This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Language is a powerful force for connection to culture, customs and history.
"Oyate Woyaka: The People Speak" shares the story of language loss and revitalization as told by Lakota elders. The feature-length film is directed by Bryant High Horse and George McAuliffe.
George joined "In the Moment" for a conversation detailing the process of making the film and reconnecting with nature and relatives.
This documentary premieres on SDPB Thursday, April 4, 2024, at 8 p.m. CT/7 p.m. MT.
The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
You are listening to In The Moment on SDPB, I'm Lori Walsh. Language and culture are intertwined in a relationship that shapes our identities, perceptions and interactions. Lakota language speakers have long understood this. Now they're working hard to preserve their language for generations to come. This morning I sat down with George McAuliffe. George is the co-director of "Oyate Woyaka, The People Speak." It's a new feature length documentary and it follows fluent Lakota speakers as they embrace their language and spirituality. Now, you can watch on SDPB TV on April 4th. That's at 8:00 PM Central, Seven Mountain. But here is my conversation with the co-director, George McAuliffe. This film goes back a number of years and it has a rather interesting genesis. Tell me a little bit about your uncle, Bryant High Horse and the work he had been doing with language and how you ended up folding that in with your work. Did you have an initial conversation with him?
George McAuliffe:
Yes. Well, we go way back. Bryant is very vocal about his language and culture and has been since we were kids. And I would always go to him for his perspective when I was a high school teacher and just getting the Lakota perspective on how you can work with other communities and putting your own upbringing aside and meeting people where they're at. So he was always influential, and I go to him for advice a lot. And in 2020, it was around the pandemic and there was a lot of things going on in the country as there are today, and then we were reconnecting and he said, "The Lakota language is left out of the national discussion and holds a lot of wisdom that can help people, and we should make a documentary about that 'cause the language is slowly dying."
And I said, "We should do that, but I don't know how to make a documentary film, so what do we do?" And then the next morning it really hit me that we have to do this. And I called him back and I said, "Okay, let's figure it out." And so over the course of four years, we've been figuring it out and the film has just been completed.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. What happened that night when you were thinking about it that you thought, "Okay, we have to do this", because that's a huge commitment that you've just made. You have lots of other options of things you can do with your time. You didn't know if it would be successful. What happened in your head the night before you said yes to your uncle?
George McAuliffe:
Well, it was just the deep value that I have for him as a person and his perspective and his influence on me. And I didn't know the language was in that state, so I thought it was something that would just be around. And when he put it in the way he did, I said I have to push other things aside and make this a priority because it just is too valuable to not do what we can to give voice to the state of the language and more importantly, the value of the Lakota language.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. I want to dive deeper into this because this is something that you handle really well in the film, I think, that this language holds wisdom in a way that someone who grew up speaking English and grew up in a western culture with a Western family might not realize. How do you articulate, and I understand that your uncle, who's not here right now, would be able to articulate this better than you and I, so I will direct people to the film for that. But what did you learn about the language itself and the way it holds wisdom in a very specific way?
George McAuliffe:
Yes, that's a great question. I do want to preface by saying that I am not the voice of the language and because of the weather and Bryant's teaching today, so two of our elders couldn't be here with us. So I think that's important. I wanted to make sure I was saying that, but from my experience, it's a spiritual language. So while English can be more commerce and noun based, the Lakota language is a deeper spiritual language that holds reverence for all living things. So it's not just about the human connection, it goes back in time through space, earth, all plant, animal, all life forms. So it really is this deep, deep, deep language that was evolved over thousands and thousands of years. So it holds really a lot of knowledge for how to actually be a human being on this land that we are on. So it goes that deep, and in the film they go into more of that. So you can really get a feeling to step into another reality system.
Lori Walsh:
And I think it's appropriate to have the conversation between you and I and many of our listeners. We have Lakota speakers on the show often, and they will speak Lakota. And so I feel really comfortable in this space is talking to those people who also might watch this film and be experiencing this anew. So I think that's totally okay, George. Let's talk a little bit about what happened to this language, why it is fading so quickly, and then we'll move into why it faded even more quickly during the time of Covid, during the time you're making this film. But first, what did you learn about the boarding school era and the way children were placed in an environment where they were intentionally forbidden, punished from speaking their language with the intent of genocide? What did you learn that you didn't already know while you were making this film about the US government's attempts to eradicate this language?
George McAuliffe:
Just that word is a great word, the intent. It was very intentional, and it was planned and it was something that was looked at at the time as this progressive movement and it was like, okay, well, because we want to end the massacres, we'll just massacre the mind instead. So they started kidnapping children essentially, and they were holding them as prisoners of war. A lot of times they would be taking the children of chiefs, to keep them from fighting, as hostages. So it was really this real diabolical thing that was going on. And then the treatment, even the use of the word boarding school is really not the right word because people associate that with, oh, this was a nice place to be educated, but it was really a place where there was manual labor. It was really education second. It was more just to break them from their language and spiritual ways. So yeah, it's not really a boarding school.
Lori Walsh:
And you film a lot of people who are telling that story, and it can be very difficult to tell those stories again, to tell stories of child abuse, of surviving this kind of abuse, of being afraid to speak your language, of learning for the first time, that that was part of what the intent was, that you were not going to be allowed to say a word in your language. Tell me a little bit about some of the people in the film and their experience with language when they were children.
George McAuliffe:
So a lot of the elders who were in the film were from these small pockets where the language was still present and spoken in their communities. That's Upper Cut Meat at Rosebud, Spring Creek, Wuambly. So these towns, they were actually, until they were taken to these boarding schools, they were brought up in their language. Like my Uncle Bryant, that's the way that he thinks. He's an original Lakota speaker. So they were brought up in these communities and then when they went to the boarding school, they quickly learned that language wasn't accepted and they experienced a lot of abuse and it's very emotional to even talk about it.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. How did you create, as a filmmaker, a place where you could be in the room with people sharing those kinds of stories and capture it in a way that was appropriate for the film, but that also didn't just repeat old damage? How did you think about that going in?
George McAuliffe:
I leaned on Bryant, that's why we co-directed this, and his presence and his influence in the community is what allowed a lot of these conversations to happen. So I wouldn't have been able to do it without him. And a lot of times I realized if there were certain... It's a different approach to filmmaking, I realized in some situations it was best if the camera was rolling, but I would leave the room more than I felt like I had to direct and run the show. It wasn't that kind of a filmmaking process. So it was really about just getting people together who are comfortable with each other and letting them lead the way. So I actually was a follower more than a director in the film.
Lori Walsh:
So in some ways, not having a background in documentary filmmaking maybe helped you. What do you think about that now?
George McAuliffe:
I think that's true. That's true. It is. It is. I knew early on there's no ego or it wasn't about me making a name for myself as a filmmaker. It was one project that we were working on, and I told Bryant, as long as he's here, I'm here with him and we'll continue to make projects, but we actually have a very different goal, it's for the people and it's not for ourselves. I think there's a different route too to filmmaking where a lot of people will go to these festivals or try to get on Netflix and go that route. And while that's great, people who live on the reservations may miss out on the story. So what would be the point of that? So we actually had a reverse strategy where we would make the film and give it right to the people. And that's why we are working with South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
Lori Walsh:
Does it give you a freedom to create the film pacing, for example, when you're working on editing to say, this doesn't have to move at the pace of Netflix, this can move at the pace of the story itself? Help me understand how knowing that that's what the film was for, knowing the highest purpose of the film changed how you made the film.
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad that you picked up on that watching it. There was a freedom in that to where we could let the story. The story would guide what we included in the film. We had over 40 hours of footage, and we actually, for one of the earlier cuts, we realized there wasn't enough Lakota in the film. And it's like, we are actually falling into the same traps of trying to explain the language through English. And we were watching it. We were like, "We need to go back and conduct more interviews in the language." And then that really brought the film to life. And that's why I think that it has such a strong impact from just our initial screening. And when I'm showing it to people, you can feel the language, even if you don't know what the words are, you can just feel that is a deep spiritual and healing language. And it comes across in the film.
Lori Walsh:
You can have two minutes of that language and not worry about somebody clicking off of it or what have you. But then you also, I think from your visual language, I would be curious to hear more about that because when I was watching it, I found it to be very meditative and patient and intimate. How did you think about the visual language of not only how you filmed people, but landscapes?
George McAuliffe:
Yeah. Well, that's when you're making a film about the Lakota language, it can't just be a human story. So when we were in the Black Hills for certain ceremonies, you can just see that it's evident that this is a part of the story. So we saw that and got a lot of filmmakers who could capture that in a really beautiful way, a combination of drone and 16 millimeter film and a variety of digital cameras. So we spent a lot of time in early mornings going and getting them at the right time and just showing different parts of the day, different seasons, different angles, different places around the Black Hills. There's a lot of spiritual locations that are in there. Some are labeled and some are just present, so we believe that they'll be felt. But that was a big goal of the film to capture animal life, plant life and the Black Hills.
Lori Walsh:
Did that process change you as well?
George McAuliffe:
Yes. I'm going to say the word wrong, but [foreign language 00:13:10] was a word that I learned along the way, and that's to look at yourself instead of looking at other people and pointing fingers, or. It's about going inside of yourself. And I feel like when you go inside of yourself, there's a whole world that's undiscovered and it's very deep and it's very freeing. And so just continuing to do that, to check in along the process of the filmmaking. And that helped me also outside, like I described, I live in Los Angeles, and I would go on these hikes and be thinking about what do I do? How do I make a living doing this as a career and all these different things, and looking out at the city and being like, "How do I do this for myself?"
And then throughout the process of this filmmaking with the Lakota people, I started turning my attention to the actual plants and actually turned my back on the city and was looking more at the plant life and the nature of the hike. So it just shifts you out of yourself and back into your place in the land and the cosmos.
Lori Walsh:
All right. You have a background in comedy and improv, which I have not done, but in my imagination, if you're on stage doing improv, there's a pacing to it, there's a pressure to it, there's a structure to it that most people don't see. Was this totally different from that or did they somehow feed each other? Help me understand in your mind, in your experience where the intersection of those two kinds of work happened for you.
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, I think there is just being able to, they call it the yes and, where you just go with the flow and you're in a moment and you don't go in with all these preconceived ideas and try to jam them into the process. So it really is a freeing way to stay present and in the moment and roll with the punches. Because in documentary filmmaking, it actually serves it really well because things do not always go according to plan. So you have to be ready to shift that at every moment. And that could be within the day of shooting or things falling apart and having to plan something new within that day. And this film had that happening at every level all the time, all the way up until the last moment where we delivered it. So yeah, it did help in that way. It did help.
Lori Walsh:
And Covid, a little thing called Covid. Also, you're filming this during 2021 is a very early scene happens in 2021 in the film. I'm not sure when you first started planning this, but a lot of it is during this time where Lakota elders are dying from the pandemic that more native or fluent language speakers are gone forever and taking that knowledge and that experience with them, but then also people have huge heavy thoughts about what's happening in the world as they're having these conversations. How did the pandemic influence the way this film was made?
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, that's a great question. It really, what it did was it stopped us and I feel like a lot of people felt that halt to their life as they knew it. And I think a lot of the challenges that we're up against is that it's just the pace of life is moving so quickly, it's hard to stop and reflect and take stock of where we're going, what's the goal, what is happening here? And I think Covid in one way stopped so we could have this deep connection between Bryant and myself and also look around in the world. And also in Los Angeles, there was more birds flying as the cars stopped and you just saw the resilience of life. And that was something that I was definitely aware of during this process.
In one way, it had that positive effect of being able to stop and reflect. And then of course there is this endangered language that is already feels like it's slipping away in certain ways. And then to have it Covid add fuel to that, that fire was really scary and lit a fire behind us to start getting the word out there that this is one of the most valuable resources in this world, and people have to be educated to what these languages hold, and also all hands on deck for making sure that more of them don't slip away because a lot of them already have.
Lori Walsh:
The theme of forgiveness comes up at one point as there are many, many stories about language eradication and child abuse, and then there is this idea that in order to move forward, the word forgiveness comes into the conversation in a really interesting way. How did you explore that theme?
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, that's a word that you have to be really careful with because it can be something where it's like people, I think, who are on the other side, who are the colonizer side will want that word 'cause they want to be set free from history in the past, and it's a way to just sweep it under the rug. But in the film it's thought of in a different way. It's a forgiveness as a way to get that history off of your own spirit and put it in the hands of the people who were committing these abuses. So it's not a way of forgetting what happened or giving a free pass, but it is a way to return to the language and get some of that negativity that is destructive and kills people through substance abuse and other ways of self-medicating the history. So it's a word you have to be very careful with, but also an important and valuable word.
Lori Walsh:
Something worth spending time with. You mentioned your uncle, Bryant High Horse is teaching and there are many teachers in this documentary and teaching in different ways with different methodology. And I don't know that it ever occurred to me as much as this film made me think of is how difficult it would be to not only speak your language that you were told as a child you couldn't speak, but to teach it and the act of teaching it as an incredible act of hope. I don't want to say defiance, that's probably not the right word. I'm struggling to even find the words. It is overwhelming what it means to stand in front of young people and teach this language, yet so many of these elders are doing it faithfully and daily. Tell me a little bit about the teachers of the language and what they're hoping they can pass down to the next generations.
George McAuliffe:
Yes. Well, it's Dollie Red Elk is one of the great teachers and people in the film, and Bryant High Horse of course, but also Sage Fast Dog and Leland Little Dog who started an immersion school on Rosebud, Duane Hollow Horn Bear. I mean, everybody really is an educator. And in the film they speak about this when they were, because of their experiences and seeing the world moving so fast in a different direction, they were scared how their children would be treated and had a lot of fear to the point where they weren't passing the language down. It was that strong and the trauma was that deep with inside of them.
And over time though, they see that that leads people to be, as Bryant talks about being caught in between two worlds where they're not accepted in the dominant culture and they don't have their own language and culture. So he said, "It's a lonely place when you get stuck in between those two." So I think over their lifetimes, they saw and always knew the value of this culture because a spiritual healing language. And I think that's what drives them to have the courage to get up there and start speaking and teaching the language
Lori Walsh:
In the middle of all of this, the return of the remains of several children from the Carlisle Indian School unfolds as you're filming this. Did you expect that part of the documentary to be included? Was that something that happened and you were able to pivot in that direction?
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, well, I didn't know about it in the beginning of the process, but as they talk about it was 18 years in the making and 142 really since it happened, but 18 years that they knew they wanted to bring these kids back. And then the Rosebud Youth Council five years before that, and that was in 2021, that they were brought back, really lit the fire to get that done. And so I knew a little bit about it, but then we were filming some of the immersion school and some other things, some of the planning, and we didn't want to overstep and be filming that. So we were hesitant. We knew it was important and important to the healing and bringing the language back, but it was a last minute thing where we were allowed to be a part of that and told we had permission to come and do that. So we picked up one of our cameramen from the airport and drove to Sioux City, Iowa and just started documenting that process. And I've never experienced something more powerful in my life.
Lori Walsh:
Incredibly humbling project that you've been a part of. So you're riding around South Dakota, you're in the truck with your uncle, cameras are off. What are you talking about?
George McAuliffe:
Well, he wasn't there for that trip, but he is there every step of the way through conversations. And it's not something that he... He has mixed feelings because in one way we wish we weren't here making the film, we wish it wasn't at this place where it is. And there's a lot of grief in that and a lot of sadness. And so we have to always go back and forth between healing from the experiences of sharing in the film and then rebuilding our courage to go into the next portion and keep the story going and reconnecting to the purpose that drove us to make the film.
So the conversations are, oh, there are so many, but it's just, I think it's really what he's been sharing with me since I was a little boy is it's just the depth that takes... I don't understand it. I have a pinky toe in the world, but I know its value, and I know he's looking at the world through a completely different lens, if that makes sense. So it's like he has a different worldview and he's trying to figure out ways to use technology in the modern world to communicate something that has more depth than I think we could ever explain in 60 minutes as conversations are a lot of, they're very deep.
Lori Walsh:
What will you do next? Because this is the first time you and I have talked, so I can't say that this project changed you as an artist, but I can guess that it did. And I want to know what does George do next?
George McAuliffe:
Yeah, well, it's an interesting time because we're already talking about the next project with Bryant, and that's what I'm always going to be working on something with him, and that's in the early stages. And I was like, "Well, let's show it maybe to people before we go into the next one, because that's going to have its own life of connection. So we're in the early stages of planning a film that hopefully has more depth and we need help with funding 'cause this one was really, a lot of the length of time that it took was finding the funding to create the documentary, but I'm also developing a comedy show with Judd Apatow, who's a well-known comedy producer.
And 10 years ago I would've said, "What is better than that? What's better than working with someone", and it is a great experience, and we're going to pitch a television show with him. But to me, I'm like, it's become an afterthought. And these projects, this is what I'm doing, what I'm passionate about, and what I'm going to be putting my energy into. So I have to protect my energy to keep this new documentary career going.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, yeah. I love that. Anything that we didn't talk about? Oh, I wanted to ask you about the event in the SDPB, Rapid City space where people gathered, what came out of that night that had meaning for you?
George McAuliffe:
Oh, that was a really great night, and we appreciate everybody from South Dakota Public Broadcasting and the Journey Museum who helped us put that on. It was really, really special to have everybody who was in the film, minus a few people who couldn't make it for weather and personal reasons, but there was a large number of people involved with the film who got to come together and see it. And I think there was a lot of the mixed feelings. There was a lot of vulnerable things shared that were watched and felt. And then I think it was also an inspiring night for a lot of people, and it's just such a positive documentary. We stay away from the symptoms of the disease of colonization, like drugs and alcohol and all the negativity that people often present in documentary film with Lakota people. And it's the positive side of their culture, and it's deep, and it was put on screen, and I think everybody connected over it.
And there was just so many great compliments afterwards. And I was at the Welcome Back the Thunders, beings the day after we went to the top of Black Elk Peak, and I ran into a guy and he goes, "George", and I go, "Oh, I've never met you before." And it was a man from Ireland. And he said, "I know we didn't meet, but I saw the film and this is just what humanity needs right now, is this film."
Lori Walsh:
Wow.
George McAuliffe:
And that really hit me because was I felt that it could connect to people all over the world with the focus, of course, on the Lakota people and indigenous communities across the country and world. But when he said that, I was like, oh, this is a human story that can really connect. And that gave me a lot of hope.
Lori Walsh:
I love that. Tune in to "Oyate Woyaka, The People Speak." It's a new feature length documentary, co-directed by George McAuliffe and Bryant High Horse Jr. SDPB provided production assistance and the broadcast for the program.
