Documentary Educational Resources - Indigenous Studies / Histories / All Films

Unearthed

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 17:57:45 GMT

Archaeology is generally seen as an innocuous, innocent, and objective academic pursuit in Western culture. Archaeologists, after all, excavate into the earth to unearth the remnants of past human activities and lives. In doing so, offering objective evidence for how the world was—so that we might better situate ourselves now and into our future.

But there is more to the story. Caught up with the colonial project in the Americas, Archaeology has propagated harmful narratives and played a major role in the erasure of Native people, their loss of sovereignty, and communal traumas. That is not to say the field of Archaeology does not hold great benefit for Native Communities—there is no doubt it does. The question becomes: who is the archaeological research for, how is it done, and for what ends?

In recent decades, Native-led research, Native scholars, Native archaeologists, and their associates have begun a revolution to decolonize archaeology and the future looks bright. Unearthed offers a look into this complexity as it is unfolding today, and a deeper view into the rich material culture excavated from Cache Cave. The materials shared here are shared with the collaboration and consent of the Tejon Indian Tribe.

"Visually captivating and with tremendous heart, Unearthed succeeds in portraying how Indigenous peoples’ struggles are ongoing and increasingly intersect in positive ways with archaeology and senses of place, both to reawaken and rejuvenate venerable cultural traditions." – Edward Jolie (Oglala Lakota/Hodulgee Muscogee), University of Arizona

Selected Screenings & Awards

Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, UK, 2023

Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival, USA, 2022

Santa Barbara International Film Festival, USA, 2022

Poppy Jasper International Film Festival, USA, 2022

Durango Independent Film Festival, USA, 2022

Red National International Film Festival, USA, 2022

Ashland Independent Film Festival, USA, 2022

San Diego International Film Festival, USA, 2021

Mammoth Lakes International Film Festival (Premiere), USA, 2021

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6 Generations

Tue, 9 Oct 2018 15:11:00 GMT

6 Generations
Buy Now: $320.00

Ernestine De Soto is a Chumash Native American whose mother Mary Yee was the last speaker of her native Barbareño language. In 6 Generations, her family reaches back to the days the Spanish arrived in Santa Barbara and made first contact. Ernestine tells this history from the perspective of her female ancestors, making her a unique link with the past.

Famous anthropologist John Peabody Harrington, whose work focused on native peoples of California, started research with her family in 1913 and continued with three generations for nearly 50 years. This inspired Ernestine's mother to begin taking notes and, combined with mission records (which survived intact from the late 1700s), they form the heart of this story.

Because of these circumstances, her story, possible only in California, is unique in America.The impact of loss of land, language, culture and life itself is made all the more clear as this story is told in Native American voices, who describe the events as they experienced them. Ultimately, it is a story of survival and the fierce endurance of Ernestine's ancestors, particularly the women.

“This is history as autobiography, foregrounding the power of language and telling a checkered tale of cultural survival in the extreme. The time depth is simply astonishing, and the narrative is frank and true and sometimes stark. 6 Generations is a home run. I cannot recommend it highly enough.”
— David Hurst Thomas, Current Anthropology

"Using old drawings, photos, old film footage, live interviews, and dramatic readings by Ernestine of her family's story, filmmaker Paul Goldsmith has woven together an important testimony to the vibrancy of a people brought into the California missions around Santa Barbara."
— Glen Farris, Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

“Some films do not deserve a review so much as a rhapsody, and 6 Generations is one of these special films. There are some productions that go beyond ethnography to find the heart of a people — and show how individual anthropologists can transcend the professional limitations of their discipline and really engage fellow human beings — and 6 Generations is just such an achievement… This would be a particularly effective film to use in the classroom… Suitable for college courses in cultural anthropology, anthropology of gender, anthropology of colonialism/globalization, and Native American studies, as well as general audiences.”
— Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

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House in the Fields

Tue, 9 Oct 2018 15:11:00 GMT

House in the Fields
Buy Now: $320.00

House in the Fields examines the life of an isolated rural Amazigh community in the south-west region of the High Atlas Mountains. The thousand-year history of the Amazigh in Morocco has been, for the most part, recounted, preserved and transmitted by bards and storytellers in oral form among Tamazight speaking pastoral communities.

Continuing this tradition of transmission in an audiovisual form, House in the Fields attempts to faithfully document and present a portrait of a village and community that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years despite being confronted with the rapidly changing sociopolitical realities of the country at large. The film follows the lives of certain villagers, most specifically two teenage sisters, one who must give up school to prepare for her wedding, and the other who dreams of being a judge.

“Beautifully intimate and charged with the sense of inevitable change to come, this prescient production, embellished with minimal sound and a fantastic spectacle of celebration for an ending, makes House in the Fields well worth the journey.”
— Rene J. Meyer-Grimberg, Berlin Film Journal

"Hadid's film beautifully frames thesisters within their domestic setting and the wider Moroccan society, andhandles the balance between daily chores and personal dreams with grace andsincerity. A powerful documentary filmed in a section of North Africa rarelyseen in the media, this is highly recommended."
— P. Hall, Video Librarian

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

World Premiere, Berlin International Film Festival, 2017

Best Documentary, Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2017

John Marshall Award, Camden International Film Festival, USA 2017

Fiction/Non-Fiction Award for Best Film, Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival, Poland, 2017

City of Milan Prize, Festival Cinema Asia Africa America Latina, Italy, 2017

Prix TV 2M, Fidadoc, Morocco, 2017

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First Contact

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

First Contact
Buy Now: $320.00

The classic film of cultural confrontation that is as compelling today as when it was first released over 35 years ago.

When Columbus and Cortez ventured into the New World there was no camera to record the drama of this first encounter. But in 1930 when the Leahy brothers penetrated the interior of New Guinea in search of gold, they carried a movie camera. Thus they captured on film their unexpected confrontation with thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of human life beyond their valleys. This amazing footage forms the basis of First Contact. Yet there is more to this extraordinary film than the footage that was recovered. Fifty years later some of the participants are still alive and vividly recall their unique experience.

The Papuans tell how they thought the white men were their ancestors, bleached by the sun and returned from the dead. They were amazed at the artifacts of 20th century life such as tin cans, phonographs and airplanes. When shown their younger, innocent selves in the found footage, they recall the darker side of their relationship with these mysterious beings with devastating weapons. Australian Dan Leahy describes his fear at being outnumbered by primitive looking people with whom he could not speak. He felt he had to dominate them for his own survival and to continue his quest for gold.

First Contact is one of those rare films that holds an audience spell-bound. Humor and pathos are combined in this classic story of colonialism, told by the people who were there.

Films in the The Highlands Trilogy

First Contact

Joe Leahy's Neighbors

Black Harvest

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Full Circle

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Full Circle
Buy Now: $295.00

In the summer of 2001, under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a totem pole in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University was returned to its original owners' ancestors, a Tlingit community in Southeast Alaska. The journey of the pole began a hundred years ago when it was removed by the Harriman Expedition from the deserted village of Gash at Cape Fox. The totem pole makes its way from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Ketchikan, Alaska, where the Cape Fox community holds a ceremony to welcome home artifacts taken by the Expedition.

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A Frontier Conversation

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:52:00 GMT

A Frontier Conversation
Buy Now: $320.00

A fascinating journey through the Top End of Australia to explore what history means to the traditional landowners.

A Frontier Conversation documents a unique collaboration between indigenous and white historians from Australia and North America. In September 2004, a diverse group travelled through the Top End of Australia meeting representatives of the traditional landowners, and engaging in a dialogue about indigenous history. The themes that emerged raised more questions than answers - from cultural appropriation and copyright, to land rights, the role of language and art, and what history means to indigenous communities in the current climate of cultural reclamation and survival. Narrated by Professor Ann McGrath, Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University, A Frontier Conversation is a fascinating and thought-provoking account of a journey that breaks away from "the History Wars" and signals the first step in a new approach to the study of frontier history.

"A Frontier Conversation asks intriguing questions, and has some unexpected answers. At one level, it's a very simple and watchable film about a group of historians from Australia and the United States visiting Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, and talking with them about the importance of history. As the film progresses, we realise that its concerns are not simple at all. They are nothing less than the complex problem of the very different uses that history is put to in different cultural settings, and its varied meanings and consequences as a result. The film asks some difficult questions: such as how valuable can histories written by outsiders to any community be? What are the responsibilities of the historian, Indigenous or not, to the people whose stories he or she attempts to tell?"
— Ann Curthoys, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National University

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Homage to the Yaghans

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Homage to the Yaghans
Buy Now: $295.00

Homage to the Yaghans was filmed with 16mm cameras in Tierra del Fuego and the Cape Horn area (Chile and Argentina) during the summer of 1987 and the winter of 1988. It was first presented in the United States at the New York Academy of Sciences in early 1990.

The video's purpose is twofold. The first is to achieve an understanding of certain episodes of western expansion, beginning in the early seventeenth century, which finally led to the extinction of the Yaghan people. The second is to gain an appreciation of the courage and fortitude of a people who had survived for thousands of years in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet, but who had been judged by many Europeans as the most degraded human beings in the entire world.

Homage focuses on the personality and life of a Yaghan called "Jemmy Button" who was taken to England in 1831 by Captain Fitz-Roy and returned to his homeland two years later during Fitz-Roy's second expedition, in the company of Charles Darwin. Jemmy Button died in 1864, a victim of the first in a series of epidemics which decimated his people. The video ends with scenes of the four women who still speak Yaghan (as well as Spanish) and who live on Navarino Island, on the south shore of Beagle Channel in Chile. One of the four Yaghan-speaking women vividly remembers witnessing the last enactment of the great initiation ceremony, the Chiexaus, held on Navarino Island circa 1932.

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Gogodala

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Gogodala
Buy Now: $320.00

This film examines the implications of the Australian colonial era for the Gogodala people of the Fly River Delta, Western Papua New Guinea. Excessive missionary zeal, tolerated and encouraged by the government, contributed to the almost total destruction of Gogodala art and culture. More recently, an indirect grant from the Australian government has enabled the people to reconstruct a traditional longhouse, along with a new meaning and function: as a cultural center.

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In Search of the Hamat'sa

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

In Search of the Hamat'sa
Buy Now: $295.00

The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker's fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research partners.

The material for this film was gathered and shot over the year between 2002 and 2003 during the course of research for Glass's dissertation in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The research process consisted of extensive archival work - in which he traced the history of ethnographic representation of the Hamat'sa (in texts, film and photography, art gallery and museum display, and intercultural performance) - followed by an eight month period of residence in the Kwakwaka'wakw community of Alert Bay, BC. The film was edited in a documentary filmmaking course in the Program for Culture and Media at New York University. It is intended to communicate some of the complex issues involved in representing indigenous peoples and their expressive practices, especially as anthropological materials increasingly end up back in Native communities where they are used and debated as one kind of historical resource among many.

"...Glass is to be commended in his filming, as well as his writing and editing. It is provocative without being pompous, sympathetic but not romantic, and reflexive without being overly self-obsessed."
— Alexander D. King, Museum Anthropology Review

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Australian Anthropological Society Film Festival, Sydney, 2009

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, Taiwan, 2009

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York, 2008

Society for Cultural Anthropology Meeting, Long Beach, CA, 2008

8th Astra Ethnographic Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania, 2006

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Itam Hakim Hopiit

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

Itam Hakim Hopiit
Buy Now: $320.00

Recently inducted into the National Film Registry, Itam Hakim Hopiit, which translates as "we / someone, the Hopi," is a poetic visualization of Hopi philosophy. Made at the time of the Hopi Tricentennial - marking 300 years since the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against Spanish colonial rule – the film presents a view of Hopi culture and history. Speaking in Hopi, a community elder shares personal recollections and cultural history, recounting stories of the Hopi emergence, perseverance, and the Bow Clan migration stories of his father. Through use of the film medium, Masayesva challenges viewers to understand the Hopi conception of time as cyclic, in which the world starts, ends, and starts again.

" ...The film offers a cultural bridge of a very different kind, evoking a culture and an environment through the look and sound of it and the fluidly majestic pace of its unfolding...to impart the drama of distant rainstorms across desert landscapes or cause one to gasp in astonishment at the rainbow that enters the frame during a revelatory pan, for indeed the lyricism of Masayesva Jr.'s imagery and the tone of reverence for the earth, whose caretakers the Hopi consider themselves to be, has the power to transport the viewer. It is the achievement of Masayesva Jr.'s work that even the most committed interpreters among us stand to be converted, if only for a moment, and taught the quiet virtues of observation.".

–Michael Renov, University of Southern California

"In this innovative work one of the last members of the Hopi historians' clan, Ross Macaya, recounts various epochs in Hopi history.... Macaya's tale concludes with a particularly Hopi type of history–the Hopi Prophesy."

– Elizabeth Weatherford, National Museum of the American Indian, in Art Journal

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Gold Hugo Award, Chicago International Film Festival, 1984

Museum of Modern Art, NYC

The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Long Beach Museum

National Museum of the Native American

Selected museums in Japan, the Netherlands, France, and the former Soviet Union

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