Synopsis

These are precarious times. How do we create a future that includes us all, and our earthly home, in health, harmony and hope? This is a question long asked by Native people whose own struggles have a deep and enduring history. It is also the question addressed in What’s In the Heart Can’t Be Taken, a feature-length documentary film about the problems we face and the solutions already at work, in great part thanks to the fortitude, courage, wisdom, and sense of balance of the Native Americans in North America.

Through inspiring interviews and landscapes these programs will be shown:

The Tesuque Agricultural Initiative at the Tesuque Pueblo just outside Santa Fe is generating enough nutritious, diverse and organic food to feed their members year-round and to serve as an educational resource and model for others.

On Pine Ridge in South Dakota, where two of the poorest counties in the U.S. are located, the Lakota youth have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The 100-mile Youth Ride, a multiple day horse-back ride across the reservation, helps youth to see the beauty that exists on their land and to regain a sense of hope and pride in who they are and in their history.

The Menominee Tribe in northeastern Wisconsin has developed a sustainable logging practice that not only provides jobs but enhances the health of the land. It is a tradition that has been in effect for 150 years and offers its practical skills and wisdom to the forestry crisis we now face.

Cherokee Choices is a program formed by Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to develop a community-based intervention program to lower the high rate of Type 2 diabetes in adults and children. Ninety-six percent of elementary students are now making healthier food choices. Besides improved health, interest in school and learning has skyrocketed.

The Wellbriety program is a nationally recognized program that teaches that culture is prevention of chemical dependency and other dysfunctional behaviors. In May of 2009, it is sponsoring the Way Home Tour for Native teens who will ride 5,300 miles on bikes offering forgiveness to the US government for atrocities done to children at boarding schools.

The Tribal college system will be shown as a place where language and culture are being protected and passed on through Indian students.

What’s In the Heart Can’t Be Taken illuminates the ways in which Native American cultures, through the organizing principle of the Medicine Wheel, have survived and thrived in the face of genocidal policies of neglect and betrayal. It focuses on programs and individuals that are returning to traditional ways to heal generations of trauma and grief and who are forging a sustainable and innovative path for the future.

Why I Want To Create The Film

As a young girl, I was traveling with my family on vacation in southern New Mexico, when we stopped along the road beside an elderly Mescalero Apache man wearing a full Plains Indian feather headdress.  He was offering himself as a photo-opportunity to tourists, gesturing out with his hand for payment. My parents, thinking they were doing a good thing, stopped, and my brother and I stood with him and had our photograph taken. I was far too young and far too uninformed to understand what was wrong with this picture.

I keep that photograph on my desk; but now I see it as a painful reminder of the ignorance that shaped my education and my cultural experience. Forty years later, I understand why American Indians have lower living standards, lower life expectancy and higher suicide rates than their Anglo European neighbors. That elderly gentleman in full headdress on the side of the road of my childhood was not there for my entertainment; he was trying to keep his family fed after every aspect of his and his tribe’s way of life had been severely changed since the time of the European colonization. I have since learned that American Indians lost not only most of their land but also many of their languages. Their children were removed from their family homes and sent to brutal and demoralizing boarding schools. In effect, American Indians were denied the most basic right to a dignified life.  Forty years later, very little has changed. American Indians have a life expectancy between twenty and twenty-five years less than the rest of us.

I have spent many years re-educating myself about this country’s history and the ways in which America has betrayed the original inhabitants of the land we call home. I have become painfully aware of the nearly 500 treaties that have consistently been broken as regards the taking of their land in exchange for health, education and housing. This promise was included in the United States Constitution, and we are not living up to this trust responsibility. 

We are in times of painfully ironic circumstances: We desperately need the wisdom of the indigenous philosophies that at one time the US government actually outlawed, if we are to survive as a species on this planet. Yet we have done everything imaginable to destroy the future of the very people who can help bring balance to our out-of-control consumption and destruction.

Polls say that between seventy-six and eight-one percent of Americans are deeply concerned about the direction our country is headed—and I am one of those people. We know there is something wrong but we do not understand exactly what; consequently we do not know how to fix it. Healing ourselves and our history means waking up to, and understanding, the ways in which our past has been whitewashed and propagandized. It means waking up to, and understanding, the ways in which our Native American heritage holds the promise of healing through its profound respect for the interrelationship between the natural and the human world. Until this is uncovered and understood, our country will be unable to self-correct its unrelenting course of destruction of human and environmental integrity.

I want this film, What’s In The Heart Can’t Be Taken, to do three things:

1. Improve the quality of life among American Indians, especially as it relates to health disparities, and to promote pride for the rich history that Indians possess. In brief, I want this film to provide a step towards greater sovereignty for Indian peoples.I also hope to raise the awareness of the numerous ways American Indians are organizing and creating remarkable programs to help restore balance and health to their communities. Donald Warne, MD, MPH, Lakota Oglala, has noted that spreading word of these various models through this film will help inspire other tribal leaders to create models of their own.

It is my intention for the film to have an educational outreach program that will facilitate its dissemination among groups that will benefit from the information. These groups include: Tribal, State, and Federal Departments of Health, members of Congress both at the state and federal levels, and the education system in general, from fourth grade through graduate training.

2. Illuminate the magnificent gifts and wisdom of Native American philosophy with special focus on the Lakota Medicine Wheel. With its commitment to sustainability in all directions, the Lakota Medicine Wheel offers a key to our salvation as we face global warming, species extinction, the shame of knowing that millions of people are living in total misery on less than a dollar a day, and the ways in which we have all—inadvertently and otherwise—participated in the destruction of the world we love.

3. Reveal the truth of our country’s beginning as a path to a new course of stability in the 21st century.

I am privileged to be a development officer working to raise money for the Medicine Wheel Foundation, an organization created by Dr. Warne, to help eliminate the huge disparities in health and healthcare among American Indians. A significant portion of the proceeds from this film will go specifically toward a scholarship fund for American Indian students to go to their own medical school—American Indian School of Health Sciences, a project of Dr. Warne, which will be located in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area on Tribal land.