May 2006

Interview by Margaret Sagan of FVC, NMAI

MRS: Good morning, Carol. First, just to begin, I'd like to know where you're from.

CK: Well, I was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is in central Bolivia, in a town called Quillacollo. I didn't really grow up there. I left there when I was three years old. I came here to New York with my parents.

MRS: You've worked for many years in international policy making. Could you please describe how indigenous communities can use international policy as a tool to strengthen their collective rights?

CK: First I want to mention that if they do try and use international policy [they need] a lot of patience, because it's the governments of the nation-states, the members of the UN, that make the final decisions on how policies are going to change or not. Those nation-states have been very influenced and almost guarded, I would say, by the private sector: the oil industry, mining, industrial agriculture, et cetera.

For the past few decades, while it's difficult for them to do so, most indigenous peoples have been putting part of their efforts in the international arena, while still keeping their other efforts and their other energies at the local and national level. If you put all your eggs in the international basket—it moves at the speed of a glacier. It's not the most effective, but it's the place that indigenous peoples thought they needed to take their struggles—because indigenous peoples are peoples just as the German peoples or the British or any others, with their own government systems, with their own forms of social organization, political organization and their own languages. So the international arena is where they should be and have chosen to be.

MRS: Please describe the relationship between international political organizations, nation-states, non-governmental organizations, and indigenous organizations. Do they work in concert?

CK: Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. In order for indigenous peoples to have any type of status within the UN system, they have to form non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In a way it's ironic, because many of them are governments in and of themselves, so how can they be non-governmental? But many of them have chosen to say, "OK, if we're going to play in the UN system we have to play by their rules, so we're going to form non-governmental organizations."

If the NGO functions well, it has very strong ties to the local, traditional community and gets its guidance from the traditional structures at the grassroots level. What they usually do is try to get what's called "consul status" in the UN System, so that they can register and participate in any of the policy-making discussions they feel are important to them. That's how the link is made to the grassroots communities-through the NGOs.

MRS: You've been working within policy-making discussions around issues of food. How's food an expression of culture? And why is that important to you?

CK: It became important to me a long time ago, just understanding who I was living here in the US. It was through a lot of the food-related traditions that my mother kept really strong ties to our background and to our homeland. Some of my favorites are a lot of the soups that my mother makes with quinoa and with peanuts. I also really like the jerky that we used to have; when I have been lucky enough to be able to go back to, I try and get some of the llama jerky that they have there.

We're still really happy when we can find some of the traditional foods that we used to eat back home. Lately it's become easier to do that, there are a lot of stores that sell those types of things. When we have relatives who come here they often bring whatever they can.

So, I have a personal tie to food as a cultural expression and as part of cultural identity. When genetically-modified foods came to the forefront of our reality…it freaked me out. I felt like by working on food issues, especially now in this globalized era, that it would be a really good way to link with other people, not just indigenous peoples, but to form strong alliances to help move the flow of things into a direction that was healthier and wiser for everybody on this planet.

And I know that it's always been an important issue for the indigenous peoples that I've worked with….The food, the welcoming that they would give us, the foods that they would serve, they were so proud and happy and honored to be able to share that with us, and to be able to tell us the stories that were behind the salmon or the caribou or any of the types of corn that they would serve us. You knew that their identity was very much tied into it.

In Indian cultures, they consider themselves descendents of these foods. The Mayan people are the people of the corn for example: los hombres del maíz. There are people who are salmon people, there are people who are caribou people, like the Gwich'in in Alaska. Their whole being stems from it, even some of the clan systems are based on foods and crops…it's very much literally part of many indigenous people's cultural identity, and their food systems carry a lot of their singing traditions and their dances. Their overall health depends very much on them being able to eat that food—in the season when it's supposed to be eaten, not in the seasons when the federal government, or state government decides it should be hunted or gathered or sown.

MRS: I know that you recently came back from living in Alaska and I was wondering if you would like to describe the indigenous community and the community work that you've been doing.

CK: Sure. Chickaloon Village in south-central Alaska, the community that I lived in, is pretty unique because the traditional leadership, both male and female, in that community has been at the forefront of the sovereignty movement there.

They've also been very active in creating bridges that help to heal some of the misunderstanding or misconceptions between Native and non-Native in the work that they've done. In their clinic for example, they decided that they would want to try and help as many people as possible…with some of their employment services and the access to computers that they provided to the public, they wanted to make sure that the non-Native people who live near-by could also have access to that, so that the entire community would benefit.

They have been affected a lot by mineral extraction up there, because there has been a lot of coal development over the past decades. And their subsistence food, their salmon in particular, has suffered under the impact, and of course the people have too. Through the mining that was done there, a lot of the rivers were contaminated. It made it impossible for the salmon to really be healthy there and thrive. Some of the environmental work that they've done there has been really ground-breaking—they've been able to re-route and recreate the original path that the salmon used to take into this one creek. They've been able to bring the salmon back to that creek, to a fairly healthy population, little by little.

One of the areas that I've been helping them with is strategic planning and gathering some of the traditional knowledge from the elders through interviews and visits, so that they could have a traditional basis for the laws that they developed in order to protect the environment. I worked on [coordinating] an environmental ordinance for them, and I'm helping them also in grant-writing for that Moose Creek restoration project.

MRS: Is there youth participation in any of these efforts? Is that traditional knowledge being passed down within the community?

CK: It is. [Chickaloon] has a strong language program. There aren't very many elders who speak the language, there aren't that many Ahtna Athabascan speakers left. They've been involved in documenting the language through a really innovative and creative language program that includes interactive media.

Another way that they've been doing wonderful work is through their traditional school. If I'm not mistaken, they created the first Alaskan Native traditional school in Alaska, where they teach not only the standard reading writing and 'rithmetic, western-style, but they also teach the Ahtna language and the traditional stories. The young people do extremely well on standard tests…in Alaska; they have been on radio and television in some interviews, and they bring a lot of confidence with them when they speak in public. Many people think it's because they know who they are, because they have that strong basis in their language and their traditional stories.

MRS: How can community video also be a way of knowing who you are?

CK: In remembering back to some of the videos and discussions that I had with indigenous people, Native filmmakers from Bolivia, for example, I know that there's been a lot of self-knowledge and resurgence of pride in who they are as peoples that has arisen through the use of media. Many of them have said, "You know, when we see ourselves on the screen, it really strengthens our sense of self. It inspires us to delve even more into understanding our older stories, the tribal stories." Many of them have been able to take those traditional stories and put them into genres like fiction, inspiring the young people to want to go back to these stories as well. And they see that they are using a modern technology to bring these stories back, to recapture them in a really interesting way.

Many of them want to learn media and continue on being expressive and having the courage to say who they are and do so proudly. In many countries in Latin America, in Bolivia in particular, the element of racism is still very strong. It's not quite like it is here. To be a Native person here it's almost…in the past decade or so it's kind of cool or sexy to be Native, no matter what fraction Native you might be.

But there, and in other countries in Latin America, the ones who have the hardest times are the ones who are influenced by the type of racism and subjugation that they find, especially if they have any interaction with the city people. They go to the urban areas to try and find work, because some of the climate conditions are changing the way their agriculture can survive. They confront so much mistreatment and racism that some of them decide to perm their hair so that it's curly, or they change their last name from their Native last name to a more Spanish last name, and try to fit in that way. I think that little by little that that's changing but it's still a big struggle. The media is helping the resurgence in indigenous pride and in wanting to know more about and recover a lot of the traditions.

MRS: We're here at the Selectors Meeting for the Native American Film and Video Festival. What do you personally look for while you're evaluating videos for the festival?

CK: I try and keep any type of judgments I might have about the videos in the context of, "What access do the local people there, the media makers, have to other ways of seeing, other ways of thinking.?" I look for something that speaks from direct experience rather than being a view of something from the outside If the filmmaker really allows the voice of the local people to come through strongly, that's always an advantage for any video or any film. I look if it expresses something that really no other filmmaker could express or no other people could express.

MRS: How did you get involved in media to begin with?

CK: ….I think I got involved mainly through my writing, through trying to communicate, not just the Native public in the Native journals and newspapers that I used to write for, but also to a more general audience, about all of the different levels of issues that indigenous peoples are dealing with: day-to-day survival and their long-term aspirations for how they want to develop as peoples, what type of future they want to leave for their children and grandchildren.

I saw how important it was to use any possible tool to communicate those things. And it doesn't necessarily have to be in a dry depressing documentary style. It can be told through fiction. A lot of factual things can be expressed through fiction, sometimes much more powerfully than in documentary. So I've always been interested in writing as a communication tool, not just journalistic writing but also short story writing. I see the short story aspect of video as well: storytelling, narrative. And that's why I got interested.

Image credit: Carol Kalafatic - photograph by Tim Warner