"History/Native American Heritage" Trailer | Week Five (November 6 - 13, 2022) | 2022 VMFF

Our history is a living, breathing, moving one. We never let go, we never die off, and we never forget where we came from. The films this week dig into everything about who we are and where we come from. We'll keep marching forward, carrying the past with us.
THE INDIGENEITY SERIES: The ‘Indigeneity’ web series presents an accurate portrait of the Native American Experience, tackling stereotypes, exploring contemporary issues, and celebrating Indigenous contributions to America. Presenters combine truth, traditional knowledge, humor, animation, and personality to present important educational themes in Indigenous Studies.
WHAT WAS OURS: An Eastern Shoshone Elder and two Northern Arapaho youth living on the Wind River Indian Reservation attempt to learn why thousands of ancestral artifacts are in the darkness of underground archives of museums and churches, boxed away and forgotten. Like millions of indigenous people in many parts of the world, they do not control their own material culture. It is being preserved, locked away, by ‘outsiders’ who themselves do not know what they have.
STANDING BEAR'S FOOTSTEPS: Standing Bear’s Footsteps is the story of an Indian chief who went to court to prove he was a person-and in the process redefined what it means to be an American. In 1877, the Ponca people were exiled from their Nebraska homeland to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. To honor his dying son’s last wish to be buried in his homeland, Chief Standing Bear set off on a grueling, six-hundred-mile journey home. Captured en-route, Standing Bear sued a famous U.S. army general for his freedom-choosing to fight injustice not with weapons, but with words.