Kevin O’Brien, Sky Hopinka, and layers of meaning in the landscape

Sky Hopinka's 2021 film Mnemonics of Shape and Reason

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Two recent interviews have got me thinking about the relationship between culture and landscape: the generations of peoples who call a place home, how those histories endure even after the communities may be long gone, and the lessons we can learn about stewardship of the land.

Both interviewees, perhaps coincidentally, came to my attention through Portland State University: one an alumnus and one a visiting professor — filmmaker Sky Hopinka and architect Kevin O'Brien — each pursuing ideas informed by their Indigenous heritage.

Hopinka, who now teaches at Bard College in upstate New York, is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people of southern California. O'Brien traces generations of Aboriginal Australian ancestry on his mother's side.

I'm a seventh-generation native Oregonian, and part of what attracts me to Hopinka's films and O'Brien's explorations is my own interest in connections to my homeland of Oregon, ancestrally and experientially. One ancestor on my dad's side of the family, Solomon Fitzhugh, a southern Oregon judge and territorial legislature member, was a signee of the Oregon constitution in 1859.  But ultimately my longer ancestry comes from Europe: England, mainly, to where I can actually trace my roots back before the Norman invasion in 1066; the Fitzhugh family only came to America in 1670 (William Fitzhugh was a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses), and to Oregon in the 1850s. In context, even seven generations is not that long.

Yet it's a connection to the land as much as to ancestry that roots me in the Pacific Northwest and Oregon. During my college years and into my 20s living on the East Coast, I always felt tethered to my homeland, in ways I couldn't completely put to words. Which is why Hopinka's poetic cinema appeals to me, and why O'Brien's ideas about layers of land and history make sense.

 

Sky Hopinka (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

 

These interviews with O'Brien and Hopinka also come at a time when our understanding of Indigenous history in North America is evolving, thanks to a much-discussed book released earlier this fall:  Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, in which Oxford University historian Pekka Hämäläinen asserts that the war for control of the continent was “one of the longest conflicts in history,” lasting some four centuries. Hämäläinen argues that while Native American tribes controlled the continent for thousands of years, “it was only 130 years ago, a brief span when compared to the long pre-contact history of Indigenous America, that the United States could claim to have subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans,” he writes. “On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck.”

Sky Hopinka, whom I recently interviewed for Oregon ArtsWatch, was this fall one of 25 people to be named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Best known as the "Genius Grant," the MacArthur is perhaps the nation's biggest validation of brilliant minds, ranging from artists to scientists to activists.

 

 

Hopinka's 2021 film Kicking the Clouds

 

Born in 1984 and raised in Ferndale, Washington near the Canadian border, Hopinka came to Portland in 2006 to study at PSU, where he earned a bachelor's degree, and stayed here until 2013 (before pursuing a master's of fine arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). It was at PSU that he became interested in language, learning the Chinook Wawa language used in centuries past by peoples of the lower Columbia basin and the Willamette Valley. At the same time, Hopinka was becoming interested in film and experimental film in particular.

"When I started filmmaking, around the same time that I started working with language revitalization with Indigenous communities, part of the desire I had to make films was to tell Indigenous stories that were unique to my own community and my own identity," Hopinka said in a Criterion Channel interview. "I feel like there was a lot of room to tell contemporary stories without engaging in contextualization around the history and around trauma and around the historical romanticization of Indigenous people. And what I was really interested in doing was telling stories that are relevant to what contemporary experience is without that baggage and how to make things a bit more creative or poetic, or trying to explore these different facets of my culture and my identity and how all those different things had shaped me."

 

Hopinka's 2016 film I'll Remember You As You Were, Not As You'll Become

 

In a piece for the Museum of Modern Art called "Film Is The Body" published earlier this year, Hopinka went further, writing, "Somewhere between an active and passive presence, we’re all contending with intergenerational and trans-generational effects of pain, resistance, stress, love, and joy. Forgetting and remembering the impermanence of our existence on planes of being that are both in and out of our body and our control…Indigenous cinema is a cinema of the ineffable dreams suppressed for so long. We return to the land and return to our homes and we exhaust our minds and our spirits, seeing and being in the grass and the water and the dirt. Exhausted and free to remember what we need to know, as now the time has come.”

Watching Hopinka's films in preparation for an Oregon ArtsWatch interview, I was struck by his ongoing exploration of western landscapes, especially the Pacific Northwest. We continually see characters walking down forested trails, driving down highways and canoeing rivers, delighted by waterfalls. But the built environment also figures in, in films like Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary , which begins with a quote by acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma (designer of Portland's Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing):  “The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter… Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.” In that film, Hopinka's camera views two Portland area landmarks: the Tilikum Crossing bridge near downtown and the Ridgefield, Washington’s Cathlapotle Plankhouse.

 

Hopinka's 2017 film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary

 

Because these films are mostly non-narrative, with kaleidoscopic imagery and sound collages of spoken word in Chinook Wawa, not only are we able to draw our own conclusions about the relationship between culture, place and identity, but Hopinka seems to get at something deeper and more elusive.

"There’s a lot of different ways that I think about the land," Hopinka said in our interview. "There’s the sort of a high-minded way of looking at the histories of it: the things that it means, and the potential to mean so many different things. But also on a practical level, it’s just a matter of where I’m at, and if I have a camera, if I’m going to film there. After that, it’s a process of understanding: how does it fit into a conversation that I’m interested in having, whether that’s around myth or story or language or history? That’s often just the first way in: framing an idea as I’m trying to understand what that idea is. I make the films that I do in the way that I do because I’m trying to understand an idea that I don’t quite know how to express or explain. The films then become demarcations of that process, or part of the ways that I am trying to relate to these bigger ideas that I don’t have clear answers for. It’s a thing that I’m trying to work through. Who am I and where am I?"

 

Architect Kevin O'Brien (Portland State University)

 

Then there's Kevin O'Brien, a Brisbane, Australia-based architect and professor who brings Aboriginal concepts of space to his architectural practice, at Kevin O'Brien Architects. That he's trained as an architect and also has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Queensland speaks to his thoughtful manner. O'Brien, who like me was born in 1972 and turned 50 this year, spent a week here this fall as a Portland State University visiting lecturer, culminating in a student design workshop in October.

Over the course of the week, O'Brien asked PSU architecture students participating in the workshop (including both undergraduates and master's degree candidates) to look at the city of Portland from three different scales, from single structures to whole blocks to neighborhoods, and then envision ways to empty it of half of the built environment and infrastructure in order to reveal what he calls "country," with a deeper sense of meaning than we ascribe to the word. In O'Brien's description, country is the natural world beneath the city, but it's also a relationship between individuals, cultures, and the land of their ancestry, going back thousands of years. 

That afternoon, after the design exercise and O'Brien's lecture—further exploring his multilayered process of investigating a site's geography, geology, and human history—he led the students, carrying their structural models, to the campus's Oak Savanna. There, O'Brien set fire to the models in a ceremonial burn.

The blend of architecture, philosophy and ceremony O'Brien brought was inspiring enough that I had to learn more. I watched online a 2013 lecture O'Brien gave called "Finding Country," in which he first showed onscreen  a photo of his aunt's home in northern Australia, a modest hand-built dwelling beside the ocean, where his family often gathered. "It's where the first understanding of space occurs. It's the distance between you and the next person," he explained, "and it's the prospect out onto the ocean. That's the first beginnings of talking and understanding your lineage and where you where you belong."

He then showed a wider view of that same landscape, including two nearby islands, describing a local folk tale about how the land there was formed: "an ancestral dugong [a manatee-like marine mammal] came across the waters from the west, laid up, spat two seeds out of its nose, and these two islands came; the one on the right is where my grandmother's people are from. And that became its story of understanding. The scientific reasoning of this is that there was three volcanoes, but it's not as nice a story to tell."

 

Preparing students' models for the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)

 

In combining his traditional architectural training with a remembrance of these ways of thinking about space, O'Brien said he realized architecture can only come after understanding the landscape, its peoples and their history. "Once you know your relationship with your people and the relationship with country," he said, "then you can develop an architecture that's bound to that….Before we get into the architecture, there has to be about a notion of the city… being made up as a series of layers, as a sort of sedimentary thing with a natural world at the base, an Aboriginal one above that and on an upwards you went to, you got to the final European and modern layers." Even so, he added, "Something in that doesn't quite ring true for me because it seemed to say the Aboriginal place had gone: it was there, but now it's been rubbed out. And it's just not true. The culture is there, the country is still there and people understand it, still believe in it. The way I thought about it was that it's no longer a matter of vertical representation; it's just a horizontal one."

Eventually, I sought out O'Brien for a further one-to-one conversation, which follows.

Portland Architecture: Was there wildfire smoke while you were here in October? Right about that time there was the Nakia Creek fire, which briefly caused Portland to have the worst air quality in the world.

Kevin O'Brien: On the last day, there was a little bit. I went up to Mount Hood to look around and it was a bit smoggy up there.

Reading your remarks about fire as a kind of tiller of the soil and encountering your design exercise at PSU burning the models, I felt pleased to be reminded of some of those ideas, because the very thing that defines Oregon, the bounty of millions of Douglas fir trees and these forests, seems to be under permanent threat now: an age of wildfires. But perhaps how we manage the forest is also part of the story.

Fire as a tool, that's very much part of my Indigenous culture. In the community where my mother's from, in far-north Australia, fire was used as a tool and you sort of grow up with it. It's used in the same way you might use a small lawnmower. You keep the yard in check, you keep the fuel down in the landscape around you, and you manage it. A lot of the Australian native insect species need fire to crack their shells so that they can propagate. In the northern states, allowing that traditional practice, a sort of cyclical patch-burning, been reasonably successful in avoiding big catastrophic fires that you continue to see every ten years in New South Wales and Victoria.

Just as COVID hit, a massive one fire hit Victoria, and they have a strict fire ban throughout the whole year, so they don't do any kind of management of the forest. From my perspective, that means they're allowing it to fall into disrepair. They're not keeping the floor of the forest clean. After ten years, you've got a tinderbox waiting to happen. A fire can start there, maybe a couple hundred meters wide, but the wind blows and changes direction and the embers spread, and what was once a couple hundred meters wide is now five kilometers long. They've got a catastrophic set of conditions and they just don't look after the landscape.

Bill Gammage, a historian, wrote a fantastic book on all of that: The Biggest Estate on Earth. He basically looked at the colonial first colonial paintings that were made at Sydney, Melbourne at the time of contact [with Aboriginal peoples] corresponded that with tree-ring samples from old growth forests. Those early paintings of the show that the understory of all these forests was clear and there's records of the British galloping at full pace around Sydney. But then within ten or 15 years of stopping the ongoing fires, it was all overgrown.

 

O'Brien beginning the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)

 

Could you talk about the word “country” and what it means to you?

What it means to me and how it’s used here in Australia is very different from when I talked about it with Native American students at PSU; they didn’t have a similar kind of word in their culture. When we say country here, we put it in italics. We're not meaning the sovereign boundary. When we talk about country, it's a number of things that go into the making up of it. It's not strictly landscape, although that's part of it. Country is kind of the thing you belong to as opposed to the thing you own. It has a whole cultural, spiritual overlay. There’s memory based in it and there’s experienced based in it, there’s inter-generational rituals that get based on it. So there's this kind of very long association with the place that sort of gets into being. It’s not just what you walk on. It's the thing you see above you in the sky. It's probably the hardest concept to explain. But it’s in the belonging to something that it affects your behavior. It's different from when your own something and it's at your disposal. It's kind of a reverse-arrangement.

I feel in my bones that I'm an Oregonian: that I’m spiritually connected to our rivers and mountain ranges, our ferns and evergreen trees. When I went to college in New York City, excited as I was to be there, I also felt this aching for home: not just my loved ones, but that landscape.

You hit it right on the head. That's exactly what it's about. When I'm to talking to old farmers back here, they get it, especially the ones who engage in self-sufficient and sustainable practices. They're up at sunrise with the animals are doing everything they can to keep the land productive in that way. Surfers get it. Surfing, it's like, you don't own it, but you're part of being bound to it and you certainly don't want to ruin it. And fundamentally, that's what fire was doing to start with: keeping the land in a productive state; it wasn't allowed to fall into disrepair.

The other thing related to this, which you’ve probably heard of, is the term ‘song lines.’

 

Thomas Tjapaltjarri, "Tingari" (Invaluable)

 

I vaguely know the term, which seems tied to something else I love: Aboriginal Australian visual art.

A lot of Aboriginal paintings are meant to represent those song lines. A song line in really simple terms is a communal-memory-experience track. So within that bit of country that you might be from, there's a set of tracks that cyclically take people around that country during the seasons and during those seasons there'd be certain rituals and births, deaths, marriages, initiations: All of those things become part of a spoken set of instructions or information that were passed on over 50,000 years. Talking to you now, we may remember the gist of the conversation, but not word for word. When it's put into song, you sing the song and don’t miss the words, ideally. You're just singing the information about where to go. These are the experiences beyond this ridge at this time of the year. These are the right places for the initiation ceremonies. This is the right time now. A friend of mine, Morgan Neill, who is the deputy director at the National Museum of Australia, put this fantastic exhibition on it. She says conceptually, everyone in Australia, at any point in the years on a particular circuit, whether it's between work, where they holiday, where they live, where they go to the football, all these things make up a particular circuit. And if you reduced it down and ask that person to tell their son or daughter or relative and they took up that, you've just started a new song line. And that's what gets you to this sense of belonging to the place. So what you were saying about the whole going to New York and longing for origin makes so much sense.

Reading about your exercise with the students that involved burning their architectural models, I got interested in the idea of design as taking away and not just building things. It reminds me of 1960s visual artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who would artfully, surgically cut apart old houses. How did this exercise develop?

The influence on this matter of taking away and adding at the same time comes from a guy called Noel Pearson, a historian, lawyer, intellectual: an Aboriginal man from North Queensland. About 15 years ago he wrote about the idea of politics and the radical center as it pertains to Aboriginal people. His argument was essentially that the radical left and the radical right have become inconsequential, because they're only arguing with themselves. He said you can't sit on the fence, but you have to be either inside the right or inside the left: able to negotiate and pull the country forward.

The other big influence was a mentor of mine at the University of Melbourne, Michael Martin McCarthy. He told me about an exercise, targeted at getting the students to remove parts of the city. Michael said, ‘If you could take anything out of the city, what would you take out?’ I said, ‘Well, I take it out in this way, but only do it to 50 percent because I'm into this radical-center idea: those two things intersect in the most unlikely places. Where it gets to next, I don't know. That's what excited me about what was happening at PSU. I might have lost a lot of the students and I think a few of the lecturers.

You need to start with the Romans and looking at the horizon as the limit. The Greeks before that, they're looking at the walls as the limit. It’s about being able to recognize what the limit is, whether it's a city or the architecture.

 

Completion of the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)

 

We're lucky in Portland because it's easier to reconnect with nature than in a lot of American cities. Portland has an urban growth boundary, and you can leave the metro area relatively quickly. We also have Forest Park, the largest urban wilderness in the United States. Yet one still winds up being disconnected from nature without meaning to.

It’s interesting too the idea of nature and the city. I noticed that main sort of garden strip through the middle of downtown Portland through the city. Are those trees something native?

Funny you should mention that. No, they’re mostly non-native elms. There was a controversy last year over a plan to replace them with native evergreens, slowly, as the elms die over time.

The thing I've been pushing back here is to use wherever possible endemic species from that country. It's part of its character, part of its real spirit: the light, the breeze, what it attracts in terms of local fauna, all those things that make it unique to other places.

And it’s only  a massive reforestation of the planet that will save us: peeling back the city to reveal more of the carbon-sequestering natural landscape.

I think population growth actually is the number one killer of the planet. The premise of that exercise the PSU students did, and every iteration we've done, is that we asked them to imagine half the population is gone. Everything else is reduced by half.

What aspects of Portland struck you as unique or interesting?

When I was looking at Portland before I got there, and thinking about other cities I've been to in the States, I've never, ever got my head around the scale of the city blocks. Los Angeles was the one that I really miscalculated, thinking I could walk somewhere and I really couldn't. But I was looking at Portland's going, ‘This looks like about 200-by 200 [foot] blocks. It couldn't possibly be.’ That sounds un-American. And sure enough, the blocks are 200 by 200. It just threw my whole sense of scale because I expected everything to be a lot larger. I found it was impossible to get a sweat up walking because just as you start to hit a bit of speed, you just hit another traffic light and typically have to stop. But it means there's a lovely scale to everything.

 

I decided to talk about Hopinka and O'Brien because each one's work helped me understand the other's: two overlapping perspectives that helps me see beyond my own Euro-centric roots and education. O'Brien's notion of country, binding together architecture and landscape, history and culture with a binding sense of narrative, helped me make sense of Hopinka's poetic non-narrative films. Hopinka's blend of kinetic visuals and a musical sense of language helped bring alive some of the ideas I'd just talked about with O'Brien in a Zoom call.

It's not always easy being a freelance journalist. I often seem to take on too many assignments from a bunch of different clients at once. But I love moments like this, where two  different interviews for two different publications about two people in different professions can berth some combined understanding, all the more if it helps me understand myself and where I fit into a deeper, longer, continuing story of this place.

 

 

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