Emily Sunflower Thompson

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ene piramsa: Mourning Slow Violence Through a Slow and Gentle Medium

Slow violence is “[a] violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space. An attritional violence that is not viewed as violence at all.” – Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

This short experimental film focuses on a creative rendering of Mission San Juan Bautista and the intricate hand-embroidery of a single bell.

Descendants of Amah Mutsun, Yokuts, and Awasas peoples live with the violence which once took place on mission grounds. A clapper stick (traditional Mutsun instrument) taps rhythmically while a young Amah Mutsun boy lists his favorite animals in Mutsun: bear, wolf, butterfly. A rambunctious toddler can be heard singing, yelling, and making noises in the background. That’s when Vertigo (Alfred Hitchock, 1958) begins. Jimmy Stewart describes Mission San Juan Bautista in detail after Madeline recounts an apparent dream about it. This sound clip of Vertigo is not only haunting because of the eerie non-diegetic music and the uncanny resemblance between her “dream” and a real place, it is also a haunting reminder of slow violence. Alfred Hitchcock’s use of the Mission land–-at a time when indigenous people were not allowed access–reveals a violence often invisible: the use of sacred land by white Americans for capitalistic ventures. The actual mission bells (recorded recently) ring continuously on a looped soundbite until the threaded bell is complete. Rethinking the landscape and history with gentleness in mind, I reached out to four members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to discuss what they would like to see outside of the mission, if given the choice. They unanimously agreed on a plaque with the Mutsun word for burial ground: piramsa. The word piramsa is layered here–it quite literally is a burial ground as 4,000 people are buried in unmarked graves on the grounds, but is also a cemetery because this is the landscape in which an apocalypse took place. The kidnapping, enslaving, murdering, christianizing, and dismantling of an entire culture–one that had thrived for millennia. Imagining a sign in Mutsun on mission grounds is quite revolutionary, as the language itself was once considered “dead.” The repeating of the word “gentle” in Mutsun by a descendant of “mission indians” is part of this meditation on meeting the histories with gentleness and to acknowledge that although these tragedies occurred–and continue to ring through time–that using the Mutsun language is in itself a powerful form of gentle resistance. The slow process of hand embroidery along with the sounds included are a haunting reminder of the layered histories of Mission San Juan Bautista–and the whole of California.