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Synopsis

In the 1970s, with the swagger of unapologetic Indianness, organizers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought for Native liberation and survival as a community of extended families.

Warrior Women is the story of Madonna Thunder Hawk, one such AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists' children - including her daughter Marcy - into the "We Will Remember" Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. Together, Madonna and Marcy fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Today, with Marcy now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for Indigenous cultural values.

Through a circular Indigenous style of storytelling, this film explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.


Featured Perspectives

MADONNA THUNDER HAWK

Madonna Thunder Hawk, an Oohenumpa Lakota, is a veteran of every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz, to Wounded Knee in 1973 and more recently the NODAPL protest at Standing Rock. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s as a member and leader in the American Indian Movement and co-founded Women of All Red Nations and the Black Hills Alliance. In 1974, she established the We Will Remember survival group as an act of cultural reclamation for young Native people pushed out of the public schools. An eloquent voice for Native resistance and sovereignty, Thunder Hawk has spoken throughout the United States, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East and served as a delegate to the United Nations in Geneva.

In the last three decades at home on Cheyenne River, Thunder Hawk has been implementing the ideals of self-determination into reservation life. She worked for over 15 years as the tribal liaison for the Lakota People's Law Project in fighting the illegal removal of Native children from tribal nations into the state foster care system. She established the Wasagiya Najin "Grandmothers' Group" on Cheyenne River Reservation to assist in rebuilding kinship networks and supporting the Nation in its efforts to stop the removal of children from Native families.  

MARCELLA GILBERT

Marcella Gilbert is the daughter of Madonna Thunder Hawk and a Lakota and Dakota community organizer with a focus on food sovereignty and cultural revitalization. She earned a Master’s Degree in Nutrition from South Dakota State University. Gilbert was a 2014 Cohort of the Bush Foundation's Native Nations Rebuilders Program.      

Her formative years were influenced by the activism of her extended family’s leadership in the American Indian Movement. She was a seventeen-year old delegate to the newly established International Indian Treaty Council to Geneva in 1977 and a graduate of the We Will Remember Survival Group. This alternative school run by and for Native people, was a remarkable tool for decolonizing and healing the intergenerational damage caused by boarding school. Her goal is to reintroduce sustainable traditional foods and organic farming to her reservation as an expression of the most fundamental form of survival and empowerment. She is working on launching the pilot project of her own survival school Waniyetu Iyawapi (Winter Count) Mobile learning experience. Marcella currently works for Simply Smiles, Inc., a non-profit organization that locates one project on the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota. She manages the garden project that includes wild food identification, harvest, and food processing.


Our Filmmakers

CHRISTINA D. KING  |  Director & Producer

An enrolled member of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma, Christina D. King’s work spans broadcast news, commercials, documentary, film, and television with a focus on human rights issues, civic engagement through storytelling, and democratizing filmmaking opportunities for marginalized voices.

King most recently debuted the narrative feature film We The Animals at Sundance 2018 to critical success. The film was awarded the NEXT Innovator Award and is nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. King’s directorial debut about the mothers and daughters of the American Indian Movement, Warrior Women (ITVS), debuted at HotDocs and and was awarded the SkinsFest award for Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking.

King’s other producing credits include This May Be The Last Time (Sundance 2014), which explores the origins of Native Mvskogee worship songs in Oklahoma, as well as the POV documentary Up Heartbreak Hill.

A former Time Warner Native Producing Fellow through the Sundance Institute, King’s producing and directing work has gone on to receive support through the Institute’s Documentary Fund, Edit & Story Lab, and Producing Fellowship. King’s projects have also garnered supported through fellowships with the female film fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures and Stanley Nelson’s Firelight Films.

King is based in un-ceded Lenape land in Brooklyn, New York.


ELIZABETH A. CASTLE  |  Director & Producer

Dr. Castle brings over 25 years of experience as a scholar, activist, and media maker working in collaboration with Native Nations and underrepresented communities. Warrior Women is based on the research done for her book "Women were the Backbone, Men were the Jawbone: Native Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement."

While completing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, she worked as a policy associate for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race and in 2001 she served as a delegate for the Indigenous World Association at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. While working as an academic specialist for UC Berkeley’s Oral History Office, she received the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Santa Cruz under the supervision of Professors Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker.

Dr. Castle was a professor in the Native Studies Department at the University of South Dakota and is the founder and Executive Director of The Warrior Women Oral History Project. Castle has numerous publications including “The Original Gangster: The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk.” Castle is a committed anti-racist ally and descended from the Pekowi band of the Shawnee in Ohio - both shape how she engages with community-based scholarship and organizing. Warrior Women is Castle’s directorial debut.


ANNA MARIE PITMAN  |  Producer

Anna Marie is a producer working in a cross section of formats and genres; documentaries, commercials and narrative films. Instigated by the disappointment created from witnessing similar indigenous struggles in her home country of Australia, Pitman’s ambitions lie in documentary storytelling through socially-conscious projects. She is a graduate of the University of New South Wales in Australia with a BA in Film Studies, Political science & Spanish.

Pitman recently produced Crystal Moselle’s Our Dream of Water, a three-part documentary series for National Geographic spotlighting the global water crisis through the eyes of women in Haiti, Peru and Kenya and their daily struggle to find clean, safe water. Pitman went on to produce Moselle’s documentary/narrative hybrid short film; That One Day, which premiered at Venice Film Festival 2016. 

Pitman produced Jared Leto’s documentary projects The Great Wide Open, a series celebrating America's National Parks and the adventurers who explore them, as well as Beyond the Horizon an in-depth interview series with visionaries such as Al Gore, Edward Snowden, Deepak Chopra, Alicia Garcia, Walter Isaacson, Charles Frank Bolden Jr, Marina Abramovic and John Kiriakou.  

Other documentary credits include Rick Burns’ American Experience: We Shall Remain (PBS), Future Cities (Vice), 7 Deadly Sins (Showtime), Six by Sondheim (HBO), Hidden Dangers (Waterislife.org), Brooklynn (PSA for Gun Safety), and #Callingallvoices (Fusion).


ANDREAS BURGESS | Director of Photography

A cinematographer working in narrative, documentary and the spectrum in between for over 15 years, Andreas Burgess' work has screened at TriBeCa, SXSW, Full Frame, Sundance and Cannes and on ABC, PBS, ESPN, History, Discovery and NYTimes.com.

In 2015, he received his 2nd consecutive Emmy for his work on the period murder series A Crime To Remember. His narrative credits also include ABC's Final Witness, Independent Spirit Award-Winner Conventioneers, Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's Claire in Motion, Mehreen Jabbar's Dobara Phir Se, and most recently Liz W. Garcia's One Percent More Humid, which premiered in competition at Tribeca 2017. Documentary credits include Johanna Hamilton's 1971 (INDEPENDENT LENS), Elisabeth James' ethereal In So Many Words, and The Other Half of Tomorrow (Samina Quraeshi and Sadia Shepard's portrait of modern Pakistan that opened the 2012 Margaret Mead Film Festival).


KEIKO DEGUCHI | Editor

Keiko Deguchi is a film editor of narrative and documentary films based in New York City. Deguchi has edited over 30 feature length films including the narrative films We The Animals by Jeremiah Zagar, The Hot Flashes, directed by Susan Seidelman, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, directed by Steven Shainberg, (Untitled), directed by Jonathan Parker and Handsome Harry, directed by Bette Gordon. Her documentary film credits include award-winning films such as Jeremiah Zagar’s In A Dream; Linda Hattendorf’s The Cats of Mirikitani; Jason DaSilva’s When I Walk and Todd and Jedd Wider’s God Knows Where I Am.


JOHN LARSON | Director of Photography

John Larson is a documentary cinematographer who works on a wide variety of projects with a focus on vérité filmmaking. His film Edith and Eddie (2017) was nominated for an academy award.


KRISTEN NUTILE | Editor

Kristen Nutile is documentary editor and filmmaker based in New York City. She recently edited Heroin(e) which was nominated for an Academy Award. She also edited Weed The People, The Bullish Farmer, Deep Run, and Unfinished Spaces. Other editing credits include Every Day Is a HolidayStarboard Light, Invitation to Dance, and From Prison to Home. Kristen’s work has shown all over the world including the Sundance Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, and she is a recipient of the Albert Maysles Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. Kristen collaborated with legendary filmmaker, Albert Maysles and Tanja Meding on Sally Gross - The Pleasure of Stillness, a documentary about dancer and choreographer, Sally Gross. It screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Film Forum in New York City. She holds Master’s degrees in both Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and Biology from San Francisco State University.