[Short film] #Ákhuin

Radio-JusSunná / Sunná Nousuniemi (#Sámi) & Guhtur Niillas Rita Duomis / Tuomas Kumpulainen with Ááná Jyyrki Sáárá-Máárjá / Saara-Maria Salonen

"With the singular Sámi oral storytelling tradition of joik at its center, ÁHKUIN is a visual and musical call-and-response between a grandmother and her descendants. Archival interviews and the joik of Maarit-áhkku (dir. Sunná Máret Nousuniemi’s grandmother) unspool as a connective thread across time, inviting the viewer through a portal into this corner of Sápmi. Here, the rhythms of time are set by the daily tasks that assured the survival of those who came before; seemingly mundane chores — carrying water from the river, setting up the sauna, boiling reindeer bone marrow — offer up gifts of memory, music, and Indigenous knowledge.

"As in Indigenous communities the world over, colonization has profoundly shaped recent Sámi history through stories of loss. Drawing aesthetic inspiration from sources as diverse as duodji (Sámi handicrafts and land-based knowledge systems), the work of David Lynch, Pauliina Peodoroff’s Matriarkaatti (Matriarchy), and the environmentally focused, community-based art of Niillas Holmberg, Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski, ÁHKUIN presents a melancholy yet playful Sámi story with lessons for a new era defined by giving and receiving."

Watch:
https://www.reciprocity.org/films/ahkuin

#SolarPunkSunday #ClimateCrisis #Nature #ProtectNature #LandBasedKnowledge #Sápmi #joik #DCEFF #IndigenousStorytellers
#IndigenousFilms #OceansAreLife #ReciprocityProject #Reciprocity #IndigenousFilmMakers #IndigenousWisdom #ProtectTheSacred #IndigenousKnowledge #Reciprocity #duodji #colonization #Maaritáhkku #Matriarkaatti #Matriarchy #CulturalSurvival

[Short film] #Tentsítewahkwe

Katsitsionni Fox (#Mohawk) with Xochitl Fox (#Mexica / #Azteca)

"As a young girl, Jessica Shenandoah (Wolf Clan from the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation) learned about harvesting medicine and food plants alongside her mother and grandmother. Contemporary Native People are often separated many generations from their traditional knowledge due to the effects of colonial realities such as boarding school, forced religion, and land theft.

"In the latest Native women-centered film by Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox (Ohero:kon - Under the Husk, Without a Whisper - Konnon:kwe), Shenandoah goes on a journey across four seasons and multiple Native territories to connect with other knowledge keepers reviving the land-based knowledge of their ancestral grandmothers in order to return to time-honored practices of pottery making, mat weaving, hide tanning, medicine making, food gathering, and more. Jessica embodies the Mohawk concept of Tentsítewahkwe as she picks up knowledge of the old ways, these slow methods of creating and connecting in reciprocity with the Earth.

"This film is at once a thank you to the Native women who imbued their descendents with blood memory of these practices and a promise to future generations of Native people that these practices will stay alive for generations to come."

Watch:
https://www.reciprocity.org/films/tentsitewahkwe

#DCEFF #IndigenousStorytellers
#IndigenousFilms #LandDefenders #ReciprocityProject #Reciprocity #IndigenousFilmMakers
#IndigenousWisdom #IndigenousKnowledge #IndigenousReclamation #Reciprocity #MotherEarth #Akwesasne #MohawkNation #TraditionalMedicine #LandBasedKnowledge #WomenCenteredFilms