Dislocation Blues

Sky Hopinka

United States – 2017
Video – duration 13 min

The Standing Rock Reservation is located in North Dakota and South Dakota in the United States. In 2016 the reservation got widespread media-coverage because of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests – a historic gathering of Indigenous communities that stood in solidarity to resist the construction of the pipeline. Dislocation Blues sketches a loose and highly personal reflection on the Standing Rock protest. The two main characters are Cleo Keahna and Terry Running Wild. Cleo tells his experiences of entering, being at, and leaving the camp and his difficulties in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

Sky Hopinka

― Artist

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 is currently based out of Vancouver B.C. and Milwaukee, WI. 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. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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