LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES - Mark Reviews Movies

Lakota Nation vs. United States, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2023

Words matter. The ones we choose to use define us, our experiences, our perspective, and our view of the world. Lakota Nation vs. United States opens with an explanation of the words it and its subjects will be using to define the people who are at the film's center, but note how many different words and phrases must be put forth by co-directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli. More to the point, consider how many of those words and terms have not come from the people themselves. Take the time to think of how the existence of an entire group is defined, not by those who have lived those lives, but by others who have spent centuries eradicating, exploiting, and forcibly migrating that group.

Words are at the heart of this documentary, which tells the story of the Očéti Šakówiŋ, the preferred term of the Great Sioux Nation—a collection of seven nations of Native American people, originally divided by dialects of language and geography but increasingly brought together as any pre-existing boundaries were shrunk by forces beyond them. Even the word "Sioux" does not technically belong to this group, as it came from a French misunderstanding of a pre-existing word from the people's native language, but such is the inherent power of words and communication by way of them.

There's the identity we have, intrinsic to us after generations and generations of relationships and traditions, and then, there's the identity others presume of and force upon us. This film, by way of history and personal testimonies and poetry, observes the attempted eradication of the Lakota people, as the film itself agrees to be the simplest and most acceptable of all of the words or phrases that could be used to define its subjects, and the gradual evolution of that group's current identity as displaced survivors, working toward a reclamation of themselves and just reparations for centuries' worth of loss.

At its best, the film is a clear-eyed dissection of the history of the indigenous people of the United States in terms of treaties, made and quickly broken by the country's government, and battles, as well as how that history has been transformed into some great American myth that has rarely considered the most obviously wronged side of that history. There is no real concern for straightforward chronology, though, because there is little rationale in making sense of the intentionally senseless.

If the course of this history is a string of violated agreements and acts of bloodshed performed in the name of expansion, is there any reason to go through each of those one by one? The history here is a collection of unjust actions, and as such, the filmmakers imagine them as a collective, in which the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the President of the United States using the backdrop of a monument carved into sacred land for a fireworks show in 2020 are, on some level, part of the same, continuing crime against Native Americans.

There is, in other words, a lot to cover and to dissect in this story. In addition to the directors' vision of history as something that always exists for us and continues to be written (or re-written, as is often the case, and ignored or denied, as is currently happening throughout the country in ignorant reaction to people simply trying to acknowledge the truth), they offer a powerful framing device in order to streamline the focus.

That belongs to poet Layli Long Soldier, who provides the spoken narration for the film by way of a pair of her own pieces. It shapes the expansive material into something digestible, thoughtful, and haunting, especially in the way the selected poems discuss the use and misuse of words—the letter "X" appearing in rows of treaties as a reminder that those agreements were written and presented in a language the signers did not know.

Mostly, the material does cover the history of treaties with the indigenous people of the United States, with every agreement being ignored and restructured as westward expansion uncovers assorted natural resources to mine and demands that land be given to those doing the expanding of the country, and atrocities committed against them. Of primary concern for the Lakota nations is the region of the Black Hills, which holds a special place in the heart of their tradition as the location of their creation narrative.

As the territories and borders of United States moved west in the 1800s, the area became a place of trails being established across land that the government had promised to Native Americans, forts being erected along those routes, homesteads being built there, and profit-making endeavors decimating the land. With each advance and every new enterprise, the boundaries of that protected land shrank, often by unprompted force or with violence meeting any kind of resistance (If anyone is skeptical about the 2020 fireworks show being included in this narrative, the protests—an act of resistance—being met by angry political partisans, riot police, and armed members of the South Dakota National Guard should answer that). A helpful animated map appears at times to make the full picture clear.

Lakota Nation vs. United States is ambitious in its scope and its form, which does eventually become a detriment as the central legal case and modern protest movements come to feel like an afterthought to the larger narrative. It's a melancholy but passionate and hopeful argument for justice, made by way of strong visuals and, yes, words that matter.

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