Journalist and independent filmmaker Kevin McKiernan’s new film, “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A reporter’s journey,” will be shown Saturday, Oct. 19, at the Eureka Theater, 612 F St. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the screening starts at 7 p.m.
Tickets for the documentary — inspired by a chance meeting several years back with Yurok tribal member Willard Carlson of the Klamath River region — are $12 general and $8 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased at Annex 39 (next to the theater) or at the door.
“I ran into Willard in 2011 when my wife and I were searching for a remote camping spot in Humboldt that might be free of tourists,” McKiernan said in an email interview with the Times-Standard. “That was when we inadvertently trespassed on Yurok land near Klamath village. At the time, Willard and his cousin were looking for a place to build a ceremonial site. We told each other we’d been at Wounded Knee in ’73 — Willard as an armed combatant against federal agents and me, a rookie reporter for NPR, who naively defied the news blackout imposed by the feds to quell the rebellion.”
McKiernan said at first he didn’t believe Carlson had been at the Wounded Knee occupation in South Dakota.
“After all, thousands claimed to have been at the Alamo when fewer than 190 were actually there,” he said. “Willard thought I was BS-ing, too. He took me down to his cabin on the Klamath. He showed me his proof: a group photo of him with a few dozen other warriors. That’s when I knew we were on solid ground. It turns out I took the photograph!”
Upon meeting Carlson, McKiernan remembers wondering why “a 20-year-old kid (would) drive 1,500 miles in the wintertime to fight the FBI. … In the end, I saw Willard as the micro story for a macro portrait of all the tribes that felt the same magnetic attraction to an uprising which, at 71 days, would become the longest act of civil disobedience in U.S. history.”
Following Wounded Knee, Carlson returned to California to fight for Yurok sovereignty and fishing rights on the Klamath River, according to McKiernan’s website, kevinmckiernan.com. McKiernan’s website also states that Carlson was at the 2016 pipeline resistance in Standing Rock (North Dakota), “where he and members of some 280 tribes have come together to oppose an 1,100-mile oil pipeline, which they believe threatens Native burial grounds and a precious water supply.”
McKiernan — whose other films include “The Spirit of Crazy Horse” (1990), “Good Kurds, Bad Kurds” (2000) and “Bringing King to China” (2011) — decided to make a film about Carlson’s “bittersweet journey from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock.” He took the idea for the film to the California Endowment for the Humanities (now called California Humanities) which, he said, provided the first funding for the project. The film premiered earlier this month at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
McKiernan — who served as the film’s writer, producer and director — visited Humboldt County a dozen times doing research and then filming over eight years.
“For research, I spent a lot of time with Jack Norton, the Hoopa Native and HSU professor emeritus who has written books on Northern California,” he said. “Jack educated me on how the Gold Rush triggered the Wiyot bloodletting on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay and the massacres along the Klamath River. … As a historian says in the film, the Golden State was not ‘golden’ for Native peoples.”
Norton is credited as an associate producer of the film as is Carlson. The late Haskell Wexler, two-time Academy Award winner (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Bound for Glory”), served as director of photography for “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock.”
McKiernan, of Santa Barbara, has been a foreign correspondent for more than 30 years and, according to his website, has reported from Central America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. His articles and photos have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor and other publications.
McKiernan will be on hand for the Eureka Theater screening Saturday. The local screening was put together and publicized by a group of Humboldt County residents, McKiernan said.
“One of the key organizers is Lonyx Landry, an administrator at HSU who wanted the film to cap Indigenous Week celebrations at HSU,” McKiernan said.
In an email interview with the Times-Standard, Landry said: “I have performed many collaborative activities with Willard — namely native science camps at his place, Ah Pah Traditional Village, where we connect the dots on advocacy, social justice and indigenous management practices in the development of today’s native scientists.”
He added: “My mother, Donna Landry-Rehling, and I answered the call to assist Willard in finding a venue and to assist with a bit of marketing for the film Willard is involved with. From my mother, councilwoman of the Nor Rel Muk Wintu Nation, I am Nor Rel Muk Wintu. We have family that are citizens of the Yurok Tribe and the Hoopa Valley Tribe, however, we are Nor Rel Muk Wintu (currently a federally unacknowledged tribe within the Klamath River Basin).”
Landry is pleased the film is coming to Humboldt County. “The struggles for environmental and social justice are still just as relevant now as they were in the 1970s when the second Wounded Knee and Klamath River fishing rights clashes occurred. This film helps to connect the dots of on-going struggles,” he said.
Jerry Rohde, a past president of the Humboldt County Historical Society and an author and historian, notes that people in Humboldt County are “gradually learning the story of the Indian genocide that occurred here in the 1850s and 1860s, but there is little awareness of what has happened to local Indians since that time.”
Carlson’s story, he said, “tells us much about the lives of Humboldt County Indians in recent times, and it also shows the connection that local Indians have with oppressed Native Americans elsewhere.”
For more information about the screening, go to eureka-theater.org
