University of Washington Press and the Film

From the Desk of the Director of University of Washington Press:

"The Western Reads common book selection is just one example of how communities and readers engage with the work we publish. Another is Promised Land, a new documentary about the Duwamish and Chinook fight for treaty recognition. Several UW Press books “formed the academic framework of the film’s narrative,” as filmmaker Sarah Samudre Salcedo puts it, including Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, Robert T. Boyd, Kenneth Ames, and Tony Johnson’s Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia, and Jon Daehnke’s forthcoming Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Lower Columbia River. The Seattle Theatre Group will present Promised Land on July 6, 2017, at the Neptune Theatre. The screening is free and open to the public and will include a preshow discussion with representatives from the tribes. We hope you can join us."

Read more on University of Washington Press's website.

The Film Is Finished!

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We have fantastic news: Promised Land is officially finished. While it is still awaiting its official Pacific Northwest debut, it's already been seen by several North American festivals and won small awards. 

We are currently in the process of planning the film's festival and university tour. Though the film begins in a specific region, the story it tells is one that countless tribes are going through not only throughout North America, but throughout the world as well. The film ends by expanding its focus to issues such as aboriginal identity, blood quantum, and the struggle of indigenous communities for self-determination. We also just won a grant from 4Culture that will enable us to develop interactive educational materials that will help engage audiences and our educational partners with the history and current events discussed in the film, sharing an even greater depth of information than we had time to provide.

We hope to partner with aboriginal communities around world wherever our film is screened to help draw attention to all issues of self-determination that all bands and tribes face in every country.  This film is presented without a narrator, so that only the voices of the tribal members themselves, along with their allies, are the ones presenting the story. We hope that all our showings will be avenues for indigenous voices to meet with the community and have their voices heard. We don't want to be the ones doing the speaking; that's never been a goal of the film, to promote ourselves as artists. The goal of this film is to raise awareness of the complex and unjust struggle that the Duwamish, Chinook, and countless tribes like them go through concerning recognition, enrollment issues, blood quantum, and the like. 

We will be updating the site in the next month with preliminary dates for showings, a new trailer, and more exciting news about partnerships for the film's outreach journey. The poster above (which was designed by the filmmakers and the bear illustration was created by Port Gamble S'Kallam artist, Jeffrey Veregge, who does a lot of work for Marvel and Nike and graciously added his graphic stylings to elements in the film) and the news about 4Culture is just the first of many updates we'll be posting about in the coming months. We look forward to sharing these things and of course, the film itself, with you all this summer.