Photography courtesy of Jack Theis.
Jack Theis used to sit on the hardwood floor of his parents’ Oak Cliff bedroom poring over documents, photos and family trees, tracing his genealogy into the 19th century and earlier.
“It said my family was from Manitoba, and I was just this 8-year-old kid in Texas, and I was like, ‘Where in the world is Manitoba?’” he says.
That family history is part of what drew him to the French language. He learned to speak French at Bishop Dunne Catholic School, and he became fluent, so he enrolled at Inalco University in Paris.
“I had such an incredible education at Bishop Dunne, and I was already speaking French, so I decided why not?” he says.
While living in France, he also spent a few months in Romania, where his mom’s people came from, and he started learning about Romanian and Hungarian culture and languages.
He also cites his Catholic-school education for what happened next.
In Catholicism, some people feel called to the “vocation” of becoming a priest or nun.
“They talk about it in this divine way,” Theis says. “It’s a call from God, basically.”
That’s how it felt when, at 21 and in his third year of university, Theis says he was called “specifically to North American soil.”
He dropped out and moved to Minneapolis, where there is a large and active Native American population.
He held two jobs while applying to colleges in Canada, and in his free time, he gave his energy to the indigenous-language revitalization movement, as well as protests, vigils, public lectures, film festivals and medicine-garden teachings.
Now he lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his ancestors were part of the Red River Settlement.
Theis is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation. Métis are Indigenous people who are of mixed European ancestry, an ethnicity with origins in the fur-trading industry of that region, beginning around the mid-1700s.
He was working in a coffee shop in the St. Boniface neighborhood of Winnipeg when he overheard two people discussing a film they were casting. They needed a male lead who was indigenous and had the right look.
He said, “Well, I’m Métis.”
The casting director said, “You are?” and her eyes got really big, he says.
By the time she got her phone out to snap a picture to show the film’s director, Theis had taken his hair down and struck a pose.
That comes naturally to him because his mom is Tammy Theis, a former Dallas Morning News fashion writer who also was a photoshoot stylist and owned a modeling agency in Dallas.
He got the part.
The film, Ste. Anne, was written and directed by Rhayne Vermette and premiered at the 2021 Berlinale Film Festival.
That brought his story full circle, in a way, because the film is an homage to Paris, Texas, the 1984 Wim Wenders movie set in the Lone Star State.
Theis, whose dad is Oak Cliff resident Joel Theis, is 28 and graduates from the University of Manitoba soon with a degree in native studies and a minor in native languages. He likely will move back to Minneapolis after graduation to pursue a full-time career as an artist and devote himself to activism and language revitalization rather than going to grad school.
“It’s what gives me the most joy, working with my hands, making things,” he says. “It’s what comes most naturally to me. I love researching and reading and writing, but I feel the need to specialize in visual art.”
