FREE FILM SCREENING: HAWAII A VOICE FOR SOVEREIGNTY

Haunani-Kay Trask in Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty. Photo by Catherine Bauknight.

Paradise lost

By Ed Rampell

The 2011 Hawaii-set feature, The Descendants opens by asserting that it’s crazy to consider the Aloha State to be some sort of a paradise, where no major problems exist. Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty is a documentary about those troubles, or pilikia. However, whereasThe Descendants protagonist (George Clooney) plays a character who has a smidgen of indigenous blood and belongs to a privileged family with a multi-million dollar land trust, Catherine Bauknight’s powerful, multi-award winning doc focuses on the Disinherited: The Native Hawaiians, who have become a landless, disenfranchised, disempowered minority in their own ancestral homeland.

Say, just how did this Polynesian archipelago, about 2,000 miles from California, become part of the American empire anyway? Just how did the U.S. gain the Pearl Harbor Naval Base that Imperial Japan bombed on Dec. 7, 1941 anyway? History is usually written by the victors, just as Americans often trade in unexamined assumptions, but in Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty co-writer/director Bauknight dares to examine the assumed. Bauknight’s probing camera takes a peek behind the curtain of U.S. imperialism and presents a platform for the Islands’ aboriginal activists to present their side of the story.

Hawaii may be popularly portrayed and imagined as a visitors’ playground, but Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty exposes the social, political, cultural and environmental pilikia confronting the disinherited descendants of the Polynesian people Captain James Cook encountered when he made landfall there in the late 18^th century, thus putting Hawaii on the map for Westerners. Of course, the Hawaiians’ ancestors – masterful navigators -- discovered the Islands a millennium before Cook arrived. The culture clash that ensued after Cook made one voyage there too many was a harbinger of the societal convulsions that would engulf Hawaii and its indigenous inhabitants. These calamities include a swarm of “Christian” zealots and the armed invasion of the isles by the U.S. military -- acting in league with the original missionaries’ descendants -- and the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893. Auwe!

Far from the Waikiki high rises and mega-resorts Bauknight shows us Hawaiians who are not only landless, but homeless, too, living in encampments on the beach before the Occupy movement was cool. Best of all, Hawaiian activists, artists, fishermen, taro farmers, hula dancers, practitioners of the pre-contact religion, et al, explain their plight and cause in their own words, instead of having Bauknight, a “Haole” (Caucasian person) from da kine (mainland) impose her spin on indigenous viewpoints. The struggle against militarism (the Pentagon owns a higher percentage of Hawaii than it does any other state), mass packaged tourism run for the benefit of multi-national corporations, ecocide, the desecration of sacred sites, the theft of the aina (land) and the courageous resistance to all of these (and other) injustices under the battle cry of “Sovereignty” is compellingly depicted and commented on.

On a personal note, as a journalist who spent 23 years living in Tahiti, Samoa, Micronesia and half of this time in Hawaii, reporting on the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement and the Hawaiian Sovereignty cause, a highlight of watching Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty was seeing some of the leaders I used to cover as they now appear. They include: Dennis “Bumpy” Kanahele, a sort of Malcolm X-type of activist (the so-called Black Muslims even marched with Bumpy’s Nation of Hawaii group at the Iolani Palace in Downtown Honolulu during the 1990s). Kalani English of Hana, Maui, who became a state senator. Sarong-clad Professor Haunani-Kay Trask, an indefatigable academic and poet, whose courageous outspokenness is only outmatched by her brilliance -- and the fear her righteous rage raises amidst the staid status quo.

I got a special kick out of seeing one of Haunani’s former U.H. Department of Hawaiian Studies students, Kaleikoa Kaeo, who I used to cover at all of the Sovereignty demos when he was a bearded youth with longish hair. Today, he’s completely bolohead (bald), covered in traditional tattoos, and is himself now a professor, who expertly explains Hawaiian history in his thick Pidgin English accent. He’s a Hawaiian Howard Zinn, a true people’s historian!

Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty includes an interview with a legendary figure of the movement with a rascally reputation, whom I’d heard of but never met, and my hat is off to Bauknight for tracking the elusive Skippy Ioane down for at the Big Island. The film also includes organizers, rank and filers, etc., whom I was not aware – but am now, thanks to this wide ranging doc.

Like Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, this documentary has a great sonorous soundtrack of Hawaiian music by talents such as Cyril Pahinui. Some of the musicians, such as Henry Kapono and Willie K (who I remember when he started out, and has gray hair now, auwe!), are also interviewed onscreen. A Cd with the soundtrack has been released.

The documentary also includes sumptuous cinematography; Bauknight, a noted photojournalist, is also the film’s director of photography. There is also archival footage, news clips and soaring aerial shots, as well as lots of original footage shot specifically for this nonfiction film.

Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty has won seven awards since its premiere at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and has had a special screening at the U.N. in Geneva. Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty won the awards for Best Environmental Film at The Red Nation Film Festival in Los Angeles and Best Environmental Film at the New York International Film Festival, as well as a prize at Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Wairoa Maori Film Festival.

And in the end, what is this thing called “Sovereignty”? Competing factions and trends of thoughts have different visions. When I covered the Hawaiian Revolution during the 1990s, Bumpy’s Nation of Hawaii advocated independence from the U.S. Ka La Hui Hawaii, the organization Haunani was linked to and which her activist attorney sister Mililani Trask led, endorsed a nation within a nation, government to government relationship with Washington, similar to the political status the so-called American Indians have, to exist on a land base somewhat similar to tribal reservations. Be that as it may, most Hawaiian activists share the belief that sovereignty is a form of self determination that guarantees indigenous empowerment. Perhaps above all else the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement means that the disinherited shall re-inherit the aina.

The digital launch of the documentary in North America will take place soon on iTunes, Netflix and Gaiam TV. But, before that, there will be a free screening of Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty March 31, 11 a.m., at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101. After the screening there will be a panel discussion and/or a Q&A with director Catherine Bauknight, Hawaiian activist Leon Siu, veteran journalist Robert Scheer and myself.

Admission is free, so, as they say in Hawaii: "Try come!”


For more information: Hawaii A Voice for Sovereignty.

THEATER REVIEW: THE FRYBREAD QUEEN

Lily (Elizabeth Frances) and Jessie (Jane Lind) in The Frybread Queen. Photo Credit: Tony Dontscheff.

Cooking up herstory

By Ed Rampell

When it comes to depictions of America’s indigenous peoples, most audiences carry the heavy baggage of celluloid stereotypes and other cultural tropes, which the Native Voices at the Autry strives to dispel by presenting plays expressing aboriginal perspectives. Cherokee/Muskogee Creek Carolyn Dunn’s The Frybread Queen may be about Navajos and Cherokees, but this tribal playwright shares much in common with dramatists such as Anton Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill, who plumb the depth of the human soul plus family dynamics and dysfunction in classics like The Cherry Orchard or The Iceman Cometh.

(For the record, Dunn told me that her theatrical influences include not O’Neill, but Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard, who wrote 1980’s True West.)

Frybread’s long night’s journey into day begins with 60-year-old Navajo Jessie Burns (Jane Lind, an Aleut) lightheartedly telling the audience her recipe for making frybread. This gives the audience the false impression that they’re in for some whimsical drollery. In any case, frybread and the various recipes for cooking it are a leitmotif for this four-woman show.

Jessie is proud of her award-winning prowess preparing this tribal staple diet, and indeed, she is considered by herself and others to be a frybread queen. However, as that other playwright, William Shakespeare, noted, “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” and there’s big trouble with a capital “T” in her majesty’s realm, as Jesse’s California-based daughters-in-law, Carlisle (Shyla Marlin, a Choctaw) and Annalee (Kimberly Norris Guerrero, a Cherokee) gather at Jessie’s ancestral home on the reservation, following a violent family tragedy.

Here, an indigenous aesthetic comes into play, as what would be typical theatrical family conflict filled with deep dark secrets and the like becomes enmeshed with Native beliefs in the spirit world. As in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the ghosts symbolize the weight of a past caused by whitey’s brutal conquest and domination of people of color. It’s a sort of traumatic stress spiritual syndrome, wherein the souls of the oppressed can’t rest at peace until things are set right -- nor can the psyche’s of those still alive.

Your plot-spoiler-adverse critic won’t ruin the story for you, Dear Reader, and take away your joy (or sorrow, as the case may be) in discovery. Suffice it to say that this powerful, poignant four woman show and its ensemble cast, which includes Cherokee Elizabeth Frances as Lily (plus some ghosts), deftly directed by Robert Caisley, offers a quartet of outstanding performances. As Jesse’s granddaughter, Frances’ Lily dresses like a Goth -- and why not? No buckskins for her, thank you very much. Lily may be living with grandma at a Navajo rez at the Arizona/Utah border, but with her punk purple strand of hair, this teenager puts the “American” into Native American.

As a source of contention between Jesse and her daughters-in-law, Lily crackles with tension, laying bare her divided self. As for life on the rez with granny, Lily is split: to paraphrase The Clash hit, should she stay or should she go? Lily also has an awareness about the caricaturing Natives are subjected to, and her insightful recitation of a frybread recipe calls into question the origin of this food source and how healthy it is for Native Americans who, demographically, have troubling health statistics. Dunn’s naming of this character may be a reference to the “Tiger Lily” of Peter Pan fame, a popular if stereotypical image of the Native maiden or so-called “squaw,” who is here turned on its head.

Guerrero really shines as Annalee, an attorney who lugs around an oxygen tank as she fights to breathe (what a symbol for America’s struggling Natives!), stay alive and save Lily from a fate that she and sister-in-law Carlisle view as doomed. The stunning Shyla Marlin brings Carlisle -- the California Native who lives off the rez in the “modern” world -- to vivid life, secrets and all. As Jesse, who is suspicious of her daughters-in-law and of their intentions regarding Lily, Jane Lind bristles with contradictions, sharp wit, and not a few shocking secrets of her own. She can be forgiven for flubbing a few lines because she, like the rest of the cast, otherwise delivered a bravura performance.

After that show, the cast was joined onstage by members of the creative crew and took part in a talkback with the audience called “Peace Over Violence” about The Frybread Queen and the underlying issues of violence the drama delves into. However, some of the white theatergoers saw the violent plot as reinforcing the stereotype of Natives as “savages,” just as Alan Duff’s novel and the screen adaptation of Once Were Warriors was criticized by some (Native and non-Native alike) for perpetuating clichés about New Zealand/ Aotearoa’s Maoris.

Dunn maintains that Frybread’s purpose is to end the cycle of violence that persists in indigenous communities and families that began with the coming of the Europeans and their genocidal conquest of what we now call America, or, as Native Americans might call it: “How the West was lost.” Fair enough. However, Dunn’s verbal description of her play’s denouement, and that the survival of some of its characters escape an apotheosis of violence and go on to live full, healthy lives may be inferred from the action. But audiences aren’t mind readers, and Dunn needs to take her play, which has been extensively workshopped already, back to the creative drawing board in order to add a finale that makes this crystal clear. After all, Dunn won’t be able to explain what she really meant after each and every curtain fall, and again, playwrights should not expect ticket buyers to be clairvoyants. And ethnic nuances may fly right over the heads of unsophisticated viewers unfamiliar with the peoples being depicted.

Aside from this need for a clearer ending that sums up the playwright’s intent, my biggest beef with this play concerns the sets by scenic designer Susan Baker Scharpf. On the one hand, the interior of Jesse’s kitchen is highly realistic, and one almost expects her to whip up a batch of frybread there right before our eyes. On the other hand, the painted tree that forms the backdrop for the onstage exterior looks like it’s straight out of a junior high production of Sprigadoon or something and really does not belong on a professional stage. So much for that old chestnut of Natives living in harmony with Mother Nature!

Another beef I had is that the play gave me the munchies for some frybread, so during the intermission I went to the Autry Café where chef Carolyn Baer is offering frybread dishes during the run of this play. But it took too long to prepare and I had to skedaddle back to the theatre sans frybread in time to see the second act, and after the play and post-performance discussion, the museum’s eatery was closing, alas!

But these are mere quibbles that should not deter serious theatergoers interested in indigenous, family and female themed plays. With its Native Voices program the Autry Museum is making a major contribution to the deconstruction of the dominant majority culture’s imposition of the trite, timeworn, typecasting and stereotyping of America’s tribal peoples, by providing a vital platform for indigenous expressions and perspectives. Not bad for an institution that owes its existence to its namesake singing cowboy! And I for one hope that The Frybread Queen goes on to make lots of well-deserved dough for its creator, cast and crew.

Please note: There is an L.A. Native Women Playwrights Roundtable Following Frybread’s 2:00 p.m. performance, Saturday, March 19. Guest panelists include playwrights Carolyn Dunn, Larissa Fasthorse, and Laura Shamas. Moderated by Liz Frankle, Literary Manager of New York's Public Theater.





The Frybread Queen runs through March 27 at the Wells Fargo Theater, The Autry, 4700 Western Heritage Way, L.A., CA 90027. For information: 323/667-2000 ext. 354; www.NativeVoicesattheAutry.org