Las mujeres deciden

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has declared a “State of Emergency”, after an outbreak of youth suicides has devastated the community. Due to a lack of Federal assistance, residents have taken prevention efforts into their own hands. A tenacious Oglala Lakota elder takes charge, rallying the community to get involved, while empowering a resilient young group of suicide survivors to band together to help raise awareness.

In an unfair country women work day and night far from home while their children learn to survive between loneliness and emptiness. They grow to become teenagers, locked down in one of many low income neighborhoods made up of identical small houses, outlined by overcrowding and scarcity. Their mothers, mostly workers in transnational factories, go in and out in buses that take them to a work place where they carry out twelve hour shifts two hours away from home, while their children muddle through their upbringing in tiny houses of 40 square meters. In spite of everything, they look for a way to move ahead and chase their illusions. This is a story full of youthful aspirations set in a context of difficulties and shortages.

This Peabody Award-winning documentary from New Mexico PBS looks at the European arrival in the Americas from the perspective of the Pueblo Peoples.

This documentary follows Dawn Murphy, or “Princess Delta Dawn”, who rose to fame in the 1980s and early 1990s and became the first Indigenous woman wrestler and the first Canadian woman wrestler to compete in Japan.

Afghan documentary maker Najiba Noori offers not only a loving and intimate portrait of her mother Hawa, but also shows in detail how the arduous improvement of the position of women is undone by geopolitical violence. The film follows the fortunes of Noori’s family, who belong to the Hazaras, an ethnic group that has suffered greatly from discrimination and persecution.

For almost a century, the Coast Salish knitters of southern Vancouver Island have produced Cowichan sweaters from handspun wool. These distinctive sweaters are known and loved around the world, but the Indigenous women who make them remain largely invisible.

Filmed on location in Saskatchewan from the Qu'Appelle Valley to Hudson Bay, the documentary traces the filmmaker's quest for her Native foremothers in spite of the reluctance to speak about Native roots on the part of her relatives. The film articulates Métis women's experience with racism in both current and historical context, and examines the forces that pushed them into the shadows.

In this evocative meditation, a disturbing link is made between the resource extraction industries’ exploitation of the land and violence inflicted on Indigenous women and girls. Or, as one young woman testifies, “Just as the land is being used, these women are being used.”

Ompung Putra Boru, a sixties indigenous Batak woman from Humbang Hasundutan, North Sumatra, retraces her life stories through photographs that interweave her past and present as a wife, mother, healer and indigenous land defender in two neighboring villages. Her multi-layered stories are juxtaposed with visual records of everyday life in the two villages, where people’s living space is still increasingly threatened by a giant pulp expansion.

This documentary follows two Mohawk girls on their journey to become Mohawk women. Friends since childhood, Kaienkwinehtha and Kasennakohe are members of the traditional community of Akwesasne on the U.S./Canada border. Together, they undertake a four-year rite of passage for adolescents, called Oheró:kon, or "under the husk." The ceremony had been nearly extinct, a casualty of colonialism and intergenerational trauma; revived in the past decade by two traditional leaders, it has since flourished. Filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox has served as a mentor, or "auntie," to many youth going through the passage rites.

An intimate and thrilling portrait of a young Siksika woman and the deep bonds between her father and family in the golden plains of Blackfoot Territory as she prepares for one of the most dangerous horse races in the world… bareback.

Bolivia's Climbing Cholitas - a group of indigenous women scaling the Andes Mountains, some of the highest peaks in the world. Shot in Bolivia for Vogue Latin America and Vogue Mexico's 20th anniversary cover story.

"Without a Whisper" is the untold story of how Indigenous women influenced the early suffragists in their fight for freedom and equality. Mohawk Clan Mother Louise Herne and Professor Sally Roesch Wagner shake the foundation of the established history of the women’s rights movement in the United States. They join forces on a journey to shed light on the hidden history of the influence of Haudenosaunee Women on the women’s rights movement, possibly changing this historical narrative forever.

Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh puts a human face on a national tragedy: the murders and disappearances of an estimated 500 Aboriginal women in Canada over the past 30 years. Explores the deep historical, social, and economic factors that contribute to this epidemic of violence against Native women.

Amá is a feature length documentary which tells an important and untold story: the abuses committed against Native American women by the United States Government during the 1960’s and 70’s: removed from their families and sent to boarding schools, forced relocation away from their traditional lands and involuntary sterilization. ​The result of nine years painstaking and sensitive work by filmmaker Lorna Tucker, the film features the testimony of many Native Americans, including three remarkable women who tell their stories - Jean Whitehorse, Yvonne Swan and Charon Aseytoyer - as well as a revealing and rare interview with Dr. Reimart Ravenholt whose population control ideas were the framework for some of the government policies directed at Native American women.