Oct 8, 2025
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The Modern Films, Ancient Environs & Different Peoples of Robert Lundahl
by Robert Lundahl
Robert Lundahl, returning from hiking to the Elwha River source, Olympic Mountains Washington, 1995. photo: R. LundahlPLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
Oscar Wilde: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
I WAS IN MY SAN FRANCISCO OFFICE
listening to NPR’s “Pulse of the Planet,” when I first heard about the Elwha, a river on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where Congress had mandated the removal of two dams the year before. I had prepared for this moment. I had acquired a 4 wheel drive truck and an Eclair ACL 1.5 16mm film camera.
Art is a form of expression, reflecting the world around us through mediums like painting, literature, music, and film. Oscar Wilde’s quote, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” changes the perspective on the nature of art. It suggests that art is not just a similacrum of reality, but a projection of the maker’s own experiences, emotions, and interpretations.
I had traveled to the Elwha several times, shooting this and that, when down the road walked two Elder women, members of the Klallam tribe.
Adeline spoke first. “We heard you want to hear a story.”
“Yes,” I replied tenuously.
Adeline Smith and Beatrice Charles (Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe), 'Unconquering the Last Frontier'. (2025 re-master) photo: R. Lundahl “You mean the one about how they put a pipeline through my mother’s farm, killed the animals, the dogs and the chickens, destroyed the farm, and then how she died of cancer?”
“That would be the one,” I responded.
With that we began a lifelong friendship. And a film.
Bea Charles and Adeline Smith were indigenous activists of a previous generation.
Together, they contributed 12,000 words to the Klallam dictionary.
Together, they testified in the legal case US v. Washington, restoring treaty rights.
Think Marlon Brando refusing the Academy Award for Best Actor in the Godfather. Brando supported the tribes’ fight for their treaty rights, advocating for their access to traditional fishing grounds.
The film we made together with the Lower Elwha Klallam community, 25 years ago, is called “Unconquering the Last Frontier.”
The level of racism I witnessed in the fading logging and mill town of Port Angeles became an unfortunate, though all too familiar, backdrop for several films made in both Washington state and Southern California.
The poster from Lundahl’s PBS doc, 'Song on the Water' (2005). photo: R. Lundahl My mother was progressive for her time, having studied at Sarah Lawrence College with Joseph Campbell. Without realizing it, I was raised in a non-culturally specific household environs. Multi-cultural, multi-racial San Francisco in the ‘90’s suited me.
I travelled to 23 countries filming for client Sun Microsystems.
“Unconquering the Last Frontier” premiered at Dolby Labs and subsequently at Oakland’s Fine Arts Theater, projected from 16 mm. film. It was one of the last films processed, timed and printed by Jim Moy at San Francisco’s Monaco Labs. In a strange twist of fate, the pipeline built through Adeline’s mother’s farm supplied water to Rayonier Mill, producer of Rayon, guitar picks, ping pong balls, and celluloid acetate motion picture film.
Today, three dams on Washington’s Skagit River in Skagit and Whatcom counties block salmon runs which sustained the Swinomish, Upper Skagit and Sauk Suiattle peoples since time immemorial.
After sustaining a life threatening injury, I found myself under resident care. Fortunately Topaz AI allowed me enhance and increase resolution of this and other films to 4K for projection. It’s complicated and takes experimentation.
I had been creating “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” on primetime KPFK, Los Angeles [now on PRX, Public Radio Exchange], an arduous weekly task. There were 74 or 75 created, based on a simple premise.
Philip Smith (Chemehuevi) confronts construction workers at a sacred site outside of Blythe, California, from “Who Are My People?” (2015). photo: R. Lundahl That simple premise? Ask three good questions.
The show, called CreativeFRONTLINE, was produced with Indigenous Investigative Journalist, Tracker Ginamarie Quinones.
The dams on the Skagit are problematic for several reasons. Aside from blocking fish runs to upriver tribes, who depended on them for food, spiritual sustenance, and cultural identity, as did the Elwha Klallam tribal families featured in “Unconquering the Last Frontier,” the dams supply all the power to the City of Seattle, via Seattle City Light.
A recent article, called “River of Deception” in The Nation explains the destruction caused.
The Elwha Dams were removed in 2011 and 2014, in the first major dam removal and ecosystem restoration effort in the world, predating dam removal on California’s Klamath. In both cases fish stocks are returning.
On the Skagit, however, removal has not been proposed, with Seattle City Light resistant.
Upper Skagit Tribal Elder, Scott Schuyler comes down clearly on where his tribe stands, in the Nation’s article. Referring to the waterless and diverted riverbed, Schuyler says, “The tribe would prefer to take out the dams and restore a free-flowing river.”
Alfredo Figueroa (Yaqui/Chemehuevi), Acacitli, Blythe. California, from 'Who Are My People?' (2010) photo: R. Lundahl A few phone calls later, enlisting the support of the Mt. Baker Group and Washington Chapter of the Sierra Club and a former Executive Officer of several tribes, Unconquering the Last Frontier is back in the theaters, in Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Mt. Vernon, Olympia, and down the road maybe Seattle and Berkeley.
The KPFK “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” and salem-news.com print versions followed on from an opportunity to work with Sr. Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, UFW [United Farm Worker] leader with Cesar Chavez, in making “Who Are My People?”
In the Mojave desert, the world’s energy companies converge to produce power. They’ve destroyed ecosystems, migrating birds, tortoise, and sacred places from ancient civilizations. The LA Times indicates, we are at a “Flashpoint” between competing value-systems. Bodies have been exhumed, and geoglyphs destroyed, in an area that is a long-term indigenous settlement. “Who Are My People?” depicts how the world’s energy firms have met their match in a small group of Native American elders, in the hottest desert on the planet.
More atrocities, more cultural genocide, more racism brought me to a place of societal discontent.
Nothing is perfect in this world, says Alfredo Figueroa, Chemehuevi Cultural Monitor and Founder of La Cuna De Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle. There are many beginnings and many endings.
Reverend Ron Van Fleet (Mojave/Apache) at Ivanpah Solar Electric Facility, outside Las Vegas, from “Who Are My People?” (2012) photo: R. Lundahl
It is the beginning which sets the story in motion; and therefore determines what we see and how we see it. The desert and the West is a place of many such beginnings and endings.
When I was a student at the University of Oregon, one of my professors was a television Art Director and painter named Bob (Robert) Kostka, now deceased. Bob had studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded by a generation of emigré artists and architects from Europe after World War II, who had fled the Nazis. As a young student, my early readings about the Bauhaus had focused on architects such as Mies van de Rohe, and Walter Gropius, famed for “modernist” buildings without ornamentation. The great French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier had been an influence. Le Corbusier had called buildings “Machines for Living.”
My beginnings therefore in a professional education that would lead me eventually to corporate communications and filmmaking, was ‘Cartesian,” seeing the human-built world as a kind of “clockworks.”
Kostka, however, perplexed me. He had seen in me at that time a kind of intellectual rigidity and sought to dilute it, actually he wanted to annihilate it. “You’re a good talker,” he would say.
Author, Frank Waters, Taos, NM. photo: Bob Kostka First, Bob introduced me to the great English filmmaker, Nicolas Roeg. Nick had started his career as second-unit director on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. A desert film with few parallels. Wikipedia states, “A characteristic of Roeg’s films is that they are edited in disjunctive and semi-coherent ways that make full sense only in the film’s final moments.” It was another desert film, 'Walkabout' (1971), which completed the destruction of my Post War American “Rationalism.”
Nick Roeg’s distrust of civilization mirrored Bob’s. Not content with the ordinary perspective (and life) of a Chicago Art Director for PBS station, WTTW, Bob spent a great deal of time in Taos, NM, where he befriended the great Western writer, Frank Waters. Bob Kostka had photographed Waters on several occasions, and some of these pictures appear on the dust jackets of his books.
One of Frank Waters’ seminal books was Book of the Hopi, which he wrote with Oswald White Bear Fredericks. Book of the Hopi correlated the stories and prophesies of the Hopi clans and made them available in written form for the first time
The Hopi and the Chemehuevi of the Colorado River Basin share elements of a worldview that matter today. Both speak of great migrations of peoples following the end of the Fourth World, a world ended by flood, caused by, what we can surmise today, a warming of the Earth. “Everybody has a flood story,” says Figueroa.
As Sigmund Freud points out in “Civilization and it’s Discontents”, Civilization requires conformity for some very good reasons. However, our notion of what civilization is at any given moment may be based on a version of reality that has outlived its usefulness. Kostka, Roeg, and Waters in no way were conformists. What each sought through the connection with ancient peoples was a grounding vision and lesson in Earth-based cultures, that allowed them both a psychological and physical perspective to be more realistic and sustainable in their thinking.
Poster for 'Incident at Ft. McDermitt', a CreativeFRONTLINE Cinema Verité Radio Documentary, KPFK, Los Angeles (2024). photo: R. Lundahl As the film screening approaches, Vanessa Castle, [Elwha Klallam] has informed us her family will be receiving Adeline's land back. Seized when Adeline’s mother was dying, her title to the land was an ‘Indian Patent,” and her hospital bill was charged against that Patent, illegally, as a “Patent” cannot be mortgaged.
For more info, see my site or IMDb page. You can attend or sponsor an upcoming screening, book here in Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Mt. Vernon (at the beautiful 800 seat Lincoln Theater), Seattle, Olympia and Vancouver and love get a show at the David Brower Center in Berkeley.
Posted on Oct 07, 2025 - 01:58 PM
by Robert Lundahl
Robert Lundahl, returning from hiking to the Elwha River source, Olympic Mountains Washington, 1995. photo: R. LundahlOscar Wilde: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
I WAS IN MY SAN FRANCISCO OFFICE
listening to NPR’s “Pulse of the Planet,” when I first heard about the Elwha, a river on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where Congress had mandated the removal of two dams the year before. I had prepared for this moment. I had acquired a 4 wheel drive truck and an Eclair ACL 1.5 16mm film camera.
Art is a form of expression, reflecting the world around us through mediums like painting, literature, music, and film. Oscar Wilde’s quote, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” changes the perspective on the nature of art. It suggests that art is not just a similacrum of reality, but a projection of the maker’s own experiences, emotions, and interpretations.
I had traveled to the Elwha several times, shooting this and that, when down the road walked two Elder women, members of the Klallam tribe.
Adeline spoke first. “We heard you want to hear a story.”
“Yes,” I replied tenuously.
Adeline Smith and Beatrice Charles (Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe), 'Unconquering the Last Frontier'. (2025 re-master) photo: R. Lundahl “That would be the one,” I responded.
With that we began a lifelong friendship. And a film.
Bea Charles and Adeline Smith were indigenous activists of a previous generation.
Together, they contributed 12,000 words to the Klallam dictionary.
Together, they testified in the legal case US v. Washington, restoring treaty rights.
Think Marlon Brando refusing the Academy Award for Best Actor in the Godfather. Brando supported the tribes’ fight for their treaty rights, advocating for their access to traditional fishing grounds.
The film we made together with the Lower Elwha Klallam community, 25 years ago, is called “Unconquering the Last Frontier.”
The level of racism I witnessed in the fading logging and mill town of Port Angeles became an unfortunate, though all too familiar, backdrop for several films made in both Washington state and Southern California.
The poster from Lundahl’s PBS doc, 'Song on the Water' (2005). photo: R. Lundahl I travelled to 23 countries filming for client Sun Microsystems.
“Unconquering the Last Frontier” premiered at Dolby Labs and subsequently at Oakland’s Fine Arts Theater, projected from 16 mm. film. It was one of the last films processed, timed and printed by Jim Moy at San Francisco’s Monaco Labs. In a strange twist of fate, the pipeline built through Adeline’s mother’s farm supplied water to Rayonier Mill, producer of Rayon, guitar picks, ping pong balls, and celluloid acetate motion picture film.
Today, three dams on Washington’s Skagit River in Skagit and Whatcom counties block salmon runs which sustained the Swinomish, Upper Skagit and Sauk Suiattle peoples since time immemorial.
After sustaining a life threatening injury, I found myself under resident care. Fortunately Topaz AI allowed me enhance and increase resolution of this and other films to 4K for projection. It’s complicated and takes experimentation.
I had been creating “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” on primetime KPFK, Los Angeles [now on PRX, Public Radio Exchange], an arduous weekly task. There were 74 or 75 created, based on a simple premise.
Philip Smith (Chemehuevi) confronts construction workers at a sacred site outside of Blythe, California, from “Who Are My People?” (2015). photo: R. Lundahl The show, called CreativeFRONTLINE, was produced with Indigenous Investigative Journalist, Tracker Ginamarie Quinones.
The dams on the Skagit are problematic for several reasons. Aside from blocking fish runs to upriver tribes, who depended on them for food, spiritual sustenance, and cultural identity, as did the Elwha Klallam tribal families featured in “Unconquering the Last Frontier,” the dams supply all the power to the City of Seattle, via Seattle City Light.
A recent article, called “River of Deception” in The Nation explains the destruction caused.
The Elwha Dams were removed in 2011 and 2014, in the first major dam removal and ecosystem restoration effort in the world, predating dam removal on California’s Klamath. In both cases fish stocks are returning.
On the Skagit, however, removal has not been proposed, with Seattle City Light resistant.
Upper Skagit Tribal Elder, Scott Schuyler comes down clearly on where his tribe stands, in the Nation’s article. Referring to the waterless and diverted riverbed, Schuyler says, “The tribe would prefer to take out the dams and restore a free-flowing river.”
Alfredo Figueroa (Yaqui/Chemehuevi), Acacitli, Blythe. California, from 'Who Are My People?' (2010) photo: R. Lundahl The KPFK “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” and salem-news.com print versions followed on from an opportunity to work with Sr. Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, UFW [United Farm Worker] leader with Cesar Chavez, in making “Who Are My People?”
In the Mojave desert, the world’s energy companies converge to produce power. They’ve destroyed ecosystems, migrating birds, tortoise, and sacred places from ancient civilizations. The LA Times indicates, we are at a “Flashpoint” between competing value-systems. Bodies have been exhumed, and geoglyphs destroyed, in an area that is a long-term indigenous settlement. “Who Are My People?” depicts how the world’s energy firms have met their match in a small group of Native American elders, in the hottest desert on the planet.
More atrocities, more cultural genocide, more racism brought me to a place of societal discontent.
Nothing is perfect in this world, says Alfredo Figueroa, Chemehuevi Cultural Monitor and Founder of La Cuna De Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle. There are many beginnings and many endings.
Reverend Ron Van Fleet (Mojave/Apache) at Ivanpah Solar Electric Facility, outside Las Vegas, from “Who Are My People?” (2012) photo: R. Lundahl It is the beginning which sets the story in motion; and therefore determines what we see and how we see it. The desert and the West is a place of many such beginnings and endings.
When I was a student at the University of Oregon, one of my professors was a television Art Director and painter named Bob (Robert) Kostka, now deceased. Bob had studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded by a generation of emigré artists and architects from Europe after World War II, who had fled the Nazis. As a young student, my early readings about the Bauhaus had focused on architects such as Mies van de Rohe, and Walter Gropius, famed for “modernist” buildings without ornamentation. The great French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier had been an influence. Le Corbusier had called buildings “Machines for Living.”
My beginnings therefore in a professional education that would lead me eventually to corporate communications and filmmaking, was ‘Cartesian,” seeing the human-built world as a kind of “clockworks.”
Kostka, however, perplexed me. He had seen in me at that time a kind of intellectual rigidity and sought to dilute it, actually he wanted to annihilate it. “You’re a good talker,” he would say.
Author, Frank Waters, Taos, NM. photo: Bob Kostka Nick Roeg’s distrust of civilization mirrored Bob’s. Not content with the ordinary perspective (and life) of a Chicago Art Director for PBS station, WTTW, Bob spent a great deal of time in Taos, NM, where he befriended the great Western writer, Frank Waters. Bob Kostka had photographed Waters on several occasions, and some of these pictures appear on the dust jackets of his books.
One of Frank Waters’ seminal books was Book of the Hopi, which he wrote with Oswald White Bear Fredericks. Book of the Hopi correlated the stories and prophesies of the Hopi clans and made them available in written form for the first time
The Hopi and the Chemehuevi of the Colorado River Basin share elements of a worldview that matter today. Both speak of great migrations of peoples following the end of the Fourth World, a world ended by flood, caused by, what we can surmise today, a warming of the Earth. “Everybody has a flood story,” says Figueroa.
As Sigmund Freud points out in “Civilization and it’s Discontents”, Civilization requires conformity for some very good reasons. However, our notion of what civilization is at any given moment may be based on a version of reality that has outlived its usefulness. Kostka, Roeg, and Waters in no way were conformists. What each sought through the connection with ancient peoples was a grounding vision and lesson in Earth-based cultures, that allowed them both a psychological and physical perspective to be more realistic and sustainable in their thinking.
Poster for 'Incident at Ft. McDermitt', a CreativeFRONTLINE Cinema Verité Radio Documentary, KPFK, Los Angeles (2024). photo: R. Lundahl For more info, see my site or IMDb page. You can attend or sponsor an upcoming screening, book here in Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Mt. Vernon (at the beautiful 800 seat Lincoln Theater), Seattle, Olympia and Vancouver and love get a show at the David Brower Center in Berkeley.
Posted on Oct 07, 2025 - 01:58 PM
