A conversation between Jona Luna and Tracy Rector on Luna’s film ‘Buscando las Marcas del Asho´ojushi / Searching for the Marks of the Asho´ojushi’

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When organizer, filmmaker, and Emmy award-winning producer Tracy Rector was founding the 4th World Media Lab in Seattle, she sought out an Elder, and he told a story about a time when the world would be in need of healing due to human environmental impacts and that Indigenous stories would bring forth healing for the whole planet — this time would be called the “4th World.”

Now about to welcome its ninth cohort, this fellowship has been strengthened through multiple generations of storytellers, organizational partners, deep roots in community, and belief in the power of narrative sovereignty — where stories by Indigenous people (rather than about them) are uplifted. The 4th World Media Lab is a yearlong fellowship for emerging and mid-career Indigenous filmmakers that provides opportunities for networking, workshopping, and developing skills to get their films ready for industry pitches and funding meetings. They travel together to the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana, the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), and Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) in Maine, and have additional support from ITVS and Nia Tero. While the year is memorable, the work each fellow brings to it spans years of development.

On Sept. 16, 2023, at CIFF, 4th World Fellow Jona Luna (Tama-descent/Mestizo) discussed the decades-long work they bring to their filmmaking with Rector as they geared up for the last leg of yearlong fellowship activities.

Jona shared that in their project, Buscando las Marcas del Asho´ojushi / Searching for the Marks of the Asho´ojushi, directors David Hernández Palmar and Marbel Vanegas Jusayu embark upon a journey to rediscover the Indigenous heritage and nearly extinct art of Wayuu tattoos. In La Guajira (Colombia and Venezuela) Wayuu elders affirm how tattoos are a safeguard after death to find loved ones and fresh, clear, drinking water in the spiritual plane. Today, as Wayuu people are confronted with poverty and violence, the practice of tattooing with a cactus spine and ash has nearly been forgotten — can today’s Wayuu youth take on the monumental task of keeping this art form alive?

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Rector: Jona, will you tell us about your feature film project that you are presenting to funders and collaborators at the Camden International Film Festival?

Luna: Our documentary feature project is about traditional Wayuu tattooing as part of self-determined expressions of culture, Buscando las Marcas del Asho’ojushi / Searching for the Marks of the Asho’ojushi, directed by David Hernández Palmar and Marbel Vanegas Jusayu. We are currently a team of 33 people, 29 of them are Wayuu and two of us — including myself and our camera person — are from other Indigenous and Indigenous descent communities and have spent the last 15 to 20 years working alongside Wayuu communities. (I am mixed, my maternal family is Tama descent from La Jagua, Huila, and the camera person, Duiren Wagua, is Guna Dule from Panama.) Even though the project is very much by and for Wayuu Peoples, it is also part of an intercultural exchange that they’re having with other Indigenous Peoples.

The tattoo project started in 2019, but long before that David Hernández Palmar, Leiqui Uriana, Miguel Iván Ramírez, Jakeline Romero, and others co-founded processes and spaces like the Wayuu Film Showcase, the Wayuu Communications Network, and the Wayuu Communications School to build media-making skills in Wayuu communities. For 18 years, this first generation of Wayuu filmmakers, communicators, and community organizers took on the task of training other young Wayuu People in radio, written journalism, photography, and film.

It sounds as though there was a vision for Wayuu Peoples to have the skills and experiences needed to tell their own stories?

Wayuu communicators have worked intentionally towards this moment, where the community can make productions that are by and for Wayuu Peoples, where the majority of the entire team — production, direction, and everyone involved — is Wayuu. By no means has all of this happened because of luck. It’s something that has been worked for a long time and very hard, in rural Indigenous territories of Colombia and Venezuela. Building the skills to have narrative sovereignty and self-determined advocacy in territory comes with the extra layer of challenges that occur in La Guajira, an area with a lot of impoverishment, inequality, stolen land, state abandonment, and structural violence against the people that live there.

How does the ethos of activism inform this work?

Narrative sovereignty is a liberation practice. It has often been seen through a lens of social justice movements and a struggle to be included, a struggle to have autonomy and self-determination, that these first generations of Indigenous filmmakers and communicators had to fight by documenting human rights abuses. They were also the ones who then opened space so that future generations and waves of Indigenous communicators could experiment with other genres, with other ways of communicating, whether it be through film or radio or any other different mediums.

It’s also important to note that the actions and the efforts made for many decades now by brothers, sisters, and other kin in the Pacific Islands, the Arctic, the Amazon, around Turtle Island, and other places of the world in many ways inspired our project’s initial question and subsequent research. We had the desire to find out about the role and historic presence of tattoos with Wayuu People. This process of working with the Wayuu around traditional tattoo revitalization through film and community organizing, in a lot of ways, can be put within the lens of globalizing hope — a concept I first heard about from Via Campesina — through storytelling and knowledge sharing at these gatherings.

When people speak of globalization, we normally speak of all the negative things that state policies and international economic institutions are trying to systemize and impose, but there’s also the reality that Indigenous Peoples are able to build links and relations to inspire each other and create relationships of mutual aid and solidarity. Essentially, globalizing hope is a way of globalizing resistance.

We certainly do need more hope in this time of climate crisis, exhaustion, and social fatigue. What has your research revealed about the role of tattooing for the Wayuu?

What we are seeing around the world, for many Indigenous Peoples — the Wayuu included, is that traditional tattoo revitalization is a way to start conversations about wanting to reclaim, wanting to re-Indigenize, wanting to heal — whether it be from violence a person lived in their own life, or intergenerational violence that we’ve inherited from many generations of colonization and oppression.

We have found that tattooing for Wayuu and many other Indigenous Peoples, is completely tied to ancestors and family, the relationships to territory and place, culture, as well as the relations with other beings — human and non-human, that are in those places. We have also learned how this visual language of markings facilitates a non-verbal communication to others of who you are, who your peoples are, what roles or status you might hold, and things of that nature. For many Indigenous Peoples this also remains true after death and how we identify our loved ones once on the spiritual plane.

The interactive nature of this project can be seen as transformative on a number of levels. Can you share more about the role of in-person gatherings in this creative journey?

Our first gathering, for Wayuu tattoo artists, was held from the 25th to the 27th of August 2023 in Oorokot and La Guajira, Colombia. It was three days in community with about 80 participants, and it was extremely evident that this space was needed for people to express themselves, to learn, for people to cry, for people to support each other, for people to heal, and ultimately, for people to feel that they could mark themselves with the symbols and the iconography that their ancestors once used, and make visual that process and that position they have taken on for themselves.

In our work as community organizers and land defenders, we’re constantly in survival mode and constantly on the defensive. We often don’t have the time or the economic capacity to aspire and dream beyond what we are living in this time and place. And the support from the 4th World and Storytelling Fellowships has really allowed us to build and create something of substance. If Tracy hadn’t taken a chance on us, none of this would have been possible. It’s really strengthened and deepened our capacity and opened the door for other organizations to support our project.

It became very apparent in the last month that this is much bigger than we are. It’s much bigger than this film project. It is gathering a life of its own, and it is responding to a need for the Wayuu People and many other Indigenous Peoples as well. I find that the particular approach that 4th World has had with us is quite unique, and we haven’t been able to find it in other spaces: the mutual respect and understanding, the appreciation, the trust and confidence in us, that our past experiences and what we’ve lived in our own territories, in our own communities, is enough evidence and argument in itself that we are the ones to be doing this.

How has the 4th World Media Lab and Storytelling Fellowship supported the work of this story and Wayuu Peoples’ self-determined goals of representation?

Your support has been fundamental and transformative for Wayuu People to be able to achieve these accomplishments. The different fellowships haven’t only been an economic support in this process, which has directly benefited our people, but the fellowships have also brought us into an extended family network of global Indigenous creatives, which goes beyond the staff. This weaving together of different support systems, perspectives, and intimate mentorship is unique.

I particularly like the feeling of family and relationships that we have with everyone here in the 4th World Media Lab fellowship. We’re all from different backgrounds, very different ages, and extremely different experiences, but we all meet each other where we are at, in a very respectful, empathetic, and supportive way. We’re constantly trying to see how to help each other, share resources or knowledge, or simply be a present listener, and you don’t find that often in life.

This project is being done with an international audience in mind. This whole thing has been possible because we were inspired by something very similar done by Kunaq, a fellow alum from the Storytelling Fellowship, with the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project. The documentary feature is also inspired by the film Matses Muxan Akadakit – Festa da Tatuagem Matis, created by the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista – CTI and the Associação Indígena Matis (AIMA). So, it would only be correct of us to also make this accessible (at least language-wise and on the internet), because who knows, maybe someday youth from another Indigenous Peoples in another part of the world will see something in our videos or photos or podcasts and start to ask the right questions to their Elders in their own community.

Our hope is that all of this work and organizing will allow other young Indigenous People from the Global South to see that they are also capable of telling their own stories with their own Peoples. It’s not just about us, and ultimately, this work is possible because of those who have come before us.

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This piece was supported with editing by Michelle Hurtubise.

📸 Featured Image: Indigenous Wayuu filmmakers Marbel Vanegas Jusayu and David Hernández Palmar pause with Dayuma Palmar and Emiliano David Muñóz during the community-driven production of “Buscando las Marcas del Asho´ojushi / Searching for the Marks of the Asho´ojushi.” (Photo courtesy of the Tatuado con Espinas – Asho’ojushi Collective)

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