Promised Land

Indigenous sovereignty is an incredibly important topic today. These communities are often ground zero in resource exploitation. South American governments are firebombing indigenous groups out of their rain forests in order to sell their land to logging companies. Australia is seizing aboriginal land and expelling its native inhabitants. Canada is giving mining and oil rights to Chinese companies from sovereign First People land. Here in the United States, we like to think we’ve finished with our colonial ways, but we haven’t. The Dakota Access Pipeline would violate many treaties and the government has already seized Apache land in the last year to give copper mining rights, as well as attaching riders to healthcare bills that would allow companies to gain access to oil and coal on reservations like the Lummi Nation in Washington State. These are the issues facing tribes that already have formalized relationships with the government.

Indigenous recognition is at the frontline of the battle for native sovereignty. These tribes—who signed treaties, helped settlers, and lost their land—are asking for their treaties to be honored. To redefine their recognition, to put blood quantum restrictions on who is and isn’t native enough, to redefine treaties over and over, continues a toxic cycle of colonialism where the government, and the corporations it partners with, continues to unlawfully profit off of the resources of indigenous lands at great peril to our increasingly climate-challenged world.

The Chinook and Duwamish tribes represent the most recognizable tribes in the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest is arguably one of the most politically liberal regions in the country. The names of our cities and towns are in Chinuk Wawa and Lushootseed, the region’s native languages. Seattle’s logo is an image of Chief Si’ahl. If in this area, with these tribes that all kids learn about growing up in school, justice can’t be found, then how does that bode for the rest of the country? This film uses the region to spark a discussion about identity and sovereignty, but the message about whose land we inhabit and how we work to right these wrongs is universal.

We began this film in April 2013 and have been honored to work with tribal communities, historians, and political allies who work on these issues. It has been a life-changing and humbling experience, and we are profoundly grateful that this story was our first feature film.

Sarah & Vasant Salcedo