After screening Making the River — a wonderful and powerful documentary about how one Native man became a product of and overcame the unkind, uncaring, discriminatory reformatory and prison systems of Oregon and Washington States, as well as a victim of the United States infamous Termination Act and the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act of 1954—directed by Sarah Del Seronde and produced by her partner, Paul Stoll, I had the opportunity to interview them together on the phone.

Fortunately their non-judgmental tone and humble demeanors placed me so at ease that my planned interview turn out to be more of a casual conversation. I caught them in Austin, TX as they attended Cine Las Americas Film Festival where their documentary was screening. For the sake of bandwidth and time, the following is an abridge version of the original conversation that lasted a quick hour.


SS (Sarah Del Seronde, Director): This was our first feature so this one was a whole different ship. We didn’t expect this film to turn out . . .

TM (Torry Mendoza): Do you think that the topic may be why it was so powerful, it went so far, I’m assuming you think it wasn’t going to generate so much or to go as far, is that what you were saying?

SS: No, it takes a lot to do any film. And it takes a lot of emotional, mental concentration. In a documentary like this where you are documenting something that happened twenty-five, twenty-eight years ago it’s hard to get people to talk about their past.

TM: I noticed that on your website. It said that was one thing you had to gain was his trust—Jimi’s trust.

SS: Yeah, we were talking with an ex-convict and we could tell that he was not comfortable talking about prison. He would only talk about prison on a superficial level. Then when we’d go to breakfast he would tell all these crazy stories about what was happening inside. But as soon as we put the camera on him he had a different presentation.

TM: Was that part of the convict code, do you think, that was still engrained in him?

SS: I think it is a part of the code definitely, because there’s no room to talk about what happened in a war in civilian life. Whatever he did in there, whatever a person does inside prison has no relevance to how they operate in the free world. The values are different, the belief system is different, the behavior system is different. What you expect to do in prison you can’t do outside, that was a challenge. Both Paul and I had not had any experience with prison or with ex-prisoners before. This was a whole different experience, it just really changes your perspective on what happens to people when you are subject to a set of rules that are not your own. The institutions just turned this man inside out, completely.

TM: What was your motivation for documenting this story of Jimi Simmons and Making the River, how did you come across his story?

SS: The story actually came to us because we had just completed our first short film. I completed a short film that screened at the American Indian Film Festival and Jimi sat on that jury selection for that festival and actually had fired a previous crew. So they had collected about forty-five hours of footage. He wasn’t happy with the previous crew’s direction I guess. He hired a White guy to do his film and I think the perspective was different. They just had different perspectives on what it would take to make the film. When Jimi approached us, he approached Paul and I to help them make a film. First we didn’t know it was his film, just that he wanted help work on a film. Well this film was a challenge from the very start because it’s so complicated, because there are so many details, there are so many perspectives. You have one man’s perspective, and then you have his wife’s perspective, and then you have the guard’s perspective, and then you have the lawyer’s perspective and then you’ve got the older brother’s perspective. You have so many people’s experiences, which are very true and valid to them, but it’s hard to bring that into a documentary thirty years later.

PS (Paul Stoll, Producer): Also, during the festival we kept running into Jimi we’d end up sitting by him at different events just coincidentally. We’d start to get to know each other personally before we even talked about doing anything like Sarah said we didn’t knew he wanted to make a film. So we got to know him on a personal level and then eventually he mentioned he was making a film, but we established a relationship before finding out they were even making a film.

TM: It’s kind of funny that Paul talks about you guys had developed a relationship before knowing that you were going to take on this story, continue on with this project that he was so, not necessarily distrustful but, unwilling to talk on camera so intimately about prison even though you guys had developed a relationship. It seems like it was a level of trust because it was prior to your knowledge of that story that he wanted to be told.

PS: I think what happened was that he completely trusted us with his word talking on a personal basis but then when the camera came up you’re having to trust the world or whoever is going to see your word on the screen.

TM: So he was unsure of the gaze?

PS: Yeah, you have these things that you went through and you don’t know who’s going to see it. Sometimes it would be an inner political prisoner issue and sometimes it was just a personal issue because it had changed his life, he was living in the free world now and he’s a different person. I think it’s still challenging for him to go back and reveal things about himself that he no longer feels is him.

TM: I knew about the Termination Act, but I didn’t know that the Grand Ronde were one of the tribes until this film.

SS: The state of Oregon or any state, they’ve got their horrible relationship with tribes. But when you look at Jimi’s life you can see concrete results of federal policy. You can see forced termination, you can see the child welfare Indian act, you can these different issues at stake that he could have gone into a different family that would have hopefully given him some stability. But he was raised by the state, his family identity was the state and that’s a hard concept to grasp. Up until the age of thirty-one, he didn’t have a family connection. The only family connection he really tried to forge on with his brother in prison. I cannot even comprehend that. How do you meet your brother, how do you get to know and love your brother in prison?

TM: It’s amazing in the movie he was taking away from the backseat of the car from his parents and he didn’t know how many siblings he had and that’s unfathomable for me.

SS: His tribe was terminated in 1954 and Jimi was seventeen months old when it happened. He was taken away from his parents, I think largely because they were unable to take care of their thirteen kids and what’s ironic was his dad was a former tribal chairman. This act of the federal government literally took away your identity, you life, your culture and saying it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a really strange idea. The U.S. was trying to cut budgets during the Eisenhower administration and they were trying to make ends meet and I guess the best way they thought to do that was to turn them into full-fledged Americans. It’s sad now. You look at the Confederated Tribes and Jimi’s actually Rogue River within Grand Ronde, he’s from the Rogue River Band. The make-up of the tribe are people who returned to reclaim their identity or people who went underground. They didn’t get their restoration until 1987. As with Jimi’s family most of them bottomed out . . . and you have these situations where you have an entire family, one generation that directly affects the next generation, the results are devastating. You see this one man and he’s been able to somehow get out of the situation by the help and the love of people and that’s really how he got out of the situation is through people actually having a passion for what they’re doing. I think that when you’re doing any type of work if you love what you do somehow you’re going to come through and perservere. Somehow you’re going to end up floating upright instead of going over with the ship.

TM: How was it working together as a romantically involved couple?

SS: When Paul and I worked together, it was tough. It was strenuous, strenuous on your communication. You have to have good . . .

PS: . . . communication.

SS: When you don’t have any sort of clear way to communicate how you feel it taints things. It moves into the next day, you’re still reacting to something that happened yesterday and you can’t do that because each day is a new opportunity, it’s a new problem, it’s a new situation. That’s something I definitely learned, is you have to be able to communicate and we were struggling with someone who didn’t want to communicate. That made our situation more complicated because you have to be able to be open and honest and be able to talk about things.

TM: I can see that magnifying into your relationship, that’s got to be difficult, but you persevered.

SS: Yeah, definitely. We’re moving onto the next project. We’re going to switch roles, which is I think the way to do it. I directed the last one and now it’s Paul’s turn and I’m going to help him figure out how he wants to tell the next story.

TM: So, do you know what your next project is, is it set?

PS: Our next project is going to take place in Tonga, in the South Pacific. I’m half Polynesian from Tonga, my first short film that I shot I shot in Tonga. So we’re going to return there and try to make something there. The king is going to be coronated in August so it’s a good time to go back. Maybe something related to the coronation of the king. It’s a big event and the Tongan people are going through what Indigenous people are going through all over the world. Anybody for that matter, being exposed to western influence and having to pick and choose what traditions you keep and what traditions evolve and change to be able to adapt to modern society. I want to create a mirror of Tongan society today, a mirror for them to look at and maybe ask the questions themselves, along those lines, but we haven’t completely formulated the project.

TM: How did you secure Cedar Sherbert and Larry Blackhorse Lowe for your cinematography and editing?

SS: We drank them to death.

PS: Actually, Larry helped a lot with the particular interviews. We wanted to credit him because our most important interview . . .

SS: . . . the blue interview . . .

PS: yeah, the blue interview with Jimi, that you see throughout the movie was done by Blackhorse.

TM: When did you guys start this project?

SS: We started in the fall of 2006 and that’s actually when Larry first came out to help us editing and then he came out again, he came out three times. He shot the blue interview in the spring of 2007. In total, production was a year and a half, but we were shooting and editing all at the same time. You can see the DVCam footage versus the Panasonic P2. That was hell, if anything put more strain on the relationship was inter-cutting interlaced footage with progressive footage. We had Cedar come out. Both of them are brilliant filmmakers. They are the real deal. They both come from different backgrounds. Cedar has professional school training, and Larry doesn’t and you’ve gotta respect both of them the way they think about things. We had those two and other people also help out. The sound, the guy who did the score is a phenomenal composer who donated basically his time, he’s a really well known composer. He did stuff for The Contender . . . he was a friend of Jimi and Karen. It was weird, the little things—who you know and then it would lead you to the next person and the person. We went to the prison and the prison gave us a tour. We went around with a secretary and that was probably the most important and transforming moment for me and maybe for Paul too, is going inside a prison. Not going to the visiting room, but going inside and walking around the tiers, the yard, going through the different sections . . .

PS: . . . while the prisoners are walking around.

SS: While the people are walking around and that’s scary. As soon as the door closed, I said ‘oh, fuck.’

PS: No disrespect to the prisoners, they’re all good people. It’s just hard because in prison there’s tension right when you walk in. It’s really hard to describe and if anybody had the opportunity to take a tour of a prison I highly recommend it, especially a maximum state prison. It was interesting because the younger inmates wouldn’t look at you and if they did look at you it was for a split second. Just looking at a person was some type of communication and that wasn’t always a good thing. The older inmates would actually give you eye contact and say hi, more experienced I guess, that was kind of interesting.

TM: I’m assuming that the prison climate has changed, especially at Walla Walla, they’re much more secure than they were back then.

SS: The state of Washington did a complete overhaul of their correctional system when Sgt. Cross died. He was killed on June 15th. The prison system before 1979 was actually under the Behavioral and Social Services. They were under the same department as welfare. When Sgt. Cross died the state then got $16 million to create the Department of Corrections. Since that time, the state of Washington and all its employees have grown up with the myth of the Simmons brothers and Sgt. Cross and what happened on June 15th. They reformed their training methods, they put in metal detectors, they secured the eating situation. At the time, their used to be two dining halls, they moved doors so that only inmates can exit so that they’re facing a tower, whereas when they exited at that time you couldn’t quite see. Now they’ve made it very clear, they’ve just gotten control of the prison. Between the years of 1971 and 1979, they were doing a social experiment basically, a state mandated experiment that allowed the inmates liberties. As many civil liberties they could to give them privacy. In thinking they were going to behave better, the administration pulled back in fifty percent responsibility hoping that the inmates would step up in fifty percent responsibility, but what happened was that you had an inmate elected council that was representative of the different clubs, the different gangs, the toughest people in the prison were the lifers because they had nothing to lose and then the bikers. So you had Indians, who were a smaller population within the prison, you had the Chicanos—they basically tainted the correctional system coming from California. And you had the Black population, they’re no Black people in Washington at that time, because they were in prison, they were all locked up in prison. So you had this crazy system and this photographer, this amazing, amazing photographer by the name of Ethan Hoffman. He went into the prison for four months and did a photo-documentary, it’s a book called, Concrete Mama. That’s actually a short film that I’d like to do when we’re all said and done with this.

TM: That’s actually a chapter in your film.

SS: Yeah, that’s probably the most manicured part of the film. I didn’t have any experience with prison. When you think of it—when you know nothing about prison only of what you watch today of the violent things on T.V. During the reform, it was a completely different world. They wore their own clothes, they were able to go wherever they wanted to go, they had privacy, they had their clubs. Guards couldn’t go inside their clubs. And that’s why you had all these weapons coming out because people were scared. Jimi would tell us stories of walking by and seeing some guy getting robbed and not knowing what to do, but he has to ignore it because he’s going to get his ass kicked. What do you do when you’re in that situation? We couldn’t talk about the bikers. I think he had a bad experience with the bikers, something happened. We could put no bikers in the film, we couldn’t put any Chicanos in the film, we couldn’t put any Black people in the film, because the situation still exists, people don’t forget in prison. And we could not put anything that would jeopardize a Native person today. It sounds paranoid, but when we went back into the prison, people still remembered. They remembered Jimi Simmons, George Simmons, the guards remembered their names, that was crazy. It’s one thing to do research, but then it’s another thing to go into a place and have all of that come to life. We saw the locations of the photos. The ghosts of those places do not die down they don’t go away.