Barking Waters

I don’t cry in movies. Or at least I can’t remember the last time I did. But I came pretty close when we watched Sterlin Harjo’s Barking Waters, and I’m almost positive that I would have had I not been in public.

That’s nothing unusual, of course. It was a powerful movie, and at the end of it, there was hardly a dry eye in the room. But it seemed that the most emotional part of the movie was different for me than it was for other people, in large part because of my own cultural baggage. The scene that really punched me in the gut was the one in which the title characters stop off to get a home-cooked meal. It’s difficult to put my finger on, but something about watching those women cook fry-bread—maybe it was the lighting, or the conversation, or the sounds, or the people—something about it took me right back to my childhood in my great-grandmother’s three-room mill house. I could almost smell it—it always smelled like cigarette smoke and cooked ham and something musty and comforting that I can’t quite identify. Add all that to the fact that I lost my great-grandmother to lung cancer, and it's not much of a surprise that I so nearly lost my composure.

This, I think, is important because it demonstrates how relevant Harjo’s work is not only to the Indian experience, but to the working class, Southern, or even human experience. Again, whether my great-grandmother should be classified as Indian is subject to debate. But she certainly didn’t think of herself that way. And without a doubt, it’s a very different sort of experience than the one portrayed in the movie. But I, at least, related to the movie in an extremely universal, somewhat nonracial way, and that's definitely a lens through which Harjo's film can be viewed.