indigenous peoples Archives -

11 Feb

The Legend of Sarila – Inuit inspired kid’s film

sarila-poster Recently I found a kid’s film called “The Legend of Sarila,” which takes its inspiration from the Canadian arctic.

The story arc is straight up hero’s journey: leave home, pass trials, gain knowledge, mysterious helper, return home with rewards and establish new order. That’s fine. There are some reasonable portrayals of the Arctic landscape: caribou, seals, lichen, wide open tundra landscape. There are several scenes where I thought they really got the lighting right. There’s a wonderful warm glow that happens when the sun is low to the horizon in the north. It’s the golden hour for photographers around the globe, but at the higher latitudes it lasts a long while and you can enjoy it.

The destination for the little protagonist group (three friends, aka a love triangle) is Sarila, a mythical land of plenty. When they arrive, it is a beautiful, bountiful boreal forest: trees and berries and tasty tasty herbivores. Since that’s the biome that I grew up in, I was greatly amused and probably more positively disposed toward the film that I might have been otherwise.

legend-sarila-boreal

Of course, it’s far from perfect. The carryover of actual cultural detail may be a bit thin, as this Animation Scoop review points out.

Given the beauty of the Inuit carvings of humans and animals, Legend of Sarila should be a visual feast. But the viewer looks in vain for that influence on the designs, aside from the occasional angle of a cheekbone. The animation is weightless and inexpressive, indistinguishable from countless other recent CG features.

The Legend of Sarila is apparently Canada’s first 3D animation. I’m agnostic on animation styles in this case, but I’ll throw in with the Animation Scoop reviewer and wish that there was a bit more artistic influence on the character design. I’ve recently been reading about Arctic facial tattoos (another blogpost soon!), but Sedna’s the only one who gets any. I’m glad they included those, but the portrayal of Sedna with fingers was the first wrinkle for me. Sedna is one of the legends that was part of my own childhood, so I take this a bit personally. The whole point of her story is that she doesn’t have fingers! Briefly, Sedna accidentally marries a bird. When she tries to return home, her husband calls up a storm and she falls out of the boat. Rather than helping her back in, her father, who doesn’t score a lot of points for contemporary supportive parenting, cuts off her fingers as she clings to the gunnels. The finger bits become sea mammals; Sedna becomes a fingerless undersea goddess who controls the marine food supply.

The Legend of Sarila - Sedna and Markussi

Even with these caveats, I’d say give it a watch if you have any interest in the arctic. It’s not long, and if you’re looking to expose your kids to a different biome — or, for those of already in the north — watch a story set somewhere familiar, it’s worth the time. Particularly if, like me, you’re looking for a distraction while working on a craft project. (Apparently quilting involves a lot of fabric cutting before any actual sewing happens. Who knew?)

As a postscript, I looked up the film online when I started writing up my reactions and discovered the biggest mistake that the film’s producers made: trying to market it in the US as “Frozen Land.” That lasted for about six seconds before Disney’s lawyers shut it down.

16 Jul

New acquisitions: Children’s books about the Russian Far East

A pile of RFE children’s books

Alaska has a different relationship with Russia than any other American state. It’s a geographic, historical, and even emotional connection. After all, as Sara Palin put it, we can see Russia from our backyards. As you might imagine, the political border between northwestern Alaska and northeastern Russia, is one that was largely disregarded by the indigenous peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait until the Cold War got far enough along to enforce the border and separate families. The Iron Curtain was something that dropped down in Eastern Europe. Alaska and the Russian Far East were divided by the Ice Curtain, and when it began to melt sister-city ties were established that were truer siblings than many such international relationships. Exchanges happened as well, including with my hometown.

The exchange visits were more than a swap of people: they were exchanges of material goods, mostly in the form of gifts. I remember collecting bubble gum for some sort of international care package when I was in second grade, because we understood that Soviet children were deprived of this ubiquitous American luxury. In high school, when I took my first international trip to Magadan, each American student carried one piece of luggage, and one box of printer paper for the school we would visit. I returned with VHS tapes that would not play, but visitors who stayed with us brought jewelry (lots of mineral wealth in the RFE), brightly colored scarves, watches, and children’s books if they knew their hosts had children. Read More →

09 Jul

Going native

Art by Jennifer Norton

I’m back in Seattle, but before I left Alaska, I spent an evening going to art openings with my mother in my hometown of Homer, Alaska. It’s a bit of a nostalgia thing, really, as she used to cover arts for the local paper, and I tagged along with her to many many openings as a child. Homer is a big art town, so there’s quite a bit to see.

Our first stop was Bunnell Street, a restored building housing a wonderful gallery and a bed and breakfast. Rather than a single artist’s work, their current exhibition is a curated collection by a variety of Alaskan artists.

During the opening, the curator stood up and spoke to the crowd about his experiences coming to Alaska, originally as a seasonal worker. The first question that many people asked him was, ‘how long have you been here?’ Now that he’s lived in-state for ten years, he still feels like there is a line drawn in the sand, and he wanted address that with the show. Here’s his statement on the idea behind the show. Read More →

12 Jun

Trans Siberian Stories

Jesup North Pacific Expedition: Vladimir Jochelson, Norman G. Buxton, and Vladimir Bogoras

Part of my research texts for my Isobel the Bear-Eater Project have been the writings of Waldemar Bogoras, who spent some time hanging out with the Chukchi in the Russian Far East. His work was part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, and was published through the the American Museum of Natural History. Other authors in the same twelve volume series included Franz Boas and John Swanton. Bogoras recorded folk stories and daily practices, trying to get the whole culture down on paper. An impossible task, if you ask me, but I appreciate what he recorded.

Two of the stories Bogoras included particularly interested me. Both are listed as “Told by Qo’tirgin, a Maritime Chukchee man, in the village of Mi’sqAn, November, 1900.”* Read More →

28 May

Research reading: Hopping

I discovered recently, to my great joy, that I can still use my grad school credentials to log in to Project Muse and access a wide variety of academic publications. I spent a happy evening going down the rabbit holes of different search queries – ‘salmon anthropology’, ‘mongol horde history’, ‘transvestite shaman’.

The last, of course, is when my taller half looked over my shoulder. His query: What are you doing?

Research. I’m doing research for Isobel the Bear-Eater, because her story is set in a place not so different from Siberia and the Russian Far East, although I am adding in a healthy dose of my own knowledge and experiences from Alaska, and taking a great many liberties in mixing my own imagination in with true cultures described in historical and anthropological accounts. The more I know about these places, the richer my writing will be. Read More →

22 May

Hunting with Golden Eagles

Lady-berkutchi Makpal Abdrazakova, aka “eagle-babe”

Maybe you’ve heard of falconry, the practice of training birds of prey to catch small animals and bring them back to human handlers. Personally, I associate them with medieval Europe. However, the International Association for Falconry and Conservation of Birds of Prey informs me that falconry was already popular in Mongolia 3000 years ago, and it’s still practiced in contemporary central Asia. And don’t go assuming that “falconry” is only for falcons, because I got on this track after reading about Makpal Abdrazakova, the only woman in Kazakstan who has been trained as a berkutchi, or golden eagle hunter. Read More →