Movies: Indigenous

Far from home and struggling to reconcile their Native identities with non-Native culture, Ray and Jolene negotiate a growing attraction as they're drawn together, in this reflective exploration of urban Aboriginal identity....

Kelly is a Métis man without treaty or hunting rights, struggling to sustain his traditional life. His daughter Theresa longs for a red dress from France that she believes will give her power and strength, as the bear claw once did for her great-gran...

An Anishinaabe man is restless and isolated in the city of Minneapolis, haunted by an ominous sense that he doesn’t belong. Shinaab eerily portrays Indigenous people’s dislocation and alienation on their own land as sinister and enigmatic forces....

Following her brother's death, Georgia, a young college student, returns home to her reservation only to find she's become the prey of a shapeshifting, faceless figure....

Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders an...

An intimate exploration of the circumstances surrounding the incarceration of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of murder in 1977, with commentary from those involved, including Peltier himself....

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 day in the life of 91.1, Nuxalk Radio, a radio station built to help keep the Nuxalk language alive while broadcasting the laws of the lands and waters....

In 2032 an eight-year old boy, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile northern metropolis. Haunted by memories of flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, the boy forms an unexpected friendship wi...

What does blood have to do with identity? Kendra Mylnechuk, an adult Native adoptee, born in 1980 at the cusp of the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, is on a journey to reconnect with her birth family and discover her Lummi heritage....

A portrait of an albino Aboriginal teenager, her feelings of alienation while at a convent boarding school, and her dreams of escape....

Cree matriarch Aline Spears survives a childhood in Canada’s residential school system to continue her family’s generational fight in the face of systemic starvation, racism, and sexual abuse. She uses her uncanny ability to understand and translate ...

Although the mountain volcano Mauna Kea last erupted around 4,000 years ago, it is still hot today, the center of a burning controversy over whether its summit should be used for astronomical observatories or preserved as a cultural landscape sacred ...

More than an attachment to our territory, the Innu live a filial relationship with Nitassinan, our ancestral homeland. For so many generations, the land has nourished, cared for and raised us. It has inspired our language, our culture, our lifeway an...

This short documentary follows three Indigenous women as they practice ancestral forms of worship: drumming, singing, and using sweetgrass. These ancient spiritual traditions may at first seem at odds with urban life, but to Indigenous people in Cana...

As an outbreak of leprosy engulfs 19th-century colonial Hawai'i, a small group of infected Native Hawaiians resist government-mandated exile, taking a courageous stand against the provisional government. Inspired by real-life events....

Mavis Dogblood is a Mohawk painter from Canada haunted by the tragic death of her husband, who was hit by lightning. She paints the stories he used to tell her, but she can’t come to grips with her loss. It is only after she drives to New York City f...

A First Nations man takes a famous actor back to the reserve to help him cope with his drug addiction....

To gain his independence, a quick-tempered drug dealer must escape the shadow of his kingpin grandfather in a devout Native American community....

Incident at Restigouche is a 1984 documentary film by Alanis Obomsawin, chronicling a series of two raids on the Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation (Restigouche) by the Sûreté du Québec in 1981, as part of the efforts of the Quebec government to impose ne...