A short film based on a traditional Lingít tale will be premiering at the world’s largest Indigenous film festival this weekend. The 11-minute film made in Sitka is narrated entirely in Lingít with English subtitles, and features several Sitka locals.
The film opens with a scene of a man donning regalia, intercepted by aerial shots of Sitka. In Lingít, he says, “The berries were ripe. They were so good at that time.”
The short film is based on the traditional Lingít tale “The Woman Who Married A Bear.” There are multiple versions of the story, but the basic premise is that a woman is disrespectful to a bear while out picking berries with a friend and ends up marrying the bear disguised as a man and having a family with him.
“What I did with the traditional Lingít story was I wrote a contemporary version of it,” said Kaa,laa Mary Goddard, a Lingít artist and filmmaker based in Sitka, who wrote and produced the short film. “I wanted it to resonate with audiences today, but still be told in our traditional way, which is the oral Lingít storytelling.”
Goddard said the project has been in the works for several years, and was filmed last summer during salmonberry season.
In this modern, condensed retelling, a cell phone is central to the plot. Goddard said some themes she wanted to pull out of the story are being aware and being present.
“In modern society, a lot of times we are so distracted by our phones, we are so distracted about what looks good, what sounds fun, that we can be swept away into a completely different world, whether that world is addiction, whether that world is not living out your values,” she said. “And so without giving too much away, I want people to be able to watch this film and take away what they need to take away from it. But I believe the story is just as relevant today as it was hundreds of years ago.”
The 11-minute film is narrated completely in Lingít by X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, professor of Alaska Native Languages at University of Alaska Southeast. Twitchell said he’s studied the traditional tale quite a bit.
“The story is a really incredible Lingít story,” Twitchell said. “And what I really love is we have these different retellings of it, which I really like, because Lingít are not flat, one dimensional peoples. And so any story we have, there might be 10 different ways to tell it, although there are certain things that usually, most people want you to sort of get to.”
One of the biggest lessons from the story, Twitchell said, is to be respectful of nature.
“Ch’a Idakát át a yakg̱wahéiyag̱u ḵudzitee, ách áwé ch’a ldakát át a jeex̱ tootée at yáa awuné, there’s a living spirit inside of everything, which is why we give respect to all things. And when those things don’t happen, they’ll say, ‘Ux̱ kei kg̱watée i ḵutseeyí,’ your life will spin out of control,” he said.
Twitchell said he had fun finding translations for modern words and concepts in the script that haven’t traditionally existed in Lingít, like “taking selfies” and “texting,” which he translated to “yoo gushdatánk,” which means “thumb talking” in Lingít.
“For Indigenous languages, there’s a real challenge of modernizing our languages, because our languages were actively banished. We were forbidden to speak our own languages,” he said. “These were governments, these were churches, these were leaders who actively forbade us from speaking, so we didn’t get to hang out with a world as all these different things were being developed: boilers and engines and cell phones and all this other stuff.”
Twenty-three-year-old Gavi Kay Stroemer is an Indigenous Nakota Sioux model from Sitka, who makes her acting debut in this film as the woman who marries a bear. She thinks the modern retelling of the traditional story will help reach a younger audience.
“So I think this was a really, really brilliant idea,” Stroemer said. “Most people do respond well to modern teachings. They can hear the stories traditionally, but I think they more see it as like an old thing, you know, and teaching it in a more modern way, like a film, is, I think, a better way to speak to people now.”
Twitchell hopes the film gets people interested in learning more — to learn, or continue learning Lingít, and to delve deeper into Alaska Native stories.
“There’s a lot of people who taught me the stories of our people, and their voices echo through me,” Twitchell said. “As people listen to me, they’re listening to all the people who taught me Lingít, and then their intention in doing that was to make sure that all of our grandchildren would be speakers of the language. And I think that’s the direction we’re going, is that we’ll have a generation someday that’ll look back and say, ‘Whoa, this was almost gone? It’s all over the place.’ And we got a long road ahead of us to get there, but I think this project is one part of that road construction that gets us to a place of safety, which is where we deserve to be.”
The film team said they hope to continue to make more of these short films showcasing Alaska Native stories, or possibly even a full-length feature, in the future.
“This film is probably one of many to come, because it’s such a cool way to not only highlight Lingít stories, it’s a good way to get it out there to the younger generations,” said Lucas Goddard, who plays the bear in the film.
The Woman Who Married A Bear will premiere at the Red Nation International Film Festival in Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 15. It will also be showing in Sitka on Dec. 5 and at the Anchorage Film Festival on Dec. 13.
