Presented as part of the Native Spotlight Series sponsored by the Flint Family Foundation. A portion of proceeds will be donated to Dana Tiger’s nonprofit Legacy Cultural Learning Community.
Screening includes a post-film Q&A with special guests Kevin McKiernan (writer/director), Willard Carlson (Yurok Indian fisherman featured in the film who fought at Wounded Knee), and Richard Ray Whtiman (Yuchi-Muscogee, actor, artist, and activist).
The film tells the intertwined stories of Willard Carlson, a Yurok Indian fisherman who fought at Wounded Knee, S.D., and journalist Kevin McKiernan, the film’s non-Indian director, who covered the controversial occupation from the inside. The Yuroks — the largest Native American tribe in California — discovered their “Indian-ness” during the 1973 confrontation at Wounded Knee. Following the 10-week siege by FBI agents, U.S. marshals, and the 182nd Airborne, they returned home to fight for Yurok sovereignty and fishing rights on the Klamath River. The film traces Willard’s bittersweet journey from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, where he and members of more than 280 tribes come together to oppose an oil pipeline that threatens a native water supply. “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock” provides both an eyewitness account of the American Indian Movement’s armed occupation of Wounded Knee and an exploration of how the confrontation at that historic village changed Indian Country and led up to the recent events at Standing Rock.