All My Relations is a feature documentary about American Indians leading the way to save some of America’s most iconic wildlife from extinction - animals they consider their relatives. When their efforts are met with obstacles from bureaucracies, business interests and their own neighbors, the film begs the question: if we humans could heal the wounds we've inflicted on the land and on each other, would we do it?
SUMMARY:
In the 19th century the United States relocated its native people to remote reservations - to marginal lands often deemed low-value or unfit for the plow. In an ironic twist, some of these lands are now among America’s most important natural edens - and welcoming homes for some of America’s most threatened, iconic wildlife.
Development has transformed the United States within a couple hundred years. It's once-heralded wilderness areas now only make up 2.5% of the land in the lower 48, and in the West, natural areas are being lost at the rate of a football field every 2.5 minutes. One in five species are at risk of extinction. This film profiles 3 brought to the brink: the wild bison, the Chinook (or King) salmon and the black-footed ferret, the most endangered mammal in North America. Today they stand a chance of survival, having found allies in native people who consider them their relatives. With some tribes still in possession of large, healthy landholdings, a spiritual and lifeways relationship with these animals that goes back millennia, and legal clout in the form of treaty rights, some American Indian tribes are stepping into a unique and increasingly pivotal role as stewards of America’s natural heritage.
This film spotlights the work of fish and game staff, biologists and advocates on the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Reservations in Montana and on the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. There, on what remains of the American frontier, the boundary lands that separate tribal, federal, and private farms and ranches, range wars of a kind are still taking place: over grass, over water, over energy and perhaps more profoundly, over culture and beliefs about humanity's place in the natural world. In the neglected margins of America, where dollars and jobs are few, words like sustainability can sound like luxury and wounds and hostilities have long memories. There a few visionary, committed individuals are betting on conservation as a way to re-connect to ancestral Indian practices and economies, promote health and healing among their own people and safeguard some of America’s natural treasures for future generations. This is a story about their effort.
