Two Documentary Films Honoring Native American Heritage Month

Join us on Thursday, November 16th at 7pm for DAWNLAND and BOUNTY, including an introduction and post-screening discussion moderated by Upstander Project Researcher Kristine Malpica (www.upstanderproject.org). Presented by Imagine Studios and The Regenerative School, proceeds from this program will benefit Wabenaki REACH and MA Center for Native American Awareness.

About the films:

DAWNLAND (1 hr 26 mins)

Following the work of the nation’s first ever government-endorsed Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this feature-length documentary investigates the impact of Maine’s child welfare practices on the Wabanaki people.

The Wabanaki are the people who are there to greet the light, “the people of the dawn,” in the upper Northeast. For decades, Maine’s child welfare system placed Wabanaki children in foster or adoptive homes under the presumption that assimilating into white society would improve their quality of life and give them a better future. But many children in the system suffered untold physical and psychological abuse. Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began the work of attempting to heal the wounds of a foster care system that devastated Native American families, this documentary gives groundbreaking access to intimate, sacred moments of truth-telling and healing, revealing untold details about America’s history of Indigenous child removal.


BOUNTY (9 mins)

This documentary short reveals the hidden story of the “Phips Proclamation,” one example of the use of scalp-bounty proclamations to exterminate Penobscot people in order to take their land in what is now New England. In the film, Penobscot parents and children resist erasure and commemorate survival by reading and reacting to one of the dozens of government-issued bounty proclamations that motivated colonial settlers to hunt, scalp, and murder Indigenous people.

From the filmmakers: “We are citizens of the Penobscot Nation. For this film, we bring our families to Boston to read our ancestors’ death warrant, the Phips Proclamation. This abhorrent edict, enacted in 1755 by the colonial government, paid settlers handsomely to murder Penobscot people. It declared our people enemies and offered different prices for the scalps of children, women, and men. Bounty proclamations like this persisted for more than two centuries across what is now the United States. The memory of being hunted is in our blood. We know this to be true, and the science now affirms that trauma can be passed from generation to generation. In BOUNTY we step into the future together with our children, into the colonizer’s hall of injustice to read their hateful words and tell the truth about what was done to our ancestors. We exercise our power by sharing the horrors of this hard history as an act of resistance and remembrance and a step toward justice.”