In the Tules is a personal documentary focusing on contemporary Northern California and its changing landscapes. The film explores how the visual experience of paintings and landscape photography helped create an understanding of the way land has been seen and used in “The West” among White Americans, and following a path through contemporary California, unpacks how these vistas hide as much as they show us of the often violent forces that forged the region and continue at play.
From the mid-19th century both landscape photographers and painters of the West were crucial in establishing a quasi-religious American settler relationship to ‘their’ land, as well as an understanding of “Nature” in the West as something split into resources for exploitation on the one hand and areas of ‘wilderness’ to be preserved on the other. The state of California has been massively transformed in successive waves, each accompanied by another revisualization. Today this is a region plagued by extreme draught, devastating fires, and massive ecological disaster that demand a new way of seeing and understanding our links to the land.
The “tules” of my title are a type of bulrush or sedge (schoenoplectus acutus) The tules were to Native Californians what bamboo is to Asia, a basic building material for everything from boats, to homes to hats. Being “In the Tules” is an old California expression for being in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere. Tules are a potent symbol. They once covered California. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, huge efforts to clear the land (including the invention of the caterpillar tractor) spelled the end for California wetlands. Tule Lake, one of the oldest lakes on the planet, was drained. Lake Tulare, once the largest lake west of the Mississippi, disappeared completely.
California is also the home to some of the largest indigenous populations in America. Since a low point in the early 20thcentury, those tribes have seen a cultural and political resurgence. Through interviews and an exploration of ecological and artistic practices in contemporary tribal life I highlight modern indigenous practices of land and water use as potential guides to what can become a different way of seeing and understanding the landscape. Ultimately, the film, through this interrogation of landscape suggests new ways of seeing and understanding the land and ourselves.
In the Tules 