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StllnG_a (Tyler York)
About
Interview with Dana Moraes and Graham
'I heard about the movie from the elders and my cousin.'
'I started at SHIP cause I did want to learn the Haida language. My uncle Du kept talking about going there. And then aunt Peggy often talked about going there as well. And so I figured, she never really had the incentive to go. Our Dad never really taught her the language, so she kind of had a little resentment for it, I guess. So I figured if I started going and put my foot in the door and going home and speaking what I learned throughout the days with her that it would inspire her to go and maybe branch out for herself. Because when I go home and I say some words she can say it back. Just I I say them. Sometimes I go to SHIP with words that she remembers from much in an age and I go there and they are like, 'Wow, I haven't heard that in years, that's what it is." So they tell me about it and I go home and I tell her, and just to see her light up was great for me. See how happy she was, she thought she had lost a whole language. So I'm just trying to inspire her if you will.'
About the film lines Tyler had to learn..'Going home and saying those lines over and over again to myself. With a different tone, different fluctuations.[...] Work on that every single day until I got it.'
'[...] when I was in High School my teachers told me that the only way I could get to University was to take French. So they made me dropped Haida language which I was excelling at one point and had to take French, because that's what the school board wanted from me.'
'The biggest help would have been Ben Young, our young Haida speaker from Alaska [...] This young man can speak so fluently, right?. I can do this. So he kind of hit my competitive nature and really made me want to strive to get the lines down proper.'
And what about your tattoos? 'Oh, those are awesome. I get to keep these forever. And they are old school. Like hand poke. These three took 8 hours all together. The one on my chest by itself took 8 and a half hours.'
'What I do hope is that [the film] is a great learning tool for the youth. And for the rest of the world, to know that we are still here. Our old stories are there and they have always been there. It's more about a teaching tool. We have old stories that date back to the ice age and we don't have anything written down really. We are a very verbal society.'
'This is the old school [as he points out the pole he is carving], the old school teaching. Film and computers, and all that, is the new technology. So we are kind of hitting that demographic, kind of hitting the kids of where they view the rest of the world. That's where they see everything.'
Interviewer: Dana Moraes
Camera and Edit: Graham Richard
