From the Film Room: Gather

For Indigenous History Month, the Film Room is thrilled to be presenting the powerful and moving new documentary film, Gather (2020). On Tuesday, June 22, 2021, we’ll be gathering in virtual space for a live screening event of the critically acclaimed feature documentary film. The screening will be followed by an interactive live gathering and discussion with cast members and other inspiring invitees centered around collective healing through the reclamation of indigenous foodways, ecology, and land reparations.

We Invite You To Join Us and Reserve Your Ticket

About Gather

Gather is a critically acclaimed New York Times Critic’s Pick film that weaves together an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political, and cultural identities through food sovereignty while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide.

75% of the variety in global diets comes from products cultivated by indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. There would be no such thing as Italian tomatoes, Irish potatoes, Thai chilis, East Indian spicy curries, Swiss chocolate, or African cassava without the extraction of these goods by early colonists. For centuries after that first Contact, the US government and military policy worked to separate indigenous peoples from traditional lands as a result of thousands of years of cultural and spiritual relationships with that land. A significant aspect of these relationships was incredibly deep ecological knowledge of local food systems. The poor health outcomes in Indian Country aren’t merely a result of poverty but, rather, of centuries of economic and government policy that targets their right to live in a traditional, environmentally balanced manner.

Gather follows the stories of Natives on the frontlines of a growing movement to reconnect with spiritual and cultural identities that were devastated by genocide. An indigenous chef embarks on an ambitious project to reclaim ancient foodways on the Apache reservation; in South Dakota, a gifted Lakota high school student, raised on a buffalo ranch, is proving her tribe’s 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 the reclaiming and recovery of ancient foodways is a way forward for Native Americans to bring back health and vitality to their people.

Background

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.

Directors Statement

I’m in a very privileged position as a non-indigenous director to make a film on Native American food sovereignty under the guidance of one of the most vaunted NGOs in Indian Country – First Nations DevelopmentInstitute (FNDI). The access their relationships in Indian Country have afforded us allowed us to make a film on these vital issues with depth and nuance we never could have reached otherwise. As it happens, I have a track record working with and for various indigenous groups around the world which informed my ability on Gather to simply listen and be present in an observational manner–allowing our Native American characters to drive their own narratives. I worked in human rights for 20 years, some of which was spent running a foundation that funneled millions of dollars of support to water infrastructure projects of the Dogon (Mali) and the Samburu (Kenya). My first film, Food Chains, chronicled the rise of a group of tomato pickers in Florida who were displaced Oaxacan, Chiapan, and Guatemalan indigenous. My last film, 3100: Run and Become, delved deeply into Navajo and Kalahari San Bushmen running traditions with rare access granted by elders themselves. At the same time, I come from a family and tradition from India that vehemently and sometimes violently opposed the British colonization. While my experience of historical trauma is not analogous to Native Americans, I feel alignment in my approach to the de-colonization of economics and my belief in human and civil rights. It is with this perspective that I approached my role in Gather. My job was to listen and serve. I understood that my abilities are limited as a non-Native but, like in all my films, I relied on the subjects to drive the narrative. I took their lead, guidance and just trained the cameras on them in a way that would expose and honor their traditions