About this story: Dr. Belcourt, Blackfeet, Mandan, Hidatsa, Chippewa (Aamineesiaki-Otterwoman) is a Professor at the Univeristy of Montana’s School of Community and Public Health Sciences and a TH Chan Harvard School of Health Senior Environmental Public Health Fellow. Dr. Belcourt has teamed with Sun Dog Films to create narratives aimed at advancing indigenous public health storytelling in film, media, and literature. These works are aimed at illuminating truth, justice, beauty, and forced resiliency within indigenous spaces. The works are rooted in the responsibility to advance social justice for marginalized indigenous voices and to dismantle systematic health inequity sources in the indigenous occupied territories of the Americas.

Read a narrative story, browse images from the upcoming short film, Dogwood, and learn more about Dr. Belcourt’s work:

One thing about surviving a pandemic and near murder is that you learn to grow stronger and to grow strong children. My children are dragons in a time requiring strength and hope.

During the coldest part of a Montana pandemic winter my daughter arrived with a small suitcase covered in a universe of literal stars and enough hope to build back our spirits with love and story. She held space within her heart to hear the stories of the crushing cruelty both her sister and I had experienced.

She listened.

She learned.

Then she responded.

Her story is her own to tell and she is doing so in film. Her stories weave within them worlds she has created. A world where no one has ever hurt those she loves. A world where indigenous women heal the world in story and strength. Her grandmothers each lived for the Blackfeet and indigenous communities. They were not just Blackfeet or Mandan or Hidatsa or Chippewa: they were love personified in each action they took toward our collective survival. In researching her films Maya learned their languages. She learned their daily rhythms and the knowledge living within them about our healing ways. She read the stories and the studies about their knowledge of the ethnobotanical traditional ways and ecological knowledge from written and spoken history. She breathed their ancestral knowledge and power back into her soul. In doing so she breathed life back into each of us.

She stood strongly and touched every item in our home to cleanse it from the hate that had touched our lives. She carried each item out of our home and replaced it with love. Repaired holes in the walls. Swept each trace of the ugliness that had slowly infiltrated our lives. She helped us build a home again from the ashes of a fire. A fire that had nearly consumed us all.

She is our sanctuary of strength and sanity in a world quite demonstrably broken. Bringing order to chaos is nothing compared to the healing love can provide. The Japanese practice of Kintsugi or golden joinery is a method of mending broken items with lacquer mixed with previous metals like gold, silver, and platinum. Breaks in an item are remembered and even celebrated for their unique beauty. They are not a source of shame to be hidden, but rather the beauty that unites our necessary pieces of clay. When Napi created the world and the Niitsitapi he made us out of clay and blood and many items. Our magic and our beauty lives within that mixture. Maya is the metal that holds us all back together and provides us a way to call our spirit back home to the safety of our bodies and family.

So as a family we rose together to follow her on a journey towards home. A journey guided by the lanterns of our ancestral mothers and fathers past the cruelty of a colonized world of a million sharp edges to a flower filled world on the edge of the mountains. She brought us all home.

We began a long anticipated, mostly Maya-funded, family-led effort to bring her story of love and healing to life. Maya saved her earnings from television writing to bring together a cast and crew who would breathe life into her world of creation. A world of dollhouses, sage, our homelands, dogs, plant medicines, language, ghosts, and stories. Woven together in images and spoken words to celebrate the unbreakable love that lives in the magical lives of Indian women and girls.

Perfumes and potions of wildflowers and plants replaced hateful words and actions. Kind uncles who could fix anything replaced gossiping old hateful women stuck in traumas from 50 years ago. A loving and chaotic grandmother was there to fuss and worry about the entire crew from the youngest child to the oldest arthritic on set. Loving cousins flew in from out of state and helped pull focus on each scene. A loving father camped out in the brutal smoke and sun to help move equipment and drive the set jeep. A family of mice evicted to make way for a story to unfold. A kind and loving boyfriend using every trick up his sleeve as a cinematographer to capture luminous moments of indigenous beauty and story. A small surgery at one point was performed on an ailing camera using tweezers found in an old sink on a borrowed ranch filled with a world of dreamers.

It all started with story. The story of berry soup. In this case, we had planted the sarvis/savis/juneberry/saskatoon bushes in April and harvested them the day before the shoot to make a traditional soup. A Blackfeet Elder named Leon opened the film shoot by asking each cast and crew member to take a berry and led everyone through a prayer. Leon called all of the women ancestors and healers to join us on that smoky afternoon as we held our berries in a moment of sanctuary. I then collected the prayers living in the berries and provided them as an offering to creator. An offering that included all of the prayers, hopes, wishes, and dreams of each person working together to help show how indigenous strength can transform pain into power.

I once was named one of the 50 “badass” women in health by a magazine. However, I know fully that Native women are the strongest persons in this world. I once was blessed to know an elder from a coastal tribe who shared the ways we view our spiritual foods. He shared that he was at a clambake for his tribe and he noticed an elderly woman taking pink medication for allergies. He was concerned and asked her if she was okay. She replied, “Yes, I am okay, but you see I am allergic to shellfish.” Incredulous, the elder asked her not to eat the food and strongly stated that it would be okay for her to not eat it. Her reply was simple.

She said she needed the food to feed her spirit and she reassured him that she would be okay.

She was more than okay she was a warrior.

As we began our journey with story and the miracle living within our spiritual berry soup, we became warriors too. We held each other up with story and love.

When asked what her film is about I explained it is about indigenous ways of knowing, healing, and restoring balance through indigenous justice.

She said it was a story about revenge.

All are true and I love her for all of it. She decided that the time to remain silent is over. Her voice is aimed at elevating indigenous women and families to truly destroy violence in indigenous families. To elevate worlds dripping with knowledge, hope, fears, laughter, strength, and ways to stitch people back together with golden threads. We are luminous beings.

Her grandmothers and grandfathers are proud of her. Their love is present in her stories and the healing she brings is tangible in actions.

There is not really a Blackfeet word that exactly translates to thank you, as she said we say thank you through our actions. We show people our gratitude and love.

That is perhaps the best way to end this story. With a promise of actions aimed at love, truth, healing, and justice. Mostly love.

Dogwood is not just a revenge story.

Dogwood is about finding a semblance of justice in the world; it is about fighting for what’s right and charting new destinies. It is a story for the Indigenous women proud and strong enough to take matters into their own hands. After seeing her aunt come home scared and hurt, eight year old Rose is sent out into the wilds surrounding their small home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Her task? To collect the bulb of the white death camas. While working to protect her sister’s innocence, Rose must knowingly acquiesce to the plot against her uncle-in-law in order to save her family.

Learn more from Dr. Belcourt’s podcast, Native Women Rising: Montana Voices.

Read about Dr. Belcourt’s work during the pandemic here.