ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) is an important film. It is Indigenous history, told in Indigenous voices, often in the endangered Indigenous language that is also the film’s focus.
This Oklahoma project follows Cherokee individuals as they fight to prevent their language from falling extinct after hundreds of years of colonization. The film features teachers, artists, musicians, activists, Cherokee Tribal leaders, and more who share their experiences learning and sharing the language across generations.
Michael McDermit, Co-Director of ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak).
We spoke with co-director Michael McDermit about ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) via email ahead of the deadCenter 2023 Film Festival to learn more about the making of this compelling Oklahoma documentary. The film debuts at the festival on Saturday, June 10th, at 4 PM at The First Americans Museum.
How did the journey of this film start, and when did you decide to make the doc?
The project originally started in late 2018 when Jacob Koestler—my filmmaking partner and co-founder of Blurry Pictures, our production imprint—and I set off to make a sprawling documentary comprising various vignettes about unique aspects of language.
We had been making short docs that had to deal with issues of language in the past, including a documentary about my father who has aphasia (a language disorder), and a short about cattle auctioneering and the specific language they use. We had found interest in a story about Sequoia, probably the most famous of Cherokees, who created the Cherokee written language without being able to read or write another language; he’s the only person in recorded history to do so.
So, we spent the summer of 2019 in North Carolina with a few members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who were helping us find our footing with the story. A man named TJ Holland helped us immensely, and let us know that while the story of Sequoia was still interesting, the Cherokees were facing a current and imminent threat: the potential extinction of the language due to the loss of fluent speakers.
We began retooling the project to focus more on this and realized that the story needed a much bigger space in which to tell it. TJ, who has since unfortunately passed away, helped open doors for us in North Carolina and sent us to Oklahoma to meet folks from Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band. That’s where co-director and UKB member Schon Duncan entered the picture. As a devoted language activist, he recognized right away that the project was vital and a way to reach a wide audience to raise awareness.
Schon came on first as a participant in front of the camera, where he opened up his day-to-day life to us of what it looks like to try to save a language from a grassroots perspective. His role then continued to grow more and more, as he introduced us to more folks in secluded Cherokee communities and helped guide the story as filming progressed through the pandemic and into 2021-2022; soon he was helping the film as co-director.
How did you find your film participants? Carolyn for instance was very compelling in her journey and Keli’s art was very moving.
Carolyn, Schon, and Keli’s journeys are vital to the film in that they provide a much-needed humanity to ground the largely abstract concept of what it means to try to pass on culture through a language. It’s a foreign thing for most non-Native audiences, so it was integral to illustrate it in the documentary. Through Schon, we reached out to Keli Gonzales initially to provide art for the film, and to contribute animation to some of the language concepts. She was enthusiastic about the project, as she and her family have deep roots in the language, and she offered to help in many ways. We were able to commission Keli to paint a mural in Cherokee syllabary at a nearby school, and we decided to film it as a sort-of touchpoint throughout the film.
We quickly realized that Keli’s own journey with her art and how she interacts with her community and family was a beautiful thing deserving of its own showcasing. Keli’s role grew into that of a producer, as well, and she was gracious enough to open her world to us and allow filming with her grandparents, both first-language speakers. Including different generations of Cherokee folks (especially elders guiding youth) was a key component that illustrates another important aspect of language learning: a lot of this battle to save the Cherokee happens outside of schools as well. The scene with Keli, her sister Dehaluyi, and their grandparents is my favorite in the film because it’s so filled with emotion—there’s a tenderness, humor, and love that would have been impossible to illustrate in any other way.
Carolyn Swepston’s language journey is filled with that love and respect, too, but my favorite thing about it is that she was largely able to document it herself. We met her at the Master/Apprentice program and she was so full of enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. We kept seeing her at all these local events and she was doing everything she could to help out her communities. During the pandemic, we sent her a camera and she recorded her family’s journey back to the Cherokee homelands in western North Carolina, which was so gracious of her, but honestly, it was the only way to illustrate the highly emotional nature of that trip. It would have been different and less authentic with any outsiders, so I’m super grateful for Carolyn’s help in that regard.
Long story short, Schon and Keli are so connected to their communities that they knew exactly who to introduce us to and who would be willing and able to help tell this story. We spent a lot of time meeting some amazing folks doing great and challenging work.
What did your production timeline look like?
We began production in early 2019, and initially started filming during summer 2019. We spent weeks in North Carolina and Oklahoma before we turned any cameras on, just meeting folks and talking to them to hear the story of the fraught history of boarding schools and assimilation and what the situation at hand was with losing fluent speakers.
The most heartening, and the main aspect we wanted to focus on in the film, was the amount of hope that remains through the ways of language preservation that are happening right now. Cherokee is very much a living language and while the threat to it is very real, we wanted to illustrate the on-the-ground fight by the elders and people in the trenches making sure it doesn’t go away. We came away with a lot of interview footage at the end of 2019 and intended to return in early 2020 to gather more verite and on-the-ground activity, but obviously, COVID had other plans. We retooled our entire production and brainstormed ways to try to make a movie during a pandemic—not easy, it turns out! This led fortuitously, however, to Carolyn’s own chronicling, and us leaning into other means to try to assemble the story.
It also allowed us to slow down and take a beat to figure out the arc of the personal narratives within the documentary. Our core team’s collaboration really deepened during this time with sometimes daily Zoom meetings and correspondences. We resumed regular filming all through the summer and fall of 2021 and spent the next year in the editing room.
Editor/cinematographer Jacob Koestler had so much footage to work with and figuring out the flow of a pretty nuanced story took some time and a lot of communication. At this time our producer Laura Heberton also came on board and sent us into warp drive. Her industry expertise really helped us put the final touches on the film and get us set up to get out into the world. We premiered at the 2023 Cleveland International Film Festival in March and have since shown in many festivals around the country.
Each week I feel like there is more momentum for this project to reach more people, and we are in talks with distributors and educational avenues about where the film will land after the festival circuit.
How did you get Wes Studi involved as executive producer?
Producer Laura Heberton is the one who connected with Studi’s team after we had an initial cut of the film. Studi is a fluent Cherokee speaker himself and has devoted a lot of his life to language revitalization efforts already. It was a natural fit.
Studi enthusiastically came on board and has since helped us increase our reach even further. He’s so beloved, within the Cherokee community, of course, but also far beyond. His support of the project means a lot to many people. He is scheduled to be at one of the deadCenter screenings to continue his support even more!
What were the biggest challenges of this project?
[The] main challenges included the pandemic, of course, as I mentioned it prevented a good bit of filming from taking place while increasing the urgency of the story being told, as many of the Tribe’s fluent speakers are elderly, and COVID hastened the course of the language’s endangerment. The urgency of telling a timely story in general created a lot of stress, as everyone on our core team has full-time jobs in addition to being filmmakers. That meant working long nights, weekends, etc., and squeezing out any time there was to keep the project on pace.
There isn’t a lot of money in independent documentary work, so we had to scrounge for every dollar possible for this project to fully bloom. Thankfully, the community led the charge in funding a very successful Kickstarter campaign, which really just speaks to the fervency of this story needing to be told.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
I’m so incredibly proud of this film and our entire core team’s devotion to all aspects of getting this project completed and out into the world. At each screening I’ve been able to attend, the response has been magnificent, and always emotional. Unfortunately, while this is a Cherokee story, the threat to Native language loss extends to many other Tribes, as well. There have been people who have thanked us for telling this story and illuminating the issue around language loss and revitalization efforts. Nothing fills my heart more than to know that many Native folks feel seen in our film and that they feel hope is not lost.
ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) will play at the deadCenter 2023 Film Festival Saturday, June 10th at 4 PM in the First Americans Museum Theater. An encore screening will be held on Sunday, June 11th at 12:30 PM in Harkins Bricktown Auditorium 12.
*This email interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
