Movie review:
“Land itself is life giving”
Of importance in this phrase is not the physical boundaries of a territory, but the space between people who are bound to each other by a shared history, language, customs, and laws. Land is a way of life.
This documentary gives a voice to the land back movement. It sufficiently demystifies it for a non-indigenous audience and rejects any accusations that the movement is just a blind campaign of revenge. The narrators provide a thorough history of the process through which the Lakota people were stripped of their way of life by white settlers— and the subsequent acts of resistance that today are finding more and more allies— particularly in the climate movement.
It finishes on an optimistic note. Pointing to the future as an opportunity to radically reimagine our society. Strangely, this didn’t feel very tone-deaf, even in today’s America.
Something is brewing and it may not look promising right now, but as G.D says, it’s within every regime that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. “There is no need to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons.”
I’m glad that media like this exists. We have to cling to it before the powers at be confiscate all of the ugly truths this country was founded upon and lock them away forever.