Guest speaker Carole Vandal of the Wampanoag Tribe will give a talk before the film
INHABITANTS: INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES ON RESTORING OUR WORLD follows five Native American communities as they restore their traditional land management practices in the face of a changing climate. For millennia Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain these processes. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. The five stories include sustaining traditions of Hopi dryland farming in Arizona; restoring buffalo to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana; maintaining sustainable forestry on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin; reviving native food forests in Hawaii; and returning prescribed fire to the landscape by the Karuk Tribe of California. As the climate crisis escalates, these time-tested practices of North America’s original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.
Carole Vandal is an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, born and raised on Noepe. She is a retired American Indian Culture teacher, Assistant principal, biologist, climate change activist, and water protector. Carole’s delighted to be home after 30 years of working in Minnesota with her sister tribes and relatives the Anishinaabe.
“….the wisdom of the original inhabitants is finally being heard…”
– Cinema 365
“Inhabitants is a very well-constructed and well filmed documentary that would be valuable to Indigenous studies, environmental sciences or agriculture courses.”
-Lauren Stieglitz, University of Alberta
