Movies: Indigenous

This short documentary follows Gabe Etchinelle as builds a mooseskin boat as a tribute to an earlier way of life, where the Shotah Dene people would use a mooseskin boats and transport their families and cargo down mountain rivers to trading settleme...

Still working through the grief of losing her only child, Thelma, a young Blackfeet woman in Browning, MT, is taken advantage of by friends who use her as de facto child care while they continue to live the freewheeling lifestyles they had before bec...

"Sisters Rising" is the story of six Native American women fighting to restore personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing colonial violence against indigenous women in the United States. Dawn was in the Army, now she’s a tribal cop in the...

The Living Stone is a 1958 Canadian short documentary film directed by John Feeney about Inuit art. It shows the inspiration behind Inuit sculpture. The Inuit approach to the work is to release the image the artist sees imprisoned in the rough stone....

On Canada's Pacific coast this film finds a young Haida artist, Robert Davidson, shaping miniature totems from argillite, a jet-like stone. The film follows the artist to the island where he finds the stone, and then shows how he carves it in the man...

As the name of this short film promises, a filmmaker (Merata Mita), a cook (Anne Thorp) and a singer (Moana Maniapoto) sit down for an interview at Pākiri beach. With a focus on their personal lives, these highly accomplished wahine Māori are generou...

Poet Layli Long Soldier crafts a searing portrait of her Oyate’s connection to the Black Hills, through first contact and broken treaties to the promise of the Land Back movement, in this lyrical testament to resilience of a nation....

On August 9, 2016, a young Cree man named Colten Boushie died from a gunshot to the back of his head after entering Gerald Stanley's rural property with his friends. The jury's subsequent acquittal of Stanley captured international attention, raising...

Filmed on location in Saskatchewan from the Qu'Appelle Valley to Hudson Bay, the documentary traces the filmmaker's quest for her Native foremothers in spite of the reluctance to speak about Native roots on the part of her relatives. The film articul...

Traditional Northwestern Indigenous spiritual images combined with cutting-edge computer animation in this surreal short film about the power of tradition. Three urban Indigenous teens are whisked away to an imaginary land by a magical raven, and the...

A cinematic wonder & incredible opportunity to learn about Indigenous ways of knowing. A group of puppeteers are transformed by their experience of "being buffalo" at night under the stars. Amethyst First Rider tells the puppeteers, "You are the buff...

In this feature-length documentary, 8 Inuit teens with cameras offer a vibrant and contemporary view of life in Canada's North. They also use their newly acquired film skills to confront a broad range of issues, from the widening communication gap be...

Florent Vollant, an iconic musician of the Innu nation, feels the urgent need to tell his story like never before. Co-founder of the celebrated duo Kashtin, renowned for his acclaimed solo albums and as a political activist in defense of his culture,...

A young Ojibwa girl from 1770 marries a Scottish fur trader and leaves home for the shores of Georgian Bay. Although the union is beneficial for her tribe, it results in hardship and isolation for Ikwe. Values and customs clash until, finally, the ev...

After losing their star player, a high school basketball team rooted in Native American culture must unite to keep their state championship dreams alive....

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Tom E Lewis knows he must die with all of his Songs. After years of haunting silence, he returns to his Grandmothers’ country to seek the permission of the Jungayi (Lawmen) to learn Thumbul corroboree (Morning Star). With the family’s blessing throug...

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds...

Legendary Canadian documentarian Alanis Obomsawin digs into the tangled history of Treaty 9 — the infamous 1905 agreement wherein First Nations communities relinquished sovereignty over their traditional territories — to reveal the deceptions and dis...

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....