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The Indigenous Studies Collection

Films from the Docuseek2 collection that cover the history, culture, and contemporary experience of indigenous people around the world. Films range from reports of initial contact between Europeans and Africans and South Americans to contemporary challenges of First Nations people to maintain their identity, spiruality and territorial claims.

What is indigenous studies?

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The Indigenous Studies Collection includes the following titles:

Native Table - imageNative Table

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.

Bullfrog Films | 2022 | 12 minutes | 7-12, College, Adults
Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line - imageNecessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line

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.

Collective Eye Films | 2022 | 60 minutes | 10-12, College, Adults
Necessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance - imageNecessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance

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.

Collective Eye Films | 2020 | 60 minutes | 10-12, College, Adults
Niigaanibatowaad: FrontRunners - imageNiigaanibatowaad: FrontRunners

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.

National Film Board of Canada | 2007 | 48 minutes
Oil and Water - imageOil and Water

Two boys come of age looking for solutions to the global problem of reckless oil drilling following years of oil contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Bullfrog Films | 2014 | 78 minutes | 10-12, College, Adults
Old or New? - imageOld or New?

In Lima, Peru, a new generation of top chefs are cooking with traditional ingredients and supporting traditional livelihoods.

Bullfrog Films | 2013 | 29 minutes | 7-12, College, Adults
Once a Nomad - imageOnce a Nomad

In Namibia can Dalton and Lameck build a 'Life App' to help the illiterate and isolated Himba people market their goods?

Bullfrog Films | 2013 | 27 minutes | 7-12, College, Adults
Our Nationhood - imageOur Nationhood

In Our Nationhood, Aboriginal filmmaker and artist Alanis Obomsawin chronicles the determination and tenacity of the Listuguj Mi'gmaq people to use and…

National Film Board of Canada | 2003 | 97 minutes
Passage - imagePassage

A brilliantly innovative telling of the story of Dr. John Rae who discovered the awful truth about the fate of the Franklin Expedition's attempt to find the Northwest Passage.

Bullfrog Films | 2009 | 108 minutes | 10-12, College, Adult
Paths of the Soul - imagePaths of the Soul

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yang blurs the border between documentary and fiction to follow a group of Tibetan villagers who leave their families and homes in the small village of Nyima to make a Buddhist 'bowing pilgrimage' - laying their bodies flat on the ground after every few steps - along the 1,200 mile road to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet.

Icarus Films | 2016 | 117 minutes

Visit the title page to preview any of the titles above.