Movies: Indigenous rights

In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, sets the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness....

The film follows Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martinez and Kade L. Twist, who put land art in a tribal context. The group bring together a community to construct the Repellent Fence, a two-m...

A Native American Civil War hero returns home to fight for his people....

A jailed activist is bailed out by her brother, who happens to be involved with the very land development she was protesting....

This film follows the aftermath of the Oka crisis, which brought Indigenous rights into sharp focus. After the barricades came down, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was created, and travelled to more than 100 communities and heard from mor...

This Peabody Award-winning documentary from New Mexico PBS looks at the European arrival in the Americas from the perspective of the Pueblo Peoples....

A documentary account by award-winning filmmaker John Ferry of the events that led up to the 1969 Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island as told by principal organizer, Adam Fortunate Eagle. The story unfolds through Fortunate Eagle's remembra...

This short documentary revisits Mi’kmaq territory, where an iconic moment was captured in 2013—igniting into a symbol of Indigenous resistance and halting fracking exploration on unceded lands....

The Australian Aborigines (in this film anyway) believe that this is the place where the green ants go to dream, and that if their dreams are disturbed, it will bring down disaster on us all. The Aborigines' belief is not shared by a giant mining com...

This powerful short documentary showing Indigenous youth resistance and emerging voices that will continue to define the landscape of Indigenous cultural and political activism for the next generation. Members of the National Youth Council, including...

In the swirling volcanic steam and misty rain forest of Kilauea volcano’s east rift zone on the island of Hawai’i, two forces meet head on. Geothermal development interests, seeking to clear the rain forest for drilling operations, are opposed by nat...

The world knows the image of the good Canadian. But what if there was a dark secret behind a national identity? THE GOOD CANADIAN exposes the truth behind the idea of a True North strong and free. In this unflinching and eye-opening documentary, dire...

For centuries, Inuit in the Arctic have lived on and around the frozen ocean. Now, as climate change is rapidly melting the sea ice between Canada and Greenland, the outside world sees unprecedented opportunity. Oil and gas deposits, faster shipping ...

Examines the violence and civil disobedience leading up to the hallmark decision in U.S. v. Washington, with particular reference to the Nisqually Indians of Frank's Landing in Washington....

Presents the history of the conflict between the Canadian government and the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific over the ritual of the Potlatch. Archival photographs and films, wax roll sound recordings, police reports, the original potlatch f...

"A documentary film which looks at the issue of British Columbia Native land claims and how the aboriginals link their culture to the land, which has been stolen by the dominant white culture of North America. In the film, the argument is presented t...

In the face of AAPI violence, an intergenerational coalition of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, People of Color organizers come together to organize a march across historic Washington Heights and Harlem, as a continuation of the historic and radica...

Australia was colonized in the late 1700s. Pemulwuy, a man of the Bidjigal tribes — from the region that is today modern-day Sydney — led a 12-year resistance against British settlers moving into his people’s traditional lands....

“Can I be nostalgic about something I’ve never experienced?” asks debut filmmaker Pranami Koch. She has in mind her grandmother, a person she never knew who belonged to the Koches, a people in India with their own culture and traditions. In her searc...

In this era of “reconciliation”, Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation are standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence ag...