Born and raised in Northern Washington State and Southern California, Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) navigates the world through his films, photography, calligrams, and other nonfiction creative forms. Drawing from his experience within Indigenous homelands, Sky explores language, landscape, memory, and identity, weaving together poetic and ineffable reflections on existence–shaped by an interwoven and ever-changing system. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

​

The following is an excerpt from a presentation and discussion during Hopinka’s class visit on February 27, 2025.

​​

​

XINRAN LI: You started making films around 2010, which is also when you began learning Chinook Wawa, your ancestral language. What does it mean to you to have started those two journeys at the same time? How did that feel?

​

SKY HOPINKA: The two feel really intertwined, especially considering where I was in my life at the time. I was about 27. But actually, Chinook isn’t my ancestral heritage language — my two heritage languages are Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin and Pauma Luiseño from Southern California.

​

I started learning Chinook Wawa because I was living in Portland, Oregon, and trying to fulfill my foreign language requirement at PSU with an Indigenous language. It made more sense to learn the language of the land I was living on. That’s when I found a Chinook teacher.

​

That was within a year — maybe eight months to a year — of picking up a camera for the first time and learning how to edit. So, at that point, I was still relatively new to filmmaking, but I knew it was something I wanted to do, especially around Indigenous issues. I was just figuring out how to shoot, learning how to shoot. My teacher told me he’d teach me Chinook if I made some videos for him. 

​

Looking back, I think filmmaking and language learning really supported each other in expansive ways. At the time, I was interested in making films about Indigenous perspectives but I didn’t want them to feel — well, I guess “standard” is the word. I didn’t want them to be cut-and-dry or to follow the typical PBS documentary style (I might be a little too hard on PBS, though.) I was more interested in creating work where young Native people live their lives without having to be overly traumatized or historicized. That became a really foundational part of what I wanted to do.

​

And the way I learned Chinook was pretty non-traditional by Western standards — it was immersion-based, without translation. That experience was important in understanding that there are different ways to learn something. I was teaching myself filmmaking at the time, and I often felt like I was doing it “wrong” because I didn’t have the proper education. It is a nice parallel to have Chinook being taught to me that is not traditional, and it is about finding whatever you can to make it work, to learn the language and to teach the language.

​

XINRAN LI: This is amazing. Would you say your approach to filmmaking was also nontraditional?

​

HOPINKA: Yeah, I’d say it was pretty non-traditional. When I made my first film, I just opened iMovie, not quite sure how these things fit together. I had a background in Pro Tools and GarageBand in terms of editing and making music, so I was familiar with editing layouts, and eventually, things started to click. At first, I was just trying to reverse-engineer how to make a documentary or write a film, just based on the things that I’ve seen.

​

XINRAN LI: We read “Desire Lines,”[10] and frequented this term shooting back, describing how marginalized communities start filming their own cultures or turning the camera toward society as a subversion of the normative white patriarchy filming and framing oppressed people. I was wondering — how do you understand that idea? Do you see your cinema as a way of filming back?

​

HOPINKA: Yeah, I mean … that’s the funny thing. It’s interesting to think about the time and space I was in because, in a way, I wasn’t alone — there were other people thinking about the same things, just in different communities or different locations. And over the past 10, 15 years, I’ve seen how different filmmakers and artists have approached these ideas. I don’t want to say it felt natural, but it did feel like the next step in conversations around representation, Indigeneity, decolonization. Like, a natural outgrowth of those ways to understand how you live in the world.

​

I’m not the most academic or the most studied filmmaker. Most of the theory I’ve engaged with — big ideas about what Capital-F Film is — came in my early thirties when I went to grad school. And at that point, it was just about trying to keep up, trying to understand the things I didn’t know. But also seeing how there were certain ideas and forms out there describing what I was trying to do. Whether it’s shooting back or ethnopoetics — which is a term that describes a similar thing — it was about giving words to an ineffable way to make works and be in the world. That’s part of why you make art, why you make films — because there are things you can’t describe. There are different ways to approach this idea, like the ethnopoetic. It comes from an essay by Eliot Weinberger called “The Camera People,”[11] where he traces the history of ethnographic cinema — from its inception in the late 1800s, early 1900s, up until the 1990s, when the essay was written. He talks about the ethno-poetic emerging when people who traditionally had cameras pointed at them start picking up cameras and filming what they are interested in. Small semantic differences aside, that’s the concept that resonated with me the most.

​

In terms of my own trajectory, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m interested in shooting back. My own departure from the ethnopoetic comes from a kind of fatigue — having to justify what I was doing in regards to the longstanding ethnographic history, the ethno- prefix, which is not what I’ve always wanted to have a conversation with. It’s interesting to think about the diversions and conversions of ideas and the ways to distinct and contextualize the art and film you make, at the same time to have a certain freedom to deviate from this form, to find a way of working that feels relevant to the moment I’m in.

​

BEX OLUWATOYIN THOMPSON: What you’re saying makes me think about a discussion I was having with my friends — about center, or whether the work we make is always reactionary, always responding to something. And how maybe there’s this desire to escape that — to move beyond the responsibility or obligation of constantly responding to colonization, or Western modes of making, or knowledge production. And something you said reminded me of “Film is the Body”[12] — this idea of filmmaking as an extension of the body, of the somatic experience of being in the world. You mentioned the ineffable, and it made me think about how filmmaking can be an extension of being in or feeling through an experience. I see that a lot in your work — how things remain opaque in a way that seems to mirror what you’re experiencing. And that got me thinking about what we talked about last week: how your form leads to, or shapes, the experience of making. Could you talk a little more about how the form you take when making a film connects to that experience?

​

HOPINKA: I guess starting with wawa (2014)[1] — that was the first experimental film I made. It was actually for a graduate sound seminar I was taking during my first semester of grad school, which was also when I first learned what experimental film was. Before that, I’d heard the term used to describe my work, but I didn’t quite know what it meant. But once I was introduced to it, I realized — okay, this is describing something I’ve already been thinking about. So, why not investigate this a little more?

 

Through that sound seminar I was thinking a lot about translation — about the semiotic relationship between language and words, and how intergenerational meanings often shift a lot, even within language revitalization efforts. We had a lot of conversations in our language group about what it means for a language to shift. Linguistically, language shift is a normal process — it happens all the time. No language is static, except maybe Latin, but that also contributes to a lack of use. Language constantly shifts and changes over time based on the people who use it. Just ask your parents or grandparents about the slang they used and you’ll notice how even small things shift in the way they describe. 

​

With Chinook and other revitalization efforts, or other languages that might have 50 or 100 fluent speakers, it's interesting to see how students who are learning the language right now — teens, people in their twenties and thirties — are reshaping the language. They’re not speaking with the same accent, inflection, or intonation as their grandparents. They might introduce English-like patterns — like the rising intonation in a question: Is this a question? That upward lilt is a very English thing, but once it enters the language, the language itself shifts. Some people see that as making the language less pure, but I see it as inevitable. I’d rather have people speaking “incorrectly” and evolving the language than not speaking it at all. Language is meant to be useful, and it will keep changing. At the same time, I was also thinking about translation in film — how Indigenous languages are often translated or rendered in subtitles in ways that feel overly simplified or even stereotypical, like reducing everything to nature, animals, or spirituality. That made me think a lot about the choices we make in translation, as well as the intergenerational aspect of language acquisition. In Wawa, there are five or six generations of language speakers represented in one video: Wilson Bob taught Henry Zenk, who taught Evan Gardner, who taught me, and now I’m teaching David Edwards, who’s teaching Susanna Ciotti. That’s six generations in one film. Even within a single language, there are dialectal differences depending on geography — accents and phrasing can shift from the north to the south, east to west. They might be very small differences, but they are meaningful to the community. 

​

​

​

​