In confidence

Beach House is from Baltimore.

The band, I mean, the ones in the perennial memes about “songs that make you want to kill yourself.” I never related to these memes because Beach House, specifically their album Depression Cherry, reminds me of the times I danced on the edge of a knife without knowing it and came back unscathed. “Levitation” is like an anthem for the girl I used to be, the one who sort of bumbled and charmed his way through the Native film industry and its associates.

By “associates” I mean the prestigious and the white and the gatekept. It’s funny, if you’re a white person in a position of power at a film festival, chances are I think of you as an attachment to the main apparatus, i.e. Native film. You’re likely filtered through several gaussian filters of relatives, friends, enemies, years’ worth of generational alliance or beef defining the individual you might name-drop to show you know your Indigenous stuff. Some of you have picked up on this, the way I or my family–with all we entail–pinch our faces a little or go extremely still when you say you know so-and-so, assuming we’re close.

Recently, a director and I had a long overdue heart-to-heart, where I confronted them about what I felt was my exclusion from a key process in a film I loved dearly. They informed me that the casting was not biased against my gender, but that the producers wanted someone who could “bring audience.”

“That is not to diminish what you’ve done,” the director said, “or what you still are capable of.”

I inhaled slowly and exhaled slower. “White audience, you mean. Because, and I don’t mean to humble-brag, or whatever, but I am so… loved.”

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve written here. A lot of the previous entries on this blog have formed the bones of my first manuscript, which I have big news about, coming soon, but that’s led me to view this website through a lens of heightened scrutiny. Do I have anything book-worthy to say? Should I stop? What if I post something here and I want to absorb it into the book? Etc. But after my discussion with the director and subsequent unpacking with my dad, I’ve decided to return to this blog with a looser sense. This is my scratchpad now. I’ll use this space to work out the big ideas before I go forward narrowing them down into essays that make sense, submitting them to institutional places that ask for such things.

One big idea is something my dad asked of me. He wants me to write about how I view “audience,” not as a broad demographic, i.e. white cinephiles between the ages of 27-50, for example, but relationally. He brought up the points I made to the director: how I might not have a large following at all, but those who do follow me love me. How I don’t hold that lightly, and what I do is for them. For you.

There was a time when I wanted a zillion followers because I was an older Gen Z, Millennial cusp, and the internet was our gold rush. I was chronically online back when that sorta meant something. When it was a hermetic art practiced by a terrible few. Now, everyone else seems to be chronically online, tapped in to identical drip-feeds of memes I simply do not understand–what is an “October canon event” and why does everyone want one so bad?–and overtaken by bloodlust. Celebrities, callouts, misinformation, panic. I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want to be recognized by random people who use TikTok at work, I don’t want my casual words thrown at me as if they’re the sum total of my existence while I’m trying to buy a drink.

I told the director that within my small following are people I would consider to be “the Canon” of Native literature and film. That I love these people, that I trust them, that many love and trust me in return. This is my definition of an audience, and, judging by the overwhelming number of copies Bottlecap Press had to print of my debut chapbook, they are powerful and voracious. I don’t name-drop them, not without permission, but back when I had a memorable name, I remember many of them name-dropping me amongst themselves. I remember because some would call me and say “We were just talking about you,” and I would smile because I missed them dearly and wanted so badly to return to life as it was, to the pre-pandemic flurry of film festivals and speed-dates with producers, to the elevator pitches and the hookups and the fights and the filth. To the redemption.

Or, as Beach House sings in that devastating song, “You will grow too quick, then you will get over it.”

When I first relocated to Baltimore, it was partially out of desire to see if I could recreate or forge a similar thing to what I’d received from the Native Canon. I’d had what Smokii and I call my “nepo baby dinner” in Minneapolis a few months prior and I fled from it, not due to a lack of gratitude, but in curiosity. Could I go somewhere as myself, with this new name and new face, and could I move as I had before, but better? More controlled? The girl I was trembled through the tides of the industry, frightened and seductive in his smallness. I’m bigger, now, and colder. I’m not desperate. When I meet people, I meet people. That’s it. There’s no expectation, no open wound in my heart begging for someone to balm it. With money, with love, with lust. There’s just the conversation and where we’re having it. Sometimes it becomes something. Or it’s just that.

I joined a group here called Crew Call. They serve film workers “below the line,” which is to say, marginalized people. There’s a budding film industry here. A good one. I don’t want to say too much about it because it’s still being born, and I hold to Anishinaabe baby protocols even when the baby is an “it” or a “we.” But I will say, I met some of these film workers and fell in love instantly.

One of my uncles, cousins, whatever you want to refer to him as, lives in LA right now. He called me to check in.

“Why Baltimore?” he said, suddenly serious.

I was standing in the stairwell of Native American Lifelines, staring out at the midtown Belvedere skyline. “It’s… there’s something. Here.” I swung one leg back and forth, a tic I didn’t realize I had until I started to write about my phone calls. “When I first came here, the people, they… they grabbed hold of me? They pulled me in. They want me here and I… I want them.”

He laughed. “How old are you?”

“Twenty seven. I just turned twenty seven.”

“Ah, that sounds about right. That’s about how old I was. Maybe a little older than you, actually. When I found my place.”

I won’t tell you where it was, on the off chance you’ll be able to guess who I’m talking to, but it wasn’t LA.

So. Audience.

When I was little (I know I’ve told you this story before, just bear with me) and I couldn’t sleep, my dad would tell me to make a list in my head of everyone who loves me. I would start and then get overwhelmed and cry, which put me to sleep pretty quick. I do this often, now, within reason, but it has a different utility. It keeps me accountable to the unspoken contracts I’ve entered into with so many of you. It reminds me who I am within your orbit, within your world, and what I can offer you. It’s different than, say, an influencer having to churn out content for a bunch of anonymized, numerically weighted human beings who have way too much power over a stranger, because we’re not strangers. We’ve met before, or we’ve spoken virtually for long enough that we might as well have. Your lives are not mere illusions to me, they’re meaningful. They have a gravitational pull. We’re not a figurehead and a legion of demanding mouths, we’re planets in orbit around similar suns.

I want to write about you as much as I want to write for you. So, scratchpad. So, research. So the work continues.

In confidence.