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About the film

James Beard Award winning filmmaker Sanjay Rawal offers an intimate portrait of a growing movement. Indigenous Americans are reclaiming their spiritual and cultural identities through obtaining sovereignty over their ancestral food systems, while battling against the historical trauma brought on by centuries of genocide. An indigenous chef embarks on an ambitious project to reclaim ancient food ways on the Apache reservation. In South Dakota, a gifted Lakota high school student, raised on a buffalo ranch, is proving her tribes native wisdom through her passion for science. And a group of young men of the Yurok tribe in Northern California are struggling to keep their culture alive and rehabilitate the habitat of their sacred salmon. All these stories combine to show how reclaiming and recovery of ancient food ways is a way forward for Native Americans to bring back health and vitality to their people.

Centuries before native North Americans encountered Christopher Columbus lost at sea, tens of thousands of miles from his destination, indigenous peoples lived in harmony with the land, cultivating and maintaining a thriving food system across the entire Western Hemisphere. In the early 1600s Europeans marked a push to settle the Americas. Unable to best Natives through weaponry alone, Americans took to asymmetrical tactics – killing women and children, inducing famine and demoralizing warriors. The most effective of these tactics was the annihilation of food systems. This attempt at extermination motivated not only military policy but social and political policy. It is by design that Indian Country remains food insecure – dependent on the same ration system enacted to settle Natives adjacent to Military Forts, freeing their ancestral lands for unabated resource extraction. The west was won by starving Indians and yoking them to government support – a system which endures to this day.