Reproductive Justice Reel Camp for Girls June 21-26, 2021
day-by-day
We began! Day #1 at Reproductive Justice Reel Camp for Girls
It’s day one of the Reproductive Justice reel camp and we are settling into our home for the next week, Ka Waiwai. It’s a smaller camp than last week’s Environmental Justice one and it’s also our first hybrid camp, with a few participants sharing space with us in person and other folks tuning in from home.
We start off with introductions and are sure to pass the laptop around one by one so we can introduce ourselves both to the people in the room and to people on Zoom.
After going through community agreements as a group, we launched into the presentation on reproductive justice lead by Tanya Smith-Johnson of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaiʻi and Grace Caligtan of Planned Parenthood Hawaiʻi.
Tanya and Grace walked us through the origins of the term ‘reproductive justice,’ which was coined by 12 Black women at a conference in Chicago in June 1994, as well as how the genesis of reproductive justice is firmly grounded in the history of Black women in the U.S. as commodities, property, and birthers during the earliest years of colonization and enslavement and how they came out of that with a desire to ensure more agency over their bodies.
They reminded us that reproductive justice comes from this lineage but that “this lineage stretches across the Pacific,” and that we also have similar issues and traumatic histories with colonizing nations trying to rule our bodies in Oceania as well, including how our bodies interact with land, culture, and each other.
After the presentation, we launched into a brief overview of camera work by Vera and then straight into hands-on practice with Inez and a walk-through of cameras’ functions lead by Jessie for folks who were tuning in remotely.
The day ended with photos and laughter. So looking forward to what this week brings.
Day #2 @ the Reproductive Justice Reel Camp for Girls
We started session two off with a review of the photos the participants and mentors took of themselves the day before where they were posing in ways where they felt most comfortable in their bodies.
Whether sitting down and chilling, reading a book, lying down, or doing ballet, being comfortable in one’s body looks and feels different for everyone. Tati’s pose is the ballet one and they say that ballet is an activity where they feel most comfortable because they know what they’re doing. They are in control of their body because they know this thing so well. In connecting this to the ongoing discussion of reproductive justice that we end up having after sharing photos, reproductive justice is ultimately about peoples’ rights to be comfortable in their bodies.
To feel safe, secure, and at home in their bodies and to know that they have the agency to make decisions in regards to what helps them to live their best lives. Tati and everyone who shared their poses of comfort with us remind us that we all deserve a world where we can choose how to go about achieving and that sustaining that best life.
Tanya and Grace’s presentation further reminds us of this point with their list of resources and legal reminders for young people who are interested in asking questions, learning more about their bodies, and pursuing safer sex practices and mindsets around sexual and reproductive health. Ultimately we all deserve to feel good and safe in our bodies in everything we do and reproductive justice is a movement dedicated to making that a reality for those of us who continue to remain marginalized within a rigid and discriminatory system.
The rest of the day consisted of learning the importance of audio in relation to film, coming up with team names and allotting production roles, and finally the thing that makes the film: the story. It’s day two and everyone is already laughing, scheming, moving, and getting on so well. I can’t wait to see what these brilliant people end up creating.
Self-care. Day #3 at the Reproductive Justice Reel Camp for Girls
Session three opened with an important conversation about the meaning of self-care.
Everyone shared what they had done as a form of self-care for the day and naturally, each answer was different. Just like with session two’s exercise of celebrating the poses and activities that make us feel most comfortable in our bodies, everyone has something they consider self-care that is unique to them.
Whether it’s eating breakfast, dancing, lying down for a bit, or spending time in the water, we all have our own ways of caring for and returning to ourselves. Vera reminds us of a quote from Audre Lorde, in which she says that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” and we expand into how self-care is not only something we should do as a pure act of love for ourselves but also as a way to actively fight against the burn-out bent, exhaustion-bent society we live in.
Capitalism and colonization have convinced us that we need to keep going at all hours if we want to be successful in any way. This type of thinking also finds its way into political movements as well and we find ourselves torn between working ourselves to death under capitalism and under the pressure of fighting against it within movements and circles that have limited resources or few people who can make time to help carry the load.
Many activists and leaders have found themselves pushing, pushing, and pushing onwards and while this has certainly resulted in amazing political victories and actions, it ultimately has also lead to burnout for so many of them and finding no time for self-care, rest, and healing can truly damage a person. One participant then chimes in to say that we have to remember to put ourselves first because 1. we deserve to love ourselves purely because we just should and 2. loving and caring for ourselves enables us to then give that to our communities and the causes we are a part of. We cannot pour from an empty cup.
After this, the participants continued with their hands-on camera work. They practiced recording audio today as well as taking some practice shots and using the slate. Laughter and excitement can be heard bubbling throughout the room when they’re not deep in discussions over their story. We end the day discussing the plan for the next few days, which will mainly consist of filming and checking off the inevitable production to-do list that is to come.
Just a few more days and we’ll be once again in another showcase. Time flies.
Keep moving forward into the good life - day #4
We opened the fourth session with more thoughts on self-care before launching straight into continued production and the in-person team getting some of their first shots for their film.
Their film is a documentary and they’re using an interview style. In our closing circle from the third session, they said one of the messages they wanted to get across was that they hope other young people get to learn about reproductive justice and health and the importance of having this knowledge early on in order to live a more informed, healthy life. Much of the day was spent interviewing Tanya and Grace about reproductive and sexual health and justice and dealing with the busy sounds of metropolitan Honolulu that inevitably would make their way into the room from time to time.
As they filmed, the hustle of bodies and cars going to and from work, lunch, coffee, summer vacation, and UH can be heard going steady outside.
It’s a strange sensation to sit inside the calm of Waiwai while the team is creating this piece dedicated to educating young people on the importance of reproductive justice and the necessity of human rights and have it juxtaposed with the capitalist-driven, colonially-maintained machine in what is now known as Honolulu.
How people run themselves ragged to be able to barely survive in one of the most expensive places to live in the so-called U.S. How having several jobs is the norm in Hawaiʻi and most people don’t bat an eye when Kānaka Maoli are forced to leave their homeland because they can’t even afford to live here. To live at home. In the ʻāina that is both blood home and literal ancestor. Because tourists and corporate greed say that high rises and shopping malls are more important. That private beaches, hotels, and forced smiles are the things that matter more than keiki o ka ʻāina.
I think once again about how Grace and Tanya reminded us that reproductive justice is about the ability to give birth and raise a family safely and with agency, but also it is about the ability to just live and live well. That RJ is also about those of us who are already living. That it is about challenging and taking down all of the things that detracted from a good life for our ancestors and that continue to detract from us now, like capitalism, colonization, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, Indigenous displacement, anti-Blackness, and everything in between.
These things impede a good life from taking on its fullest form for many of us and we see it running rampant in places like the machine of Honolulu. And places like this and the whole of places like the U.S. continent show us that we have so much work to do in order to create that path to a good life for all of us.
And so I look forward to what these films have to say. Where they ask us to go and what they ask us to do. How they encourage us to keep moving forward into the good life.
Time management, steady workflow, and relation-building at its finest - Day #5
It was quiet in the space on Friday. Probably the quietest it’s been since we started the camp.
The fifth session was dedicated to reviewing footage and getting as much editing and assembling done as possible so I suppose it makes sense: the stillness.
The abundance of moments one had in between re-examining shots and typing out interview transcripts to sit for a second. Breathe. Feel the chill of the air conditioning sweep over you as you look out onto the hot, concrete of University. Notice the way the sky hints at overcast for the entire day just before the sun comes barreling down once again. Reminding us that it is in fact summer. That we still have some months to go before some of us return to school or a fuller bus on the morning commute to work. That we need to get in whatever ocean, play, community time that we can now before our schedules become a lot busier.
This day went just the way it was supposed to. Work balanced with moments of respite. Sharing food together at the long, wooden family-like tables. Huddling around laptops and working together to get the film as wrapped up as possible in the time available for the day.
The anticipation for Saturday when everyone will get to see what was created in this beautiful space and with such beautiful people. Time management, steady workflow, and relation-building at its finest.
We’re all so excited to see and learn come Saturday.
What Our Ancestors Want(ed) - Final day at the RJ Camp
The contrast between the cool and calm air of Ka Waiwai versus the busy, non-stop, hot summer rush of Moiliili outside has been experienced multiple times this week. Today, however, everyone seems to be feeling it just a little bit more. Who knows the reason. Could be everyone on the same temperature frequency, the air conditioner could be a little colder today, or it could be the nerves of the participants as they work on the finishing touches of their films and try to get them exported before 4:00 pm rolls around.
Everyone seems to be relaxed for the most part and a few folks have even been through this process already having been to other camps before this one. But even with experience in our back pockets, people can still get nervous. We can still get jumpy. More sensitive to our environments than before. And why wouldn’t we with something like art? Like creation? With something one has spent hours working at, honing, sharpening, fine-tuning, and finally releasing into the world for everyone to see? To look at with different eyes and different minds? It’s big.
And that’s where we find ourselves today at the showcase for the Reproductive Justice (RJ) Reel Camp for Girls. Watching what was created in this beautiful space over the course of a week by two production teams, one sharing the space with us in person and the other tuning in remotely.
It’s fitting to use the word ‘creation’ for this camp in particular given the theme is RJ. While most folks hear the word ‘reproductive’ and automatically assume the field has mainly to do with birthing people and their rights, Tanya and Grace reminded us throughout the week that RJ is so much more than just the act of giving birth.
It is a movement originally started by Black women in the American south in response to their history of being considered commodities and essentially just bodies used primarily for breeding. RJ comes from the need to assert that Black women have agency over their bodies and that they should be allowed to choose how they go about living and taking care of their bodies without the unwanted intervention of the reigning, colonial apparatus.
This need to have full autonomy over one’s body has gone on to extend to all marginalized groups throughout the world who also find their bodies becoming the subjects of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and other harmful legislation and actions. Birthing people who want to decide how they give birth but also people who don’t want to give birth. People who simply want the ability to wake up and be able to walk outside without fear. This act of living, thriving, and doing it in all of the ways that fit our beliefs and what we feel in our naʻau: that is RJ.
And these films illustrated those points so beautifully because, well, of course they did.
The first film we watched was made by the remote team. The film “Mālamalama,” was a poetic journey through RJ from an Indigenous lens. Through the joined mediums of poetry and animation, we see what it RJ means for an Indigenous woman, specifically a Kānaka Maoli woman living in her homeland of Hawaiʻi.
The film shows us the impact of colonization on this woman’s homeland, her ancestors, and the following generations. It shows us the ways in which colonization and the wrongful, as well as the nonconsensual occupation of Hawaiʻi by the so-called U.S., continues to harm Kānaka Maoli and result in persistent physical, mental, and spiritual sickness. We see the importance of RJ as a movement for securing safety and healthiness for birthing people but we also see it as a movement for securing safety and healthiness for the ʻāina. For water. For the sky. For native languages, traditions, religions, and relations. We see it as a movement for #landback and whenua being returned to those whom it was stolen from. We see it as a movement to raise families and live individual lives in ways that make sense for Indigenous peoples and are completely antithetical to what the joint evil of capitalism and colonialism would have us think. It is the right to be at home in the piko of one’s lineage, to stand strong in our tūrangawaewae, and not fear any wavering.
Speaking from the perspective of a takatāpui Māori, this film so powerfully shows us that RJ is something deeply imbedded in our blood, our naʻau, and our histories as Indigenous peoples. That Indigenous sovereignty, stewardship, tradition, and relation-making are directly tied to healthy ways of living, loving, birthing, and thriving. That we have always done it this way. That policing, restriction, and violation are forced interventions by the colonizing power but agency and autonomy are traditional. That everyone deserves the right to access and enjoy their bodies, birthing or not, without judgement or intervention. This film shows us the ways in which RJ truly does encompass so much more than we realize and that it is such a powerful tool for engaging in decolonial world-building.
In the last film, “Defining Womanhood” by Snap, Crackle, Pop (SCP) Productions, we are introduced to some of the fundamentals of RJ once again by Tanya and Grace. These fierce and mana-ful leaders in the work of RJ walk us through this fight for justice once more, beginning with the importance of remembering the lineage of RJ as a movement created by Black women in the American south as a means to fight back against the legacy of slavery in the so-called U.S. that made an industry out of abusing, exploiting, and commodifying Black people and their bodies. The relationship between Tanya and Grace, their unique perspectives as folks from different cultural and racial backgrounds, and their separate but also similar experiences in this world are also a direct reflection of RJ itself and the many intersections that it houses within that label.
Throughout the film we not only learn from Tanya and Grace as practitioners and warriors in the fight for reproductive justice as community advocates, educators, outreach workers, and midwives, but we also learn from them as people who have experienced the injustice firsthand. That they know what it means to be growing up and experiencing the transition from girlhood to womanhood/childhood to adolescence and not having anyone there to guide them through it and answer the questions they had. They know the heaviness of shame, guilt, and secrecy that society and the women/adult figures in their lives who have been conditioned, place on that transition and how they were made to feel as if they had to learn about themselves and their bodies in unproductive darkness. They know what it means to go to the doctor’s office or a trusted adult and not receive the care, concern, and advice that young people should receive when looking for resources and assistance with questions about sexual and reproductive health. They both also know what it means to approach each of these injustices while existing in a Filipinx body and a Black body, respectively. As women. As people who can give birth. As people with fraught, damaging, and traumatic relationships with the so-called U.S. that continue on to the present day. As people with children but also just people. People with relationships to family, community, and land. People who can look to each other and see similar struggles, kinship, and a shared desire to want to have better for themselves and future generations. People who recognize the importance of RJ as a movement for birthing people but also as a movement for life as a whole and the right to live it exactly how we want to.
These films show us how having agency over one’s life, autonomy over one’s body, and being equipped with the knowledge to ensure we live authentic, healthy lives is what our ancestors wanted for us. That these human rights were taken from people with the invasion of Indigenous lands in the so-called U.S., theft of Black people from their homelands and enslavement, and the continued exploitation in the present day of Black, Brown, and Asian bodies and spirits in the name of American “innovation” and “freedom.” That we have so many battles to engage in, roads that wind and have to be re-routed when we stop at dead ends, worlds that demand building and rebuilding over and over in the name of a more just and loving world for all. And that despite the long fight ahead, RJ is committed to re-instating what was taken from our ancestors. It is committed to re-gifting what was always ours: the right to do what we want and live how we want with our bodies. That we will keep going till there is justice. And with Tanya, Grace, and these young people there to help guide us and with the wisdom they shared with us in these films, I have no doubt we’ll get there.
films
The Reproductive Justice Reel Camp for Girls organized by Hawai‘i Women in Filmmaking in collaboration with AF3IRM Hawaiʻi and Planned Parenthood of Hawaiʻi, and made possible thanks to the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the League of Women Voters of Honolulu Education Fund (LWVHEF) and NoVo Foundation.