Sky Hopinka
“It's a simple statement, and a simple sentiment, but one that I hope acknowledges the shared history between Indigenous Peoples on both sides of this artificial border, a violent faultline, and it's also something I've said sincerely to friends and family in the past, and is something that someone's told me in the past, that can bring about a lot of emotion and is something that some of us really need to hear.”
BIO
Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and is currently based out of Vancouver B.C. and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
OWN WORDS
Hear from Sky Hopinka: