different entirely. [00:57:37] Speaker B: And I believe that Burner, the uncle in this case just tells Aayla and Tyler the school up there, it eats kids. And yeah, that sounds like a boogeyman tale to us. But then we see this mass grave, and even not seeing the mass grave, if we listen to the stories of the people without the visual evidence, we understand that this is actually the case. This is a place that eats children. And the ones who escape, the ones who don't end up in that grave, are the ones that we see stumbling around sometimes under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, stumbling around like zombies, the living dead, they walk around, but as Barnaby, I think, is suggesting at various points, are broken. [00:58:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So speaking about broken characters. So Ayla's father is a really interesting character and there was kind of a point of just narrative confusion that I had toward the end of the movie and I was trying to work this out with, with my wife. We watched the film together. I can't recall exactly how it was suggested, but it seemed to me, suggested that Ayla might not actually be the biological daughter of her father at all. That, that they said something about the priests having misbegotten children and that he had. Had saved her by. By claiming responsibility. [00:59:09] Speaker D: Possibility. [00:59:09] Speaker A: And I could be completely wrong about this, but my wife looked at me like, the hell you say? Like, there's nothing I. So, so I see the reaction on your face like, no, I didn't read that at all. Okay. [00:59:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that never comes up. I've never encountered that particular plot point as a focus for, for the many folks who watch this. [00:59:31] Speaker A: Okay. [00:59:31] Speaker B: This film, I'm always, always viewed Ayla as Glenn Gold's character, I believe. Joseph's daughter. Yeah, yeah, that one has missed me. [00:59:42] Speaker A: Okay. It could be that I just watch too many horror movies and I'M looking for every twisty turn that I can find in a plot line. [00:59:48] Speaker D: Right. [00:59:49] Speaker A: But as far as her father. Right. So he's described as not a good man, but a man who does good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons. Right. So he, like that's a good summary. Summary of just saying this is a complex character. [01:00:04] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [01:00:06] Speaker A: And at the end of the film we see him kind of take the. Take the fall, take the heat for a second time for, for violence that he was involved in, but not the direct cause of. Right. How do you view Joseph, this, this father character? What, what's, what's his role in the story? [01:00:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Joseph, played by Glenn Gold in another just incredible performance, is originally sent to prison for the tragic death of his own son. He backs over him drunk driving that ultimately leads to the suicide of his wife. And seeming that crime is compounded by the fact that its effects on Ayla seem to have incredibly long lasting and serious implications that change the way that she's able to interact with the world. Do you remember the voiceover narrative that we get from Ayla the second she finds her mother? It says, the day I found my mother dead, I aged 5,000 years. [01:01:22] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. [01:01:23] Speaker B: And this is the complexity of the Glenn Gold character because it does seem that he is not responsible for the things that have happened to him in the residential school. Right. Which ultimately seem to, Barnaby suggests, cause him to try and seek escape and things that make him a zombie, things that make him not present, and also things that make him harm other people at the same time. It is that absence that Ayla also has to deal with. And it seems to be Barnaby talking in a really nuanced and complex way about intergenerational trauma. The trauma is not just Joseph's, but it's directly passed down to Ayla and it robs her of a childhood when he takes the fall from her the last time, when he decides to say that he is the person who murders Popper, the residential school head, he at first tries to tell her, like, you're just a little girl. And she says, I've never been a little girl. Yeah. It's a complex journey. And perhaps Barnaby is suggesting that this is okay because he is broken beyond repair. He is the person who can take the fall, whereas Ayla has another chance. The second generation has a chance to escape some of this. [01:03:00] Speaker A: Almost like it's the most good that he can do from where he is. Or something like this. Yeah. [01:03:05] Speaker B: I mean, that, that is a possible reading of It. Another potential reading of it is, in fact, what is your reading of this particular scene I'm talking too much about? [01:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I noticed that there was something interesting about the interaction with the police officer who puts Joseph into the car at the end of the film. It is the first time that there's any kind of interaction between the characters in the film and law enforcement that is compassionate. Right. So all other scenes in the film, you have Popper show up with his squad of goons and they're beating people up and they're involved in, you know, grift and all kinds of stuff. But at the end of the film that the officer who. Who places Joseph in the car, he. He kind of compassionately says, like, let's call it a day. [01:04:16] Speaker B: Right. [01:04:17] Speaker A: And you see kind of a resignation, but also like an acknowledgment of like, you've. You've done what you needed to do here or something like this. [01:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:04:29] Speaker A: And it just. It was very powerful but very confusing, I guess, in the way that fatherhood, I guess, generally is. [01:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And maybe this is the. The second reading that I was talking about here. This is a. A film about destructive cycles. And it does seem that Joseph's sacrifice at the end to save Ayla is the end of one of those destructive cycles. We are now with Ayla as a character, able to get out of this just respond and survive cycle that she's been forced to into. And without Popper and without the residential school, we also see Joseph, even confined, be able to see a sense of relief. And part of this is Gold's performance. But he no longer seems scared. He no longer seems angry. [01:05:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess now I'm reflecting on the very final line of dialogue, right, where the young kid asks, halo, what now, boss? It's legitimately an open question in a way that it could not have been any other way. Right. And that maybe is kind of like the big. The big success, right, that she has this as an open question available to her. [01:05:51] Speaker B: Absolutely. [01:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'd like to maybe ask you a little bit. I was deeply saddened after watching the film because I immediately wanted to know more about Barnaby's work and to know more about him as a filmmaker. Profoundly saddened to learn that he passed away in 2022. [01:06:10] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. And unexpectedly, too. [01:06:12] Speaker A: Yeah. He was young. Yeah. [01:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:06:15] Speaker A: And so I wonder, right, what kind of legacy he, you know, he has or think he will have as being such a young filmmaker who only had the opportunity to release a limited Number of features. What is the status of. Of that right now in the. In the community? [01:06:36] Speaker B: I mean, Jeff Barnaby was beloved in terms of what he did for Indigenous film, which is in, in a way something that was always going to happen. But the expansion of indigenous epistemologies and visual sovereignty into some of the realms of. Of genre film. For instance, this you. You categorize as horror, potentially. There's not really any question about what his next film in this sequence would be categorized as. And that's Blood Quantum, which. Have you seen Blood Quantum? [01:07:14] Speaker A: No, but I read up on it a little bit. Sounds like that that's. That is a zombie movie. Very much so. Right. [01:07:19] Speaker B: That is. That is a zombie movie with an interesting history. Almost immediately after he made Rhymes for On Ghouls, Barbie talked about the desire to create an indigenous zombie movie. So it was greatly anticipated for years and production seemed to be a little rocky. It took a long time for it to get off the ground. And he is also a perfectionist as a director. So I believe. Blood Quantum premiered in 2019. I was at one of the first screenings of it in Toronto at Imaginative, the global Indigenous Film Festival. And while I still prefer rhymes quite a bit, just the expansion of kind of prestige genre films into indigenous circles is. I mean, that legacy is massive. There's also the legacy of Rhymes as just a cult classic or kind of a necessity on Indigenous film syllabi. Apart from that, we also have the fact that the folks in this movie go on to just explode in terms of their careers. Like Devery Jacobs is in Reservation Dogs, which is, in my opinion, the most important piece of indigenous filmic media of the past 10 years. And definitely Native American film and media. And she's in a lot of Marvel movies as well. A really, really recognizable figure whose career was. Was absolutely launched by this film. Yeah, it's a. It's a tragic loss because whether or not you have the stomach for some of the gore in a Barnaby film, the guy always made interesting things. He was always kind of pushing visual sovereignty into places where I think folks might not think it would necessarily fit. And ahead of the game as well in terms of. I don't know, there's the almost tropic metaphor thing going on right now where every horror film, prestige horror film that comes out has this kind of deep and abiding metaphor. Barnaby was on that earlier and I think doing it in probably a more interesting way than I think a lot of the filmmakers on A24's platformer are doing currently. [01:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, sure. I can easily imagine, like, him, you know, being picked up by A24 or Neon or something to do something now. Well, so maybe. Maybe something that we can bring our conversation toward the end with as sort of a legacy or tribute here from Barnaby is, you know, it leaves me wanting to explore the world of Indigenous film more. So where would you recommend that a newbie go from here? [01:10:18] Speaker B: I mean, first, I would really try and engage with Indigenous representation in earlier films, because I do think that this is just a continuous conversation. I think that a lot of the history of indigenous film from 1999 all the way up into we can say, 2013, is thinking about and talking about the legacy of Indigenous portrayals in. In film history. [01:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:51] Speaker B: Film definitely in this country. And as a larger cultural apparatus doesn't exist without the portrayal of Indigenous peoples, it's the first thing that directors want to do in kind of a widespread Hollywood thing. And it continues to be a place that folks return. So I would really encourage you to go back with a critical eye towards the famous Westerns, towards John Ford, and then to look for incredibly tribally specific sovereign productions. I had one of my mentors, Cherokee film scholar Joshua Nelson, has talked a lot about this, as. About Indigenous film as kind of like the coolest sort of indie music that you could possibly find. And I think a lot of folks approaching Indigenous film try and look for the. For the things that meet them, where they are at, the things that feel familiar to them. They essentially want that music to be the Rolling Stones. Right. And he pushes back on that, and he's like, no, we don't need more Rolling Stones. What we need are more support for these $1.5 million indigenous films, these smaller stories, these messier stories, because Rhymes, despite how beautiful it is, has some messiness to it that I think that we can appreciate. And those are the films that I would encourage you to seek out, some of those being the films of Zacharias Canuck. I think that's. That's about as good as anyone does it right now. [01:12:36] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, I definitely look forward to checking that out. Well, Matt, I thank you so much for taking the time to share your enthusiasm for film and for the humanities and for your specific field in general. I'm hopeful that people have listened to the conversation, get a feel for what that is and how. And how we can make old traditions and new traditions come alive just by talking and engaging with him in this way. Thanks for coming by. I really appreciate it. [01:13:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I cannot wait to talk about Deadman with you. And I think that's just gonna be such an interesting film for us both to engage with. It's one of your favorite films. [01:13:11] Speaker A: It is indeed. Yeah. [01:13:12] Speaker B: And I'll say in indigenous film circles, it's one that folks really like for what it is. Jarmish seems to be one of those folks who did the homework and then did something really interesting with the assignment. [01:13:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:13:26] Speaker B: He is looking back on those kind of historical representations of Native folks and talking about indigenous absence and presence in film history. And Dead man does that in a really interesting way. [01:13:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I can't wait. All right. Thanks, Pat. [01:13:40] Speaker B: Cool. Thank you.