Bring Her Home. Directed by Leya Hale. Twin Cities Public Broadcasting Service, 2022. 56 minutes.

Sisters Rising. Directed by Willow O’Feral and Brad Heck. Women Make Movies, 2020. 59 minutes.

Bring Her Home, directed by Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné Nations), and Sisters Rising, directed by Willow O’Feral and Brad Heck, are two recent documentaries that take quite different approaches to raising awareness about violence against Indigenous women.1 Both films are powerful in their own ways, highlighting the tremendous activism of Native American women who work to remember and honor survivors as well as those who have been killed or disappeared.

Bringing together the voices of an artist, a lawmaker, and an activist, Bring Her Home manages to value each person’s distinct approach to raising awareness about missing or murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) and creating change. As Ruth Buffalo (Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation and the first Native American Democratic woman elected to the North Dakota Legislature) points out in the film, “Any one of us can do this, get within these systems and fix these systems to work for us, to honor us as human beings” (42:51). Bring Her Home emphasizes that change happens both from within oppressive systems and from outside them, through artistic practices that renew culture and promote healing, as well as from activist approaches that put pressure on existing systems and question their legitimacy. At a critical moment in the film, activist Mysti Babineau (Red Lake Nation) insists, “What you call activism, we call breathing” (23:55), reminding viewers that for Native American women, accepting the status quo is often life-threatening.

Sisters Rising also foregrounds the voices of Indigenous women working to end violence. However, with one exception, the film focuses more on conveying the women’s testimonies of their own and their loved ones’ experiences of sexual and gender-based violence than on their activism or change-work. The opening scene featuring Dawn White (Arikara), a tribal police officer, powerfully confounds viewers’ expectations, as films about MMIW typically do not depict police as agents for change (for good reason, given how policing is implicated in such violence). Lawyer Sarah Deer (Muscogee) conveys how difficult it is to hold non-Indigenous perpetrators accountable when they commit violence on tribal lands, given a loophole in the law. An excerpt from Deer’s book, The Beginning and End of Rape (2015), would pair well with the film in the classroom. The other women featured testify to brutal experiences of violence that are all too common to many Native American women. This theme is affirmed in the film’s closing sharing circle in which participants in a self-defense class are invited to share their own experiences. As Patty Stonefish (Lakota/Sioux) asserts, “There’s something really powerful about sharing your story—it’s all that weight that you don’t have to hold on your own” (48:38).

Because of the traumatic nature of the subject matter, both of these films present challenges for use in the classroom that would benefit from careful consideration of whether/how to include them on any syllabus. If I were teaching these films, I would want to acknowledge with students the strong likelihood that watching them will be experienced in viscerally different ways by Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers. In the majority of classrooms where there are few Indigenous students, or possibly only one, I might hesitate to screen these films at all, given the high likelihood that other students may try to turn the Indigenous students into “native informants” during discussion and expect them to act as spokespeople for all Indigenous cultures and communities. As instructors, we have a responsibility to perceive and interrupt these kinds of dynamics. Ideally, we should structure discussions in a way that allows these tendencies to be identified and addressed as problematic before they occur.

Content warnings could be beneficial, as well, particularly for Sisters Rising, because some of the film’s interviewees recount experiences of rape and childhood sexual and physical abuse in graphic detail. While Indigenous students are likely to be the most affected by the significant experiences of loss, trauma, and violence recounted in the films, it is also highly likely that non-Indigenous students with histories of gender-based or childhood violence may find some of the testimonies in the films overwhelming. Students might then risk collapsing their own experiences with those of the Indigenous women in the films, missing the significance of colonialism and racism that compound the violence and vulnerabilities to violence discussed in the films. Attuned facilitation that is alert to these potential dynamics and responses will be essential for meaningful discussion of the films in classrooms.

Indigenous feminist scholarship on colonial gender-based violence by Audra Simpson (2016), Mishuana Goeman (2013), Sarah Deer (2015), Janice Acoose (1995), Leanne Simpson (2014), and Sarah Hunt (2016, 2023) would help contextualize these films and enrich classroom discussions. While Bring Her Home is recommended for grades 9-12, I believe both these films are better suited to college/university classrooms, particularly courses in women’s and gender studies, Indigenous or Native American studies, critical race studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

1As of the issue’s publication, the film is available to watch through PBS: https://kera.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/bring-her-home-video/bring-her-home/.

Amber Dean is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where she teaches courses in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and critical settler colonial studies. She is the author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and co-editor, with Susanne Luhmann and Jennifer L. Johnson, of Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on University-Community Engagement (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019).