About Thunderheart Films

Our Mission

The official mission of Thunderheart Films is to create and distribute films and videos that are designed to foster healing, tolerance and unity and to reduce prejudice and discrimination. That’s a broad mission, we know, and we decided that our first projects would focus on the buffalo living on the Blackfeet Reservation and the people most directly involved with those animals.

Buffalo are a force of nature: they’re a symbol of recovery and resilience, they bring people together, they break down barriers, they help people heal from trauma, and have the capacity to rejuvenate cultures.

We would like to achieve with our films what the buffalo achieve simply by being. They are our teachers and we hope to learn from them, and give back to them, in our film adventures.

THE ISSUE

For millennia, the Blackfeet’s existence depended almost entirely on the buffalo. The buffalo served as their food, clothing, and lodging, with even the Blackfeet economy dependent on the animal. When the Blackfeet were conquered and nearly wiped out by settlers and the American government, the tribe also lost its connection with the buffalo. As the settlers overturned the Blackfeet and their culture, they simultaneously hunted the very animal that had been the tribe’s lifeblood, slaughtering the buffalo to near-extinction.

One hundred and twenty years later, the Blackfeet and the buffalo are returning from the edge of the abyss. Both clans, human and animal, were the victims of genocide, but ultimately survived and are now in a process of recovery, one that is being embraced beyond the borders of the reservation and one that celebrates and empowers the natural world.

The United States is in the beginnings of a buffalo renaissance. All around the country ranchers are beginning to raise buffalo and there are more than 59 tribes that are returning buffalo to their lands. Buffalo conservation efforts are gaining exponential traction, with the buffalo being named the national mammal of the United States. Despite all of this, there still remains hostility toward and skepticism about the buffalo’s future in the United States.

There are many challenges that buffalo face in our modern landscape. Many cattle ranchers are fearful of the buffalo due to a perceived threat of brucellosis that buffalo can carry and the competition they pose for grazing land. Federal and state governments, established alongside the cattle industry, forbid a free-roaming buffalo, and have imposed dozens of rules and regulations about buffalo transport and sales. The Blackfeet also have challenges with some neighbors who leave fences open, impose large fines on the buffalo whenever they graze on non-tribal lands and create constant headaches for the Buffalo Program workers. These challenges, large and small, are relevant not only for the Blackfeet but for nearly anyone working with buffalo nationwide. Their work revolves around the question: How can we overcome these roadblocks so that we can grow our herd?

Our current projects follow a small band of Blackfeet whose mission is twofold: to return buffalo to Blackfeet land by establishing a thriving buffalo herd on the Reservation, and to release a free roaming herd of buffalo into the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park and the Badger-Two Medicine. The film focuses on the lives of the people who work most intimately with the animals, following their journey as they strive to grow their domestic herd and restore a wild, free-roaming buffalo to the Rocky Mountains and the American West.