Discussions
Film Screening with Sky Hopinka
Join us for a screening of maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, a poetic experimental feature circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest.
Experience a post screening talk with filmmaker and artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) and Dana Hedgpeth, a Native American journalist at The Washington Post and an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of northeastern N.C.
Tickets
$10 BMA Members | $14 General Admission
About the Film
maɬni (pronounced: moth-nee) follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier’s wanderings through each of their worlds as they wonder through and contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin of death myth, with its distant beginning and circular shape. Total run time: 80:21.
This program is inspired by Don’t wait for me, just tell me where you’re going, a series of short experimental films by Native artists selected by guest curator Sky Hopinka as part of the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum exhibition initiative.
Screening courtesy of Grasshopper Film.
Accessible seating and assistive listening devices are available for this program.
Please have your ticket printed or readily available on your phone for check-in.
Schedule
1:30 p.m. – Doors open
2 p.m. – Program begins
Remarks by Leila Grothe, co-curator of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum
Screening of maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Total run time: 80:21)
3:25 p.m. – Talk with Sky Hopinka and Dana Hedgpeth
4 p.m. – Program ends
Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media.
His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He is the recipient of the Infinity Award in Art from the International Center and the Alpert Award for Film/Video and fellowships including The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Art Matters, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Forge Project. In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker.
Dana Hedgpeth
Dana Hedgpeth is a Native American journalist at The Washington Post and is an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of northeastern N.C. She has worked for 25 years at The Post and previously worked at The Baltimore Sun. Dana is most enthusiastic about her work writing about Native American communities and shedding light on Native American history. In May 2024 she published an exhaustive investigative report into the pervasive sexual abuse of Native American children by Catholic priests in U.S. boarding schools, prompting an apology from U.S. Catholic Bishops for the church’s role, which represents the most direct expression of regret to date by church officials.