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Returning to Ancestral Hands: Indigenous-Led Land Restoration and Healing
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From the Montana plains to the wetland forests of Jamaica, traditional forms of land management revitalize cultural knowledge and heal legacies of colonialism, extraction, and extinction. The two films in this panel share the momentous efforts of the Blackfoot Nation to restore the wild buffalo on their ancestral territory, and a retelling of Queen Nanny, a national heroine of Jamaica. These stories coalesce to highlight how climate resilience is strengthened by returning to the wisdom of Indigenous restoration practices, African spiritualism, and ecological caretakers.
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Bring Them Home/Aiskótáhkapiyaaya chronicles a decades-long initiative by members of the Blackfoot Confederacy to bring wild buffalo (Blackfeet: iinnii) back to the Blackfeet Reservation. A thriving wild buffalo population would not only reconnect Blackfeet with a central part of their heritage, spirituality and identity, but would provide economic opportunities and healing for the community. Along the way, however, the initiative faces obstacles from ranchers who see the buffalo as a threat to the cattle ranches that dominate the land and are a legacy of colonization.
Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons, produced by Jamaican NYU Professor Leo Douglas, seeks to retell the story of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, national heroine of Jamaica. Traditionally Queen Nanny (also known as Grandie Nanny) has been portrayed through a lens of mountain guerrilla warfare and her successful anti-slavery emancipatory military campaigns in the early to mid-1700s. But here she is represented in what some scholars of the Black Atlantic and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade believe to be a more accurate and broader reality – an early Afro-Caribbean ecologist, a protector of the springs, forests and watersheds, and as the quintessential Black conservationist and environmental justice leader, and scholar of the wild places of the mountains of Jamaica. The “Reimagining Nanny: Her Sword – A Seed Documentary” was initiated as part of a larger project reflecting on Jamaica’s 60th year of national independence from Great Britain.
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