Marek Probosz, actor, theatre and film director, screenwriter, producer and university lecturer, received the Gold Medal for his contribution to the promotion of Polish culture and the traditions and culture of the indigenous inhabitants of the American continent in the United States.
Marek Probosz with the Medal (Source: Ania Navas)
The Gold Medal was awarded by the American Institute of Polish Culture in Miami, founded in Florida in 1972 by Lady Blanka Rosenstiel.
The ceremony of awarding this prestigious distinction took place during the annual Polonaise Ball in the beautiful hall of the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, on February 1, 2025.
Marek Probosz gave an interview to Kuryer Polski's correspondent Ania Navas from Florida.
Ania Navas: Welcome to Miami and congratulations on the Gold Medal. Your achievements and contributions to Polish culture have long been widely known. Your connections with Native American culture, or as it is commonly called, American Indian culture, are somewhat less well-known.
Marek Probosz: Native American culture is primarily about close contact with the land, with nature, with the spirits of ancestors. It is a centuries-old legacy that has survived to this day in ritual ceremonies, customs, and characteristic dances and musical pieces.
It is mainly a perpetuation of what the wealth of nature is. According to tribal beliefs and commandments, the Indians were to live in such a way that the seventh generation that will follow them will find the earth in the same condition in which they found it.
When I came to America, I was fascinated by the culture of the Hopi Indians. It is one of the oldest cultures that have survived on our planet. The Hopi Indians are a tribe that has never been moved from their lands. They have a reservation in Arizona where they came from. It is an area so desert and inhospitable to life that the white man who took over America decided that they should stay there because this remote wasteland seemed useless.
The Hopi Indians who have lived there for centuries have survived despite extremely difficult conditions. Here I will add a personal thread. Together with my current wife Gosia (we were not married yet) at the beginning of my stay in the USA (and I have lived here for over 30 years), we went to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. There we came across a shop with jewelry made by Hopi Indians. This jewelry is very unique. It consists entirely of silver, in which certain symbols are carved. These symbols are blackened. It is actually a perfect division into "yin and yang".
Black is contained in white and white is contained in black. During my visit to this store I told the Indian woman selling there that I was very fascinated by the history of the Hopi tribe. After a short conversation she asked if we would like to see ritual dances. When her husband, who was in the back, heard this, he butted in, asked his wife to go to the back of the store and spoke to me in a completely different way. He said that there were no ritual dances here and if we wanted to buy anything then please go ahead, otherwise please leave.
After this experience, Gosia and I decided to take a risk on our own and drive into the reservation, lifting the barrier separating Indian land from the rest of Arizona. We drove quite far into the reservation, where we normally shouldn't be allowed to go. After two hours of driving like this through desert, sun-scorched earth, Gosia started to get a little nervous. Remember that 30 years ago we didn't have cell phones or GPS systems. Gosia was afraid that if something happened to us, like a car breakdown, no one would find us there and we would die of thirst and become food for snakes and vultures, which are constantly circling there waiting for carrion. But when you're young, you're ready to take risks for the sake of adventure. That's why I decided to keep going, at least to the first Indian mesa. At that time, there were three mesas, or Indian settlements, on the reservation. The journey through this wasteland took us another hour and a half. We finally reached this mesa.
There were indeed ritual dances there. The Indians start them at sunrise. Then they come out of the "kiva" (the kiva is their sacred place, used for ceremonies) and then, according to their beliefs, they incarnate the spirits of their dead ancestors. Then, for example, the chief of the tribe turns into a "kachina". He goes down a ladder to such an underground, where they create their prayers, every time anew.
This is a preparation for a three-day ritual dance in costumes. This type of ceremony lasts from sunrise to sunset and is led by a shaman, who I suspect made sure that they didn't run out of strength. Additionally, it must be remembered that according to beliefs, these Indians deprive themselves of corporeality for the duration of these ritual dances and incarnate the spirits of their ancestors. As we know, when a person is in a state of spirituality or in love, the body stops bothering us. We don't feel tired or pain, we reach a state of ecstasy.
Hopi "Snake Dance". From the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1895) (Source: Wikipedia)
Gosia and I were lucky and honored to admire these rituals. Interestingly, the Indians participating in them seemed not to acknowledge the presence of strangers, white people, namely Gosia and me. When I tried to make any contact with any participant in these dances, he acted as if he did not see or hear me. Of course, any attempt to photograph these rituals would result in immediate removal from the reservation. Besides, I was an intruder there, having arrived without an invitation.
AN: So only memories survived.
MP: Exactly. A kind of heart-felt record. At night, when we had to leave, I heard a voice with an American accent. The man spoke to us and said: "How lucky you are here. I am a Buddhist priest who also comes to these dances without an invitation, and this time my car broke down. So if you weren't here now, I would be stuck here and who knows for how long. Please, give me a push in your car so that mine will start."
Indeed, that was what happened. Once both vehicles were “up and running,” the Buddhist priest said we would not make it out of the reservation before the nightfall. He offered to take us along a road to the canyon where we could spend the night.
We drove to this canyon. We lit a fire there, where we talked about various strange things. Finally, tired of our experiences, we fell asleep by this fire. In the middle of the night, we were woken up by a scream. At first, we thought they were Indians from the reservation. After all, we were intruders there. Fear took over our imagination and we thought that the Indians would attack us like we saw in the movies when we were young. Instinctively, we jumped into the cars and slammed the doors. Then suddenly an extremely violent storm fell from the sky. Streams of rain literally flooded the area. Only after some time did it dawn on us that prayers for rain had been the main theme of the ceremony we had participated in the previous day. We were therefore eyewitnesses to a kind of miracle, because rain in these desert areas happens extremely rarely. After all, there was not a single cloud in the sky and nothing foretold heavy rainfall.
The desert and unfavorable living and farming conditions are the main reasons why the white man left these Indians there, thinking that they would not be able to survive anyway. However, the faith of the Indians is so strong and spiritually so deeply developed that every year they manage to "pray" for rain and survive in the desert areas.
Hopi water jug with Kachina image, 1890 (Source: Wikipedia)
The next day, Gosia and I went to the second mesa or settlement and there we again witnessed ritual dances. On our way back from there, we came across an Indian house by the road. Gosia asked me to stop and go inside. After an hour of waiting in the car, I decided to follow her. Right at the doorstep, I saw an Indian woman who, right at the entrance, started to scan me with her gaze as if with a laser beam. She stared at me intensely for about 5 minutes, while I stood still. Finally, she motioned for me to come in and join them.
Then she turned to both of us and said that everything I knew about the Indians was wrong. The Indians have been passing down their knowledge from generation to generation through word of mouth for thousands of years.
From these verbal accounts, the story of the four worlds of the Hopi Indians has been preserved. According to their beliefs, the symbolic buffalo now stands on its fourth leg, which symbolizes the fourth and last incarnation of this world. This meeting was so extraordinary and a symbolic bond was established between us that I found the courage to confide in this mysterious woman.
I told her that I wanted to marry Gosia, whom I considered to be the woman created for me. It was here that I wanted to marry her in an Indian ceremony. After some thought, the Indian woman agreed and led us to a cave, where she performed an Indian wedding for us.
The scenery was incredible, we stood knee-deep in water, in a mysterious cave, and our naked bodies touched during the ceremony, covered only by one garment used for this ritual. The Indian woman spoke in their language, which we did not understand. The wedding was concluded and our souls joined. After the ceremony, I asked the Indian woman what her words meant, and she said:
I have asked the Great Spirit that your love will last forever and that when your time on Earth is over, that you will pass away in old age, without disease and with the same love that you now feel for each other.
Then we got two beautiful silver rings made by Hopi. At the end I asked her to give us Indian names. In this way Gosia took the name Bakavi (Water Reed). Since Gosia comes from Gdynia and water is her element, the Indian woman read it perfectly. On the other hand, I received the name Owatsmo (Mountain of Stones), i.e. Rock Man. I come from the mountains and I admit to having highland roots, which is again proof of how thoroughly I was examined by her.
This is how our extraordinary bond with the native people of America began. In later years we participated in the so-called Indian Summits several times. We were in South America, in Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, where leaders of many Indian nations from different countries met. It was on the occasion of the Summer Solstice, where representatives of the Indian nations made prophecies and prayed to their Great Spirit for the good of Mother Earth, who is so abused by us, humans. There we were also invited to a joint ritual dance.
Source: Ania Navas
In 2019, I played in the film "Valley of the Gods" directed by Lech Majewski. I have the role of an expert to whom the Navajo Indians come to consult what to do about their land, which the richest man in the world wants to buy because of the uranium deposits discovered there. It is sacred land for them and they do not want to sell it. This role deepened my bond with the Native Americans even more.
Some time later I got an offer to teach at Williams College in Massachusetts. It's the second oldest college in America. I taught acting for film and theater there.
On our way back to California, we drove across America. It was a great opportunity to visit Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. A white man (the sculptor was Gutzon Burglum) created monumental rock carvings of four presidents of the United States. They were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The construction of this unusual monument lasted from 1927 to 1941. It inspired another monumental work carved in rocks.
AN: I think you want to refer to the still unfinished monument in the Black Hills, not far from Mount Rushmore. It is an image of the famous chief Crazy Horse. Its author and sculptor was the Polish-born sculptor Korczak Ziółkowski.
MP: Exactly. We visited this monumental work, which represents the Oglala Dakota chief, Crazy Horse. Korczak Ziółkowski devoted 35 years of his life to this largest rock monument in the world, the initiators of which were Indian chiefs, and especially the Sioux chief, Henry Standing Bear.
The Black Hills of South Dakota are sacred land to the Native Americans. The Crazy Horse sculpture makes this place even more special, not only for the first inhabitants of America, but for all who respect their traditions and culture.
Crazy Horse Monument, Black Hills, South Dakota (Źródło: Ania Navas)
I was there and contacted representatives of the place. This land is still in private hands. The Indians never gave up this land. The US government wanted to buy this land and fully finance the monument project. However, the Indians did not agree to this. They said that they had been cheated by the white man so many times that they had lost trust. The project is still financed by private donations and partly by admission tickets. No serious film on this subject has been made so far.
AN: You are also a director. Don't you intend to make such a film?
MP: There is such a project. In my concept, we should start with a documentary film, because in this way we can reach people who could later sponsor a feature, epic film in the Hollywood style. My dream is to make such a film that could have a global reach. I believe that these people, the first inhabitants of the American continent, despite all the suffering, are still at home. You can kill the body, but you cannot murder their spirit. It is this spirit of the Indian owners of this land that remains here.
AN: A beautiful and true statement. I think that the project of this film is extremely interesting and I wish you its realization. Once again, congratulations on receiving the Gold Medal for your achievements to date and contribution to the promotion of Polish culture, as well as the culture of Native Americans in the United States.
Source: Ania Navas
Translation from Polish by Andrew Wozniewicz.
