Movie Poster for The Sacred & The Snake
Jean Kawahara is a film editor who is working on The Sacred and the Snake, an incredibly important and exciting project that is currently crowdfunding for completion funds. Here’s a summary: “At Standing Rock, a two-spirit Jicarilla Apache/Navajo youth leader, a Lakota matriarch, and a non-binary Appalachian join the resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. They each discover their power within a movement that echoes worldwide–but as each returns home determined to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma and abuse, they realize their battle has just begun.”
Jean: Like many documentaries, this film has been years in the making, with many stops and starts due to lack of funding, so it’s been a struggle. However, I (and the team) feel highlighting Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice is more urgent than ever. Our country’s recent reckoning with how we treat Black people, the poor, the oppressed, how we use their labor and resources reveals a strategy that started with the genocide of Native Americans and stealing their land. The idea that protecting the earth starts with protecting Indigenous people was made crystal clear to me. The acceleration of climate change and this administration’s goal of polluting land, air, and water for profit is obviously destroying the planet and yet the majority of us feel powerless. As a cynical, middle-aged person, I’ve been motivated and energized by seeing the work these Indigenous activists are doing despite the odds and feel whatever I can do is better than nothing.
The Daily Dose: Can you frame the ways the film addresses climate change and/ or the Green New Deal?
There is a direct connection between the genocide of Native Americans and the abuse of land and water. Disregard for human life in the pursuit of profit is illustrated by the 2016 construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which runs partly under the Missouri River and jeopardizes the drinking and irrigation water of millions of people. Our film shows how thousands of people from all over the world converged in Standing Rock to protect the water, linking Indigenous rights with environmental protection.
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