Native and Indigenous Peoples Heritage Month: Videos and Film

This guide serves as an introduction to the concepts and practices of Land and Labor Acknowledgements

In this profoundly hopeful talk, Diné musician, scholar, and cultural historian Lyla June outlines a series of timeless human success stories focusing on Native American food and land management techniques and strategies. Lyla June is an Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages.

For thousands of years, more than 60 Native American tribes lived in Oregon's diverse environmental regions. At least 18 languages were spoken across hundreds of villages. This civilizational fabric became unraveled in just a few short decades upon contact with white settlers in the 19th century.

On December 28th, 2016, former President Obama protected nearly 1.5 million acres of sprawling canyon lands and ancient cultural sites in southeast Utah by designating the area as Bears Ears National Monument. Politically, Native American groups and environmentalists applauded the designation. However, it infuriated some locals and state politicians who, declaring government overreach and unnecessary restrictions to the land, demanded the monument to be rescinded.

This film showcases the lives of 14 nurses who live and work in the Upper Great Plains. While their lives and stories are different, they all share a common theme -- their past life experiences and American Indian heritage have made them extraordinary healers.

The long and brutal history of the US trying to “kill the Indian and save the man”. Toward the end of the 19th century, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools, stripping them of their cultures and languages. Yet decades later as the US phased out the schools, following years of indigenous activism, it found a new way to assimilate Native American children: promoting their adoption into white families.

On the banks of Louisiana, fierce Indigenous women are ready to fight — to stop the corporate blacksnake and preserve their way of life. They are risking everything to protect Mother Earth from the predatory fossil fuel companies that seek to poison it.

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco recognized National Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day with a virtual event to highlight the Not Invisible Act Commission. The Departments of the Interior and Justice are working to implement the Not Invisible Act, sponsored by Secretary Haaland during her time in Congress.

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.

New World Rising reveals Native American cultural continuity in the face of genocidal warfare and history’s worst demographic devastation. Native Americans tap 10,000 years of beliefs to fight and survive the forces of Conquest.

Two poems, by Linda Hogan and Alberto Ríos, follow wolves, jackrabbits, and other animals across the harsh Great Plains and Sonoran Desert. Both poets join wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin, film director Chris Eyre, Native American scholars Philip Deloria and Stephanie Fitzgerald, and a chorus of students to discuss how the poems call back difficult histories of human migration in the American west.

Master drummer and community leader Ricardo Peña's two main concerns are that indigenous peoples including his fellow Aztecs not be ashamed of their origins, and that they can preserve their culture even as a small minority in the United States.