Karuk tribe ceremony makes it to Sundance

Members of the Karuk tribe have shared their stories on water rights and salmon but are now letting the world know a more intimate side of their traditions. The Karuk tribal territory ranges from California to Southern Oregon. The new film, “Long Line of Ladies,” documents Ahty Allen’s journey through the Ihuk ceremony also known as the Flower Dance, which celebrates a girl’s first menstruation and marks her transition into womanhood. The sacred ceremony has only recently begun to be practiced after years of dormancy. Rayka Zehtabchi codirected the film with Shaandiin Tome. Zehtachi joins us to share her work on the documentary along with Ahty Allen, along with her mother Pimm Allen.

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Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Three years ago, Rayka Zehtabchi won an Academy Award for her documentary short, Period. End of Sentence. It focused on shame and ignorance surrounding menstruation in a rural village in India. In one scene, young men are asked if they know what menstruation is and one says ‘it’s a kind of illness that affects mainly women.’ Now, Zehtabchi, along with Co-Director Shaandiin Tome, has created a new documentary about the flip side of that shame and ignorance. Long Line of Ladies premiered recently at Sundance. It’s about the Karuk Tribe’s coming of age tradition known as the Flower Dance, or Ihuk, that happens after girls get their first period. The filmmakers followed one family as they get ready for their daughter’s Flower Dance. Earlier this morning, I talked with Zehtabchi, along with Pimm and Ahty Allen. They are the mother and daughter featured in the film. I asked Zehtabchi what she wanted to focus on in this new movie after her award winning film, Period. End of Sentence.

Zehtabchi: Well, I think with Period. End of Sentence we realized, actually, how much of an impact just talking about periods had on people all over the world, and especially people in America. I think I came into the project, into Period. End of Sentence, kind of ignorant myself, and thinking that everyone grew up the way I did and was able to comfortably talk about menstruation with their family. It wasn’t a topic that was shameful. I realized that actually, just at home, it was still something that was shameful. I remember during the Oscars campaign for a Period. End of Sentence, there was a Hollywood Reporter article that was talking about our film and saying, ‘There’s no way that Period. End of Sentence is ever going to win because who wants to watch a film about periods – that’s just gross…’

Miller: Huh.

Zehtabchi: That was coming from Hollywood…

Miller: …and that was the whole point of the film.

Zehtabchi: Yeah, that was the whole point of the film. That was really surprising and it had a great impact. We thought, okay, this exposes the issue at hand. Working with the Pad Project [https://thepadproject.org ] , which is the nonprofit organization behind Period. End of Sentence and also behind this film, we were thinking, how can we flip that narrative now? How do we identify communities that actually don’t shame their girls at this time, just throughout history have actually had a totally different mindset around menstruation and uplift their girls. Enter Pimm and her family and their traditions.

Miller: Pimm, when Rayka and her co-director Shaandiin Tome reached out to you about making a film focused on your family as sort of the smallest circle, but also this Tribal tradition, what was your thought process before you said, ‘Yes?’

Pimm Allen: I think that I’ve been fortunate to be raised in a family that has had the luxury of knowing their culture. I’ve been able to participate in ceremony since I was a young girl and as part of that, just accidentally or automatically or by default, you end up being people that share and educate others. We’re not a very common. We’re a small tribe, so there’s not a lot of us. So when people meet you, they have questions they want to know about you. I think that it just seems like someone who is interested in who we are. Tribal people tend to be someone who people who are curious about, and whether or not we choose to share is up to each individual. But in my family, we’ve always felt that sharing our story helps to make connections. Really people are more alike than they are different, but we tend not to celebrate that in in the world. So it was an opportunity for us to share something that could potentially connect our kids to other young people around the world and help you to realize that, like I said, we’re a lot more alike than we are different. We have a lot more to celebrate that we don’t. We felt like it was a positive experience, both for our young person and young people around her as well as other young people around the world.

Miller: I was struck by one of the lines you just said, that outsiders are often curious about Tribal people. How do you decide if the curiosity is coming from a place of integrity, if that makes sense? In other words, how do you know you could trust somebody like Rayka?

Allen: I think that it really had to do with many, many conversations that we had with Rayka, and then later with Rayka and Shaandiin and Sam and the rest of the film crew, to really get to know one another and to try to understand their intent. Also I think that they were willing to work with us. I didn’t start off, but I ended up becoming one of the producers on the film because they really worked with us, our whole family and community, to ensure that they were telling the story in a way that we felt we wanted to be portrayed, which I don’t know that that always happens in film. So often people would come in and then they can edit it in a way that tells the story they want to tell. But this film crew worked with us to tell the story in a way that we all were comfortable with, that we felt met all the goals that we each had individually, as well as the goals we had collectively. I think that’s what made this different. Rayka did a beautiful job. I think also Shaandiin, being an indigenous filmmaker, was able to be the bridge between the filmmakers and the family and between the three of us, between all of us. But with that connection, it just really created something that we’re all very proud of. Rayka, when they sent us the first draft, she hasn’t told me this, but I think there was probably some nervousness and like, ‘Oh, what are they going to say? Because this is their family, their community, their culture.’ And we just cried. We just had tears of joy, and I think that’s when we realized all the time we spent getting to know one another allowed this film to be what it was or what it became.

Dave Miller: Ahty, do you remember when you saw a first draft?

Ahty Allen: I remember I was just going to sleep and I heard mom yell something, and she was like, ‘Ahty, come here!’ At first I was going to pretend I was just sleeping because I thought she wanted me to do chores or something…

Miller: [laughing]

Allen: But then after she told me to again, I came out and she was like, ‘Oh my God, actually the first draft. We have the first draft.’ So me, dad and mom sat down and watched it and it was really cool. I don’t cry a lot and I almost cried. Then after we finished it, we were like, ‘wait, where’s Nah’tes –- we should have gotten Nah’tes, my little brother.’ But it was really cool to see, because I don’t know when I was doing all the filming and stuff, I couldn’t in my mind even imagine how it would look all put together. I couldn’t imagine it being an actual film, and it was kind of amazing to me how much filming we did and how short the film is.

Miller: Well, that’s so funny because that’s your experience from, I imagine, hours and hours of being shot. My experience watching it was, I couldn’t believe how much was packed into something like 22 minutes, because it is so rich and dense and also flows so well. But there’s so much in a relatively short time. Let’s have a listen to one of the scenes, so folks who haven’t seen this yet can get a little bit of a sense for one of the scenes. Ahty, this is when you and some of your friends are hanging out at a campfire talking about the Flower Dance.

Ahty and friends: [Giggling, intermingled voices] I feel like… I don’t know. Long as it means respect from aunties, and like your grandmas and your family members. Like to be acknowledged, not just as a kid anymore. I’m just excited to find like, what my role is and all this stuff my family does. Yeah. My thing is like your age when you actually start like getting more respect and stuff. I think it’s like when you start driving around [more giggling] she said I’m going to be a woman when I got my license. Yeah. Pepper’s coming of age story [giggling]…

Miller: Ahty, what was it like to have filmmakers follow you around when you were with your family, or in this case, with your friends?

Allen: I was definitely a little bit worried about it at first. I feel like I got used to it pretty quickly. I got used to having the cameras and stuff, but I didn’t know how my friends were gonna be, because some of them are really awkward. But after a few minutes of it being awkward, it just felt normal. And then Rayka would tell us what to talk about and stuff, and it worked. It was funny because Harper wasn’t super good with it, and Renee kept forgetting she was mic-ed up. But it definitely was really weird at first…

Miller: …'Til you got used to it…

Allen: Yeah,...

Miller: Let’s turn a little bit to the ceremony, which the whole film is really about the preparation for this, and then we don’t see too much of it. That happens really once the movie ends in a wonderfully mysterious way. But can you describe the Ihuk Ceremony?

Ahty Allen: Well, there’s a lot of parts to it, but I’d go up and I have an taáv on the whole time

Unidentified speaker: How many of these is…

Pimm Allen: A taáv …taáv is a blinder made out of boothbay feathers. And you’re up there for four days, three nights.

Ahty Allen: Yeah. And I stay in a little hut with my helper who was my sister, and every day I have to do my chores. Like, I make a rock pile that symbolizes my life, so I have to make it sturdy and strong and I also pile wood… I don’t exactly remember why I would…

Pimm Allen: That’s to represent the hard work and just being kind of persistent and consistent in your life, and there’s prayers.

Ahty Allen: While I’m doing my chores, I have to say my prayers and stuff. And then every day I dance in the morning and at night, and with not only me dancing, it’s with everyone else too.

Miller: And all of this is with the feather blinders on, so you see this whole time.

Ahty Allen: Yeah, I’m blindfolded the whole time, and I’m fasting the whole entire time on acorn water, and I also ate some berries and fish.

Miller: And then, after three and a half days, my understanding is you take the blindfold off, surrounded by your loved ones on the Salmon River. What do you remember? And I should say this isn’t in the movie, the movie ends, if I understand correctly, before all this happens, but what was it like to take off the blindfold?

Ahty Allen: Well, there was a lot of anticipation coming up to it the whole day before. It felt like that 24 hours was extra long because I was just waiting to be able to take off my blindfold. But I kept having to remind myself to be present and remember to experience everything. But when I actually took it off, it was honestly… I couldn’t see that much because I had been in the dark for like three days or four days, so I could not see, really. And everyone said, because when I take it off my family, my close ones are standing in front of me so I can see them, I could definitely see them a little bit, but they always say that I had my eyes closed, which I don’t think I did, but it was, it was really hard to see them.

Pimm Allen: And the purpose is just so they’re reborn into that space, not obviously a physically reborn, but they’re reborn into a space surrounded by people that love them and on a place where there’s a lot of cultural significance in history. It’s done kind of in the right before first light, so as their taáv is being taken off, soon after that the first bit of sunlight comes over the mountains and the world is also awakened. So there’s a lot of symbolism in when we do it and how we do it, but I love to hear each of the girls’ experiences. They’re all very different. Every girl has a different experience with that moment.

Miller: What’s your experience as a mom? You have now had two daughters go through this and go through this ceremony that if I understand correctly, it goes back deep into your Tribal history, but then it was not practiced for a while until it was really brought back to life.

Pimm Allen: It’s so powerful to see young people take these roles on. And as a parent, especially during this ceremony, we really leave the young woman to be cared for by other loved ones, by her aunties, by older sisters. The mom is sort of removed. She goes up during the daytime and visits, but the young girl is removed from her mom to kind of create that independence for them. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming all at the same time, because anyone who has children knows that they have these points where they grow and they have to become their own person, and you just want to protect them so much. But to have them go through one of those transitions surrounded by so much love with so much intent, and with so much ceremony I think is really just a blessing. I feel like it really does guide, not just them, but it impacts all of those around them who love them. My family has been very immersed in ceremony since I was a young girl, so it’s not a new thing to be involved in ceremony. But some of the young women who have been able to have their ceremony, that have their Ihuk, or Flower Dance, have not always been involved in ceremony. So often we see the families transition along with the young women. We see them transition into becoming closer, finding new ways to care for one another, support one another. The family comes together to work hard during that time to support the young girl and the transition really is not just for her, but it’s really for everyone close to her and everyone at the ceremony. Every time, it’s magical. I’ll be really honest, I’ve never been there and not had my heart flutter a little bit as they take the taáv off the young woman and she sees her world for the first time, again.

Miller: Rayka, you made the decision with your team to shoot this in film,

old fashioned 16 millimeter film, not with digital cameras. How did you make that choice?

Zehtabchi: Well, it was very exciting. I think initially, really early on in the creative process before we had had a ton of conversations with Pimm and her family about the ceremony and about what we were going to capture, our Cinematographer Sam Davis floated the idea of shooting on 16 millimeter film. I think initially [it] came from a place of just being excited creatively by the prospect of shooting a documentary on film because it’s not something that you see done very often. With the documentaries, it’s kind of like your goal when you go into a place and you’re granted access to something is capture as much as you can. It always feels like you want to be able to come away with more footage, so that you just have more to work with in the editing process. But with film, it’s like every foot you’re rolling costs money. So that was scary. There was a lot of conversation between Shaandiin and I about, ‘well are we going to be able to capture… it’d be a really big shame if we have to cut the camera.’ Every time we get a wonderful conversation or something going would be a shame to have to cut the camera and not be able to capture that. We were weighing the options, but just really creatively excited by film, and we decided to take the leap.

I know for Shaandiin it was really important just from her perspective. She was saying that she had never really seen an indigenous family captured on film before in this way, in such a positive light with a film that really doesn’t have any conflict in it and that was really exciting to her. So we decided on film. And what actually ended up happening was it ended up really being a very important decision that I think impacted the film in a really positive way, just because throughout the process of making this film and working with Pimm and her family… it’s not that we didn’t understand the responsibility before, but I think it really set in the understanding of what we were capturing, what Pimm and her family were really granting us access to capture. Just the decision to shoot on film really folded in beautifully into that because we ended up having a lot of conversations with Pimm beforehand, outlining beforehand what we were going to capture, really understanding what our boundaries were, what things Pimm and her family wanted to share. So it wasn’t an issue that we were working with a finite amount of resources and film, and actually ended up just being a really great thing. We came away from shooting with less footage than I ever have had in any documentary that I’ve worked on, and that actually ended up being great. We ended up with a beautiful film that was just packed with so much love and so much beauty, but it was a lot less footage than what I had captured before on other projects.

Miller: Pimm, I was struck by one of the last words Rayka just said – that you all ended up with a movie packed with so much love. It felt like it was shot with love when I watched it. And I’m wondering if when you watched it, a movie about your family and about the Karuk Tribe and Tribal culture, if that rings true to you, if you see love on the part of the filmmakers?

Pimm Allen: I definitely do. And I think that had to do a large part in spending time with them and getting to know them. We had hours and hours of conversations with Rayka, and then later Shaandiin over Zoom, because it was during COVID. So we didn’t get to meet them almost until we started filming, I think. But I do feel that, and I feel like that is representative both of the people who were making the film, and also the people in what we call our spiritual family, which are the people who help us to put the ceremonies on. I think that everybody, once we got all on the same page, that the intent was to share that… to share the love that we had for not just Ahty, but for the culture and for the process. I think that that’s why that came across. We did feel that. We were all so stressed about making something because we’re sharing something that doesn’t belong to just us. It belongs to the people. It belongs to the Karuk people and we were being kind of ambassadors, or what not, to share that story. So we took that job really seriously too. We talked with Rayka and Shaandiin about what are the things you share that represent that in a way where you can be proud of it. And I think we did that. I’m really, really proud of the film on many levels and for many reasons.

Miller: Let’s listen to one more section from the movie. This is when Ahty, you and your father are having a conversation, and we’re going to hear his voice.

Ahty’s Father: When your sister had her first period, she calls me and I’m on this construction site, with all these other guys and I’m just like, hey you guys, I gotta go, took ‘em off to the side,... my, my daughter is having her period and I got to go make sure everything’s okay. The next day that guy, he goes, ‘Hey, I just wanted to say that, I thought that was really cool that your daughter would call you.’ Mhm. They don’t talk about it, or especially amongst the men.

Miller: Pimm, I’m wondering if you think that that lack of squeamishness about menstruation or the openness that’s really rare in a lot of societies, if it reverberates in other aspects of family or Tribal life, if that has other effects?

Pimm: Oh most definitely. I think that, you know, our kids knowing that they can talk to us about these things or that they can talk about these things around us, that it doesn’t have to be limited or that they have a lot of support in that. It really makes it so they know they can talk to us about anything going on. We spend a lot of times with our kids after work and after school with all the kids of all generations, from the itty-bitties all the way to the grandmas and the great grandmas, talking about just about anything that happens in the day, whether it be politics, school assignments, a tv show, a film we’ve watched, and everything in between. And I think that that conversation, that communication really changes the confidence that our kids have to walk in the world, knowing that they can have a thought and they don’t have to agree with us, but they can have a thought and we’re willing to have a conversation about it. It changes the way that your family dynamics work and being able to talk about this is one of those things and honor that sometimes this thing happens and it changes the way our day is. Taking time to remember that, to honor how we feel about our body, how we’re feeling that day, how we’re walking in the world that day. It makes a big difference.

Miller: Rayka, Period. End of Sentence is available right now on Netflix. Where can people or where will people be able to watch a Long Line of Ladies?

Zehtabchi: Well, we’re really early in our Film Festival run right now. We premiered the film at Sundance and we’re on to South by Southwest next and a few other festivals which have yet to be announced, but we’re probably going to be doing that for the next six months or so. Hopefully the film will be acquired and by another streaming platform, fingers crossed. I think the goal is really that we get a really wide reach and a lot of people are able to watch and experience the film.

Miller: Rayka Zehtabchi, Pimm Allen and Ahty Allen, thanks so much.

Zehtabchi, Allen and Allen: Thank you. Thank you.

Miller: Rayka Zehtabchi is a Co-director of the new Documentary short Long Line of Ladies. It features Ahty Allen and her mother, Pimm.