When Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone first began working on her new buffalo conservation documentary “Bring Them Home,” its eventual broadcast home of PBS was not at risk of being eradicated. Now, just like the animals she’s fighting to save, that is no longer the case.
“Public broadcasting is also under a very concerted effort of eradication right now, so PBS understands, in a way that’s way more timely and topical than we want it to be at the moment,” Gladstone told TheWrap ahead of the film’s Monday night premiere. “I grew up High Plains on my reservation in Browning and East Glacier. For a while, we just had our little rabbit ear television and we would get BCC from Canada because we were close enough to the border, and we would get PBS. So I learned about the bigger world from watching all of the PBS Kids shows. Bill Nye the Science Guy was my science teacher for home school. PBS was kind of everything and it continues to be so.”
“Knowing that this is [the doc’s] home, it’s also, poetically, in a way, really important, because it is like our land, like the world that we share; it’s a shared resource, it’s for everybody,” she continued. “And at a time when public broadcasting is under such attack, at a time when public lands are under such attack, there’s a ton of effort all across Montana and the American West, of conservationists coming from places we wouldn’t necessarily classically think. It’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck moment. I think PBS carrying this documentary is absolutely appropriate.”
Premiering during Native American Heritage Month, “Bring Them Home” documents the history of the American government intentionally slaughtering the
number of wild buffalo from 30 million down to under 1,000 in just a generation. However, it is also a story of hope as the modern Blackfeet Nation continues to bring the bison back to Montana and Alberta.
“The documentary is a nice way of making — in a very digestible, entertaining; the animation in this, I’m just completely floored by and amazed with — it’s just synthesized the work of a lot of different folks working on a lot of different fronts,” Gladstone shared. “Everybody knows that generally this is happening, but paying homage to the tribe itself, to the Blackfeet Buffalo Project, to our relatives across the border in Canada, the larger Blackfoot Confederacy, it’s bringing everything together into one place where you can see it in the way that film allows you to see it. It’s been incredibly invigorating.”
“It’s hard to necessarily do a whole century of undoing, with the eradication and systemized concerted effort of the U.S. government to eradicate bison from the Great Plains. A lot of that was because they recognized that eradicating the buffalo would be the fastest way of eradicating the Indian problem, as we were called. That has definitely taken a toll,” she added. “And over a century later, seeing this return and also recognizing that we’re still here is one of the biggest things. We hear it, we see it. We don’t necessarily see with our own eyes and our own timeline how far we’ve come, we live the life and time that we have now, but we know that we’re part of something that’s older than us, that’s bigger than us, that’s more continual than us, and the buffalo remind us of that. The documentary is just bringing to words and images what we all know.”
Also known as “Aiskótáhkapiyaaya,” the Thunderheart Films and WETA project was co-directed by Ivy MacDonald, Ivan MacDonald and Daniel Glick. Executive producers include Melissa Grumhaus, Sarah Clarke and Gladstone, with Glick and Ivan MacDonald as producers and cinematography by Zane Clampett, Kier Atherton and Glick.
“I’ve been involved with ‘Bring Them Home’ since 2017, ’18. Co-director Daniel Glick knew that he needed to work with community members — not just as subjects, but as filmmakers. So when he was making his rounds around Blackfeet country and kept asking for who would be a good collaborator, everybody kept pointing him back to me, as well as the Montana Film Office,” Gladstone said. “Long before ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ made my name recognizable to people, I was known in Montana for a lot of different elements. Being a Montana actress, you also spend a lot of time behind the camera doing, essentially, producing work without necessarily accepting producing credit. You just do what you need to do. So he reached out as I was doing the rounds for Kelly Reichardt, ‘Certain Women,’ which was what I’d call my big breakthrough.”
“The two projects — and I say two projects because there’s also a narrative companion that’s being developed alongside it — when Daniel brought on Blackfeet filmmaking sibling duo Ivy and Ivan MacDonald is really when they started gaining some really good momentum and lifting off, and we’re all continuing to collaborate on the narrative project together,” she further teased.”[I’m] EP-ing, doing some writing on it, there was a character that was written specifically for me that I want to play, this Montana rancher. So there’s something in it for me, there’s something in it for a lot of Blackfeet folks.”
Outside of her Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning work in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Gladstone is also known for “Under the Bridge” and “The Wedding Banquet,” with “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “In Memoriam” and “Lone Wolf” all in post-production. So how exactly does she choose her roles now that she’s made it in Hollywood?
“I feel like a lot of native actors, we get a kind of shortlist of projects that we’re able to do or types that we’re able to do. There’s things within the stories that we’re telling right now that I really want to bring attention to the character,” Gladstone explained. “‘Under the Bridge’ was a really wonderful opportunity to bring attention to this huge faction of American Indian history and First Nations history in Canada, a lot of the same policies on both sides of the border and the whole pipeline of adopting native children out away from their families was a second wave after the buffalo were mostly eradicated.”
“All of these projects that I agree to take, they kind of go back to these major elements of American Indian history that I’ve researched, that I’ve heard about, and then also just have lived with the reality and the ramifications of,” she continued. “Before the movie thing picked up for me, before the acting career in cinema really became the main focus, a lot of my acting love was channeled into community. I was raised in community and I was raised to be in community, so a lot of the early ways of stoking and keeping the love of acting alive was working with kids from communities all across Montana. When you’re working with youth, you’re confronting head-on a lot of the issues that we face as native peoples as a result of histories like the one in ‘Bring Them Home,’ of years of colonization and attempts to eradicate who we are as people.”
“You end up recognizing when you’re working on that level and working with other organizers who are keeping us going that a lot of the problems and sources kind of go back to these specific things people don’t know about, these policies people don’t know about,” Gladstone concluded. “So the chance to get to play characters on a larger stage where people are paying attention, where you get the time to develop a fondness for whoever the person is that you’re watching, then you feel the history in a way that you just don’t when you’re reading it out of a textbook, if you ever even read it out of a textbook. I would say that’s the through-line. It’s the most important, necessary works, and it’s also just where the best characters tend to be that are available to us as native actors.”
“Bring Them Home” premieres Monday night at 10/9c on PBS.
