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Gabriel S. Estrada, "Queer Indigenous Cinemas: Sovereign Genders from Seven Directions" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
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- [00:00]
McDonald's Announcer
K Pop demon hunters, Saja Boy's breakfast
- [00:02]
Gabriel Strada
meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?
- [00:09]
McDonald's Announcer
It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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Gabriel Strada
It is an honor to share.
- [00:16]
McDonald's Announcer
No, it's our honor.
- [00:18]
Gabriel Strada
It is our larger honor. No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba da ba ba ba and participate
- [00:29]
McDonald's Announcer
in McDonald's while supplies last last night you spent two hours deciding what to wear to the party this morning. It'll take you two minutes to list it on Depop and make your money back. Just grab your phone, snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. The sheer dress and platform heels you'll never wear again. There's a birthday girl searching for them right now. Your one and done look is about to pay for your next night out, or at least the ride home. Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes
- [01:00]
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Gabriel Strada
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:20]
Caleb Zakarin
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakarin, and today I'm speaking with Gabriel Strada, professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Long beach. About queer indigenous sovereign genders from seven directions. The book examines groundbreaking films produced in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Pacific region. As Gabriel explains in the introduction, this book responds to Lisa Tatonetti's 2014 call for a full queer indigenous cinema book and takes on the challenge of filling significant gaps in cinema literature. Gabriel, thanks for joining me today.
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Gabriel Strada
My pleasure.
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Caleb Zakarin
It's really great to have you on. I feel like I am just a cinema lover. I love watching films. I love watching films from all sorts of different perspectives and angles. It really does, I think, help supplement any reading that I might do. Sometimes you really need a film to fill in the mental gaps, the pictures that a book just simply can't. So I found it really interesting not only to read your book, but also, you know, to get the chance to watch some of the films that you discuss in the book that, you know, a lot of them were pretty accessible and available. So I really do recommend that listeners, if they find this conversation interesting, go and look up some of the films that we discuss. You can. You can find them. But before jumping into the book, I was wondering if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, your path into religious studies, and what drew you to Indigenous cinema as a scholarly subject.
- [03:49]
Gabriel Strada
Well, I actually began with my BA in religious studies at UC Berkeley, but when I went to ask about Indigenous religions, I was told that there really wasn't such a thing because there was a great emphasis on the time of having a written text. So Huston Smith was my professor, and he'd written a book on the traditions of the world, basically the great traditions, but did not really consider indigenous religion at the time or religious traditions noteworthy. He later changed his opinion on that and helped to protect Native American church and peyote rights. But that was later on in his career. And so I left religious studies thinking, well, it's not for me, and began to study anthropology. I really should have done ethnic studies for my ba but from there I went to U of A U Arizona in Tucson and did my Master's and PhD in Comparative Culture and Literary studies. And I actually went there because my grandma grew up in Bisbee, which is a little mining town not that far from Tucson. And before it was a mining town, it was a Chiricahua Apache reservation. So my grandma is from Namikipachihuawa, which is both Roramuri and Chiricahu Apache land with a very complicated history of war, at times peace, at times settlement, with, you know, Spanish, Basque and Afro mixed peoples. At times. And so I was really interested in going back to land. And so with the comp lit and cultural studies, there was an emphasis on media as well and film and cinema. It's part of popular culture. So that was the basis of my education. I really wanted to teach English, but I ended up getting a job in American Indian Studies. I put out lots of interviews and paperwork and they're the ones that called me back. So I ended up teaching American Indian Studies. My parents are both Chicanos, so they are Mexican Diaspora, born in California and in Fullerton, Anaheim area where I was also born. My father's father is from Huchipila, Zacatecas, and that is the location of the Creation mountain for our Kashga ancestors. So I have Rangudi through the matriline unit of my mom's side, I have Kashga through my father's side. And there's lots of mix in between. So I identify both with indigeneity and being chicanx. I'm using the genderqueer form of that with a double X in the beginning and the end. So I was really interested in indigenous chicanics and cinema, you know, film. Throughout my education I was able to land a part time job in American Indian Studies and then landed a joint position at Cal State Long beach in 2005 teaching Chicano Latino Studies and American Indian Studies. I actually gained tenure in American Indian Studies and then went to religious studies in part because I wanted the graduate studies aspect of it that American Indian Studies did not have and also in part because there were more politics supporters in the American Indian studies. But what I was doing, teaching Nahuat, which is my ancestral language from Huchipila, in studies that was more oriented towards California or the US at that time. So I said, well, I want to be free to study Latin American indigeneity. And I found that it was easier to do that in religious studies. So that's where I've been since 2012 is religious studies. I first had a bit of a transition in that a lot of the traditions are not specifically labeled religious, but the spirituality is integrated into all aspects of indigenous living. You know, there may be practitioners, but a lot of it is practice. And most often there aren't written texts that people follow unless they converted to an Abrahamic religion and are following those texts of Christianity, for example. So I always loved film as well. And I noticed that with teaching graduate classes, some students were neurodivergent and said, look, we can't just read essays and write essays. We need to do other things. We need to look at visual media. We need to write poetry. We need to do PowerPoints. We need to have other ways of expressing our knowledge than just reading and writing. And I thought, oh, well, this is great, because film allows us to learn in so many different ways that goes beyond just looking at a text and then writing a text in response. So students have made their own films or their own clips or their own artwork in response to these films as well. So I love that it can reach different aspects of who we are, including our appreciation for art and for hearing language spoken, which we don't get in just reading a text.
- [09:39]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, if you can call, like, Tiktoks films. I feel like people today are more likely to make films than they are to write essays, which is maybe an interesting, you know, switch in history. It'll definitely change the way that people look back on our current time. And I feel it's interesting looking at cinema. Cinema is so diverse, and oftentimes you're in the backyard of Hollywood. Oftentimes we focus just on a small subsection of the film world. But there are so many films being produced that don't get the sort of study that they deserve. And you were responding to this call to produce a full queer, indigenous cinema book. And what was it like for you, addressing the gaps in literature? Obviously, it's challenging to go and basically be the first person to really do something like this. So how did you begin your approach?
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Gabriel Strada
Well, people have written articles that help pave the way, and they also have ideas that are important. So, you know, putting a book form around that is easier, given that there are many articles and theories along the way. So Lisa Tatonetti had already done portions of books on indigenous cinema and gender, for example. Michelle Rahedja also wrote a really important book, Reservation Realism, which is looking at the depictions of Native Americans in Hollywood film especially. So I was able to look at these ideas of representation and some of the histories that were already written about Native Americans having a bit more representation during the silent period and then less representation during the classic period, which is around 34 to 1968. And that's when film becomes more expensive to make. That's when it becomes more codified. There's more censorship. So we have decline in both LGBTQ representations that aren't vampires, that aren't these horrific representations. At the same time, we have decline in Native American representations that aren't based around savagery. So I know people tend to think of history as being linear, like things just get better but in fact, that is not true. So where we had relatively more freedom in silent film, native director, native actors, we actually saw a decline in that within the classic film period. And it rebounds and exceeds what it used to be. You know, during contemporary film, which is post 68, there is a rejection of the film production code that had limited so much queer content and had limited, you know, miscegenation, racial mixing. And there was the advent of video and making films in ways that are much cheaper, you know, digitally even at this point. So we have an expansion of media that's made by indigenous peoples that was too expensive to make, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So all these things combined the cheapness of the media. American Indian movement pushed for increased representation, self representation in media. There was AIDS and, you know, LGBTQ movement happening in the 90s as well. So we have two spirit movement of LGBTQ indigenous people saying we are going to have this umbrella term of two spirit. There's also heightened new queer media happening in the 90s. And so these things, they combine with the relative cheapness of the technology to begin to allow people to make their own films. And now you're right, with the newest media, you don't even have to have the camera. You can just use your computer camera or your phone camera. You don't have to have a separate camera that a news crew would use or something like that. So accessibility is a part of the story. And I gave the title Queer Indigenous Cinemas because I knew cinemas was a, a good key search word. And there's a lot of history of Hollywood in the book, but when it came down to it, quite a few of these films are shorts and they're only found online. They were never, ever in a cinema theater. So it's a bit of a mix with new media videos, YouTube and longer feature films that could be shut in independent venues.
- [14:52]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, that's. I'm really looking forward, you know, we'll get into talking a little bit about some of the depictions in silent film of trans indigenous characters and so so on. It's, and I think you're completely right, you know, the, the history of cinema, especially in relation to censorship, is certainly not linear. You know, has gone through these various periods of, of incredible censorship and, you know, yeah, it's really, it's, it's, it's really interesting, I think, thinking about also, you know, the kind of the rise of independent cinema and how that allowed for, for new types of films. But also, you know, too with the accessibility of YouTube and other things, like people can produce Short films and other things that can receive an audience that they wouldn't be able to previously. I want to talk a little bit about the organization of the book because you organize it around directionality, the four cardinal directions, and then up, down, and center. I think this is a really interesting structural choice. And I don't often think about up, down, and center as directions, but I suppose they truly are. The four cardinal directions are only existing in a 2D plane. And this framework shapes how you move through the films, the regions that you look at, and why did you structure it this way? What was the impetus for this architecture?
- [16:14]
Gabriel Strada
I wanted to use Indigenous methodologies to structure my book. And so rather than doing the typical history, which is in my introduction of silent film, classic film, contemporary film, I really wanted to show spatiality and space as being more important or differently important for Indigenous peoples and thinkers. So there were people like Vine Deloria who stated that. And this is Vondalari Jr who stated that oftentimes space is more important than the history or temporality. Sacred spaces are very important within Indigenous practice. And there were different peoples who wrote about space as well and directionality. So sometimes it's a protocol that people don't think about so much within powwows or within cultural practices. But there have been a group of Dine scholars from Navajo Nation who have really used the structure of directionality, including works by Lloyd L. Lee, who is a Dene editor. And there are also Chicanx and Mexica writers who are also using this directionality. And in fact, I believe that I cite in Ezra Gandha's Avila as somebody who explains this directionality. The directionality is also used in healing. So within the two spirit Indigenous LGBTQ communities, there are workshops for HIV AIDS that I went through that utilize this four directional model, the four directions, sometimes that was termed as being, representing emotions and the physical body, the spirit, the mind. So sort of a holistic sense of who we are can be incorporated within these four directions. They're very specific, depending upon the family and the people that you're coming from. But sometimes they are made more accessible when we're in the intertribal sector setting that they're kind of opened up so we can all use them together. So I thought we're using this directionality in our dances. We were following them in our healing practices that are in urban areas, like with the Red Circle project of la, which is an eighth project la or was a program within that entity. I said we really could be orienting our scholarship around this as well. That some scholars have done. But to continue on with that, I had a dissertation that talked about directionality, and I've written other film analyses that centered around directionality for Mexica film, for Anishinaabe film. And I thought, I really love this idea. And I love the idea that we can get away from western models of organization around film history and think a lot more about indigenous space and directionality and how that really informs our sense of healing, our sense of community, and also our sense of thinking.
- [20:07]
Caleb Zakarin
In the first chapter, you look at films produced by members of the Navajo Nation, and you look at a series of films, and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about some of these films, like Mountain of Stories, two Spirit Ingenuity and Drunk Town's Finest, and talk a little bit about how gender is explored and also about two spirit representation in film.
- [20:30]
Gabriel Strada
Yeah. So I use terms based upon people's language. And for some folks in Navajo nation, saying two spirit, which is our umbrella term, could mean that you are possessed by a spirit, which is not what they really want me to say. So they'll use terms like. Well, actually, there's a couple terms that have been used. So is, as I understand it from Yuna, Begay is sort of changing. It sort of changes. Right. Naadlehi is the one who changes. So naadlehi is the term that I use in the chapter because it's most often used within the films themselves. And one person who makes the film is genderqueer. In the film they write about this is Nazba Tom. They write in the film, they write a letter to their mom coming in as to the culture as lesbian. Later on, you know, in their lives, they identify as genderqueer. But the way in which they do that is. Is to pray to a sacred mountain first. And this is Mount Hesperus, which is actually the northern mountain. But it begins everything with thinking or with prayer. And then there's a series of actions that go clockwise from the east. So when people begin days with prayer at or before sunrise, Then they follow up with the series of south, west, north directions that complete the cycle. So there's a chant in the background that actually names the four mountains. And so it gives the narrative structure in terms of time, with the east representing the sunrise and the south representing noon, and the west representing the sunset and the north representing midnight. But along with those go this idea of spring in the east and summer in the south and fall in the west and winter in the north, and even the parts of the lifetime. So Being newborn in the east and being a youth in the south, an adult in the west, and an elder in the north. So it's like a big clock. I'm saying space, but it's really a time space. The different directions can represent times in one's life or within a season or within the day. So there are important ceremonies. One of them happens at Kunal Dagh, happens in Drunk Town's Finest. And there are a few protagonists who basically begin to resolve their problems of adoption and alcoholism and sex work through going to a Kunalda ceremony. In the conclusion of Drunk Town's Finest, the character that I focus upon most is Felicia, who is a trans Navajo woman and is doing sex work to make money, but also in some ways to gain affection. And she realizes that she's not really going to gain the relationship she wants, the affection that she really deserves, because these men will avoid her in the daytime. And so instead of going to do sex work in New York City, she stays home and she helps to make fry bread for the Kumal Da ceremony. And she reconsiders her place within her family. It doesn't solve all her issues, doesn't give her the boyfriend that she's looking for, but it does give her an option and a place, and it renews the. Or kinship, harmonious kinship. And, you know, Rene Watchman had a really fabulous take on Drunktown's Finest, where as a Navajo Nation citizen, she talks about the importance of Hojok within Navajo Nation and this idea of meaning, something like beauty or well being, and that. That Hajhok is restored through that ceremony and through the actions of the protagonists. So, and there's that ceremony that's oriented towards the east. In the conclusion, it really begins at sunrise and there's a young girl becoming woman who runs to the east as part of the conclusion of that ceremony of coming of age ceremony. So yes, it's contemporary, and yes, there's sex work, and yes, there are transgender women issues, but it also is taking on the structure, cosmology, and protocols of Navajo Nation directionality. So it's a mix. It's a mix of traditional protocol and every new issue that you can think of that gets mediated and resolved through some way through that directionality. So I was always showing integration of Indigenous LGBTQI 2, 2 Spirit folks, or in this case, not Lehi people, within the understanding of the culture and within the understanding of the film itself. So these directors made a point to include the chanting of these four mountains in four directions, or to include shots of sunrise and the ceremony being oriented towards the sunrise. This is not accidental. So there's a resolution for Town's Finest, where the film begins, as Watchman notes, with disorientation. You know, it's sunrise, but no one's praying. No one's facing east is also what I note. They're facing, you know, to the south. And instead of praying, they're all out at night, you know, doing sex work, getting into drunken fights and having nightmares about, you know, family crises. So the resolution is to have people find balance, you know, not do all your activity at night, but to be oriented towards the sunrise and begin your activity in that way with prayer, with thinking. There's a third film that is done with Carrie House, who goes by he and she Pronouns is also not Lehigh, but really has these artistic ways of considering people's emotions. And this goes back to Red Circle Project. And the use we had of the east was as emotion confronting our emotions as people who potentially could have HIV to contract it, prevent it, or those who already have hiv, including myself. And so we had to really think about our emotions and how we relate to them and how our identities are related. How do we feel about being two spirit, for example, how do we feel about safe sex? And so that film, I am from 96 through Kerry House, Bavajo Nation really looks at a figure WHO and early 90s finds out they're HIV positive. And by 96, they've taken the first medications that are a lot more calm. But Kerry House gives us images of grasshoppers during one scene where Adamian Gray, who's on Anishinaabe Ojibwe, is recounting how horrible it is to see all his friends die and to have HIV and the fear that surrounds that. So by showing this grasshopper, Terry House explains. Well, this refers to a Navajo Nation narrative of the grasshoppers helping the people out of the last world underground into this world, a previous world that was underground into an upper world. And so he's giving us some protections from the trauma and seeing the person's face during the moment of trauma by referring to grasshoppers. So how do we mediate the emotions of having HIV AIDS in the 90s when there are no medications? Part of it is reliance on these ancient stories of origin that there are spirits that help, including grasshopper or insect spirits and previous worlds in Navajo Nation sacred narratives. So some of the directionality is thematic. It's not that they're pointing the camera east, but we're taking this idea of healing HIV through considering emotions and seeing how do these master artists do this in film? What are they providing from their Navajo Nation culture that helps the audience to heal from the trauma of hearing a story about becoming HIV positive and hearing of the devastation that happened in our communities in San Francisco with the rise of eights.
- [30:29]
Caleb Zakarin
Your discussion of these characters, how they go and are seeking balance, is very, I think, interesting to think about as well. And I want to turn to the second chapter where you look at sacred plants and the relationship between sacred plants and intersex people. And I think this is a very interesting connection. Can you tease this apart a little bit?
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Gabriel Strada
Yeah. So my grandfather's pueblo, Huchipila, Zacatecas, is along the Hutchipila river and the Huchipila Canyon. And it is also the regional location of the Creation Mountain for Kashga people. And Daisy Ocampo wrote a really important book about that just a few years ago, Where We Belong. And it was the second book that I've read. The first one was written 100 years ago by Kashkan author in the 20s. So it took 100 years to get another book out on Goshen culture. And they're very similar in terms of the creation narrative, which includes a dance, lots of the Suchil, or the flower dance, that is practiced during summer solstice to celebrate the monsoon rains that are on their way. Because in that region of Mexico, we get most of our rain during the summertime with monsoon, not in the wintertime, as it happens in Los Angeles. Okay. So it's tropical monsoon area. And, you know, interesting enough, there was past scholarship on Xochipili as being the deity of homosexuality and of prostitution. And when I looked at the record, it just kind of didn't really have a strong origin. It sort of repeated from book to book, but without grounding in oral tradition. There are some references to sachiwan, or flower, basically male body, flowery people, and linking that with Xochipili, who has flowers on his body as a spirit or deity or deot of flowers. So I ended up doing for Southern direction, connecting the dance that happens in Xochipilli to the actual mountain that's just a couple kilometers south of Hujipila center, where the dance is taking place. Recently, the government has claimed the mountaintop because it has a pyramid and it has a cliff house, and it's not allowing local cascanes access for ceremonial purposes. So there's that tension of being displaced even when people are still there, which often happens for pyramids in Mexico. What we call teocali and so part of it was to link the practice in one of the frames that's happening in the city center to the mountain that's just south in the frame shot. And then also to reconsider this idea of homosexuality. And what I find is it's a bit of a trans indigenous analysis. So trans indigenous is this idea of coming to a culture with some framework from outside the culture, from another indigenous culture. And, you know, there are wastecan researchers, including De la Cruz Victor, who wrote about their wastecan version of a queer figure. And the Mashochitl, which represents the corn, but can also represent, you know, different genders. And that's so because the corn is both male and female, is intersex, has male tassel, has female cobs. And so this can be seen as a sort of multi gendered entity. And so I utilize the idea of like intersex plants and applied that to classical understandings of plants that we would note. You know, some plants do need male, female together, like avocados, they grow better when they're planted that way. Or even sunflowers, there are female sunflowers that sometimes are better planted together. But that's not true of the cacado xochit, which is central to. Or the plumeria, which most people know is like Hawaiian lei flowers, even though they're from Mexico and South America, that it's not one of those flowers that grows that way. It is intersex, or hermaphrodite, to use the term, that is still used for, you know, flowers, but not for people. Right. We would say intersex. And so, you know, to think about this rain as not just being for male and female, which is celebrated and the procreation of people, which is celebrated, but really for all gendered beings that can benefit from the monsoon rains, which include all the plants, all the flowers, all the different genders. And we recognize that these plants don't have the same bodies as human people. Plant people have different bodies than human people. We're all people, but we have different ways of procreating. And so that openness to all procreation, all eroticism, all the birds and the bees doing their thing in their own way, to me opens up the possibility of such a pilli, not just being a God of homosexuality, but, you know, being a spirit that celebrates eroticism in all life forms that are helped by the monsoon rains. So is it queer? Yes, it's queer because it's all inclusive. But in the Kashgar version, I didn't see clear homosexual limitations or queer limitations or gay limitations to the practice because everyone takes part in the ceremonies whatever their orientation is. Now there are other dances that are really more pointedly homoerotic or trans, erotic or queer. And that's, that's the Los Fijitos de la China. And that dance has a cross gendered monkey wife who has a javelina husband and they're out dancing and flirting and doing their thing with a bunch of other dancers who are usually masculine. So we have a cross dressed man flirting and dancing with, you know, other masked men basically. And everyone knows that it's a very campy performance of homoeroticism. So it makes people laugh and it's funny. Now that I would say in contrast is a lot more pointedly homoerotic or trans erotic or queer erotic. Whereas the natsa de sutcl isn't necessarily so. It is more focused oftentimes on male, female, male, masculine, feminine. But it's also open to the plant world which is really complicated in terms of gender. So it's just trying to dislodge the way in which western culture centers a human body as being the only body that matters. And noting that these ceremonies for the suchil, for the flower really impact all life forms. And it was met really to welcome the flowering and the propagation and so, you know, the racism of all life forms, whatever kind of gendered body they have, including intersex, you know, bodies.
- [39:00]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, it's reminding me a bit of a, of a, an interview I did.
- [39:04]
Gabriel Strada
I think, I can't remember if it
- [39:05]
Caleb Zakarin
was a year or two ago with Augustine Fuentes who wrote a book on biology of sex, specifically looking at plants and animals and a lot of very interesting species that exhibit these, you know, these behaviors. Some, you know, like, I think very famously the like seahorse, male seahorses and bluehead wrasses and other types of animals. It's really interesting I think to move to not just looking at humans but looking also at plants as well. I think it's a very interesting framing to take on. You then turn to this documentary, Kumu Hina and you look at the Pacific region and I watched a bit of this documentary and I thought it was very interesting. And it seemed also like this was maybe a lot of the films this was, you know, toured at different film festivals and got pretty wide viewership. And I was wonder if you'd introduce this documentary, talk about it a little bit and how you explored in the book.
- [40:16]
Gabriel Strada
Well, Akumu is a teacher in Kanaka Maoli culture. So Kumuhina is a charismatic Teacher of mele and hula in Hawaii in Honolulu. So the film Kumuhina is a documentary of a mahu, which is wahine kane, as Kumuhina says, a woman, man figure, mixed gender figure. And it looks at Kumuhina's teaching at a charter school for Hawaiian language and culture. It looks at Kuohina's marriage to a man as a mahu. And it looks at gender relationships in the context of Hawaiian sovereignty as well. So the need for Hawaii to reclaim its sovereignty and its separation from the US State and US Claims to the Hawaiian Islands, that's the background politics of Kumuhina's place. I look at that connection to the west, since I'm circling in a clockwise way from the south to the west. And there was a different directionality than what I found on Turtle island, which is the Americas. Of those four directions, what Kuwahine differently explained was a connection of east to west, of sort of rising, being born in the east and then passing away or dying in the west. And there's also a healing path that is traced through there, praying for healing in the east and letting the illness slip away in the west when the sun sets. So it was more two directional to four directional. So really a different system of directionality. And so that's what I went with. I really looked at this idea of the kupuna being the ancestors and the way that kumohina is constantly reorienting the youth that she was teaching to the kupuna, to the ancestors, and their ancestral teachings of mele, which is chanting and the Hawaiian language in the film. So there's also some gendered aspect of that that other scholars have noted, with the east being more of a masculine direction, the west rather being sort of a complementary feminine direction. With Hinata being a spiritual figure represents like water and the moon and menstruation and a feminine power, if you will, that kumohina in her name, you know, begins to embody even though they are not born, you know, with wahine or. Or a woman's body. Right. So it's the ancestral connection to the west and to the kaputa that really centers the spatiality, the spatial analysis of what happens in the film. So it's very unusual. This is not something that the Kanaka Maori have really done a lot in the literature. It's something that I brought from Turtle island to Honolulu. And a lot of that is focused on these poor mahu who come from the south and heal. And they're honored by the placing of Stones in Waikiki that are still cared for to this day. You know, they were amazing healers. They were mahu, but they were not acknowledged as being such in the signage of their pohaku of their stones. And so kuhina put signage up to say, these are, you know, these are mixed gendered folks, right? These aren't just any old healers. And also made a film, Kapaimahu, that traces their voyage to Waikiki, the ways in which they healed the people, the ways in which they were honored through the placing of the four pohaku in the region of Waikiki and the need to remember who they were and what they gave and why they're still honored to this day and how the gender is just an integral part of the story. That's not the only part of the story. They weren't honored for being mahu. They happened to be mahu, people who were great healers. And there is some sense that mahu can have special abilities or special attention maybe to be able to take care of people, to be caretakers. Right. But you know, everybody can give to the culture. So it's not exclusive to the just mahu, but it's part of the story that should not be left out. So she actually wrote an article with her co director on Molelo iya, which is the sovereignty of the story. But the story itself has its own spirit and should not be altered to satisfy the latest sort of whims of censorship, including the censorship of mahu gender. So, you know, Kumuhina is an amazing figure, very knowledgeable person, an icon of Kanaka Marlu sovereignty. Her songs are songs, you know, in the protests for Manawakea to be free of that 30 meter telescope, and in all the many of the protests for sovereignty and complete separation from the U.S. her compositions are invoked. So, you know, Kumohina is mahu, but that's not really why they're known. They're. They're known for their ability to teach and to compose. And they're an icon for what? You know, she's an icon for what she's doing for Kunaka Maoli iya, the sovereignty movements that are happening. So, yeah, in all the chapters I really focused on like integration within culture and directionality. So, you know, kumuhina is somebody who honors the kupuna who make their journey upon death into the west, into Po, which is darkness, or into the path of Kanaloa, you know, as she shares. That's on the ocean, right? Kanaloa being a spirit of the ocean. So that connection to Western ancestry is what guides the chapter. In the end, I had to say that, you know, my interpretation of the culture isn't. It isn't true mo'. Oleloia. It's not true sovereignty, because the perspective is coming from outside of the culture. But I am quoting Kumuhina and I am quoting other Kanaka Mahu scholars who have spoken about directionality. And so, you know, the application isn't something I invented. It's there, but just hasn't been really formulated the way that I did. So, yeah, the farther I get away from Turtle island, the less, I guess it really fits to use these ideas of directionality. But I think it's fine to say, here's what that would look like, and there's some kind of relationship, even though it's not the same directional system.
- [48:50]
Caleb Zakarin
I mean, I think it's challenging anyways, to. The subject you're taking on is quite expansive. So inevitably you're going to have to find ways to massage and shoehorn concepts to fit with each other, I think. So I think that it's an inevitability of any sort form of scholarship or writing, that you're going to have to reduce something on some level. The fourth chapter takes on a subject which is really, you know, quite a tragic one. And it looks particularly at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and schools like this there are, you know, there. This is a, you know, quite a. This was obviously, this is in. In Canada. But, you know, I know about this also quite, quite well of having occurred quite a bit in the United States too, where basically Native American and Indigenous people were. Were forced into these schools where they were essentially, you know, stripped of their culture and essentially, you know, obviously impacted people in a really negative way. It traumatized people and it oftentimes really harmed their connection to their own culture. And I was wondering if you could talk about the films that approach this history and how these films help to essentially heal from these traumas that were inflicted on the people that experience these residential schools.
- [50:29]
Gabriel Strada
Yes, I appreciate that you said healing, because that really is the focus that many Indigenous peoples are taking within as a response to Canadian government actions of these residential Indian schools. So one of the clearest examples is my own private lower post by Duan Gaston Aucoi, who writes about the internment or actually directs the film documentary in which he takes his mom back to lower Post Indy residential school where Vicky Bob was taken as a child. And they're really clear about healing in this narrative. So it isn't about being a victim. And it's not simply about being a survivor, but it is also about healing the generations that are impacted by that cultural genocide that occurred which resulted in the deaths of children, oftentimes amongst other abuses. So there's a great scene where they face directions and they are offering, well, they're offering smoke and as a way of protection in the process, as a way of making the process one that is more about healing than just reliving trauma. So I really appreciated that part of the film. And for. I'm using or referring to the heel walk directionality, which is actually very similar to a novel where we go back to a culture that has more similar directionality of the different directions being periods of one's life, life stages. So in the north, it would be elders. And the story really impacted the elders most because that's when the policy of Indian residential schools was most active, was during the childhood of people who are now elders or they've now passed away. So there's another film by Susan Destrelle who looks at Guillot as a male bodied jingle dress dancer in the film Two Spirited. And Guillot is constantly referring to elders to support their dance and the powwow arena as a male bodied, you know, jingle dress dancer, something that is usually danced by women. And so they're able to recount their own traditions as Tony Nakota, in which two spirit people have honorable positions, are respectable. The words of their grandmother, you know, are one of those. There's our other elders who are saying, yes, you know, we honor our two spirit people and that people are not as unfortunate. Kyo has a dream in which elders come to them about the dance and they're asked to not dance in the power arena. But they say, no, you have to keep on dancing and continue to teach this as well, to really heal, you know, to help people to heal as it is a healing dance. And so GYU goes back in the end to Kamloop's powwow arena and dances openly as a two spirit jingle dress dancer. And they, you know, they call their spirit back. You know, Giya says, I lost part of my spirit, you know, five years earlier when they were asked to leave the arena. They were ashamed and were confused. But, you know, gives us the that they call their spirit back as a way of healing the trauma of not being welcomed to the circle as a two spirit gendered jingle dress dancer. And so for them to be there is really a healing moment. And it happens at Kamloops, where of course, all the 215 plus graves were mapped out and that made international news as evidence of abuse. And there was already a lot of evidence for abuse happening at that school. It was not disputed. And the Canadian government had already apologized for the cultural genocide that they funded through that system in which Catholic and other Christian churches participated. So, yeah, I really wanted to make a film that was just sort of fun, you know, like a chapter. I said, oh good. Like my original. My original analysis was a lot lighter. And then that, you know, all the graves of Kamloops came out and I had already written part of the chapter. I can't just ignore the fact that this is now causing a lot of people to look again at that legacy of residential Indian boarding, you know, residential Indian schools. And really no questioning what happened there and beginning a process of healing or continuing a process of healing around that. So I had to shift, based upon what people were doing at the time, to focus more on the healing of resentment schools. Rather than just writing about jingle dress dancing, which was my original intent. We actually had a film that was not Nihiwak, it's Northern Cheyenne, Northern Chan Nation. And in that film it's a grandfather who gives a jingle dress to the grandchild who is facing gender harassment, you know, at school, being a genderqueer, you know, two spirit male bodied person. And so the resolution is to give this jingle dress to the grandchild and have them come into the culture, present themselves, you know, in this two spirit gender and two spirit regalia, jingle dress to the community, which includes other two spirit people. And so that's WAW Parker's film of the Roof, which is on Disney. It's a short film and sometimes short films are really the best. You get really clear messaging about an elder supporting their grandchild. In terms of two spirit regalia and jingle dress dancing.
- [57:44]
Caleb Zakarin
I think it's especially useful for teaching too, because you can actually show it in a class too. So I think that's an advantage in that a lot of these films are actually accessible for a lot of people, obviously, if you have a Disney account, but some of them are available on YouTube as well. And I think also one of the reasons I wanted to ask about or focus on the residential schools, because I think that this is a history that was widespread through North America that a lot of people aren't aware of. They're aware of other. They're aware of the spread of disease and they're aware of various battles that took place, but not aware of these schools that people were forced into that were then used to basically try and separate people from their culture.
- [58:33]
Gabriel Strada
Yeah, it's part of the reason why within Indigenous cultures, there's a lack of recognition for two spirit Indigenous LGBTQ peoples to this day. So the integration of peoples that was once common throughout Turtle island and Polynesia changed as a result of Christian education, basically the one form or another, but specifically the Indian Residential School program within Canada's history. So there's been some push in the US to also look at these histories and to begin more activism around this and healing around this. Canada's a bit ahead of the curve in that respect, with government and Indigenous peoples being at times cooperative around that acknowledgement. There's still some criticism of the need for the Canadian government to give more resources to heal and to make sure that the healing is done in ways that center Indigenous peoples, not creating institutions run by non indigenous people who then will go in and try to fix things in ways that maybe aren't culturally appropriate. So, yes, it is a part of the story, you know, of Indigenous elders up north, but those elders also have knowledge that heals. So in my own private lower post, Dwana KWA tells the Raven story in the Tezan Tlingit language. And that, in fact, is also healing. It's about being able to share, you know, not just be things to yourself that are precious. And he concludes that these stories themselves need to be shared, you know, for people to heal, to have a value that goes beyond just keeping it to yourself. Even though it's difficult to share these narratives of abuse and cultural genocide, it's also an important part of the healing process. They aren't forever hidden because it explains behavior. So, for example, Vicky Vaub began to drink as a result of this abuse she experienced in the residential school or post. And so understanding that the aquatic director is able to forgive easier, that this is learned behavior. It wasn't culture itself. It was something imposed from outside, and it helps folks to forgive. Parents who drink or grandparents who had erratic behavior that was a result of that treatment that they received, or the lack of love that they experienced in these residential schools, or maybe the lack of knowledge of language. There's a reason why there was imbalance in that older generation at times because they suffered abuses in these schools. So, yeah, it's a difficult but necessary healing that is going on up north. And these films speak to that in different ways.
- [62:14]
Caleb Zakarin
In Part two, you turn to Hollywood. We've already talked a little bit about depictions, early depictions, and definitely interested in hearing you talk a little bit about the silent film era. But Also I was thinking about how when I was growing up in Los Angeles, they oftentimes have these. I think it's kind of the school requirements are that you learn about California history. And I was thinking how like the focus of the California history, obviously, like, you know, they'll do the Gold Rush and things like that, but learned a lot about the Tongva and the Chumash and then they learned about. About Hollywood, but they never really marry the two. They don't really marry Hollywood and, and indigenous Californians together. And you look at that in this book that the how. How Hollywood has interacted with and treated indigenous people. So I was wondering if you could just share a little about that. You've already mentioned a. Talked a little bit about the depictions, but you know, and then also just how contemporary filmmakers, indigenous filmmakers are sort of navigating Hollywood.
- [63:20]
Gabriel Strada
Well, I'm really specific about Southern California and that down chapter, given that I live in Tongva territory, Tongva Hatchman territory at Kelsey Long Beach. And there are really important depictions of native Californians of the area. Ramona being one of the most important. And the 1928 Ramona version, directed by Edmund Carew, whose Chickasaw is really important because it critiques genocides and massacres that were occurring in Southern California in the 1800s with the gold Rush happening in the state and with people coming in the masses and just taking over native California lands. So there's a really strong critique of a scene in which Ramona, who's learned that she is Native American and has married another Native California person and run off to live, you know, finds them. They find this couple, find themselves in the midst of a massacre of their village at Temecula. And so they have to flee when the child gets sick. The doctor won't see the child, the child dies and eventually the husband is shot by a white settler in ways that are anti indigenous, you know. And so Ramona ends up fleeing back to the. The ranch which the Spanish owned, and back to her stepbrother who desires her. But she has no memory of what happened. So what's important is that she's shown as being cross dressed in the very opening scene. There's a really big point being made that Ramona is somehow different. And that boy's clothing that she wears is meant to draw attention to that difference. She's not just a Spanish woman living in a rancho. There's something very odd about her. And if we look at queers, including people who don't replicate the nation, then we can see Ramona's cross dressing in 1928 as being a queer indication that she won't be able to reproduce her Garvalino nation or Luceno nation as she marries somebody from outside her nation. So it's subtleties like that. It's sort of meant to be funny. Oh, isn't this humorous that this is a cross dressing person? But it's also meant to queer the figure and to queer their future in ways that are repressive to indigenous people. So there can be, you know, queer settlerism. This is Morgan's idea of that, you know, queer self isn't necessarily about liberation. There can actually be really repressive as well. So oftentimes Native Americans are queered against their will, you know, as being oddly gendered or inappropriately gendered, and then are restricted in terms of rights or land, our futures. You know, there's no futurity for a queer subject or a queer indigenous subject. So Ramona is one of those examples where her narrative is one of, you know, being adopted into a Spanish rancho system, trying to flee it until her clinches massacred that is indigenous in the Temecula era, and then playing back with amnesia to a Spanish rancho where she originated and having no memory of what happened. So this says assimilation, right? You, if you're a part native, which she was, she was half in the narrative, then the answer is just to assimilate into Mexican Spanish culture and forget the indigenous part. And that is often what happened that people forgot necessarily. But for Tongva folks who didn't want to be sold off or enslaved in the 1800s through vagrant laws or through other laws, they would sometimes try to pass as non native as being simply Mexican. And people have come out of that in the last century to reclaim recognition and to go for photo recognition, for example, and to go for different community recognitions. And that was something that you would not guess from Walter in Ramona. So I contrast that as being kind of forward through the repression of local native California identities to contemporary film, where we have someone like Alfred Enriquez who openly says that Poe, to use their pronouns and their indigenous language, is two spirits and an artist and an activist. There's a great film talking about accessibility on Netflix. It's called the Wagner, and it features Alfred Manriquez as a raven who speaks to a youth about their connection to spirits. And it features Craig Torres, who is a Tongva2spirit activist, who explains it to this child who's hearing, who's a, you know, Otto Calderon who's tangled Chumash, explaining how spirits are in the land and how these are ancestors and how it's normal to hear them and it's good to speak with them. So it's bringing this down connection, connection to land back into consciousness as being something that Tongva would naturally do, you know, would naturally sing songs to the rivers or to the plants and animals, to the ancestors. To have that connection to earth that has been so disconnected by cement, cementing over the Los Angeles river, cementing over the villages, erasing traces of Tongva Gaba peoples in the greater Los Angeles area and the islands as well. So that connection down is really a reconnection, showing how Tangra are reconnecting to land and changing public perceptions about themselves in the process, teaching people that these natives aren't simply disappeared peoples from the 1800s, but rather are contemporary peoples who are vital and creating art and creating movement around their culture and their nations at this time.
- [70:43]
Caleb Zakarin
A development in. In Hollywood recently has been, I would say, the sort of the. I mean, it's been ongoing for, I guess, more than a. More than almost two decades now. But Ryan Coogler's rise as a filmmaker. And obviously you just made the film Sinners that came out recently and also Black Panther, which it's one of the most successful films film franchises in the past few years. And you know, his films, you know, sit in. They're not. Not exactly. Maybe Black Panther more so than Sinners sit in the kind of Afro futurist genre. And you, you, you'd look at Afrofuturism in the book and Afrofuturist cinema and put it into conversation with queer indigenous cinema as well. And I was wondering if you could see how these. Just talk about how you see these two intersecting and what Afrofuturism, you know, this kind of the study of Afrofuturism can help people help, you know, to maybe think about queer indigenous cinema as well.
- [71:45]
Gabriel Strada
But if you don't have a past in cinema, you don't have a future. So it's really important to have representations of indigenous people, including those from Africa in the future, that folks will not simply disappear or be disappeared by non indigenous peoples. So the chapter really looks at black also blak, which references indigenous peoples of Australia as well as indigenous peoples of Africa, including those in Ryan Coogler's film Wakanda series, rather. So the connection to the sky is important in origins. And there are song lines, for example, in many parts of indigenous Australia that link a migration of the seven sisters down across the know, the continent and back to the stars. And that references also an earlier migration of beings from the stars to the Earth. So that origin really is from the stars. And, you know, this gets referenced through the art of Zacharias Fielding and the way as a singer and performer that they're able to reference their indigenous culture and connection to the stars. So Zechariah Fielding looks at their territories and keeps alive this connection to the stars as somebody who performs in Genique wear ways as a singer, Neuro version and Eurovision competitions and throughout different communities. So that's one aspect of it. Oftentimes there's been amalgamation of African indigenous peoples and Native American peoples in sci fi. So we think Avatar, where the peoples are both sort of baby South American Natives, Native Americans, yet they have dreadlocks like African peoples. So it's sort of to say in the future these indigenous peoples of other planets are going to resemble indigenous peoples of Earth, yet kind of all mixed together. And so it's important to note how that hasn't happened historically, how people who are mixed African and Native American had been separated from those who were mixed white Native American. So sometimes those who were mixed black and Native American were not counted as Native American, were not allowed to enroll in the different nations of the Southeast due to policies of enslavement, even though there often was mixing early on as people escaped certain areas and came back together in other areas, as happened to Seminole Nation. So it's to complicate the history of if there are indigenous people in space in the future, as in Avatar or within Cloud Atlas, that they're somehow just a mix of different indigenous peoples and have basically kind of assimilated into this notion that everyone's just the same. All these people are just sort of similar, exchangeable people, when really there are a lot of differences in terms of language, in terms of history, in terms of land. Not everybody is the same. So part of that chapter is to note that we don't need transracial depictions in space. No more blueface. That's one of the refrains that Yua Begay made viral. Don't replace Native people by blue people that are just pan Indigenous. Hire indigenous writers, hire indigenous actors. Consult indigenous people to a greater extent about these narratives that are blockbuster narratives that are educating people or miseducating people about indigenous cultures. So there definitely is some comparison in the Black Panther series with Maya and African indigenous people. So there is the figure of Anika and Ayo being a lesbian couple. It's subtle. And they briefly kiss on. On the top of the head. So it doesn't get the Movie canceled from queerphobic countries There is unusually balanced gender within Wakanda. Women have leadership, they have military skills. Suri becomes the Black Panther in Wakanda Forever film, not just her brother, that can be the Black Panther leader. And so all of that is, I think is worth noting that there are queer and strong women representations within Black Panther, but there's also black on red violence or black on black violence featured. It does in some ways reproduce some tropes that are colonial, even as it is a decolonizing film in intendo for all. I sort of end that section by looking at the way that Maya are portrayed in Wakanda Forever, the way that they're these sub oceanic mutants who have also benefited from the meteorite that has this powering Wakanda and also creating a spiritual path. And in Africa as well, in Wakanda. And they're sort of fish, human like creatures. They have gills. They really can't come out of the water too easily. And their technology is not quite up to par with what is in Wakanda as well. There still seems to be sort of a hierarchy with black and Afro indigenous peoples being more relatable than Maya of Central America, Mexico, Caribbean area. They're still seen as being slightly more nefarious, although there is some resolution for nonviolence. And by the end of the film, Wakanda Forever Amaya have a slightly lower ground, freedom to occupy are slightly less humid. And I ended up contrasting that with a two spirit film, Chalk plus Jung, in which the figures of rain and earth are erotically entwined with each other. So that connection of rain from sky coming to earth fertilizing, it's sort of like inseminating the earth. You know, in some ways that it looks at that erotic connection openly in ways that are embracing trans identity, two spirit identity and make that connection of sky to earth and corn clear. Right. So the Maya who are underwater are not growing corn. I imagine they're eating fish. I don't know exactly what they eat, but they really have changed so much. Parts of their core culture are gone, although the language is still there. And they're still Maya who escaped the colonization diseases of the 1500s. The Spanish brought being refugees into the ocean. So it does critique Spanish colonization and it does give them a motivation to want to hide themselves and to protect their anonymity. So they're not just evil creatures, but they are less moral on the whole compared to Wakandans, who are really allied with us in some ways or Western norms in some ways. In Some ways not so. My reading is complicated of Wakanda, that it is decolonial. It does have important queer and women's roles, but it has less of a place for Maya and for Native Americans, even as it introduces Indigenous America into the Marvel world.
- [81:00]
Caleb Zakarin
Obviously, in the course of the book and in the course of this conversation, we've traveled around quite a bit and covered many different books and topics. And the seventh direction you look at center, it's the most personal. I was wondering if you could discuss what center means as a direction and how it also inflects your own position as a scholar engaging with cinema, engaging with the various materials that are examined in the book.
- [81:34]
Gabriel Strada
Well, people should know that I'm not speaking for all these different nations, that the analysis is coming from my perspective that is shaped by living in the us by having Chicanx parents, by having indigenous grandparents and also Mexican grandparents, so, you know, who are mixed. So this chapter is meant to give some personal insights that would help readers understand the space from which I write, the limitations of my perspective, and also the creativity in what I'm doing. So I gave papers on Jingle Dress Dance, and then I had, like, a throwaway story about ravens, you know, crows in Sacramento, being with my grandpa. And the reaction I got from a Native American audience was, oh, I really like that story. And I'm like, that's a good story. Like, that's like. I thought it was a throwaway. That was not why I was at the conference. I wasn't there to tell a personal story. I was there to give an analysis of a film, you know, using film theory and Indigenous theory. Yet people really seem to gravitate towards the personal story. So, you know, there are different Indigenous methodologies of including the personal and grounding yourself in. In your people and in your land, and also in what you are reclaiming and what you don't know, you know, and what challenges there are in understanding indigeneity, understanding, you know, our ancestry and our nations. For myself, it's complicated that I am transnational, right? So I'm not living in Huchipila, for example, with other Cascanas. I was born, as was my dad, in Orange county, right? In LA area. So there's a connection and there's also a spatial difference of what I can know and not know. So I've returned to learn to Zacatecas about Chichi Meca culture. And I share stories of, you know, different animals, different journeys with crows being the theme throughout all these reflections. Ravens and crow stories. It is complicated. You know, and I'm still in the process of learning. And as I've gone to different Indigenous lands, there's so much to learn about what crows mean to these different peoples. And I have to ask and I have to begin to learn their stories about the ravens or crows, because they have no way of knowing. We're not all the same. So even knowing a little bit about the mother crow creation narrative in Hujibila doesn't really give me insight necessarily into being in Hawaii or to being in Tlingit territory or this stories are so specific. But I can say that learning stories from my ancestors makes me curious to learn the stories from other indigenous peoples and other Indigenous Crow raven stories. There's a familiarity and basis of interest, I guess, that helped me to sustain the research throughout. So as I learned about different raven stories, I could reflect back on what I had learned with my. Through my grandfathers, you know, because we have our own stories of the eagles or of the hawk, coyote, a rabbit. Thinking of my dad's dad's dad's stories, patrilineal stories, Gascon stories. And, you know, those are really important. They're basis of our knowledge. And they're one of the few things that have come down across the generations are these stories, you know, these animal stories, the spirit stories. So I was attracted, I think, because I have that basis in Indigenous stories through my family to learn about other stories, you know, as I traveled. But no one would understand that if I didn't tell the stories that I learned or the experiences of ravens and crows that have connected me personally to the different chapters. In some cases, people didn't live. The actors in these films, they're no longer alive. And so that made an impact, and that included some reflection on. On raven and crow. In some ways, I end the reflections with a poem of dreams for dreams in Nahuatlashgan. Well, it's my Kashkanization of Nahuat. There's still not an agreed upon way to write contemporary Kashkan Nahuatl. But I did take some vocabulary and some of the differences and incorporate them into the poem. But it's really dreaming about being underground and in caves or in mountains, in pyramids, and being grounded in these dream experiences of places that I mostly saw in real life. So. And the idea here being that earth gives us dreams, Earth grounds us, Earth teaches us, and that that is what is inside. And that's part of what allowed me to go outside and travel and learn more in people's own ways of relating to land, spatiality and directionality. So it's hard to explain exactly why it's important, but indigenous audiences convinced me that it was important to tell these personal stories. And so I did. I did. And I feel that somehow it does complete the directionality that seventh Direction is inside. And it's different for each and every one of us. No two insides are the same. We don't occupy the same space. We don't have the same dreams or same experiences, even if we share other directions that are more common. East, south, west, north, different ages, we all go through that, but we go through them in our very unique, specific ways from our own perspective, which is seventh Direction. And that's part of the marvel of the world, is that we're all slightly different but related.
- [88:29]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, obviously there's a. Oftentimes in scholarship, there's almost like this. This. This one voice that people can be pushed to try and adopt. And I think what's. So, you know, people, obviously people. A lot of people try and break that and. And speak from a personal lens as well. And I think it's important to have that amidst the, you know, the. The objective voice. And I also feel too, you know, this is why, like, a medium like film is so important, because it really does allow for a type of exploration that is quite remarkable because it brings together visual art, audio components, and all sorts of different art forms sort of under one umbrella, which is one of the reasons I love film. And I'm wondering, obviously, I didn't actually count the number of films that you mentioned in this book. I think it's, you know, probably over 30. But if there was a place that you'd recommend that someone might start, maybe two or three that you might start someone off with. To go without asking you to pick favorites.
- [89:42]
Gabriel Strada
Yeah. Well, because I'm on Tongva territory, it's really important for me for people to look at Netflix City of Ghosts series, episode four to Wagner, because it's one of the very few representations. It's a cartoon form. Right. Representations of tonic people. It's accessible. And we really have to unsettle Hollywood's narrative that all Native Americans in the area are gone. So if we look at film and film history, I think all film scrollers should be noting this presence of tons of people that is ongoing, including this Tovagna episode 4 of City of Ghosts series that's animated. So that's first and foremost my recommendation for that. I think for YouTube folks, that my own private lower post is very accessible. I think it's a very important film and it gives a narrative that's rare, which. Which is to explain the healing process for Indian residential school survivors. So I really love that. And then I think for. I think Kapai Mahu is really something that it's short, it's accessible, it teaches so much about Kanaka Maoli migration and about healing and about gender. So I really recommend that short that's on YouTube and on their KapaiMaku.com website with a lot of other information. And then I think the. The Hula IO Suchil is actually a really good YouTube to look at Suchil in Hu Pila. And actually, I'm going to pause for a moment and just look at this. 2019. Yeah, that is by Alondra Sanchez Medina. And it's done in community, you know, with the dancers who are involved in keeping a live Kashkan ceremony. So I think that that's. It's in Spanish, but a lot of it is just dancing. So I think it's important to look at that and at least see the images. Let's see the dance. Dance itself is its own language, so we can explain it, but it does its own thing in some ways, as does the music. So I would say those are important. Wakanda, everybody can see.
- [92:28]
Caleb Zakarin
Everyone's already seen that.
- [92:32]
Gabriel Strada
I think it was oddly, you know, accessible. And I think for. In terms of the Navajo, I like the ingenuity of video because it just explains being. It explains being two spirit. Two Spirit Ingenuity 2013 is on YouTube and it interviews in cartoon form for youth, you know, different two Spirit folks in the Bay Area, mostly from Navajo Nation, but also Mexica and also another nation. So I like the cartoons, I like the animations. I think it's good for all ages. I do recommend those. They are accessible. If somebody had Disney, I'd say see the Roof, but not everybody has that. But most of these films, you know, there's 20 images for, you know, 19 images for 18 films. And those are the ones I highlight the most in the analysis. So folks have the book, you know, they can look for the images and then look to see those films. Most of them are publicly accessible and that's why they're in the book.
- [93:48]
New Books Network Announcer
Yeah.
- [93:49]
Caleb Zakarin
Wonderful. Well, Gabriel, I wanted to thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network to talk about your book Queer Indigenous Cinemas. It was really fantastic to speak with you. I think that this book is a really, you know, I think it serves not only as like a great introduction to the subject, but, you know, it's quite. It's quite impressive in how it's interdisciplinary and, you know, I think, also quite readable as well, too. So thank you for being a guest.
- [94:17]
Gabriel Strada
The sukamati. Gracias. Thank you. And I really appreciate the interview.