Interviewer: Why did you choose to let Heather Rae make a documentary about your life?
John Trudell: I had been approached by another party, which was interested in doing a documentary, but it meant that they would be traveling and living with me for two to three months. I wasn’t interested in having to live with a camera—I have a hard enough time getting along with myself. I don’t need cameras around and all that action. Being followed by a camera…means whatever documentation is being made, it’s being limited to a certain timeframe—the time they’re there with the camera—so it’s more personality oriented and interaction and things of that nature. It’s a different kind of documentary.
Heather approached me around the same time. The first thing that struck me was that Heather was really coming from a place of respect. She had heard my work and was truly influenced by it. She’s a generation behind me and I thought that it would be interesting to see how my generation and the things we did was perceived by the generation behind us, so I had an interest in that. One of the things in making the agreement, though, was that I wanted to be sure that Heather and whatever team she put together, that they were making this documentary about how they perceived me. I didn’t want to get involved any more than necessary because I didn’t want to put her in a position of making a doc about me the way I wanted to be perceived. I avoided that. The one thing I did insist on is I wanted to soundtrack it. I wanted this film to have a soundtrack, not that anyone opposed. So then we went for it. We started to make the documentary.
Were you surprised by the result?
I like the path that they [the filmmakers] took. What I appreciate about the way they handled it is that they took my story and placed it in the context of a larger story of what was going on at the time. It’s more than just a history of me. It serves a larger purpose than just hey, look at me!
What kind of relationship did you and Heather develop?
It’s almost like we were good friends from the beginning. We could talk freely about anything—which helps tremendously to have real expression of ideas and thoughts. So I always felt that there was a friendship there from the beginning. I wouldn’t have agreed to do this with Heather if I didn’t get a good hit off of her in the beginning, just energy-wise. She was alright, and she brought a certain honesty, as a part of who she is.
What was the most challenging aspect of telling your life story?
Talking about what happened to [my wife] Tina and the kids, that’s always the most difficult. I really appreciated the way Heather did this. Tina needs to be recognized, what happened needs to be recognized. It’s not just something that should just fade away into the darkness of history and nobody knows that it ever happened. So, the fact that Heather put the story together in the way that she did and paid that recognition to Tina. I think that’s good.
When you talk about your writing, you say that your lines just came to you. Can you explain?
That’s literally, figuratively, precisely, exactly what happened. I was in that car in Vancouver [British Columbia], and those lines came into my head and I knew—I mean, I don’t hear voices or anything like that but I hear things in my head, my thoughts maybe—and I was just told, write these lines down and don’t stop. So I wrote those first lines and it was like an explosion of words, maybe, and feelings. That was maybe in August of ‘79 and within six months of starting, I wrote all the time. I mean, I wrote all the time. There would be times I would be working on four different poems simultaneously—I did that once just as an exercise—one that had to do with happy love, one that had to do with broken love, one would be more socially political and one that would be more spiritual or environmental.
In the period of the most intensive writing, I drove a lot. I drove 250,000 miles between the U.S. and Canada in five years. I went to the moon ten times! I could drive down the road and be writing, literally, hold that steering wheel between my knees and jot down these lines, have a cigarette and drink some coffee. So I wrote as much as I could because I thought, they’re going to go away, it’ll stop, so I’m going to write as much as I can and lay it in. Then the other thing that would happen is, I would get these lines and at first I always wrote every line down and sometimes I’d think, well, I’ll write it down later, but I’d forget those lines. I want ‘em back, but I forgot ‘em. And then there came the time when it seemed like the lines weren’t coming so much anymore. And then I just looked at it and thought, maybe I’m going to be a little dry on lines but I’m just replenishing and the lines that I forgot that I didn’t write down, those are the lines that I offered back, so I will get more lines. That’s just how I looked at it. I didn’t freak myself out because I never identified myself as a writer.
How often do you write now?
I don’t write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I’ll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don’t write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I’ll write ‘em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won’t try to make stories or poems out of them. I’m doing a lot of that now, just the lines.
By the mid-1980s, you had left organized politics completely, but are organizations like AIM (American Indian Movement) still active?
All that I am is me. So I’m not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist, I’m me, and these are things that I do.
To some degree and level they are, either by the same name or in different forms. All of that activism is still active because the need for it is there. But for me, I’m not an organization person. The only group I’m with now on a consistent basis is my band. For me, I think it’s a matter of being more concise. All that I am is me. So I’m not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist, I’m me and these are things that I do. I figure now that the best way for me to participate is to just be me and to do the things that I do because my consciousness is my consciousness. I still have my political consciousness and I have my social consciousness and my spiritual consciousness and my distorted consciousnesses—I still have all of that. So to me, it’s just to try to be as coherent as I can and to make as much sense as I can in doing whatever it is that I do.
Looking back, did events like the occupations of Alcatraz and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the siege at Wounded Knee II made things better for Native people?
I definitely think that these times had a positive effect. What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy—everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought. When I look at it in that context, what happened in the ‘60s and the ‘70s had a positive effect because it made our energy stronger, so to speak. Our spirit is stronger as a result of what happened in those times. And in the material, physical sense, I think we’re holding our own. I don’t know if things are necessarily better or worse. We’re still having to hold our own because of the economics and the politics and the laws and all of this stuff—none of this is in our favor, none of these things were designed to protect us, and that hasn’t changed, we couldn’t change that. Maybe some superficial changes could be made—maybe some tribes were granted a little more sovereignty here and a little more this and that there, but basically, we’re still operating outside the protections of these so-called protecting things, like law and political systems.
What impact do you hope this film will have on audiences?
If they leave the screening of this film and it has stimulated feelings and thinking, their feelings and their thoughts have been stimulated, that’s what I would like to see. I’m talking about feelings, not just somebody just emotionally identifying. See, I just want people to think. They don’t need to believe me or not believe me—it isn’t about any of that. ~