Joey Clift always had an interest in comedy, but growing up as a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, he didn’t consider it a realistic career path, owing to the absence of Native American comedians on the television programs he watched as a child.
“I didn’t think I was allowed to work in comedy, and I didn’t think I was allowed to work in the entertainment industry,” Clift said. “So, I went to college for what, to me, seemed like the next best thing, which was to be a small-market TV weather guy.”
The Washington State native has since made his way south to Los Angeles, California, where he now works as a comedian, TV writer, director, and producer, most recently creating his first animated short, “Pow!,” which will screen regionally as part of the Saturday Morning Cartoon block at the Athens Film Festival on Saturday, April 12. Loosely based on Clift’s own childhood experiences, “Pow!” follows the misadventures of a young boy dragged by his family to a powwow, but who wants nothing more than to keep his handheld console charged so that he can continue to play video games.
“I was brought by my mom to a lot of powwows as a kid, and I viewed myself as a gamer before I viewed myself as Native,” said Clift, who experienced a turning point in his early 20s when he landed a tribal internship, an experience he said involved “a summer of looking for places to charge my phone at different tribal community centers.” “And while I was doing that, I met a lot of other Native folks of different ages, from youths to elders, and we would have a lot of conversations that started with, ‘What are you doing alone in this weird side room charging your phone?’ But then they would end with this beautiful, nuanced conversation about Native identity, what it means to be Native, and the importance of community. And that was such a light bulb moment for me in realizing that being Native isn’t just one thing, and it’s something that each person gets to define for themselves.”
In the wake of this realization, Clift said he began to reconsider why his mom routinely dragged him to tribal events, coming to understand that it wasn’t meant as punishment but rather because she understood that the U.S. government for hundreds of years had worked to systematically erase Native culture and showing up served as a necessary act of defiance.
“It’s not just a fun community event; it’s pushing back and retaking something that they forcibly attempted to take from us, and when you look at it like that, it’s the coolest shit ever,” said Clift, who has worked as a writer on shows such as “Spirit Rangers,” “New Looney Tunes” and ‘Paw Patrol,” among others. “It’s celebrating your culture as a revolutionary act.”
Clift also created “Pow!” because he wanted to bring into existence the kind of cartoon he wished he had been exposed to when he was a kid, which can be more of a challenge working as a small part in larger, less easily adaptable machines (series such as “Paw Patrol,” for example, exist within a tightly controlled universe). Even so, Clift has been able to find ways to make an impact moving within that world, revealing that one “big property” he writes for is set to introduce its first Native character in the near future.
“And that’s based on me just being in the writer’s room and simply asking, ‘Hey, are there any Native characters on the show?’ And the head writer being like, ‘No, but there should be. Do you want to write one?’” said Clift, who refrained from offering up more particulars owing to non-disclosure agreements. “But I look at projects like ‘Pow!’ as an artistic thesis statement. … It just felt like a time when a lot of different aspects of my professional and cultural life were converging and clicking together, and where I was trying to think about different ways to keep telling the stories I was passionate about.”
Even with a runtime of just eight minutes, “Pow!” is deeply layered, Clift, who conceived and wrote the short, working with Cherokee artist Morgan Thompson to develop a trio of animation styles meant to evoke the different generational viewpoints seen in the film. The 16-bit, video game art style utilized in the opening sequence captures the way the short’s central character, Jake, views the world, while a segment animated with a more vibrant, watercolor-esque look is meant to reflect the bright, beautiful perspective his parents have of their culture. And for an evocative flashback sequence, the film incorporates ledger art to depict the nuanced way the family’s grandmother views Native culture, with Clift sourcing a variety of historical documents, including the Cherokee Syllabary, the ledger from a Native boarding school, and a page from the Treaty of Fort Laramie. (The segment also folds in chants of “water, not oil” recorded during the protests at Standing Rock and which Clift said are meant to “honor the efforts of Native folks in the activism space whose fight is what allows us to practice this culture.”)
“Pow!” first screened at the Maoriland Film Festival in late March, an experience that Clift said brought him to tears, and which he traced in part to an understanding of how rare it is to create something that feels almost entirely your own while working as an artist within the Hollywood system.
“Oftentimes, you’re creating by committee and there are production notes and executive notes and all these things that can refine your project down in a certain way, which isn’t always bad,” Clift said. “Being able to create something that is so unapologetically Native, and so unapologetically me, it’s really beautiful. … So many of the Native stories we see are focused on our trauma, and focused on our attempted genocide, where I feel this is something a Native kid could watch and relate to. And I’m glad I could help put this out into the world.”