Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution Lessons, Inspiration, and Motivation: Or why we selected it for the 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution

Lessons, Inspiration, and Motivation: Or why we selected it for the 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

Morris Te Whiti Love, Te Atiawa, New Zealand and Director, International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management

Mervyn L. Tano, President, International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management

The 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival is now underway. The welcoming letter written for the festival program states in part: “The films selected for the festival demonstrate that it takes much more than flags, proclamations, constitutions, and legislative bodies to achieve Renan’s concept of the nation. It also takes stories, songs, and remembrances to build a nation. And of utmost importance, nation-building requires the storytellers, memory keepers, dancers, songwriters, and singers that are the builders of nations.”

The October 7, 2016 screening of Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution at the Davis Auditorium on the Denver University campus graphically illustrates Renan’s concept of the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle.”  The film is an extraordinary illustration of the power of music to recapture and reimagine identity, rekindle pride, and arouse the people’s nation building fervor.

The Greenlandic pop group Sumé made up of Greenlandic students in Copenhagen, brought out the Greenland Inuit language to the heart of the colonizer, Denmark, to spread both the language and ideas of a people who politically had little identity in the world in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s they had achieved Home Rule and the start of rebuilding a national identity. That a pop group somewhat in the mould of the Rolling Stones could be a force to push a drive to greater political and economic autonomy in a little known nation makes a great story and a great little film. The mantra that to be Greenlandic you need to paddle a kayak became to be Greenlandic you need to speak Greenlandic contains two important notions of identity – language and culture.

From 1973 to 1976 Sumé released three albums and changed the history of Greenland. The group’s political songs were the first to be recorded in the Greenlandic language – a language that prior to Sumé didn’t have words for “revolution” or “oppression.” After 250 years of Danish colonization Sumé set in motion a revival of Greenlandic culture and identity, and paved the way for a Greenlandic home rule government.

Mervyn Tano, president of the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management and Morris Te Whiti Love, member of the Institute’s board of directors led the post-screening discussion.  The discussion opened with an examination of the parallels between the songs of Sumé and the story of Kaulana Nā Pua, a song written by Eleanor Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast in 1893 for members of the Royal Hawaiian Band who protested the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Written shortly after Queen Lili’uokalani was deposed on January 17, 1893, “Kaulana Nā Pua” is a statement of rebellion. When the provisional government issued a mandate for government workers to sign a loyalty oath, many persons, including members of the Royal Hawaiian Band, resisted this order. The striking bandsmen persuaded Mrs. Prendergast, a close friend of the Queen, to capture their feelings of dismay, anguish, and rebellion in song. Kaulana Nā Pua was the result.

The songs of Sumé and Mrs. Prendergast’s Kaulana Nā Pua are clarion calls for resistance and that reason alone justifies the selection of Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution and makes the comparison between the two apt. The songs are prescient as well; foreshadowing more modern discourse on the national and global politics of recognition as contemporary tools designed to continue Indigenous dispossession.

However, in these songs can be seen an even more foundational aspect of nationhood and nation building—the connection of the people to, and their love for, their land. Sumé’s Inuit Nunaat describes the strength of the people as a legacy derived from the land. Kaulana Nā Pua makes a similar argument by poetically and metaphorically expressing the Hawaiian preference for the natural pu’u “hill” rather the hill of dollars (I ka puʻu kālā o ke aupuni) offered by the enemy. For Sumé the land is all; the land must remain in our hands. The Hawaiians stand firm in support of the land (Kūpaʻa ma hope o ka ʻāina). And both Inuit and Hawaiian are, Ka poʻe i aloha i ka ʻāina, people who love the land.

For both the Inuit and Hawaiians, the hopes and promises of these songs have yet to be fully realized. When Morrie visited Nuuk in Greenland and the early 2000s Home Rule was well in place, but as the film shows, some Greenlanders were perhaps disappointed that it did not quite live up to what its promise. Independence of small island economies is hard at the best of times. Sumé disbanded after their university years in Denmark and the members returned to their Greenland communities – small and isolated on a large island. Nonetheless Sumé helped pave the way to limited independence for Greenland and its indigenous people. For Hawaiians Kaulana Nā Pua still gives voice to the native Hawaiians protest against loss of land and nation. It remains a powerful symbol of pride of culture and a poignant plea for understanding as they seek to restore the nation of Hawai’i.