Exploring the relationship between Aboriginal people and their land, Walya Ngamardiki was inspired by Silas Roberts' submission to the 1976 Australian Government inquiry on uranium mining. Silas, whose tribal name is Ngourladi, is an elder of the Allawa clan and was the first chairman of the Northern Land Council, established to assist Aboriginal people make land claims based on traditional ownership. The film, which moves from Arnhem Land in the...

RETURN TO RAINY MOUNTAIN is a documentary film that tells the story of N. Scott Momaday. It is a personal account of his life and legacy told in his own voice, and in the voice of his daughter Jill. Momaday speaks of his Kiowa roots, family, literature, oral tradition, nature, identity, and the sacred and important things that have shaped his life.

The Great Lakes and connecting waterways have remained the center of traditional and contemporary economies for centuries. Meet the Ojibwe and a tribe that was relocated to this region—the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin who care for these lands. Natural resources are the Tribes’ main economy, including the famous Red Lake walleye and wild rice lakes. GROWING NATIVE host Stacey Thunder (Red Lake and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe) guides this journey by...

"HONOR THY MOTHER” is the untold story of 36 Aboriginal women from Canada and Native women from tribes in Washington and Alaska who migrated in the 1940s to Bainbridge Island, the traditional territory of the Suquamish people.  As survivors of Indian residential schools, they came, some still in their teens, to pick berries for Japanese American farmers, fell in love and married Filipino immigrants. They settled on the Island to raise their mixed-heritage,...

The Maralinga people survive aggressive colonisation, including dispossession to enable atomic testing, and through their tenacious spirit and cultural strength fight to retain their country.

Based in Sydney, Australia, Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen have been making dance films since 1985. They formed The Physical TV Company in 1997. This collection features three of their over 20 works for the camera: Rubberman Accepts The Nobel Prize (2001). A superhero who speaks only the language of dance makes an outrageous, graceful, and rambunctious physical acceptance speech. No surrender (2002). A young Indigenous woman is invaded, terrorized,...

A kangaroo has been shot. A man of the Western Desert guts it using the stone in the handle of his spear-thrower. After singeing off the fur in a blazing fire. The kangaroo is cooked in a trench covered with glowing ashes and soil. The cooked kangaroo is cut up according to custom.

A man of the Western Desert collects gum from spinifex. His wife separates the gum from spinifex particles. He then melts the gum into a usable state. He then goes to a quartzite quarry and collects a large core; back at camp he knaps this to obtain a stone knife, a scraper for his spear-thrower, and a hand chopper. Using his spinifex gum he puts a gum handle on the knife and then sticks the scraper onto the handle of his spear-thrower, his previous...

Two boys of the Western Desert make fire. They gather dry kangaroo dung, crumble it and put it in a cup of dry grass which they stuff into a crack in a dead log of wood. They rub a spear-thrower across the log and the friction ignites the kangaroo dung.

This feature-length documentary explores the traditional dance, music and spiritual world of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of Emmonak, a remote village at the mouth of the Yukon River on the Bering Sea coast. THE DRUMS OF WINTER (Uksuum Cauyai) gives an intimate look at a way of life of which most of us have seen only glimpses. Dance was once at the heart of Yup'ik Eskimo spiritual and social life. It was the bridge between the ancient and the new, the...