Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) makes work that “centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable.” His short film, Dislocation Blues, presents an alternative—what the artist calls “an incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections”—to mainstream media representations of communities and conditions at Standing Rock, the Indian reservation in North Dakota where the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, #NODAPL, coalesced during the summer of 2016.

Hopinka received his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Portland State University and his MFA in film, video, animation, and new genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work has played at various festivals, including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Courtisane Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the LA Film Festival. Hopinka is a 2018–2019 Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. Curated by Lisa Fischman, the Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum.