Examines the historic confrontation between the Mohawks, Québec police, and the Canadian army that propelled Native issues into the international spotlight and into the Canadian conscience.

Chef Sean Sherman worked for years in Italian, Spanish, Japanese and modern American restaurants. Then one day he realized his own heritage – Lakota Sioux – had a lot to teach him about foods that would nourish himself, his customers, and the Earth. Today, Sherman and his business partner Dana Thomson (Dakota) are exploring their Native cultural heritages by re-creating pre-colonial menus – meals that use no dairy, no wheat, no sugar.

NECESSITY 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.

This story of climate resistance in the Pacific Northwest brings into view a historical landscape of tribal leaders, Indigenous activists and white allies as they resist oil trains and trucks carrying these highly inflammable products through treaty lands. In following the path of oil-by-rail and oil resistance along the Columbia, we revisit lessons of the New Deal era of building massive dams and what climate activists take from that era in thinking about a Green New Deal.

In part the story of Aborginal athletes blocked from entering the 1967 Winnipeg Pan American Games with the Games torch; but also the story of a segregated school system, and survival, hope and reconciliation.