Indigenous Film: Four Faces of the Moon and Ishi’s Return

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is pleased to partner with the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management and the Denver American Indian Commission to present Indigenous Film, a monthly indigenous film series.

The film will be screened at the Museum’s Phipps Theater. Doors open at 6 p.m., films begin at 6:30 p.m. Please use the IMAX Evening Entrance on the east side of the Museum. Admission is free. Concessions are available for purchase.

Wednesday, November 8

6:30 p.m.

Four Faces of the Moon and Ishi’s Return

Four Faces of the Moon, Director Amanda Strong (Michif/Cree/ Anishinaabe). This intricate stop-motion animation interlaces Canada’s colonial past with Strong’s personal history, and illuminates Cree, Métis, and Anishinaabe reclamation of culture, language, and nationhood. In Cree and French with English subtitles. (Winnipeg Film Group, 2016, 13 min.).

Ishi’s Return, Director Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho). In 1911, when Ishi emerged from the woods in Oroville, California, he became a national sensation known as “the last wild Indian.” Ishi’s story demonstrates the insidious power of purposeful forgetting. For a country determined to forget its treatment of American Indians, it was expedient to promote the myth of “vanishing Indians” and relegate them permanently to the past. How, then, was it possible that 80 years after his death, it was Ishi’s descendants who compelled the Smithsonian to repatriate his remains for a proper burial? The film travels an emotional path from Ishi’s first encounter with modern society, the dehumanizing manner in which he was poked, prodded and displayed, to the triumph of his descendants who had the audacity to continue to exist. (Katahdin Productions, 2016, 38 min.).

Audience discussion and Q&A will follow the film screening.

[Free]

More info: http://www.dmns.org/learn/adults/indigenous-film/

2017 Schedule

No screening in December

Stay tuned for the 2018 schedule!