Hunt's Trading Post #2: Community Premiere & Our Doc Subject's Birthday!
From the bottom of a hogan, or traditional dwelling of the Diné (Navajo) people, located at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum.
On Saturday, August 16th, my cinematographer Kamyar Mohsenin and I returned to Blanding, Utah, to host our first screening of HUNT'S TRADING POST. It was also the 80s-something birthday of our main film subject, Wayne Bill Billy Bob Day. (See our last installment of this newsletter series if you are confused.)
The screening was hosted at Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, which our friend Chris Hanson, the Museum Director and Park Manager, helped us organize. Also present was a plethora of actually-delicious carrot cake donated by the fine folks at Twin Rocks Trading Post, some miles south.
To our delight, the screening was a full house. To our interest, it was a mixture of Indigenous individuals an older Mormon or Caucasian locals, as well as some who lived in the Four Corners region seasonally.
Edge of the Cedars State Park is an interesting place. Having not quite experienced the non-Indigenous or non-tourist part of Blanding on previous trips, it was a new discovery to learn more about why the museum was somewhat controversial to some Native people in the area.
One of the attendees told me of "pot hunting" in the area — a practice by early settlers and Mormons who raided old Ancestral Pueblo sites to collect "artifacts." And while Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum is an educational resource today, it also has a number of pots and other artifacts which are labeled with "Provenience Unknown." What that means is their history is uncertain — likely because they were looted and then ended up in the museum.
In 2009, for example, over 100 FBI agents arrested over 20 people in Blanding, through an operation titled "Cerberus Action." The federal government charged them with looting Indigenous gravesites. 40,000 items were recovered, and three people died, though somehow... nobody went to prison?
As The Collector writes, "Concern about these private looters and dealers led the US government to pass the Antiquities Act in 1906. This was to protect archaeological material — including human remains — from looters and dealers by designating them as federal resources. In 1979 the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) was passed, which regards Indigenous sites over 100 years old to be 'an irreplaceable part of the Nation’s heritage.'"
It is notable, however, that such laws do not at all keep Indigenous sites from being looted.
Mesa Verde-style bowl at Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum
Director Vee Hua and musician Aaron White, who offered us a blessing song at the start of the film screening.
Going back to the screening, however...!!!
We were honored with guests, which obviously included Bill Day, but also a lot of his family members who drove or flew in from all over. Also driving four hours from Flagstaff, Arizona, were musician Aaron White (Diné and Northern Ute) and his family. Aaron contributed tracks to our film and also — without prompting — offered to perform a blessing song to kick off the screening. (We were introduced by way of an awesome mutual friend and one of Aaron's now musical collaborators, elijah jamal asani.)
After spending much of the evening with Aaron's wife and daughter, we learned that he had actually worked on our film while being totally laid out by a brown recluse bite after a hike in some desert-y national park. (Check your shoes, folks! In 90% of cases those spider bites are chill, but in rare circumstances, can lead to necrosis, aka flesh death!!!)
We also received the best compliment ever about our documentary short (especially considering how calm of a voice Wayne has): Aaron's likely Gen-Z daughter said she has no attention span but didn't look at her phone once during our screening! Groovy!
Director Vee Hua, musician Aaron White, film subject Bill Day, Aaron's wife Marilyn White, musician Aaron White, cinematographer Kamyar Mohsenin, and Bill's granddaughter, Mai, who now owns the trading post.
That aside, the other gift was the presence of Mai, one of the two sisters to which Bill gifted the trading post. She has recently graduated college and told us it was nice to see an outsider perspective on the trading post, because she sees it in a way similar to how we see it, and that we captured much of the spirit of the place in less than 11 minutes.
Mai also now lives in San Antonio, after growing up for most of her childhood in Blanding. She would spend weekends at the house of Bill and his late wife Debbie, and we joked that even though Bill has something like 70 grandkids, she beat them all out somehow, to become the favorite!!!
"I don't know how that happened," she said, as if truly slightly perplexed.
(In that moment, I recalled a year ago, when I posted about the film on Instagram, and a friend in Seattle wrote me and said, "Hey! That's my uncle!")
After moving away, Mai would still come back often to work there during the summers. Yet Blanding is challenging; though she has spent much time in the trading post, she had simultaneously been homeschooled on weekdays by her Mormon side.
This complexity of being REALLY NATIVE and being REALLY MORMON was a tension that Mai felt growing up, especially since many of their cultural and spiritual beliefs were directly in conflict with one another's.
Yet the trading post was definitely an anchor point for Mia to maintain strong ties to her Indigenous roots. Of the main questions we raised in the film was that of whether or not the trading post would continue after Bill's tenure. Would the two granddaughters continue the legacy?
It is complex, with no clear answers just yet... but we were heartened to hear that Mai has felt for a long time the importance of keeping the trading post alive. We can only wait and see what role this documentary plays, if any... :)
We have one more OTV newsletter plus an OTV Instagram takeover dedicated to HUNT'S TRADING POST. Tune in next week for the next installment, as well as find the film streaming on OTV starting September 1!
You can also follow my journey with this film and my upcoming feature film, RECKLESS SPIRITS (a metaphysical, multilingual POC best friend comedy), over HERE.