Darrell Hillaire is the executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions, an Indigenous led non-profit that focuses on cultural education and environmental justice through film, podcasting and other forms of storytelling.
Part three of a five-part series in collaboration with the Museum of Pop Culture, with support from 4Culture.
In collaboration with MoPop for their “WA Untold Pop Culture Stories” series, MoPop wanted to focus on the stories of King County pop culture creators in order to ensure that a more accurate representation of culture artists in America are preserved for future generations.
As a queer Ojibwe woman I came to this project hoping to bring varying Indigenous stories, identities and perspectives to the forefront. Oral histories are traditionally how many Indigenous people have passed down culture, customs, and tradition. Through this series, we recognize Indigenous pop culture voices, experiences, and perspectives with the intention of honoring and celebrating their unique story.
Darrell Hillaire is the executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions, an Indigenous led non-profit that focuses on cultural education and environmental justice. CSSP is a continuation of Hillaire’s great-grandfather, Frank Hillaire’s, dance group that formed over a century ago to educate non-Native people moving into Lummi lands about Lummi ways.
Hillaire is also a Lummi Nation leader having served several terms on the Lummi Indian Business Council, including as Chair. He retired from the Council in 2008 when he founded and ran the Lummi Youth Academy. In 2013 he wrote the acclaimed play What About Those Promises? about the broken promises of the Treaty of Point Elliott. He founded CSSP to stage the play. Now, CSSP has produced films, published books, and produced podcasts of Indigenous stories.
Hillaire’s great grandfather’s goal of educating and uniting communities through Indigenous perspectives on issues like environmental conservation and treaty rights is still at the foundation of everything that CSSP does.
“One of our basic principles is to touch the minds and hearts of people,” Hilliare shared. “We like to go where the people have their boots in the water and what they talk about is what they are, and what they believe in. What they’re doing is what they believe in. So we think that’s the most effective way to tell stories is to reach into the communities where people are practicing a way of life, not just talking about it.”
Which is exactly what CSSP has done in all of their films including, Scha’nexw Elhtal’nexw Salmon People: Preserving a Way of Life, an hour-long documentary inspired by the late Chexanexwh Larry Kinley, a Lummi fisherman and tribal leader. This documentary is a part of the Salmon People Stories, a collection of films that touch on the success of the Klamath dam removal for the Yurok Tribe, salmon recovery efforts along the Elwha River, 10 years after the removal of their dam, the historic Celilo Falls Village that was flooded by the Dalles Dam and the hope of the river running free and Natives gathering there to fish once again, and the Lummi Tribe’s history of self-determination and sovereignty.
The Lummi people’s ancient bond with salmon helped to inform the entire series.
“It’s like there’s a vibe there that just overcomes everybody in the community,” Hillaire said. “So we got interested in that. And why is that so? Well, it’s because we’ve been doing it for a thousand years and the spirit comes home, the spirit of the salmon comes home and everybody sees that and feels that and wants that.”
When people watch these films Hillaire hopes that people who watch will begin to recognize and respect the first people of the land, past a land acknowledgement.
“Through time, through my father’s time, and my great grandfather’s time, it was always about recognition,” Hillaire said. “It was like we were just non-existent. That was a deliberate act by the federal government and the peoples of this world that are in charge. They just wanted us gone… So recognition is really important and it’s much beyond a land acknowledgement.”
But more than basic recognition that Native people are still here, or acknowledgement of whose land was stolen, Hillaire hopes that the films amplify the voices and solutions brought by Native peoples to the current climate crisis.
“If you restore salmon, you’re restoring a lot of things, rivers, trees, forests, the bay,” Hillaire said. “Everything’s restored if you have salmon as the central figure, as the miner’s canary. Everything else comes back to life if you take care of salmon.”
Most importantly, Hillaire hopes that these films have a cultural impact on the entire country through traditional teachings of gratitude and an understanding of reciprocity and care for all beings.
“These values that we embody, they need to be learned by these people here,” Hillaire said. “All these rich people here need to learn how to share more. They need to learn gratitude more. So that’s really kind of what I think is the most important movement we need to be part of.”
We talked for almost an hour about responding to the mental health crisis in Native country through storytelling in film at CSSP, historical trauma, working with Native youth and supporting them in their own storytelling, and so much more.
The full length interview can be found here. The interviews were video and audio recorded and saved in the MoPop Online Collections Vault with over 1,000 others.
Learn more about Children of the Setting Sun on their website and follow them on Instagram for updates about exciting upcoming projects like a graphic novel about the nuclear waste site in Hanford, which is one of the traditional homes of the Yakama Nation and others and a number of short films about the opioid epidemic in Native country.
You can read part one featuring Paige Pettibon, descendant of the Bitterroot Salish of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Black & white, highlights the complexity of Indigenous identities, and uplifts shared community values through a range of artistic mediums here. Part two featuring Ronald Mason, known by many as RONN!E The Blue Eyed Native, (Sƛ̕púlmx) Cowlitz Tribe, is a Two-Spirit artist, designer and the production manager at Daybreak Star Radio, an online radio station that plays 90% Native music here.
