Janine Jackson interviewed Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso about her film Powerlands for the September 2, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Powerlands is an award-winning documentary film about resource extraction and its impacts on Indigenous communities around the world. But if that’s all we, as watchers, take away, then we’re sort of missing the point, and may be almost part of the problem.
The film is about resource colonization, about the way that the same for-profit corporate forces that once took away whole peoples now do the same thing under the radar by usurping the resources, the minerals, the water out from under those people.
Powerlands (2022)
It asks those of us who aren’t at the immediate sharp end to see and to connect our interests in not harming people in Colombia, for example, with the desire to make use of this stuff that we don’t even know comes out from that extraction, that arrangement.
So saying Powerlands, the film, has won awards might imply that we understand that there’s a message, and we are engaged with answering that question, but that’s not necessarily the case. So if Powerlands didn’t need to be made, well, then Powerlands wouldn’t have been made.
We are joined now by Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. Powerlands is her first feature film. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso.
Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Many people might say, “OK. You’re documenting something in the film. You’re showing us something.” But you started out to say a certain kind of thing, and then it kind of expanded into many, many things. Can you just maybe start us off where you started off, and what was the process about?
ICMT: Yeah, so I grew up in Black Mesa, where Peabody Coal and BHP have been mining since the 1960s, and my family is on the wrong side of the fence. We’re on what’s called HPL, Hopi Partition Lands, not NPL, Navajo Partition Lands.
So I was born into the resistance. I come from the resistance. So that’s what I’ve always grown up knowing. And when I first met Jordan Flaherty, my producer, he had just come back from Colombia, filming a BHP coal mining site.
And we were talking about the similarities between the two. And that’s really where the whole conversation started. It’s been like, wow, this one company has done the exact same thing to these two communities.
And you almost wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, besides the language and they have monkeys. They look very similar. They sound very similar. We eat very similar.
And one thing that I’ve always grown up with is having what I call poverty porn constantly around me in, like, National Geographic, put on news stations. Like even late at night, with that sad Sarah McLachlan music behind it, it would be pictures of my family and my home and the things that I resonated with, flies flying around extended bellies.
And when I see my home, that’s not what I see. I see vibrant, brilliant, smart, funny people. And that’s exactly what we saw in Colombia and in the Philippines and in Oaxaca and in Standing Rock.
Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso: “Indigenous people should be telling Indigenous stories because we see ourselves as people more so than anyone else ever will.”
And for me, it was just showing those human connections, those emotional connections, as well as showing that we’re all connected by these corporations at the same time. We’re all fighting the same, not to say, like, enemy—but enemy.
And I think that Indigenous people should be telling Indigenous stories because we see ourselves as people more so than anyone else ever will. And the thing is, is everyone’s indigenous to somewhere, so behave like you’re Indigenous.
And that’s what the root of the film is, is that we’re all together. We’re all in this together. We all laugh, we all cook. We all love, we all dance and sing. And we all need this planet to survive.
JJ: You know, I launched us right into the middle of it, and I think many folks come to it as, “All right. Well, there’s a relationship between folks who need resources and folks who have resources.”
But there’s a reason to start in the complicated middle, and to say that it’s not a simple question of users and extractors; we’re people across these lines. And what I think is so extremely important about the film is that it makes those connections, and it connects those dots.
I think we’re past it in 2022. I think those of us who are trying to think critically are past the idea that somehow there are some people who don’t mind being harmed, and that there are some people who we can just, like, Pinterest their way of life.
Here are people in the film, their water is being exhausted. And I know for a fact that there are folks who are like, “Oh, water. Water is life,” you know? We have to be one world. We have to connect it. And I feel like that’s what this film does.
ICMT: OK. So we need to look at Arizona, which is where I’m based currently. And we are seeing Lake Powell drop to levels that it’s never been this low before. We’re watching Lake Mead drop to levels that have never been this low before. The Southwest is in a massive drought.
The thing is, because we’re all on this planet together, the entire ecosystem affects everywhere else. So this huge drought here is actually helping to cause massive floods on the East Coast, because we’ve got this heat bubble that’s being formed. It’s pushing all of the would-be water coming here up and over, and it’s creating floods elsewhere.
And that’s just a small way to look at it. We’re losing water here; we’re flooding people out. But that water is no longer drinkable. It’s nonpotable. The less potable water that we continue to have, it’s going to affect the entire world.
And that’s just a very small, simple way to look at it. There’s so many different effects that go into it. Cinder hills are something that are very special to this area, and they’re a catcher of water, but they’ve been being mined for decades to create asphalt, which also helps to cause a heat bubble, which pushes water over, and then it floods somewhere else. And then, again, we lose our potable water.
So when we look at it, you making a change in one location can really affect everywhere else globally. And we can see it happening in lots of different places.
Here in the Southwest, we have massive wildfires, and then the East Coast having these floods. And it’s just going to keep getting more and more extreme until we, as people, come together and decide to fix the problem together.
And looking in your own backyard is the best place to start. And I hope that that’s one message that the film gets across: This isn’t just in these remote, small, quote unquote “Third World” countries. It’s happening literally in your backyard.
Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at what’s happening in like Skid Row, down in LA, that is extremely devastating to people. One, we should be treating people as people. But if we were to help clean up that area, and get those people the same mental health services that they needed, and just the simple way to fix houselessness is obviously give people houses, it would entirely revitalize that area. And we could start using a lot of those areas as farmland, where we grow crops that aren’t water-heavy based.
It’s just, there’s so many different ways and so many different ideas. And I know every single person out there has an idea. And if we each implemented them, we could be living in the future that we all dream about, with flying cars and healthy ecosystems.
JJ: Yeah, no, it’s part of what I resent so much about corporate media, is the way they deny us the possibilities, the way that we can imagine these beautiful futures.
Let me just ask you about the film. Any accounting of struggle, which is what Powerlands is about, it’s going to include unspeakable trauma, and that’s why folks should be aware that if they watch Powerlands, they’re going to cry. But at the same time, it also includes this irrepressible joy, and any conversation that doesn’t entail both of those is kind of not capturing it.
But then again, and I know this is a very hard question, when you make a film, it’s about communication, right? It’s about moving people to action. And I just would love to ask you, how do you balance the struggle and the joy in a way to communicate some message to the people who are going to see this film?
ICMT: I think a huge part of that goes back to, this is my community that we started telling the story in. This is my family. These are my friends. So I grew up in the struggle. I grew up having politicians come out and threaten family members. I grew up seeing family members get sick from cancer, or other various ailments, because of this stuff happening.
But at the same time, I also grew up going to ceremonies where me and the kids would be running around pretending to make rocks together, where me and my cousins would all sleep on the same mattress outside under the stars and tell ghost stories. And those are very similar moments that I think everybody shares, are those simple moments.
There’s a moment in the film where you see two young girls whispering to each other. And that’s a moment that everybody has experienced, is watching two young children talk to each other and giggle. And so when we’re talking about these moments, it’s not just like, “Oh, look at how hard it is for these poor brown people.” It’s, “Look at how hard this is for the entire world to be dealing with, and here’s an example of how these folks are getting through it.”
JJ: And that brings us back to where we started, which is the idea that you very quickly identify the idea of resource colonization (which I think is an excellent term) as a global thing.
You started with Dinétah, but it was very clear that this was something that’s happening everywhere, and that there was resonance everywhere for this message and this conversation.
ICMT: Yeah, we’re going to keep finding that, because the capitalist system, where it’s for profit and not for people, is going to continue to put us in these situations.
And the thing is, especially here in this country, Indigenous people have been the ones who have been put into those situations the longest at this point in time. So if you have any questions, reach out to us. We have lots of support. We have lots of community. We are willing to talk to people, and there’s so many different ways to go about it.
But we’ve been living, specifically here in America, on this land for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. So we know how to grow food without depleting the resources of this natural environment. And we know how to harvest things without depleting these resources.
One good example is this white sage trend that’s hitting. A lot of people are buying white sage that’s not sourced in a sustainable way. And it’s actually really detrimental to the Indigenous people in Southern California and Northern Mexico.
But if we were to, say, start outsourcing to only Indigenous suppliers or sustainable suppliers, then we would be able to help sustain that ecosystem, so that everyone can have white sage, and everyone can be burning it.
So it’s like, we need to be working together. And I think it’s really possible, because I see so many people coming to these screenings and coming to these events, being like, “Well, what can I do? What can I do?”
And I’m not always going to have all the answers. I’m but one person. But if you look in your own backyard, you just ask around, someone out there is already doing it, and you can definitely get in on the ground floor. And there’s also the chance that you could potentially make that resistance better.
JJ: I love that, actually, because my nightmare is, you support a system that basically erases a certain kind of people who say that their relationship is with the land, and that where they are is part of who they are.
And you, as a government, support that erasure, and that you, as a culture, then try to recreate, aesthetically, that culture: “Isn’t it neat about how people are in relationship with the land?”
I guess what I’m saying is, I am very angry and resentful about the idea that media tell us that it’s okay to erase and harm people.
And then they’re going to, out of the other side of their mouth, tell us that, “Isn’t it neat to think about being the sort of person who has a relationship with the land?”
It’s beyond hypocrisy. It’s just a thing that makes me very angry, that has a particular relationship with the way US news media talk about Indigenous people in the United States.
So I guess, after that rant, I’m just asking you, is there anything in terms of news media that you would like to see more or less of, or framework-shifting that you think could be meaningful?
ICMT: I have really enjoyed seeing, in the past two years, the amount of representation that has been risen within media.
The thing is, is I have been making films since I was nine years old—I’m 27. And my uncle has been making films, my cousins have been making films, my aunts have been making films, but we have never been able to break into the Hollywood or the main media cohort in order to be seen and visualized.
And it’s just now starting that our work is getting out there. A lot of that came from Standing Rock and the remembrance that we, as Indigenous people, still exist.
And so people kind of got into it, it became a trend. And so let’s hopefully not make it a trend that goes away.
But there are so many of us out there who are creating incredible content and stories and telling these stories, and we’ve been doing it for decades.
So there’s so much out there. It’s just definitely the accessibility of it is a lot harder, because we don’t have the same resources as, say, Warner Brothers or Disney or Fox or one of those who is getting their larger stories out.
So it is amazing to see us in representation, for the first time ever, that is an accurate representation. And it’s incredible. So if you are Indigenous, keep telling your stories; we want to hear them. If you’re not Indigenous, you are indigenous to somewhere, so keep telling your stories. And I think it’s just so incredible to see the vibrancy of the truth and reality of humans being told for really the first time, and especially in Hollywood media.
JJ: Well, we are going to continue to stay, I hope, in conversation with you. We’ve been speaking with Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
ICMT: Oh, thank you so much.
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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.