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Kesh

Directed by Vanessa Renwick

United States • 2018 • 3 mins.

Always Coming Home
A white dog with blue eyes, returning home when old.
A people at home in the left coast wilds
as the animals they are. Some half human.
North Owl, half person, raised by a woman of the matriarchal Valley, fathered by a passing Condor warrior. 
She said to me, “I am here”.
Little Bear Woman, Ursula. Leaping over and through, negative as positive, dreaming our flooded future’s past.
Lullabies on wings soaring forward.
Ravens slowly spinning, slicing, a dance suspended.
To go is to return. — Vanessa Renwick

This video was made for the re-release on LP (by Freedom To Spend) of the cassette of “Music and Poetry of the Kesh,” a soundtrack that Todd Barton and Ursula K. Le Guin made to accompany her book “Always Coming Home.”

Genres: Experimental

The Northwest Film Center recognizes and honors the Indigenous peoples of this region on whose ancestral lands the museum now stands. These include the Willamette Tumwater, Clackamas, Kathlemet, Molalla, Multnomah and Watlala Chinook Peoples and the Tualatin Kalapuya who today are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and many other Native communities who made their homes along the Columbia River. We also want to recognize that Portland today is a community of many diverse Native peoples who continue to live and work here. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, future—and are grateful for their ongoing and vibrant presence.