Filmmaker Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore virtually returned to Halton Hills over the weekend - this time to present the short film The Clay She Is Made Of as part of Culture Days festivities. This was its first Canadian showing.
The roughly two-minute claymation tells the story of the legendary Sky Woman, a central figure in the Haudenosaunee creation story. Moore then guided a discussion with the 20 or so attendees.
“We just felt like this was such a powerful story, so relevant in this modern day,” Moore said.
The story is simple, yet profound. Sky Woman, who lives in a place called Sky World, is pregnant. That in itself is considered remarkable because her people don’t procreate.
Instead of replicating, she wanted “to offer an autonomous way of being for their descendants, not just replicas.”
One day, Sky Woman asks her husband to source her some roots from an uprooted tree. The tree left a void in the ground, which terrified him. She then decides to procure the roots herself. Some legends say she tripped, while others say she was pushed, but either way she fell into the void.
“She grabbed plants on her way down. She was trying to hold on to the Sky World,” Moore recounted the tale. “So as she was falling down to what is now Turtle Island, some geese saw her and they're like, ‘Holy cow! she's not going to make it.’ So they flew up to meet her and then carried her down.”
The earth was all water at this point, so the geese call up a turtle so that Sky Woman has a place to rest. The animals then packed the back of the turtle with dirt, creating Turtle Island, the name the Indigenous call North America. Sky Woman then sows the plants and seeds she brought from Sky World, creating the world we live in today. The video ends with a shot of Moore’s mother.
One of the lessons Moore derives from the story is that, “The natural world is there to feed us. The natural world is there to teach us. It’s all right there if we just open our eyes and allow those lessons to happen.”
Central to her entire way of thinking is this idea of narrative sovereignty, where the Indigenous take hold of their own stories and tell them as they were meant to be told.
“I feel like mainstream media entraps our narratives in very few ways of expressing ourselves," she noted.
