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Calm down? Um, no. This Indigenous hip hopper is crusading against racism and misogyny

Burnaby's Diana Hellson has received a $20,000 TELUS STORYHIVE grant to make a short documentary about Indigenous hip hop in Canada
Diana Hellson
Diana Hellson has earned a $20,000 STORYHIVE grant to make a short documentary The Foundation: Indigenous Hip Hop in Canada.

Whatever you do, just don’t tell Diana Hellson to calm down.

She wasn’t calm back in her schooldays in Southern Alberta in the 1990s when the other kids chucked rocks at her. She wasn’t calm when she was in Grade 7 and got jumped at a bus stop by four white boys while onlookers did nothing to help and her school principal said it wasn’t his problem.

She wasn’t calm growing up Indigenous when she had to attend school with kids whose perceptions of what “Indigenous” meant were rooted in stereotypes of long-haired, drunken, homeless people.

She wasn’t calm when she figured out her culture had been reduced to a handful of paragraphs in a school textbook: “Here’s one page about Indians, and they used the whole buffalo, hunters gatherers, blah blah blah. Now let’s talk about Japan for seven months.”

She wasn’t calm when she decided enough was enough.

Hellson, who is of mixed Siksika, West Indian and Celtic heritage, was in Grade 7 when she took matters into her own hands and told her social studies teacher she was going to make a presentation to the class. She came to school armed with a Peter Pan DVD, bannock and a CD from Canadian Indigenous hip hoppers Team Rezofficial. She showed the DVD and pointed out the kind of stereotypes it perpetuated about Indigenous people. After her presentation, she shared the bannock, played a Rezofficial song from their album The Foundation and led the class in reflecting on what they’d learned and heard.

“It was very important for me, because I was beginning to see how insidious the racism was at that age,” she said.

She worked to show her peers positive examples of Indigenous people - Michelle Thrush, Buffy Sainte- Marie, Tantoo Cardinal – to combat the still pervasive stereotypes. She repeated the presentation in Grade 8, and again in Grade 9, fighting against what she calls the “normalization and casualization” of racism by the mass media.

“Even now, in 2019, it’s still so important to me,” she says. “If no one’s going to do it, I’ll friggin’ do it. I’ll do it! I don’t trust that there might be somebody else doing what needs to be done.”

The Foundation
Diana Hellson's title card for her documentary film. - contributed

Hellson, who now lives in Burnaby, has just earned a $20,000 grant from the TELUS STORYHIVE program to help her in that quest – in the form of a short documentary called The Foundation: Indigenous Hip Hop in Canada. The documentary will look at two questions: What is Indigenous hip hop, and why are so many Indigenous youth attracted to hip hop culture?

“There are so many similarities between our cultures as Indigenous peoples and hip hop culture itself,” Hellson says – similarities in look, in sound, in movement; similarities in intention and motivation.

“We recognize it is a form of expression that is used; it is a voice for people who are oppressed to speak up for themselves, for their family and friends, for people in their neighbourhood where they grew up,” Hellson says.

Hellson herself is a hip hop-R&B-soul artist – a.k.a. Mamarudegyal, the self-described “resident angry feminist” of Vancouver’s hip hop scene. She’s also a krump dancer and a multidisciplinary artist whose work covers everything from design to photography and film.

She uses her art, in all its forms, to give voice to the many challenges faced by people who are “othered” by society, particularly in this era of Trumpian politics.

Diana Hellson
Diana Hellson at home with Patrick Kelly (a.k.a. Hope) and seven-year-old Zoelya. - Jennifer Gauthier

“They’ve been very empowered, people who have bigoted, hateful views, and they feel very justified right now, and that’s a terrifying thing,” Hellson says. “It’s a very frustrating time right now to be Indigenous, to be black, to be a woman; it’s like, why are we still having these conversations?”

Adding to her rage is the repeated message from society that she’s somehow expected to be calm about it all.

“Be perfectly calm, be peachy about it, be calm, be happy; don’t be too angry about it,” Hellson says with a sigh. “There’s a lot of things that I use my mediums to kind of attack as a subject” – like a rap verse that came pouring out of her after the Harvey Weinstein story broke and that earned her attention in Discorder Magazine.  (“And fuck your feelings if you lack in basic decency / I really don’t give a fuck about an asshole who believes that he / Deserves the right to choose what other people get to say or be.”)

Now 27, Hellson is grateful for her mother’s insistence that she find a constructive way to channel her rage and frustration back in her tween and teen years, when she balked at going to school because she was so isolated and alone.

“My mom said, ‘You have to do something,’ so she put me into arts programs all the time,” Hellson says – film programs with Women in Media Foundation and CBC, music programs through Music Centre Canada, a Quickdraw Animation Society program for Indigenous youth.

All of those experiences gave her the skills she’s now using in her music and her film projects. Besides her documentary, she’s also working on a STORYHIVE-funded music video, Red Man, with Indigenous hip hop artist Hope.

“I love doing projects that allow me to give information, inadvertently or indirectly, about an oppressed people,” she says.

The idea to explore Indigenous hip hop culture began after she saw her friend JB the First Lady, a hip hop/spoken word artist, give a presentation on the similarities between Indigenous and hip hop cultures.

“I’ve always wanted to do a documentary, and I’m passionate about Indigenous hip hop,” Hellson says. “This gives me the opportunity to share stories of what it’s like to be Indigenous, to grow up Indigenous, but that’s not all the focus. It’s about the hip hop, but it’s also about what’s behind the hip hop.”

She wants the documentary to help open people’s eyes to racism, but not in such a way that it will immediately put its audience on the defensive.

“When people are told things directly, no matter how accurate or informative it is, they just don’t want to hear it, so they’ll deflect it or deny it or ignore it or become kind of angry,” Hellson says, noting the documentary will focus on personal stories. “In this way, we can teach them about our upbringing in a way that’s gentle. They’ll have an opportunity to hear the stories, without their barriers up. …

“I don’t want anybody to be mad when they’re watching. I want them to be understanding. I want epiphanies to happen.”

She’s lined up a roster of artists to interview – including Drezus, formerly of Team Rezofficial, who has remained a guiding influence on Hellson’s career and who has become a friend. All of the artists involved, and all of the crew, are Indigenous – encompassing, all told, about 20 Indigenous artists.

The fact that funding for the new documentary is coming from STORYHIVE’s first ever Indigenous Storyteller Edition – meaning that all the teams are Indigenous-led - is important to Hellson. Too often, she says, it ends up that Indigenous stories are told by people who aren’t Indigenous – so that even when Indigenous voices are being heard, they’re being filtered through a non-Indigenous lens.

“They take the things we say, construe it, deflect it, and our narrative gets lost,” she says. “The narrative has continuously been controlled by white directors and writers. This project allows us to control our own narrative, which is a rarity for us in large media.”

Also important to Hellson is giving voice to the female experience – she has a 50-50 male-female split for her crew and cast. If anything, she says, she’ll err on the side of getting more female voices into the film than male.

“My quiet rebellion of having more females to males in a hip hop documentary is very close to me,” she says. “A lot of hip hop documentaries completely forget to talk about women, and that pisses me off.”

Hellson can already see this short documentary becoming a larger project in the future – in fact, she and JB the First Lady have already talked about the possibility of a full documentary on the subject.

For now, though, she’s intent on producing a clean and focused short documentary that, once it airs on TELUS Optik TV in the fall, will help people understand her world, even just a little better.

“I feel it’s very, very much necessary that I need to contribute somehow,” she says. “Otherwise I’m just going to go crazy.”