Tracing Roots (review)

TRACING ROOTS is a documentary and partnership between filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein and master weaver Dolores Churchill. It traces Dolores’s interest in a woven hat found with Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi (Long Ago Man Found)—a man who lived about two hundred years ago and whose body was retrieved from a retreating glacier in northern British Columbia.

The documentary has ample landscape shots, coupled with acoustic guitar folk music, to convey the idyllic natural environments of Dolores Churchill and Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi. But the frames that are most striking are those of Churchill’s hands. They speak to her contemporary environment as cogently as the vistas themselves. Dolores’s hands often fill the screen and are variously harvesting spruce roots, opening museum cabinets, weaving roots, weaving wool, or translating woven objects into texts. The most striking landscape is the one built by Dolores and her daughter, Evelyn Vanderhoop (also an expert weaver). Together, they arrange driftwood, seaweed, rocks, and fungus to create a map of the coastal territories of the Pacific Northwest nations.

As curator Steve Henrickson says in the film, “Baskets are her [Dolores’s] teacher.” Through processes of reverse engineering, Dolores tries to answer questions about baskets and their makers. After visiting the hat at an archive in Whitehorse, Canada, Dolores begins making her own version as true as she can to the original in order to think about how old the hat is in relation to its wearer, whether it was handed down to him, and who made it for him.

A real asset to the film is the slow unraveling of firm categories—even for Dolores herself. Viewers from art historical, museological, or anthropological backgrounds will be well aware of the historical tendency—and its ongoing legacy—to construct bounded classifications of objects based on form and function, and to construct correspondingly bounded notions of culture. Dolores herself repeats a common perception that weaving in a counterclockwise direction indicates Haida hands, and that weaving in a clockwise direction indicates Tlingit hands. But a number of these clear distinctions are gently disrupted by the objects we encounter throughout the film: Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi’s diet and clothing show evidence of living both coastally and in the interior; the hat’s role as an example of weaving gives way to its existence as a grave good; and finally (spoiler alert) the hat shows evidence of two weaving traditions in coexistence. There has always been an exchange of intellectual property, Dolores observes, “that’s something I really learned from this hat.”

For a film partially funded by the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project, and largely filmed in Haida territory, it is not surprising the term “intellectual property” is peppered throughout the narrative. Dolores herself uses the term often enough—though in a Haida sense, not a Canadian legal sense. We get short but telling insights into Haida ownership concepts and the ways knowledge was expected to circulate historically. Though again, just as with the objects we encounter in the film, the anecdotes in the film disrupt any pristine ethnography comprising definitive cultural values and calculated exchange patterns (think George Murdock’s description of a potlatch). Pivotal choices to supersede knowledge-sharing practices in the twentieth century are raised, including Dolores’s mother’s choice to teach weaving outside her own clan, and even to non-Indigenous people. Dolores, for her own part, was taught weaving by her mother and by weavers from multiple nations along the coast. Lest one think the insertion of “intellectual property” makes academics the target audience, there are poignant comments from Dolores that I suspect will make the film resonate with Haida, Tlingit, Tsmishian, and other neighbors: Dolores’s sense that the weavers from neighboring nations had a plan for her, for example—that they knew what they were doing in opening up their knowledge to her. As for the notion that cultural protocols around knowledge-sharing almost led to the end of weaving, Dolores casts that aside and offers an alternative theory: weaving was hidden...