VIEWER'S GUIDE
We Are Birds: A California Indian Story (2016)
Albert Chacon and Dr. Larisa Broyles Chacon, NativeImages Production Group
Before You Begin
...Our stories don't begin at contact
Most classroom material about Native peoples starts in 1492, or 1769, or 1848 — at the moment Europeans arrive. Everything before that becomes prehistory, and everything after becomes a story about what was done to us. It is written as if there were no existence prior to the point of contact with the Cahuilla — as though the record began when outsiders arrived to keep it. Yet eight thousand years of existence here has been proven. That framing is so common that most students have never encountered any other.
This film starts somewhere else. Birdsinging has been practiced in southern California for at least ten thousand years. By oral tradition, considerably longer. The tradition in this film is not a survival of something that ended. It is a continuous practice with its own internal history, its own authorities, and its own present tense.
Watch it that way, and the rest of the guide will make sense.
Using This Guide
This guide accompanies an award-winning visual anthropology project about Birdsinging — a Cahuilla and neighboring-tribal tradition that persisted through more than a century of assimilation policy designed to end it.
The guide serves two purposes.
For students of Native California, it provides context for what is on screen: who these people are, what the tradition does, and why its continuation matters to the communities that hold it.
For students of anthropology, documentary, journalism, or any field that involves entering a community that is not your own, it documents a method. The film was made through long-term participatory involvement in which the community set the terms, by a Native filmmaker working from inside the culture he was recording. That is not the standard production model, and the guide explains why it was chosen and what it required.
Film Synopsis
The Cahuilla people of Southern California, along with neighboring peoples including the Serrano, have practiced Birdsinging for at least ten thousand years. The songs are sung with handmade gourd rattles. The Cahuilla body of songs honors each day of the year and numbers more than three hundred sixty-five.
Birdsinging is not a performance genre. It is woven into social gatherings, seasonal observance, mourning practice, and the teaching of the young. It carries the values, the protocols, and the historical memory of the people who sing it. Because the songs are in language, the tradition is also one of the living conditions of the language itself — at a time when Native California languages are critically endangered, the songs are among the places the language continues to be spoken.
We Are Birds centers on Head Bird Singers: the people who currently lead this tradition in their communities. The Head Bird Singer is a cultural leader and a preservationist at once, responsible for the songs, the order they are sung in, and the protocols that govern them.
The film gathers perspectives from leaders across different Cahuilla bands and neighboring tribes, along with the singers, dancers, and community members who sustain the tradition with them. Each speaks from their own position, in their own words.
The People Who Made This Possible
This section matters more than any other in this guide.
No part of this project would exist without the elders and Head Bird Singers who granted permission for it. They were approached first, before any filming. They gave the necessary permissions, made the introductions that allowed the work to proceed, and controlled when and where cameras and recorders were allowed. They were the first interviews conducted, as a matter of cultural protocol. In every meaningful sense they co-produced this film.
Several of the people who granted that permission have since passed on. The recordings in this project are, in some cases, among the last of their voices doing this work.
That fact should change how a student watches this film. This is not archival footage of a culture. It is a record made with permission, by agreement, from people who decided what could be shared and who are no longer here to be asked again.
Instructor note: the individuals to be named in this section should be confirmed by the filmmakers before publication, including how each person wished to be identified and whether their family has any standing preference regarding how they are referenced.
How This Film Was Made
The community set the terms.
The ordinary documentary process is: secure funding, set a schedule, arrange access, shoot, deliver. This project inverted nearly all of it.
Preparation took years before substantial filming. That period involved attending events without a camera, forming relationships, being introduced through appropriate channels, and eventually being invited — not arranging to attend, but being invited. An elder deciding to speak on a subject can take years of showing up. There is no way to accelerate it, and attempting to accelerate it forfeits it.
The filmmaker was also a participant. When a respected elder handed him a rattle and told him to join in, the project changed. He was no longer standing outside the thing he was documenting.
One person carried the production.
Camera, photography, sound, and editing were all done by the same person: Albert Chacon, who also directed and produced. There was no crew rotating through the field, no second unit, no outside post house. The person who spent years building the relationships is the same person who operated the camera in the room and cut the footage afterward. Dr. Larisa Broyles Chacon co-produced and led the anthropological framing of the project.
This is not a note about workload. It is a condition of the method. A production crew changes a room — it introduces people who have no relationship with the community, who have not been vetted by anyone, and whose presence has to be explained. A single trusted person can be somewhere a crew cannot go. The scale of the production was small because the access required it to be.
Material was returned to the community immediately.
Rather than holding all footage until a feature was complete, shorter documentaries were released online throughout the project so that participants could share their own work within their own communities without waiting. Those shorter pieces now function as a running historical record of the work as it developed.
Consent was documented.
Everyone interviewed signed consent forms. At public events, coordinators posted signage indicating that filming was taking place, and the public venues where Birdsinging occurred were credited in the film.
Anthropological Principles
Students who have not studied cultural anthropology may find these concepts useful before watching, and before undertaking fieldwork of their own.
Emic and etic perspectives. The emic perspective is that of a cultural insider; the etic is that of an outsider. A researcher's own etic position limits what they can understand, which is why extended cultural immersion and trusted relationships with cultural consultants are necessary. The researcher's task is to work toward emic understanding while remaining aware of the etic assumptions circulating in the public and in academia — assumptions about Native people that are frequently simplistic or stereotyped.
Those stereotypes are worth naming directly. People who have seen images of powwows may assume all Native people wear full regalia routinely, or wear their hair a particular way. Many speak about Native Americans exclusively in the past tense, as though the peoples themselves had ended. Many do not recognize the Native people living around them, because those people do not match what they were taught to expect.
A note on terminology: this guide uses "cultural consultant." Older literature uses "informant." That term is best avoided — it frames a relationship of extraction and does not describe what actually occurred in this project.
Cultural relativism. Every culture has its own history, norms, and values, and should be understood on its own terms and through its own categories.
Holistic perspective. A culture is an interlocking whole. Song tradition cannot be understood apart from language, kinship, land, economy, mourning practice, and everything else it connects to.
Participant observation. The primary method of cultural fieldwork: the researcher does not only observe but finds ways to genuinely take part. This requires a lengthy preparatory period of meeting people, building trust, and establishing collaborative relationships. In this project, that period ran several years.
Participant observation matters because it moves the researcher from etic toward emic over time and reduces bias. Consider southern California specifically: the density of reservations means nearly everyone has traveled through Native land, and casino and resort advertising is everywhere. What outsiders often miss is that these enterprises are businesses — the public interface between a tribe and the outside world. They do not represent traditional culture or the daily life of the people. They also produce a false impression that all Native people in the region are wealthy, which lets real hardship go unseen. And they say nothing at all about tribes without such enterprises. In Riverside County alone there are Native people of considerable means and Native people living in poverty. No single story covers any people.
Ethics
The American Anthropological Association's Principles of Professional Responsibility are: do no harm; be open and honest about your work; obtain informed consent and necessary permissions; weigh competing ethical obligations to collaborators and affected parties; make your results accessible; protect and preserve your records; and maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships.
These are not procedural boxes. In this project, none of the filming, recording, or interviewing could have occurred at all without full trust. The permissions were not paperwork obtained after a decision had been made — the elders' permission was the decision.
There is a distinction worth teaching here: the difference between participatory and extractive documentation. Extractive work takes material from a community and delivers it to an outside audience or institution, where the community has no further say in it. Participatory work leaves control with the people whose knowledge it is. The test is not intention. The test is who decides what happens to the material afterward.
Discussion Questions
What is Birdsinging, and which peoples participate in it?
What protocols must Birdsingers follow? How do those protocols shape the wider community's norms and values?
How has the way Birdsingers learn changed within the Cahuilla community?
What reasons do people in the film give for singing and dancing? Which reasons appear most important to them?
The film opens from a position that Native history does not begin at contact. How does watching from that starting point differ from how Native peoples are usually presented in your previous coursework?
Aside from Birdsinging, what other cultural practices are discussed in the film? How are they interwoven with the songs?
The elders in this project controlled when and where cameras were permitted. What does that arrangement change about who the author of this film is?
Every technical role in this film — camera, photography, sound, editing — was carried by one Native filmmaker rather than a crew. What would have been different about the footage if a full production crew had been present in those rooms? What would have been easier, and what would have been lost?
If you were to undertake cultural immersion yourself, what steps would you take to establish contact and obtain appropriate permissions? What difficulties might arise?
What are some ways a careless researcher or filmmaker could cause harm to a community? How is that harm avoided?
What benefits might the participants themselves have gained from this project?
Several people recorded in this project have since passed on. What obligations does that place on the people holding the recordings?
Consider what you believed about Native peoples before watching. In what ways was Birdsinging culture different from your expectations?
How can a visual anthropology project like this one support a community's own preservation and revitalization work?
What was the single most surprising or affecting thing you learned? Why that one?
Course Project Ideas
Attend and observe. Attend a Native cultural event — a gathering, performance, film festival, or celebration — and conduct a detailed observation of both the event and the site. Focus on a specific topic of interest: song and dance traditions, regalia, foods, protocols. Consider producing an ethnographic map showing how people use the space, where activities occur, and how social interaction is organized. If time and circumstances permit, conduct brief on-site interviews, respectfully and in accordance with the Principles of Professional Responsibility.
Research the tribes where you live. Which peoples' homeland are you on? Where are their reservations, if any, and what was the traditional territory? Start with official tribal websites. Then ask the harder question: what is not there? Compare what a tribal website shares publicly with the kind of cultural knowledge present in We Are Birds. Why is there a difference, and what would a researcher have to do to be trusted with the latter?
Evaluate a museum. Survey local museums for Native content. Visit one. Is the installation culturally sensitive, or dated, or problematic? How would you improve it, and — critically — whom would you need to consult to do so responsibly?
Design an exhibit. Build an exhibit or model around a Native topic that interests you, documenting the consultation process you would undertake.
Conduct an oral history. Interview an elder, following the Principles of Professional Responsibility. What would you ask, and what would you not ask?
Resources
Official project website. Background on the project, plus short documentary videos featuring participants, local events, and presentations from the ongoing visual anthropology work. http://www.wearebirdsdocumentary.com/
USC Bedrosian Center podcast. Aired October 15, 2018. Director/Producer Albert Chacon, Head Birdsinger Derek Duro, and Birdsinger Frankie Morreo speak with USC Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Chris Finley, host Jonathan Schwartz, and Joanelle Romero, founder of the Red Nations Celebration Institute. https://bedrosian.usc.edu/featured/we-are-birds/
Project Facebook page. Screenings, presentations, and community events. https://www.facebook.com/WeAreBirdsDocumentary/
Malki Museum. On the Morongo Indian Reservation in Banning, California. Founded in the early 1960s, it was the first museum in California founded by Native Americans, and it hosts Birdsinging, cultural gatherings, and lectures throughout the year. It also publishes and sells books on the Cahuilla and other peoples. http://malkimuseum.org/
American Anthropological Association. Principles of Professional Responsibility @AmericanAnthro.Org and resources on visual anthropology, through the Society for Visual Anthropology. http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/
Tribal Nations Maps. A Native-owned business producing cartographic materials showing pre-contact Indigenous identities and place names. http://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/
Recommended Reading
Bean, Lowell John. Mukat's People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California. University of California Press, 1974.
Brumgardt, John R., and Larry L. Bowles. People of the Magic Waters: The Cahuilla Indians of Palm Springs. Palm Springs: ETC Publications, 2007.
Dennis, Yvonne Wakim, et al. Native American Almanac: More than 50,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous Peoples. Visible Ink Press, 2016.
Dozier, Deborah, ed. The Heart Is Fire: The World of the Cahuilla Indians of Southern California. Heyday Press, 1996.
Murillo, Pauline. Living in Two Worlds: The Life of Pauline Ormego Murillo. Highland, CA: Dimples Press, 2001.
Nolasquez, Rosinda, and Jane H. Hill. Mulu'wetam: The First People. Cupeño Culture, Mythology, and Cupeño Language Dictionary. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1973.
Patencio, Francisco. Myths and Legends of the Palm Springs Indians. Literacy Licensing LLC, 2012.
Questions, feedback, and ideas: http://www.wearebirdsdocumentary.com/contact.html