The Salmon People (working title)

Short Synopsis

Inspired by food and history, a young Tlingit Indian makes a pilgrimage to his ancestral home in remote Alaska and is forced to confront the dichotomy between his history and the world he lives in.

Description/Treatment

'The Salmon People' is a hour long documentary intended primarily for broadcast on PBS, with associated multi-media and educational components.  The story uses one young Native Alaskan's  return  to his traditional fish camp as a vehicle to explore the history, and the future, of his tribe.  The theme of search for cultural and racial identity via food and history, combined with a compelling character's life story, has a universal relevance in a rapidly changing, multicultural, multiethnic world. 

Stylistically the movie is a visceral first hand experience of life in Gutchquana's modern day fish camp.   Scenes are shot from a “tippy” canoe on the Chilkat river as a thrashing salmon is pulled out of the net or in the doorway of an elder’s smokehouse as the thick smoke billows out over her head.  Tlingit artwork in the North West Coast style is very important in illustrating the tribe’s pre-contact history and mythology, and historical photos are used to illustrate more recent Tlingit history.  

Current Status  

With research, development, and primary photography finished, and our first major funding in hand,  we will work with Editor Maureen Gosling in the spring of '09 to revew and assemble the footage we have and develop a comprehensive shot list for final photography in the summer of '09.  Summer of '09 we will do final photography.   Fall '09 and winter '10 we will edit for final delivery to PBS March '10.  

Treatment

-Act 1-
Cory is franticly packing.  His ferry leaves in 18 minutes.  Ice chest, sleeping bag, hunting rifle, laptop and fax machine, rain gear, canoe paddles, an outboard engine, and boxes of scarves printed with Tlingit designs all get hurled into the back of the truck.  At the ferry terminal the ramp is already half way up and they have to lower it again to let the truck drive into the belly of the boat.  He has been looking forward to this trip all winter but the whims of his business, mortgage payments, the IRS, other sundry projects and crises, have already set him back almost a month.  His business imports scarves printed with Tlingit artwork from China and then sells them to tourists in Alaska.  He owns a house and works in Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, accessible only by air and sea.  He is on his way to Klukwan, a small Tlingit Indian village that was once a rich and thriving metropolis on the banks of the Chilkat River a hundred miles north of Juneau.  

The ferry steams north past whales and snowcapped peaks with hanging glaciers as Cory begins recounting the story of his childhood. “I thought I was Mexican until I was three years old.”  He was born in Juneau but was taken by his mother to live in San Diego while still an infant.  His mother, only 18 herself, was escaping Alaska and a native culture in the throws of a destructive transition.  His two aunts, unhappy with the situation in San Diego, hitch hiked from Alaska to Southern California, retrieved the now three year old Cory from his mother and hitchhiked four thousand miles back to Alaska, stopping along the way for sightseeing, powwows, and a Carlos Santana concert.  Photos and images from the past, Southern California in the 70s, are interspersed with footage of Cory’s present day return as the rhythm of the modern day journey blends into the rhythm of Cory’s childhood journey.  The story is told by Cory intercut with his two aunts, Helen and Cookie.

Arriving in Klukwan, Cory meets Sally, another aunt.  She lets loose with a high wattage barrage of advice on fish smoking that leaves him reeling.  Following Sally's instructions, Cory cleans out and prepares his smokehouse by lighting an extra smoky fire to drive out a winter worth of mold and damp. 

Continuing the story of Cory’s childhood:  He was left in the care of his great grandmother who was born and raised in a time when Tlingit culture was still dominant.  She dedicated herself to smoking salmon in the traditional manner on an almost industrial scale, providing food and a cultural connection to a wide network of people who couldn’t prepare their own, and anchoring four generations of her descendents in an erratic world. The three-year old Cory was terrified by Alaska and the strange world he suddenly found him self immersed in. “In San Diego, only people were alive...  And cockroaches.  But in Alaska everything was alive; bears, trees, whales, even rocks.  Alive, and they might take you away if you went careful.”  Confused and frightened, Cory must contend with a world where the adults speak an unintelligible language, the ground is covered with a painfully cold white substance, grizzly bears wander nonchalantly through the front yard, and the forest and ocean are alive and teaming with creatures and spirits, some benevolent, some malevolent.  

-Act 2-
In Klukwan the tempo of the story is dictated by the day-to-day rhythms of fish camp, canoeing down the river to tend the gill net and hand-lining or sailing back up, and cutting and tending the fish in the smokehouse.

Cory and his cousin Jordan load fishing nets and equipment into a battered green canoe and paddle it down the river, he drives a wooden stake into a sand bar, ties one end of a net to it, and using the canoe, plays the net out into an eddy in the river current.  

Putting up a winter’s supply of fish is hard work.  The situation is further complicated as Cory struggles to run his business from “temporary corporate headquarters” in the Thunderbird house in Klukwan.  Mortgage payments on his house in Juneau are past due and the IRS “just doesn't understand!  It’s income tax!  How the
hell can I owe them 30 grand if I never made any money?”

The canoe shoves out from the riverbank, twists as the current catches it, and is carried down stream.   Cory and his cousin Jordan paddle down to the net.  They work their way along it picking out the fish and then use ropes to pull the now heavily loaded canoe back up stream to the smokehouse.  

In Cory’s childhood:   “’What’s that funny language you're all talking? Why don't you just speak English?’ That was the maddest I ever saw my great grandmother get.”  At a young age Cory was immersed in a radically different reality and had to learn to be Indian. “I was raised by seven women.  When one of them couldn't take care of me they sent me to live with another.  At my great grandmother Lilly's house I lived under the kitchen table in a one room log cabin, sometimes there were 8 or more people living in there.   Three of us kids could fit under the table.  It was the only free space.”

Cory, at the cutting table in front of his smokehouse neatly slices a fish along one side of the backbone, flips it over and does the other side before hanging it over a stick.  “This is split pants style.  I learned it from Sally. You gotta make sure you leave enough skin here so it hangs right”.   

An elder from Klukwan rides in the passenger seat of a battered old Cadillac and gestures out the window. “That there is the salmon hole house, the frog house used to be up the hill there... Each of these houses held
hundreds of people.  The whole clan lived together in one big house.”  He goes on to explain the social structure of Klukwan.   

Elder from Klukwan:  “Sold Alaska to the Americans!  How could the Russians sell Alaska?  You know, they only came up this way once.  They sailed their ship up into the mouth of the Chilkat River.  When they saw us coming in our canoes they tried to sail back out but the tide was flooding and the wind was southerly.  We killed every one of ‘em.  They didn’t have a chance.  Those Russians never came back up this way again.“

…These are just representative scenes.  In the film the present day story of Cory’s fish camp continues to be interwoven with vignettes from Cory’s life and vignettes of Tlingit history told by elders.  By its end the film will encompass the full beginning to end process of smoking salmon and beginning to present of Tlingit history.  
…
For Cory, after learning his people’s history and learning to be Indian, a sharp reversal comes in his early teen years.  His great grandmother Lilly dies and the City of Haines, over the families’ objections, tears down her smokehouse to make way for a new intersection.  This coincides with the social disintegration of his family,drug and alcohol abuse, self-destructive behavior, and general dysfunction. “I wanted to be anything but Indian. Indians were the most screwed up people in the world.  I just wanted to run away.” He embraces juvenile delinquency, is rescued from the clutches of the legal system by well-wishers, and goes off to college. He eventually auctions off his truck standing on a stool in an Anchorage bar and uses the money to buy a plain ticket to Taiwan where her lives for the next year teaching English. 

At the turn of the century Tlingit culture also suffered a reversal.  “When the small pox came so many people died there was nobody left to take care of the kids.  The dying climbed up to the caves so their families wouldn't have to watch,” explains Sally pointing up towards the cliffs over Klukwan.  On the heels of the epidemic an influx of outsiders brought by the gold rush overwhelmed the Chilkat tribe.  Their population was decimated by disease and their economy, once enriched by trade with the foreigners, became dependent on them.  The survivors, facing the incursions of alcoholism and their new second-class social status, retreated inward.  

-Act 3-

Cory traveled the world from Mongolia to Italy, and started a string of businesses ranging from Tlingit  condoms (“The Savage Inside You”), to a bus company (“Free Glacier Tour -$10”).  But something is lacking.  He hasn't had a summer free in years.  After selling his bus company, he took a summer off and returned to Klukwan to smoke fish.  

“You know, this isn't really my smokehouse, it’s hard to say it's anybody's because there’s been smokehouses built on top of smokehouses in this spot for generations.”   When his grandmother, one of the “seven women”, retired from a life time of working in the fish packing plant she wanted nothing more than to dedicate herself to traditional fish smoking.  She started construction on a very ambitious smokehouse on Thunderbird land in Klukwan, right next to her brothers and sisters. Unfortunately she never realized her dream.  Age and bad health prevented her from completing the smokehouse and it sat half built for years.  Cory finished the smokehouse and brought her the first fish from it shortly before she died.  “She wanted us to have a place to smoke fish, a place we could go no matter what and get our food.” 

“My mother always told me, a time is coming when the world is going to change.”  Says Sally sitting in her
car while Valentino her husband picks berries.  “When the electricity goes out, Indians will know what to do.  You know televisions and computers and that kind of stuff is all great.   But you can’t eat your television.  There’s nothing delicious about it!”