American Indian Studies

Based on the collection of nearly 500 films in the American Indian Film Gallery housed at the University of Arizona, this project tribesources mid-20th century educational and sponsored films about Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and Southern California by recording Native narrations and contextual information for film content from the Native communities they represent. The films contain valuable historical visual imagery, but the original narrations are often inaccurate and culturally uninformed. Tribesourcing places historical materials with the peoples they represent in order to tell the untold or suppressed story.

River People documents a timely issue - the clash between an ancient culture and modern society. It is the story of David Sohappy, a Native-American spiritual leader who was sentenced to a five-year prison term for selling 317 salmon out of season. For twenty years Sohappy has fished in open defiance of all state and federal fishing laws. He claims he has an ancestral right to fish along Oregon's Columbia River. As a result, he has become a symbol of resistance for indigenous people of the Northwest United States and beyond.River People uses Sohappy's case to explore the historic conflict over the resources of the Columbia and the political controversy involving fishing rights and the right to religious freedom. Behind the controversy is the story of a man caught in a conflict between two cultures, and two seemingly irreconcilable ways of looking at the world.

For years, Apache tribes had resisted the advance of the pioneers and their threat to the traditional ways of life. But Geronimo fought the longest, becoming one of the most famous, feared and misunderstood Indian warriors in our history. Now at last, descendants of those Apaches who fought so long ago tell their story as it has never been told.

Craft in America, Season Two a filmed journey of the history, artists and techniques of our nation's rich craft culture, continues the journey into the diverse and ever-evolving world of American craft. It examines artists who turned to craft later in life as a second career, and what has driven them to reinvent themselves, and by so doing perhaps fulfill the craftsman's credo best: live craft as a calling, not just a career. Includes an interview with bead worker, Teri Greeves of the Wind River Reservation Fort Washakie, Wyoming.

America's top gumshoes prove that an object found in an attic or backyard might be anything but ordinary. They leave no stone unturned as they travel around the country to explore the stories behind local folklore, prominent figures and family legends.

Native America challenges everything we thought we knew about the Americas before and since contact with Europe. It travels through 15,000-years to showcase massive cities, unique systems of science, art, and writing, and 100 million people connected by social networks and spiritual beliefs spanning two continents. The series reveals some of the most advanced cultures in human history and the Native American people who created it and whose legacy continues, unbroken, to this day. This series explores this extraordinary world through an unprecedented combination of cutting edge science and traditional indigenous knowledge. It is Native America as never seen before -featuring sacred rituals filmed for the first time, history changing scientific discoveries, and rarely heard voices from the living legacy of Native American culture.