 Welcome to Tulane University and to the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South screening of Hollow Tree. I'm Rebecca Snedeker and I direct the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, which is housed in Tulane School of Liberal Arts. We're thrilled to be here with you all for tonight's special screening and discussion with the film's director and three protagonists. We'll begin with a land acknowledgement by Dr. Judy Maxwell. Dr. Maxwell is a professor in the Department of Anthropology. And since 2010 she's been heading a collaborative team of Tulane students and the Tunica Biloxi Tribal members and scholars, the Tunica Biloxi Language and Culture Revitalization Program, working to revitalize the Tunica language. We're grateful to Dr. Maxwell for serving on the program committee of the Center's Tulane Gulf South Indigenous Studies Symposium for the past three iterations and to her for launching the new Native American Studies minor within the School of Liberal Arts. Welcome Dr. Maxwell. Heni Houtu. Imakua Keraetisa. Etowa Ehele. Houtu Lapuch. Good evening all. I'm Judith Maxwell. It wasn't a surprise. And I'm pleased to be here. I greeted you in Tunica. So just a small sample that the language is coming back. The last native speaker died in 1948. But we now have, according to ethanol, we have 32 young speakers. The last count I had was 80, but you know, who's counting? All right. I would like to begin this evening and thank you all for being here with a land acknowledgement. And the land acknowledgement that I'm going to read to you is the official Tulane land acknowledgement. If you ever want this land acknowledgement or one like it, it's on the Tulane landing page. You have to go all the way through everything on the page at the very bottom. There's a link to the land, to this acknowledgement. But let me share this with you and let us all think about what these words mean. The Choctahoma, Chittimacha, Biloxi and other native peoples have lived on this land since time immemorial. Their identities are inextricably connected to this place. With gratitude and honor, Tulane University pays tribute to the original inhabitants of this land. The city of New Orleans was not built upon virgin soil, but merely served as a continuation of a great indigenous trade hub known in Choctah as Bulbancha, the place of other tongues. For thousands of years, people lived along the Mississippi River and Bulbancha served as a place for diverse cultures to come together. We acknowledge the grounds of our campus and the city around us as home to numerous tribes before and after the arrival of Europeans. The tradition of community and sharing demonstrated by indigenous peoples enabled European immigrants to survive in a foreign environment and has influenced New Orleans and the southeastern culture since colonization began. From food and music to art and language, Native Americans continue to leave their mark on our city and academic community. We recognize that as a result of broken treaties and involuntary removals, Native Americans were often forced from their lands. We remember and pay respect to the communities impacted by these actions. Yet the resilient voices of Native Americans are still heard and remain an inseparable part of our local culture. In that spirit, we acknowledge that indigenous nations that have lived and continue to live thrive here. That's the end of the official land acknowledgement, and I would just like to note that the purpose of a land acknowledgement isn't just to say some words, but to think about what they mean and to think about indigenous peoples. So I'd like to share just a little bit, a tiny little bit more of the Tunica language with you. So in the Tunica language, the word for an indigenous person is Onimahoni. And if you translate that, that means free person. And the Onimahoni are contrasted with the Onimeli, who are people that we would call African Americans today. Onirawa, which is literally white people, and all of these peoples are divided into different ethnic groups. So for example, among the Onirawa, the white people, we have Ingrasa, which you can probably figure out is English. We have Spanish, which you can probably figure out are the Spanish. And then there are the French, who are Onirawa Cashi, the real white people. So I understand that there's nothing much that we can do about our ancestry. We are who we are, but there is something that we can do about our future. And I hope that in the spirit of the movie that you're going to see this evening, and all of us who are gathered together in hope and solidarity, that we can all become Onimahoni. Thank you, Dr. Maxwell. And I'll continue with some more gratitudes. I want to thank Dean Bryan Edwards and the School of Liberal Arts Dean's Office for their support. Our team at the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Dr. Denise Frazier, Regina Carons, and Demi Ward in hosting this programming. The Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Programs who have cosponsored and publicized this event, Africana Studies, Environmental Studies, and Native American Studies, as well as Tulane Library for documenting this evening, and finally to everyone who helped spread the word and all of you who have joined us this evening on campus. The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South is an interdisciplinary, place-based center that promotes the understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf South region and the region's relationship to the planet. We support research, teaching, and community engagement that relate the local to the global, and all of our programming is based on the idea that the more we understand where we are, the more fully we can engage our democracy and therefore our collective destiny. We have a lot of upcoming events. We're working with a new registration process. We are grateful to everyone who registered. That means you will also receive our newsletter, which you're welcome to unsubscribe from. But we hope that you might stick around on it. We always feature our events and things going on, publications and presentations by our research fellows and we recommend other people's events and other organization events, as well as advertising select job positions and funding opportunities. We have an upcoming fellowship deadline, a research fellowship deadline that is next Monday, March 13th, and it's called the Global South Fellowship. And for some logistics, for the bathrooms, if you all need to go there, head out the doors in the back and take your first left and then another left. And at the end of the film, I want to let you know we're going to let all the credits roll. That doesn't always happen, but we want to appreciate everyone who made this film and just have a minute to continue letting it kind of sink in. And then I'll invite Director Kira Ackerman and the protagonist to the stage for a brief discussion and a Q&A. After the discussion, we welcome you to join us in Newcombe Hall and we'll be having people help direct you there if you don't know where it is. It's on the end of the Newcombe Quad here, toward the right when you exit the building. And on the first floor in the faculty lounge, we'll have refreshments and hope to continue the conversation with anyone who's able to stay. Please know that this intro and the Q&A after the screening will be filmed and available online. And as safety note, just please keep a pathway in the aisle for at least two people to pass. So now to the film at last. The film Hollow Tree is winner of the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival's Best Louisiana Feature Jury Award and the Populist Audience Award. The film is a centerpiece in the growing body of work that shares narratives that tell the story of this region from the formation of our Deltaic lobes and draws connections between our land, water, racialized histories, and of indigenous and African-descended peoples and infrastructure. The director, Kira Ackerman, is the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Fellow. She received a fellowship for Station 15, which is a beautiful documentary short that served as a prototype for Hollow Tree, her first feature film. And in 2019, she received a Monroe Fellowship to support production of this feature film. More recently, she's been an ongoing consultant in the center's strategic planning and has been an invaluable partner to think through the role of climate justice, education, and the liberal arts. She's been a guest speaker at many departments and programs at Tulane, including architecture, digital media practices, environmental studies, and history. And for those of you who are faculty here, we'd love to talk to you about the use of the film in your classes. She also just had an exhibit at the Small Center. And I want to mention, speaking of the Small Center, which is in Central City, some of you may know, it's a part of the School of Architecture. There's an exhibit there called Extractivism that relates deeply to this film that I recommend. We're excited to have many of the film crew members with us tonight, and also its stars. So in addition to Kira, I want to welcome the film's protagonists, Kinsey, Fungi, Tanyalma de Costa, and Annabelle Pavey. We also have producer Chachi Hauser here, executive producer Jolene Pender, who's also a professor at Tulane, and cinematographer Maxim Katari. Welcome, you all. We want to also acknowledge Tulane professors and instructors who played a role in the film. Jelagat Cheriat, who's an evolutionary biologist in the School of Science and Engineering. And Aaron Chang, who's a former instructor in the School of Architecture, as well as former Tulane professor and environmental historian Andy Horowitz, who's now at Yale and Yukon. And with that, we're now going to roll the film, and we'll see you after. What I'd love to do is invite everyone... Sorry, I just did that because I'm so moved by the film, I get just kind of, like, somatically overwhelmed. It's really beautiful. You all have made such a beautiful film. So I want to invite everyone who's here who contributed to making this film, Kira and the three protagonists who you've met through the film, and also the producer and cinematographer who are here, and anyone else who's contributed to the film, whether you gave feedback on a focus group or showed the film in a class, or gave money during fundraising in any way, just please stand up for a minute. Thank you. All right, so I'm going to start with some questions. So this is Kira, who you haven't seen on camera yet, Kira Ackerman, the director, and Annabelle Bikinzi and Ten Yelma. I just want to start with asking the protagonists if you can bring us into a moment during the filmmaking and the film production where you learned something from a place where you were that was previously unfamiliar. And just what was it like being part of this filmmaking and learning from different people in different places? And do y'all have a mic up here? Okay, great. And we can pass these to you. Hello. Okay. I think of the many moments that I could talk endlessly about one of them that stood out to me was whenever I was out at the Chaffelai River Basin with Annie and Roy. That's the couple who was talking about the tree that was chopped down, the cypress tree. And what I observed during my time with them was the happiness that can come with living so close to nature. And the home that I grew up in was just surrounded by streets. I didn't have a lot of field time, I guess you could say. And I think that whether you recognize it or not within yourself, every human has this part of himself that's so drawn to nature because we are from nature. And I really, even from observing the film time and time again, I observe even more how much they influence me. Yeah. Every time I see the boat scenes, mainly the one she's wrapping with my grandpa, that is very dear because after we filmed that and we all went home and started talking about it, everything looked very different to him. So the land slowly will erode in very quickly. As for him, just taking a couple years away from it and him going back and really not recognizing certain places, it was kind of, it made me kind of sad for him. Like wow, you've only been away for a couple years and you going back and you don't even recognize yourself. And I talk about like a childhood fishing spot and I hold that so dearly because that's, you know, like where we started from and I can go there today and it looked completely different. And I mean, I still have the memories. It's just like to like physically see it, it, you know, it kind of hurts. Yeah. I think for myself, just thinking about speaking with you, being in Freetown in Canister Alley and just, oh, you can't, oh, do I need to move it closer? Is that better? Okay. I was just saying that being, speaking with Eve in Canister Alley and being in Freetown and just learning about how, you know, when you have instances where your own experiences are evidence and for that to not be taken seriously or not to be like credible or that was definitely very powerful for me to know that, you know, we're in spaces and systems that, you know, our experience can be devalued, but that shouldn't like keep us from holding onto them and knowing that we're valid and that that is a source of experience. That is a source of credibility just as any expert or anything like that, that evidence is important. And yeah, it also takes me back to being the Army Corps of Engineers and being like, I know what I know, I know what I see, I know what I've heard, I see this, and for you to tell me that that's not true, that's kind of crazy, but yeah. What did y'all learn from each other? What are some moments where you realize, I mean, some of them that are so beautiful are in the film, but are there other ones that come to mind? Are you pulling at me? I've said this in a previous Q&A, but I honestly mean this. Working with Annabelle, not working with y'all, learning and gaining a friendship with Annabelle has honestly given me a sense of, I don't know, I feel more comfortable being my true self. They have given me the outmost support and guidance throughout this whole journey that we've been on. So I take away from them as just believing in myself more. And I cannot thank y'all enough. I think what I learned is that the kind of active participating in environmental activism requires community, and community often results in friendship and being able to observe the different ways that each of us absorbed information and the different outlooks we had on it are further evidence for the necessity to learn together. And I think that's another great reason to share the movie even more because now all of you have a different outlook on it and you are a part of the family now of learning with us. Yeah, I'll just piggyback on that. Community has been so important because everything that we learned was so heavy. I think about just being at the plantation after Robin and I love the fact that we were there talking about that together and kind of collecting everything and it's so important because facing climate change is not something that anyone can do on their own. So I'm so grateful I did heavy guys do it with because it is so heavy. But when we think about how all of us care about it, all of us can come together for it, it definitely strengthens us. So I hope you guys can see our friendship and feel that as well. One thing that there's so many things that again move me about the film, it's something that I want everyone to see this, particularly in southern Louisiana, but there's so many ways that it relates to elsewhere in the world. And when I think of Yukira as a friend and colleague being here, I just love to hear your perspective on what inspired you to make the film and I think one of the wild things that ways that it's been a gift in my life in addition to the long timeline that it sets up for us to learn about and be able to understand our surroundings more is just the role of infrastructure in our lives and engineering and just seeing you all hang out on this oil rig and come to know one another in that setting is really profound to me because so many of those things that our lives depend on in a variety of ways and that impact us so deeply are hidden and not visible. So if you could just share some about some of the choices you made in coming to making the film and just I want to say how much I admired how you and your team laid out just the exposition of the film and the complexity of the connections that you're making over time throughout the film and how beautiful that is and I know how challenging that is to describe and really clearly educate us in what is happening around us. Yeah, it's very, very hard. Every issue in this state is connected to myriad other issues you can't talk about one without there being so many other problems. Before this film I made a short film that's 15 minutes long and it's about a young person exploring the pump station system in Louisiana or in New Orleans rather and as she learns about this underground system she comes to connect it to herself and her own identity in the ways that she feels oppressed like water and it was such a powerful experience to learn alongside this young person in the short 15 minute film that I wanted to expand it into a longer film about a larger drainage basin so moving from the pump station system in New Orleans to the Mississippi River Basin with not one but three young people who lived in different geographies in this place and seeing if together we could figure out how the river shaped us and how our infrastructure shapes us particularly as women here. This will be my last question and I might open it up but I could ask all things all night but one of the things that is so beautiful in the film is the sound and all the sounds in the film the sound design, the location recording your voices, your singing and we're doing a project through the Center for the Golf South and I have been hosting and organizing a series called Anthroposonic and considering the intersections of music sound studies and climate change and racial and social justice and we've invited a different artist every semester for the past year and a half to collaborate with us and present work at that intersection and we just took a group of mostly students and some members of the public and out to a Lily Bayou near Lake Moropah and an artist Demi Ward who also works with us recorded sounds in the landscape is going to make a composition but just having this focus on sound and moving through that experience really changed the day for me like when we set out we went under the interstate in our kayaks and I felt the vibration of that of that infrastructure and the sound of the traffic and then as we moved further into the bayou there were more animal sounds or we could hear them more, they weren't masked at all this evening and just think about the way that you all listen to one another and listen to the people who are sharing information is really beautiful to me and we've been able to hear listening to y'all can you just speak of any sound that comes to mind when I ask that from the landscape or from the film and elaborate if you want or not but I would just love to hear what you think and then Kira also at some point to hear about your process which is so often overlooked gets overlooked in film but is essential and I'm grateful that my first lesson in filmmaking was if it sounds good it looks good because it's so hard to tolerate sound that we can't hear if we want to understand what's happening so anyway I'll pitch that to y'all now I have but I think about being at the old river control structure you can hear the Mississippi River rushing and it's just this contradiction knowing how powerful and how much force it has and yet it's like being controlled that was definitely like being able to hear it kind of makes it more alive knowing that this body of water oh not body of water but it's force, it's flowing and it's sad that it's being controlled just like how it's like alive I think throughout the film there were like varying pitches of like the grumbling of flowing water and it kind of it makes you think about like I don't know this grumbling I personify a lot of nature like the ending little song that I sang I was like personifying a tree no no no singing I think especially today whenever I was listening to the grumbling at the old river control structure it kind of feels like the grumbling of mother nature and like even whenever things seem like they're going okay there's always like an underlying passing of water because influencing our structures and ecosystems whether we're regarding it or not actively I too will talk about the water so the sound of the water crashing like against the boat it could be scary if it's like strong and forceful but also take into account this slow just cruising waves and just smashing I've never been on a boat and I hear that I can go straight to sleep it's peaceful to me but not only that I was asked the question the other day and they asked me are you scared to lose your home and I'm like are you scared knowing something's coming and I'm like you can wake up and be scared every day but if you live with that then you will never experience as it is, life is beautiful you can't take, you can't live with having fear that something's going to happen just like you said about being scared you can't do that because then you miss opportunities that are right in front of you but you're too worried about being scared so y'all water, forceful mind slow bringing back memories of just taking a good nap on a boat I don't think I can say anything better than that all the water sounds are intentional intentional water sound design so when you hear when you see the levees you're hearing constrained restrained water and when you're in more organic natural places you're hearing more free flowing water and it's it's working on a very subtle level throughout the film and a shout out to your beautiful composer Free Pharrell Free is amazing who did the sound design Arjun Sheeth he's also totally amazing yeah so let's open it up to the audience and I'm curious I would like to foreground any student voices if there are any students who have questions we want to kick it to y'all first yes first thanks y'all for being vulnerable and doing this work it really is extremely meaningful for me as well about 10 years older than you guys and I spent my entire life basically trying to articulate what you guys did really so so thoroughly so movingly I guess my question is do you know from this experience the moment that they clicked to you I grew up in the public school where I learned all the synthesis of how it all worked together in the system so now having had this kind of experience do you think that it's changed what you're going to do with your life or how you communicate about where you're from um awesome how long have you been here since you came from the lake? yep so as soon as you said that I immediately thought about being at that little restaurant and watching that video clip of the land just slowly disappearing like that was the first time I've ever seen that like on a screen I mean like I said I've had teachers tell me homework would be underwater I knew that you know we lose the football field every hour and when you hear that you're like okay but I should like actually seeing it it's like wow so for me that you know and then like I said you know I can go back to old spots and I'm like wow this is I see it on the screen but now I can also see it visibly um yeah I it makes me you know like what what can we do you know to preserve the little land that we have left before it is nothing but water and then we also have no land for our homes you know it makes everyone relocate and I'm a big homer person like you know I have family who no longer who no longer live in home and they come down as as their vacation home and I'm like you coming home with a vacation I miss being home I miss I miss just being here and that's it I mean that's what it's about coming back home and being in the scenery that that you've seen all your life who else so oh oh oh sorry I was just gonna say like 1897 just knowing that you know some things are actually very I mean we we learn about you know okay we need to fix the all the problems with the environment and it's all these little factors but we I don't think I really ever ever clicked until that moment that everything was deliberately like everything were choices made over decades that was really key for me because it's like oh you need to save water and you need to recycle but it's like why I think the moment that thing started clicking for me was when I visited the Whitney Plantation because it kind of showed me like how much of a history has promoted the restriction of our of our natural ecosystems as well as our fellow individuals company with learning about Cancer Alley and how the effects are still present today and so seeing like a broader picture kind of allowed everything else to fall into place other questions yes hello professor well Lauren Cargo who's sitting over there and Chachi and I spent a very long time driving sometimes together sometimes separately around the state interviewing young people and asking them what they noticed in their changing environments and at the same time we were sending emails to friends and I knew I wanted to work with three young people in different geographical locations and so as an emailing friend saying like do you know any young person who's curious and cool and you know might want to oddly be on camera for a extended period of time and I got a bunch of emails back and it was those emails from friends ultimately that led me to these three and it was multiple people in their communities who were like Annabelle, Tin Yelma, Mackenzie so and then they all asked really beautiful questions about why their community was flooding so much or why they weren't being taught about these issues in school or why was nobody talking about the land sinking and I had really compelling conversations with each of them and that was it other questions, yes again just amazing I'm a seventh grade teacher so I wanted to show this to my class I'm very excited I first popped on my head when you all were at the Army Corps of Engineers you were talking to the front lady at the desk and then a public affairs guy were scientists not available or engineers to talk to when you were there? The woman actually who we were talking to is an engineer yeah she was I think following Army Corps protocol and as you saw regurgitating what she was supposed to say yeah we weren't intending to set her up either that just organically occurred Grace yeah, thanks so much all of us you all are very inspiring and this is really beautiful to watch I just was curious what you all are up to now you're curious about what it's around the time of the environmental sector whether it's just what are you doing here? yeah so right now I am a senior in graphic design at LSU and like it's remarkable how much this project has influenced the things that I'm creating so right now I'm doing my final thesis project and it's really central around bringing people back into Louisiana because I started my research recognizing like cultural trauma that has existed in Cajun communities and it it was such a hard and difficult topic to just express to a community and so I I developed this kind of call to action to invite people back to this beautifully blooming community in the south and Cajun Cajun community yeah La Lafayette New Orleans everywhere in the south Southern Louisiana in particular but it was heavily influenced by the knowledge and appreciation that I have from my community that I learned through this film currently still in Houma I'm working lately what I've been doing and I'm very proud of this they you know so I've been taking off work to come to screenings and they're like what are you doing I'm like watch my trailer this is my trailer and they're like it's only a minute I'm like yeah you gotta come you gotta come with me when they're watching you're like okay so my thing is whatever just I don't know what we're doing next but we're gonna do something next but my thing is spreading what we already experienced to people around me so that's what I'm doing okay I'm studying computer engineering and I want to go into research on how to build tech more sustainably using materials in a better way and increasing access to technology that's what I really want to do so I'm doing computer engineering and some international studies with the concentration environment and development so I mean I've wanted to be a computer engineer since I was pretty young but the film definitely allowed me to you know create a space where I can think about our community and still be my myself and bring my experiences into my field yes how so I all didn't change the way that you feel about where you're from I've grown up in different places but like have this shared common river and experiences with the river and flooding oh okay from time region you know seeing the oil we find ways and maybe think about how Louisiana has a toxic relationship with oil and it's kind of like you know we need to value ourselves we need to value the culture we have that it's priceless and it yeah that made me think about how you know even though we have this strong tie to oil it's not benefiting us so yeah time to change things so I would say to enjoy where you live and appreciate it because you never know what can happen but also to come together as a community and try to see what you can do as a whole rather than have one person try to do it all by themselves because that's not going to happen so staying together as a community and still enjoying where you live and loving where you live honestly like loving where you live that's like the whole motivation behind preserving Louisiana environment it's like that's the drive that wasn't my initial answer but it's just like I love where I live I want to preserve it I want everybody to come here and celebrate with us but I think what I understand about my community I guess in Lafayette is I address it with a critical eye but also a patient eye like understanding the truths about enslaved people in our history but also understanding you can't change history you can change the future hopefully for the better yes Daniel I have a question when you do all the screenings do the reactions differ in terms of the age of the audience you know like do older people respond differently to the movie than your peers let's say or would that generally the reactions that we get out of it I'm trying to think I mean I think it's kind of similar y'all just say it in different ways if that makes sense because we always get on the car of engineering questions and then yeah it's pretty much yeah I think there's a really good response everyone is blown away in one way or another that and I think that so we're young and we're bringing that perspective I still think that it is able to reach everyone I think they can still find themselves everyone can feel tied to our narrative to some degree yeah I think across all screenings we've been met with this kind of reciprocation which before we were married it was like kind of a build up of nerves like how are people going to see me when it's not about how are people going to see me it's about how are people going to see the subject as a whole and there's been like outstanding reciprocation of what we're expressing yeah we have a survey and we'll send it to all of you but these guys haven't seen it but I can affirm that the surveys sort of all of them are reporting I think it's Maryam Kava has like very commonly she's an abolitionist contemporary who says hope is a choice and so I'm wondering as you all are articulated at the end of the film this is the world you're going to be inheriting and so what where are you finding hope and what changes would you want to see that are working towards that preservation you were talking about Annabelle are there any efforts that you would want to highlight particularly that are inspiring to you I think in my own life especially recently what kind of brings me hope is like reconnecting with my community I think whenever I moved away from Lafayette to Baton Rouge I kind of felt this need to like run away from home and find myself like yeah except like the only thing I've realized is that I just I love the place that I'm from and it is what gives me hope like I this is one example that like brings such a smile to my face this past summer I was back in Lafayette and I was living with my parents and my dad invited me to the Cajun Jam and I just sat on the sidelines I don't really know I forgot how to Cajun dance can't play any Cajun instruments but just the the opportunity to be there and observe just like fueled my soul yeah everybody go to that you go I'll let you go okay when you said that hope is a choice I think it made me think about just how the biggest problem we tend to face is that people think it's impossible or that it's insurmountable of issues and I think just thinking about how in the same manner that you know decisions have resulted in what we are faced now in the same way decisions are the only thing that can counteract that it is a choice to to come together it is a choice to do what you can with what you have and it's a choice to talk about it have these these discussions I mean what I really I guess hope to see or I hope to change what I hope to what changes I hope to see it's just that there's just so much of a taboo like period in talking about the environment sometimes I want there to be a more of a comfortability just so that you know it's so although the device of the divisiveness that that you know I want everyone to be able to see that no matter where you are where you're from what you're going through who you are like it's all of our problems so community yeah my thing is that Miss Tammy who I was on there with um I don't talk very well um so she said that is going to be to stay a tribe and I brought back to mind that down and punishing along the island road there are people who are refusing to leave so that gives me hope that you know people may flee from home flee from the bayou but there's some of us who still live there and who will not give up their home that easily so that's that's my hope to still being a tribe and keeping that language alive and hopefully one day I too can learn it if I can master English first all right let's have one last question um I this might be more accurate but um what like how do you choose hollow tree and like what does the title mean to you um how did I well I just wanted to say quickly to the other question and I'll answer that question that I think also learning is hopeful once you see something one way you can't ever go back um and I think together we demonstrated that um hollow tree I first saw hollow trees when I was making a short film many years ago and they were just so evocative as an image um and and the way that we learn in this film is by looking at our environment together and noticing it and asking questions about it why are the trees hollow why are there so many stumps why is it flooding so often why is the land sinking why are there potholes everywhere um so the hollow tree is sort of a starting point um why is why is the tree hollow and and the answer reveals a lot about um the system of economic systems of exploitation and control um that we're living under and that shape are natural and unnatural world and ourselves so it it is one manifestation of that um do you want to add anything having written lyrics about hollow tree and and been and he spent a lot of time there about person I think I can speak on the lyrics in that um earlier I mentioned I tend to personify nature um and I think in in that last song I was I was trying to express the nature of the tree itself how though its core is empty its walls still stood strong and so this kind of metaphorical heart still persevered um and yeah any other final meditations on the hollow tree or a hollow tree hollow tree no alright alright we are gonna um have a reception for anyone who wants to continue the conversation and and be with everyone uh over in Newcombe Hall and we'll direct you there once we once we are and I thank you all so much so deeply for making this film and for being here tonight and bringing your voices to Tulane you're incredibly inspiring um and and generous generous hearted and um I appreciate the the risk that you took to to co-create this and be your full selves on camera and and here on campus and I look forward to seeing how your lives unfold and how we continue to live in here together um its its an honor to be here with you tonight thank you for having us it's a pleasure so let's give them a big round of applause