Celebrating Native American Heritage

Native America challenges everything we thought we knew about the Americas before and since contact with Europe. It travels through 15,000-years to showcase massive cities, unique systems of science, art, and writing, and 100 million people connected by social networks and spiritual beliefs spanning two continents. The series reveals some of the most advanced cultures in human history and the Native American people who created it and whose legacy continues, unbroken, to this day. This series explores this extraordinary world through an unprecedented combination of cutting edge science and traditional indigenous knowledge. It is Native America as never seen before -featuring sacred rituals filmed for the first time, history changing scientific discoveries, and rarely heard voices from the living legacy of Native American culture. Native America rediscovers a past whose splendor and sophistication is only now being realized, and whose story has for too long remained untold. It reveals a unifying belief that inspires these diverse cultures - people are deeply connected to earth, sky, water, and all living things. This belief is rooted in millennia of living on this land and continues to resonate in the lives of Native Americans to this day.

In 1492, there were more than ten million Native Americans in North America. By 1910, their numbers had been reduced to fewer than 300,000. In California, massacres of Indians in the 1860s and 1870s had nearly exterminated the Native peoples in the state. Therefore the sudden appearance in northern California in 1911 of Ishi, "the last wild Indian in North America," stunned the nation. For more than 40 years, Ishi had lived in hiding with a tiny band of survivors. When he walked into the white man's world, he was the last Yahi Indian alive. For young anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Ishi's appearance was a windfall. Kroeber had been searching for years to find "wild, uncontaminated Indians" who could document their traditional way of life. Through Kroeber's invitation, Ishi left a jail cell and lived out the remaining four years of his life as an informant and teacher at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. Ishi dedicated those years to relating Yahi stories and demonstrating the traditional way of life he knew so well. His quiet dignity and remarkable lack of bitterness toward the people who had destroyed his tribe greatly impressed everyone who met him. Using Kroeber's meticulous notes and recordings taken at the time, the film provides a unique look at indigenous life in America before the arrival of Europeans. It features a compelling narration by Oscar-winning actress Linda Hunt and interweaves a lively mix of still photographs, archival film footage, dramatic readings of articles and letters by Ishi's contemporaries, and Kroeber's wax recordings of Ishi's voice. It also includes commentary by historians and anthropologists, an 89-year-old man who met Ishi, and Native Americans who discuss the meanings of Ishi’s songs and myths and the importance of Ishi's legacy today. Kroeber believed that American Indian cultures were destined to vanish, but Native Americans were to prove him wrong. Today, the Native American population has grown to more than two million, and Native peoples have demonstrated the same ability to adapt and determination to survive that Ishi exemplified. "Ishi" is essential viewing for a wide variety of classes in American history, Native American studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology.

This film traces the fight in Minnesota against the expansion of pipelines carrying highly toxic tar sands oil through Native lands and essential waterways in North America. Frontline communities—Native peoples and communities of color—suffer the most immediate and severe consequences of the climate crisis, including impacts on physical and mental health as well as territorial desecration and displacement. This feature-length documentary follows indigenous leaders and white allies who are using direct action to protect the sacred and demand justice. Legal experts discuss the record of disparate treatment in the justice system and the legal strategy of the necessity defense, which makes a moral case for acts of civil disobedience, while medical and scientific experts address the health effects of fossil fuels and dangers of pipeline and refinery infrastructure.

When Annika is given an eagle feather by a Native American visiting Sweden, she realizes it is a sacred object which should probably not be in her hands. These days Native American ceremonies are being commercialized for "outsiders," arousing resentment in the Native community. Annika sets out to find the feather's rightful owner, a quest which takes her to American Indian communities in Albuquerque, San Antonio and to Bear Butte in South Dakota. She meets many Native Americans who are bitter, believing they are "the forgotten people." But others are fighting to preserve their culture and their faith as well as to protect their land. Navajo Andrew Thomas, who manages the Albuquerque Pueblo Center, explains that certain tribes use feathers in special ways to communicate with "the Upper God." He fears modern Native Americans have lost touch with the ancient beliefs. In this film we hear from a professor of Native American history in San Antonio who discusses the five hundred tribes who lived in the US centuries ago and recalls the massacres they suffered. Gayle Ross, a respected Cherokee teacher, feels Americans do not understand native people. Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota nation is deeply disturbed by the entire arena of cultural exploitation.