[man speaking Cree] [man speaking Cree] [man speaking Cree] [geese honking] [Neil] After travelling the world for 15 years, I'm back home in northern Quebec with my brother, Glenn, on our hunting ground.

[upbeat guitar melody] My family have hunted and fished here for longer than my late grandfather could remember.

In fact, the Cree have been here for over 5,000 years.

My name is Neil Diamond.

I'm a photographer, a writer and a filmmaker and I also happen to be a Cree Indian.

We call ourselves ililiw, which in our language means "human."

[speaking Cree] In my travels across the globe, I found people to be fascinated by Indians.

Everywhere I went, they all had the same images of us found in books, films and popular culture.

You can perhaps imagine their looks of disappointment when they learn I was one.

Clearly, I didn't live up to their expectations.

♪♪♪ They were brave, they died honourably.

[Neil] We might be the most imagined peoples in the world.

Everyone encounters an image of an Indian at one point or another that captures something in their imagination and creates a feeling of love over time.

Am I an Indian yet?

[Neil] We show up all over popular culture, from beloved cartoons to Hollywood blockbusters, to products and sports.

We're everywhere.

[speaking German] [Neil] This fascination extends across the planet.

[speaking Korean] [Neil] And it all relies on stereotypes of Native people.

[man singing other language] We are always tough and fierce warriors or ancient, spiritual and magical peoples.

[singing continues] What always amazes me is how these same images persist year after year until today when we have become the blue people in space.

Why are so many people attached to these fantasies when most of them have never even met a Native person?

There's a deeper story about why the world is fascinated with us... [upbeat music plays] ...and how profoundly we've influenced them.

[man singing other language] I'm going on a journey across North America and to Europe to discover the secrets underneath these fantasies.

Secrets so well kept, they were hidden even from us.

You got your passport?

♪♪♪ [singing continues] [music fades] [street din] ["Stayin' Alive" by Bee Gees playing] ♪ Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk ♪ ♪ I'm a woman's man, no time to talk ♪ ♪ Music loud and women warm ♪ ♪ I've been kicked around since I was born ♪ ♪ And now it's alright, it's okay ♪ ♪ And you may look the other way ♪ ♪ We can try to understand ♪ ♪ The New York Times' effect on man ♪ ♪ Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother ♪ ♪ You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive ♪ ♪ Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' ♪ ♪ And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive ♪ ♪ Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive ♪ ♪ Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive ♪ [music fades] [Neil] But it's beaver?

[saleswoman] Yeah, it's real beaver.

And it was trapped by Native Americans and then sent to Europe.

[Neil] How old is it?

This one is probably a hundred years old.

It could have been trapped by my grandfather.

I come from where the beaver trade started, up in James Bay.

-Holy moley.

-Yeah.

The first trading post was where I was born, place called Waskaganish.

The Hudson's Bay Company started there.

[saleswoman] I get a lot of people whose ancestors worked in the millinery trade, but I've never met somebody whose ancestor trapped beavers.

[Neil] Yeah.

♪ Stayin' alive ♪ ♪♪♪ [street din] [pop music playing] [camera shutter clicks] [Neil] The Met Gala is the most glamorous fashion event in New York City.

It's where the glitterati go to see and to be seen.

One ticket costs almost as much as my house back home.

The theme this year is American fashion.

But what exactly is American fashion?

[country song playing] I think Indigenous fashion has definitely inspired mainstream fashion, like, forever.

♪♪♪ (indistinct) (inaudible) A lot of that has been in stereotypical ways.

We have several tropes that designers and fashion houses tend to come back to-- silver and turquoise jewellery like this squash blossom necklace, the contra belt.

We see fringe, we see beading, we see moccasins.

[Christian] Weaving, leatherwork, furs, bolo ties.

Nice bolo tie, Stan.

[Christian] And definitely a lot of patterns, like the Navajo prints, are very popular.

They call it Americana or Western-influenced wear.

Anything that's Western is actually pretty much Indigenous.

♪♪♪ There are a few American designers who really put American fashion on the map, and it's not that old.

It goes back to the 1970s and then the 1980s when Donna and Calvin and Ralph launched enormous companies that really formed American fashion in the global mind, and the one who is, of course, still working is Ralph Lauren.

♪ Together We will go our way ♪ And his aesthetic is very much about Americana, whether it is country club WASPs and schoolboys in New England, or cowboys and ranches or Indigenous peoples and Native Americans.

♪ We will fly so high Together ♪ There are any number of examples through the years of his line kind of pulling on this.

♪ Together this is what we'll do ♪ ♪ Go west ♪ ♪ Sun in wintertime ♪ ♪ Go west ♪ ♪ We will do just fine ♪ ♪ Go west ♪ ♪ Where the skies are blue ♪ ♪ Go west ♪ [Neil] It turns out our influence in fashion is everywhere.

But if I ever showed up on the res in this outfit, I'd get beaten up... by my grandmother.

♪♪♪ I didn't even get close to the red carpet.

It appears that beaver hats-- after hundreds of years-- are no longer in fashion.

Maybe if I'd come in a loin cloth and a headdress.

The Met Gala does an entire show that's based on America, and Indigenous designers are not present on the entryways.

We are continually left out of the conversation.

[violin instrumental] [inquisitive melody playing] Designers adore raiding other people's closets, and that means the closets of the entire world, taking textiles and silhouettes and details and putting them all together.

Jean Paul Gaultier is one of the bad boys of fashion.

He absolutely, uh, appropriates from everybody.

From Asia to South America to Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

Inspiration in fashion is what keeps designers working.

They need inspiration all the time.

I think as far as inspiration goes, how can you not be inspired by Indigenous cultures?

I mean, our work is so phenomenally beautiful.

The amount of time that goes into it, the materials that are used in it, it's gorgeous.

♪♪♪ [Korina speaking Twulshootseed] [dog barks] -Hello.

-[Korina] Hey, how are you?

-What's your dog's name?

-Suzanne.

[Korina] I came to the conclusion around eighth grade that I wanted to be a fashion designer.

-What you doing?

-Working on some hats right now.

I would steal my sister's Marie Claire magazines and tear out all the pages of the couture like Versace, Tom Ford, Gucci, all these amazing designers in the '90s and just plaster my walls.

Isaac Mizrahi was one of the biggest personalities in the fashion industry in the '90s.

I was obsessed with the supermodels at the time, and he was best friends with all of them.

Right there.

In that documentary Unzipped, he did pull a lot of inspiration from the film Nanook of the North.

[rapid, rhythmic breathing] [Isaac] I'm sitting here and I'm watching Nanook of the North.

Oh, it's so amazing, isn't it?

And it's so inspiring.

I can't even believe how beautiful these Eskimos are.

And I love they all have fur pants, and the thing is, all I wanna do is fur pants, but I know, like, if I do them, I'll get stoned off of Seventh Avenue.

The designers would look towards Indigenous cultures, see all these beautiful garments that were really made as almost an extension of our own bodies as a way of protection against the elements, but they saw inspiration in these pieces and, you know, took these ideas and put them on the runway.

-What?

-Look at this.

[Isaac] Oh, my God.

-[woman] Do you believe this?

-[Isaac] No.

-Oh, my God.

-It doesn't look anything-- Oh, my God.

Take it away, take it away.

[sombre music playing] [Korina] So, I think it's really easy to be inspired.

But appropriation, that's a really fine line.

[audience cheering, applauding] Taking a fabric on its own, it's almost never problematic.

The problem comes when people take artifacts that they don't really understand fully and just turn them into simple decoration and the classic, classic example is the Native American Plains feathered headdress.

We have had a series of very high profile people for very high profile brands.

♪♪♪ So, we're talking about Pharrell Williams on the cover of Elle UK.

We're talking about Karlie Kloss walking the runway for Victoria's Secret in feathers, turquoise, silver and not much else.

Jamiroquai.

Gwen Stefani.

Outkast.

Lagerfeld.

Dior.

Jean Paul Gaultier.

It's dramatic.

I mean, you can't refute that.

♪♪♪ None of them understand what the symbolism is behind it.

[ululating] [serene music playing] It's very important to understand that this regalia, the headdress, it's referred to as medicine, it's the power.

It's our source of relationship to the Creator that gave us life.

It should only be worn for ceremonial purpose.

I protect the regalia that I was given the honour to look after.

The headdress is meaningful and powerful and we must respect it.

Indigenous designs have families that they come from, have meaning attached to them.

But designers see anything that is historic or in a museum as what Jessica Metcalf calls "the free bin," where those designs are free for the taking and they're cool and you can use them however you see fit.

KTZ, the design brand, came out with what they were calling a shaman coat.

This coat had been directly taken from a historic book of anthropological photographs of Inuit communities.

Seeing it in the book, recreating it for the runway without any thought to the fact that that was something that had sacred purpose and meaning, and, again, that there were descendants of that man in the photograph.

[Neil] It just so happens that I know people who know people who know who the shaman was.

Maybe they know what those strange symbols on the parka mean.

-We finally meet.

-We finally meet.

-How are you?

-Good to see you.

I was furious.

Like, I was downright really mad.

I don't think they thought we exist.

♪♪♪ I've been told that it came from my great-great-grandfather.

Qingailisaq was his name, and then the parka was handed down to another shaman, his son, named Ava, who was my great grandfather.

And he asked for it.

He wanted this particular parka made for him.

Several women, including his wife, made it, and it was for protection for the shaman.

For one, it's a design of Inuit women from 120 years ago.

And two, it's a shaman parka.

It's a sacred parka.

No one should be copying this at all.

No one should be wearing it.

[Neil] I'm travelling even further north to Igloolik above the Arctic Circle where the parka was made.

[indistinct chatter] ["Wolves Don't Live by the Rules"] [by Elisapie feat.

Joe Grass playing] ♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ [Neil] The film director Zacharias Kunuk lives here.

Zach's films preserve his culture and show the Inuit way of life before Christianity came.

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen tells the story of Aua, the last shaman of Igloolik and the son of the shaman who owned the parka.

♪ Valleys to hills you can hear the cry ♪ Zach knows the story behind the shaman's parka.

♪ They have to fight ♪ But first, we must find something for our supper.

I get dressed for the occasion.

Inuit clothing is not only beautiful, it also serves a purpose.

The Inuit designed the coolest looking eyewear to prevent snow blindness, and their parka designs are still used by the US and Canadian militaries.

I'll throw you down.

Two old men fighting.

[laughing] ♪ Oh, wolves ♪ Don't live by the rules [Neil] Beautiful.

[Zacharias speaking Inuktitut] So, how did you first hear the story?

-Uh.

-Your parents or-- No, when I saw the coat.

-Very pretty.

-Yeah, it's beautiful.

Beautiful coat, but strangely made.

But then you... asking why are these symbols?

What do they mean?

[Zacharias speaking Inuktitut] [Zacharias speaking Inuktitut] Is it still there?

Really close.

There it is, there it is.

[gunshot echoes] -Whoa!

-[Zacharias speaking Inuktitut] Okay, we got it.

-You got it?

-Yeah.

["Ukiuq" by The Jerry Cans playing] [Zacharias] Alright, we got it.

[Zacharias speaking Inuktitut] ♪♪♪ [Zacharias] Now we can go home.

♪ Nalligilaurakku ♪ ♪ Whoa-o-oh-oh-oh whoa-o-oh-oh-oh ♪ ♪ Whoa whoa-oh-oh ♪ ♪ Nalligilaurakku ♪ ♪ Whoa-o-oh-oh-oh ♪ ♪ Whoa-o-oh-oh-oh whoa whoa-oh-oh ♪ ♪♪♪ Oh, wow.

It's turning to be really nice.

-Look at that.

-Mm-hmm.

[Neil] Beautiful.

So what's the story about this parka?

Qingailisaq, the shaman with the strange coat.

This story is a 120-year-old story.

In those days before Europeans came, shamanism was their main religion.

And we knew shamans had spirits, so they were around, they were always around.

Qingailisaq was caribou hunting one day with his bow and arrow.

♪♪♪ And he saw three caribou and one looked different.

So he shot it with his bow and arrow.

♪♪♪ And the antlers came off.

And the hide came off.

And it turned into this woman.

A dying woman giving birth to a child.

♪♪♪ And the other caribou turned themselves into spirits and they came to him and told him nobody should know about this.

You have to cover it with a moss so nobody will ever find it.

And they also told him if you want to have a long life, you have to wear this woman's coat.

He saw the design and had his wife made it.

And maybe if he didn't have this coat made, he would have died.

The image of the two hands, when you get too close to spirit, they put their hand out so you won't get too close to them.

On the square, little human figures, that's the symbol of the fetus.

That was the caribou he killed.

And it's a very special coat.

♪♪♪ Christianity came around 1921.

And they told you you're a bad person, you're gonna go to hell and you're gonna burn forever and they told them not to sing traditional songs, they told them not to tell stories and drum dancing was bad, too.

So, we tried to show them.

[speaking Inuktitut] And we tried to show the shaman letting go of his spirits.

[speaking Inuktitut] [people moaning, crying] It was really sad... [sniffles] ...and I thought we tried to show the end of the shaman in our culture.

[melancholy melody building] Christianity did a really good job.

Almost wiped it off.

I just want to record, record, record because one day I will kick the bucket, and hope somebody learns from these films.

[singing in other language] I think that when we get into the conversations of cultural appropriation, especially with North American Indigenous people, the thing that's so important to talk about is not just taking an idea that's not yours.

It's the fact that we were forced to assimilate.

[soft melodic vocalizations] Our traditional designs were stripped away from us, outlawed, trashed, burned.

There's so much trauma behind that.

♪♪♪ That's why cultural appropriation is so detrimental because it is giving us the message that we stole this from you, you can't have it anymore, but we're gonna take it and profit off of it.

♪♪♪ [Adrienne] Ralph Lauren has released a winter line that had with it this kind of look book.

Each page, it would show the products and then the opposite page would show these historic photographs of Native people from the 1800s during the assimilation time period where we were being removed from our land, forced to wear Western clothing, photographs from a very painful time of history.

Using Native people that all have names, that all have descendants, that all have living communities connected to them today.

[Indigenous singing] Yes, you can take inspiration, but I think oftentimes the only right way to do it is to collaborate.

It's happening a lot more now.

[Korina] Gabriela Hearst collaborated with Naiomi Glasses, a Navajo Weaver, and that was really celebrated.

I think that's where it is okay to use Indigenous inspiration if you are working with Indigenous people.

[Neil] Ralph Lauren announced that from now on, he will only use Native designs when he collaborates with Indigenous artists.

I feel great about getting to shop at Ralph's.

I bought myself a beautiful pair of $10 socks in red.

When you see the real deal, I mean, there's a difference, and you can see it.

["Fall Away" by Sugluk playing] ♪ I think I'll write a song ♪ Move to your left a bit.

♪ A different song for you ♪ ♪ Reminds of love we had ♪ ♪ And never found again ♪ ♪ When we were alone ♪ Put your face down.

Hold it like that.

♪ You took your hand away ♪ Spin around.

♪ To hide the truth behind ♪ ♪ I wanted to settle down ♪ ♪ And fall away ♪ ♪ I fall away ♪ ♪ And never found my girl ♪ ♪ And now I fall away ♪ [audience cheers] Indigenous fashion is a movement.

[enchanting melody] We are able to create the image of ourselves and make sure that the stories that we're sharing are told through our lens and they're not getting distorted along the way.

There's a whole renaissance which is so exciting to see.

♪♪♪ Because Indigenous people were so often stuck in a historical context, so to bridge that gap between modern design but also having traditional elements was something that was really important to me.

[Jamie] I've always known that our work is luxury.

Nobody needed to tell me or tell me it wasn't.

I knew it.

And so other people are now seeing it as that, but, yeah, any Native person has always known that.

♪♪♪ [Sage] There was a time when we were not allowed to wear what we wanted to, and we're allowed to do that now.

And you see it being shown in so many different ways.

And that's what excites me about it.

[insects chirping] [blows] [howls] [soft electronic music plays] [girl] When we were younger, our grandma would always have us run just to respect tradition.

In the morning, we would have to wake up before the sun came up.

We'd yell, let our ancestors know that we're awake and that we're still here, and every run we would have to beat the sun.

♪♪♪ [Shaun] The difference in Navajo runners is it's ingrained into our livelihood.

Running is a part of our culture.

It is a part of our traditions.

It is who we are.

The act of running is a teacher.

It will show us how to overcome obstacles.

[soft, rhythmic electronic music] There were no horses, no other means of locomotion for people on this continent.

And running was a way of being connected to those around you and the landscape around you, the resources around you.

People lived through movement.

Every day you had to move, and if you didn't wake up, and you didn't move, then you didn't survive.

With that truth, it only becomes obvious that moving quickly would be sacred.

Those that could run and run quickly were respected, and their talent was certainly an asset to the community.

So, the community helped take care of them as runners.

Running was always a means for the strongest people to show that strength.

North Americans have been fascinated with Indian bodies for a really long time, with their physicality, with their strength.

They are incredible sort of human specimens, and you can see this in Hollywood films.

♪♪♪ This whole idea about Indians as having unique, athletic and performative kinds of gifts, right?

They're stoic, they don't get rattled when something goes wrong.

"Oh, if we could only be like them."

My, aren't they handsome?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -Go Chiefs!

Chiefs!

-Chiefs!

[Neil] I'm in Kansas City, Missouri.

Their NFL team, the Chiefs, are playing in the 57th Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event of the year.

-Go Chiefs!

-[whoops] [Neil] To get into the spirit of things and to fit in, I go shopping.

[cheering] Football is one of the most popular sports in the US.

It almost defines what it means to be an American.

Chiefs!

Chiefs, baby!

Chiefs!

[Neil] But from my point of view, many sports teams use strange rituals and images.

[news anchor] The Chiefs organization announced it would not allow fans to wear face paint that references American Indian culture inside the stadium.

Native American headdresses will also be prohibited.

[reporter] The Chiefs organization is still discussing the future of the so-called tomahawk chop.

With the Chiefs in the playoffs, the controversy is back in the spotlight, some calling the action offensive, derogatory and disrespectful.

Some Native Americans are asking fans to stop the chop.

[all singing tomahawk chop] The chop is a thing that I think even if you try to tell people to stop, are they gonna do it?

How about those Chiefs?

[Neil] The Kansas City Chiefs and their fans are not alone in their obsession.

By some estimates, there are tens of thousands of teams, amateur and professional, that use our names and our imagery.

How did this begin?

It turns out it has something to do with one man, Jim Thorpe, who, with a band of scrappy Indians, would have a huge impact on the game of football.

[upbeat guitar music plays] Oklahoma, which in Indian means "more casinos than Nevada."

More than 50 tribes from across America were forcibly moved here by the US government in the mid-1800s.

Jim Thorpe was a phenomenal athlete that, once upon a time, represented the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma.

[June] Living on the reservation, you'd just run, you know?

Didn't have cars or vehicles, so they just ran everywhere.

Jim Thorpe, quite simply, was one of the greatest athletes to ever live.

He could run a 4:35 mile and a ten-second 100 meter.

So, to have that type of range is truly amazing.

The Associated Press voted him the greatest athlete of the 20th century.

What he did in the Olympics, Sweden... he won the pentathlon and the decathlon.

That's never been matched by anybody.

And they stole his shoes.

He had gone into the trash bin and put together an odd pair of shoes to go and win all those titles.

[uplifting piano melody plays] [Philip] In the 1912 Olympics, the king of Sweden endorses Jim Thorpe.

[Gustav V] Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.

[Jim] Thank you, your majesty.

So, a really important figure in Native American history and American history.

[Juaquin] In Jim Thorpe's young life, he experienced what grief was all about.

His twin brother, Charlie, passed away and shortly after that then his parents passed away, and he ended up transferring out to Carlisle boarding school.

The Carlisle Indian School is the project of Richard Henry Pratt.

Pratt, who was a military officer, who was in charge of Native American prisoners of war.

[Sally] And he wanted citizenship for American Indians, but his route of getting there was forcible assimilation.

[Neil] Carlisle served as the model for many schools that the US and Canada would open.

Where they tried to assimilate hundreds of thousands of Native children.

I was only five when I was taken away from my family and community along with most of my brothers and sisters.

The "kill the Indian and save the man" initiative was started in our boarding schools where they stripped every Native kid from their homelands, from their families, and forced them to go to these boarding schools where they were stripped of their culture.

[Richard] On the one hand, we have the Navajo as we find him in his desert home.

Here, we have a group of Navajo children through the agencies of the government.

They are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

[ominous music building] My father was stripped from his homestead when he was about eight or nine years old and taken to Leupp Boarding School.

I can still remember going on road trips, sitting behind my father, and looking between the seat and the headrest and counting little round scars on the back of my father's neck.

And he said, "That's from boarding school when we were shocked with a hot shot."

A hot shot is an electrified cattle prod that is made to make cattle move, not little boys.

♪ [lyrics in other language] ♪ They didn't let him run in the morning like he was taught.

They couldn't speak Navajo, and it was the only language he knew.

They weren't allowed to sing, they weren't allowed to do anything culturally related.

♪ [lyrics in other language] ♪ He hated school and so one night he, um, gathered some food in his pillowcase and he ran down into the Little Colorado River wash and he just kept running.

He was home for two days that first time, and the army jeeps came back, picked him up, and took him right back.

Jim Thorpe, as a young boy, you know, only one could think how difficult it really was for someone that young to be shipped off to boarding school, to have no family around.

♪ One little, two little, three little Indians ♪ ♪ Four little, five little, six little Indians ♪ [Shaun] Many of these kids lost their lives running from boarding schools.

♪ Ten little nine little eight little Indians ♪ ♪ Seven little six little five little Indians ♪ ♪ Four little three little... ♪ ♪ [indistinct lyrics] ♪ Hey!

Charge!

[Jim] I was coaching at Carlisle in those days, teaching the Indians what I knew about the white man's games.

The story of the Carlisle football team is really a story of subversion.

It's a story about a group of Indian kids who take up football almost as a way of rebelling against the forces of the school.

I'm a writer for the Washington Post and the author of The Real All Americans about the Carlisle Indian School's exploits on the football field.

Early American football at the turn of the century is the sport of Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

Football is being formed around the Ivy League.

The Ivy League was where it was at.

[Sally] Americans didn't have much entertainment back then.

Football was a mass entertainment.

Very, very large crowds came out to see these teams and wanted to read about them in the newspapers.

It was front page news.

Church was actually moved up on the Sundays of big rivalry games.

It's the birth of great stadium sport in those years.

Football came out of rugby, and it was a game of trying to shove other people out of the way.

It's a way of sort of re-establishing a certain type of American manhood.

♪♪♪ Football at Carlisle really was driven by the students.

Initially, Richard Henry Pratt, the headmaster, opposed football.

It was a very violent sport, it was a very crude sport notorious for injuries.

He knew the stereotypes that his students were facing.

The general public's impression of an Indian, as portrayed in the East Coast newspapers, was of a bloodthirsty savage who lacked fundamental brain power.

And so Pratt really opposed it.

Well, the students got together, and they pitched it to Pratt as something that would help him assimilate them, but it was a great trick because the Indian boys really wanted to play the game for their own ends.

They wanted to compete.

So, finally, Richard Henry Pratt relented.

He would agree to them to play as long as they didn't engage in fighting.

The problem was, the other teams they played did engage in fighting and biting and punching, but the Indian students were not allowed to return that.

♪♪♪ ♪ Give a rouse then in the Maytime ♪ [Neil] The Ivy Leagues.

They were the elite schools then and remain so to this day.

♪ Turn the nighttime into daytime ♪ My father is a senator, my father is the head of a business.

We have all this money, we have these schools, we have all of this equipment.

♪ For it's always fair weather ♪ ♪ When good fellows get together ♪ [Sally] An Ivy League football team dined every single day on chops.

They were big, beefy, brawny, heavily muscled players because the game was so physical.

♪ Ringing clear ♪ The Carlisle Indian School did not have that kind of food.

We're talking boys who were fed a diet of salted pork and slimy oatmeal, rotten vegetables, real slop.

Dickensian Victorian boarding school conditions.

Please, sir, I want some more.

More?

[Neil] I remember watching Oliver!

at boarding school.

We could sympathize.

We must have had the same chef.

And so they were malnourished most of them as a result.

They were underweight, in some instances pretty sickly, homesick.

Overworked because the boarding system at Carlisle insisted that you be farmed out to local farmers and do pretty heavy manual labour.

Jim Thorpe, his school record, it just says "bolter."

He was sent to Carlisle unwillingly, he ran away constantly, always wanted to go home.

They were underdogs in just every sense of the word.

They couldn't possibly physically overpower the Ivy League universities.

And they start playing games and one of their first big contests is against Yale in New York City.

♪ Well, here we are, well, here we are ♪ Audiences came from all across the city to see the spectacle of quote "Indians playing Yalies in football."

♪ Fight, fight for Yale ♪ [men grunting] And they were terribly cheap-shotted by their opponents.

They would come off the field with blood running down their foreheads or their shins.

And Pratt absolutely forbade them to retaliate.

They had to fight back in other ways.

And one of the ways that they fought back was by embarrassing their opponents with trick plays.

[guitar music plays] [movie narrator] So he found himself at Carlisle.

[Albert] And I was the captain of the Carlisle team.

When Jim Thorpe showed up, he was a very smallish lad, he weighed only about 115 pounds and didn't look like much like an athlete.

Matter of fact, he wasn't, he's too small.

He was just hanging around, they gave him the ball, he ran through the whole field, couldn't be tackled.

[Sally] He had speed, he had agility, he would say, "Pop, why would I run through them when I can run around them?"

For people in the US who played Pop Warner football, Pop Warner was the coach, and he was kind of a creative and interesting coach.

[inquisitive music plays] [Sally] Pop Warner was a bit of an outsider himself.

His family had been ranchers in Texas.

He wasn't an elite.

He loved to embarrass the Ivy Leagues, and so one of the tricks that he tried was he sewed football decals onto the front of the sweaters, and he had one of his fastest running backs hide the football under his sweater and so the opposing team, Harvard, as it happened, they didn't know where the football was, and so the kid carrying the ball skirts around the end and runs for a touchdown and the whole stadium is laughing at Harvard.

Carlisle was the first team to play hide the football.

[crowd cheering] The Carlisle formation, it was called the single wing, and you didn't know who was going to carry the ball or what he was going to do with it.

Screens, pitches, rollouts, flea flickers.

[announcer] And Bledsoe with a handoff to Jones, but back to Bledsoe on a flea flicker deep down the middle for Terry Glenn!

25!

15!

Touchdown!

Flea flicker!

[Sally] All of these things come from Glenn Pop Warner's experiments with the Carlisle Indian School.

♪♪♪ So, Indian folks are at the heart of the game, right?

In terms of innovation.

[Sally] It became a game of wits.

Carlisle really is the school that transfers football from being a game of pure, brute power into a game of intellectual power.

Whatever intellect is inserted into American football today, strategy really has its origin at the Carlisle School.

They take this game and they bend it to their own purposes.

And they "Indianize" American football.

[drum music plays] One of the things that had happened in the intervening years was some deaths on the football field.

♪♪♪ And so they passed some rules that authorized the forward pass.

I think the rules makers thought, "Well, let's spread the game out a little bit, and then maybe there won't be so many people getting crushed under very large piles of men."

But you were heavily penalized for trying a forward pass.

If it was incomplete, you got set way back.

There were a lot of reasons not to really throw the football.

Even though it was legal.

Carlisle takes a small little loophole and blows it wide open.

[man] [Sally] Carlisle starts throwing the ball 20, 30, 40 yards downfield.

Put yourself in the seat of the audience, and the ball is spiralling through the air, and there's a pair of outstretched hands.

Will he catch it?

Will he drop it?

There's a suspense in that moment that is so captivating for the audience when Carlisle throws that first pass.

[man] ♪ [indistinct lyrics] ♪ [Sally] For years and years and years, historians tried to say that Notre Dame invented the forward pass.

Well, Notre Dame didn't throw their first forward passes for almost a decade later.

And Carlisle, in 1907, throws the ball on the level of a modern day football team.

-[announcer] Look at the throw!

-[announcer] What a throw!

[announcer] Going deep!

[announcer] Going deep, has a man open again!

[Sally] Anything recognizable in modern football today comes from that moment with that first spiral flying through the air.

[announcer] Odell Beckham Jr. made the catch with one hand for the touchdown!

[audience cheers] [upbeat music plays] [Sally] Thorpe brought the apex of fame to Carlisle football.

Jim Thorpe became such a star, he was such a great player.

We're talking every newspaper in the country was suddenly focused on this Indian school in Pennsylvania.

[Philip] What observers seem to see in Native folks is the classic combination of athletic-- power and strength, speed, and coordination and grace And I could throw endurance into the mix, you know, as well.

Like, people talked about how beautiful it was to watch Jim Thorpe, you know, actually move.

[Sally] He was modern day fast.

The sportswriter for The New York Times said he moved like a breeze.

That 1911 Carlisle team go undefeated for, I think it's nine games.

And they beat Harvard in front of 25,000 people at Harvard.

[crowd cheering] And the score was 18 to 15 in favour of Carlisle.

[Sally] And Harvard is beside itself.

They were not accustomed to losing, much less losing to a team of American Indians.

It's still in the history books today as one of the great upsets in college football history.

[crowd chanting] Carlisle!

Carlisle!

Rah, rah, rah!

Jim Thorpe, he went on to this really interesting kind of career.

He was the first commissioner of the National Football League.

[Sally] He's one of the origin characters of professional football.

Now, remember boys, the art of drop kicking is to always keep your eye on the ball and never look up until the ball is in flight.

[Sally] And, look, I mean, the thing that is too bad is, like, I don't think most Americans know when they're watching the forward pass and when they watch the NFL, they watch Carlisle football every day, and they don't know it.

They don't even know it.

They're watching, you know, essentially offences that were born at the Carlisle football school.

[announcer] Whoa, he got out of it!

Now he fires downfield.

And it is caught!

Caught!

You know, American sports teams in the early 20th century started naming their teams after Braves, Indians, Redskins.

And where it really takes off is in colleges and high schools and junior highs, those kinds of things.

And that makes it permeate throughout the culture.

-[announcer] First down... -[cheering] [Neil] Here we are more than a century later and they still love using our names and images.

[cheering] Under pressure, some sports teams have started to change, but many are still reluctant to let us go.

[crowd singing tomahawk chop] [cheering] What perhaps began as an honouring, over the years turned us into caricatures.

[woman] Feels like an old friend to me.

[woman] I think he's beautiful.

[gunshot] [whoops] Yeah!

[announcer] Noc-A-Homa, he's praying for a win.

[Stephanie] Representations and logos have all kinds of adverse effects.

For many Indigenous children, it's the only space in which they see their group represented, and they're inaccurate representations.

When I was growing up and still, like, in my hometown, you know, there's kids with Atlanta Braves hats on because there's an image of an Indian there.

T-shirts and hats and stuff people wear because there's nothing to reflect who we are.

That imagery continues to dehumanize, to locate us in the past, to, you know, not show us for who we are.

We're rarely represented in contemporary contexts, so many Americans think that Native people are historical figures, that we no longer exist.

Europeans coming here, they needed to dehumanize us to commit genocide.

Yes, sir, I'd sure love to kill me an Indian.

Because if you dehumanize the people that you're enslaving and killing, you don't feel as guilty.

When you take away people's humanity, you can do a lot of things you wouldn't necessarily usually do to human beings.

[gunshots] ♪♪♪ [gunshots] This erasure and dehumanization is very much about protecting what it means to be American.

And so you don't have to feel bad about the past, if we don't exist anymore.

♪♪♪ And so there's this cycle that's going on that is extremely harmful to contemporary Indigenous people.

We are still here.

Not only are we here, but we're one of the fastest growing groups in America.

And until America sees us for who we really are, it will not change.

Jim Thorpe, he went to the Olympics, won the decathlon, he had his medals stripped afterwards, because he had played baseball for money.

[Sally] It's really a shameful, racist episode.

Every Ivy League kid who was a good athlete picked up cash in the summers playing semi-pro baseball, but they weren't stripped of medals or publicly disgraced.

Thorpe was, simply because he was an Indian.

I think that he wanted to be treated as an athlete, but every headline called him "Chief" or "The Indian" and it's that same dehumanization that they were levelling against all of us, they were really giving it to him, because he was one of the first ones to do something different, I think, and shine at that.

The world wanted to hold him down.

He was perhaps threatening to the white male understanding of what power was.

They took that from him.

♪♪♪ The issue of Native mascots and sports team names has shifted a lot over the last couple of years.

When the cops killed that poor guy, George Floyd, it's like the country is moving down the track that certain things have got to change, and it starts with people of colour.

In comes the Redskin name.

And so you have the pressure from the NFL itself saying that, you know, certain things we just got to move on from.

I also really want to give credit where credit's due.

There are Native activists who have been fighting this battle for a long time.

[Ray] We stood on their shoulders, but were able to succeed.

And look at what we accomplished.

And we were a small, ragtag group of people who just took on the NFL and succeeded.

[Indigenous vocalizations] [Sally] The fact that it would take until 2022 to restore those medals, it was an enduring shame.

And finally, the record book has been corrected and the medals, you know, restored.

They did return them and that was-- I think it touched all of our hearts.

We were all happy that, you know, they got them back and that they did finally recognize him.

Hero to our people.

Made us all proud.

He put us on the map.

He represented the country before Native Americans were even citizens of the United States.

And he is still a role model to a lot of our young children that play sports.

Not only just a great athlete, but he did a lot for Native people.

I got to meet him and I got to shake his hand.

Jim Thorpe.

And I think he died that same year, in 1953.

But it was my pleasure and honour to shake his hand.

He reflects, I think, the epitome of our people.

We're a very strong people.

Very, very, exceptionally strong people.

♪♪♪ [Shaun] Part of the route of my own running is to use running to defeat the modern day monsters.

Defeat alcoholism for our people, the diabetes epidemic, and these other social ills that we have here.

Running as a catalyst to promote connection to culture, to heritage, to the earth.

Having that connection is an advantage, because there's a greater reason to run and then the energies that one can feel while they're running is definitely an advantage.

The most evident example of that is our local runners.

In nine years of teaching and coaching, we've won 14 state titles.

We have 49 runners go to college on scholarships and they're changing not just their lives, but the lives of their entire families because they're first generation college graduates and they're coming back to do good things.

So, the positive things are coming by going back to the old teachings of running.

[speaking other language] ♪ I'm a rebel soul ♪ ♪ I'm a rebel soul ♪ ♪ I'm a rebel soul ♪ ♪ I'm a rebel soul ♪ [eagle screeches] ♪ This land is mine ♪ ♪ God gave this land to me ♪ This idea that Native peoples are either kind of noble savages... or kind of barbaric subhumans... We're always kind of struggling to escape this visual imprisonment.

♪♪♪ [indistinct mumbling] ♪ When did he first say, "Ugh!"

♪ With the Americans, fundamental to their being is this idea that the original inhabitants of this continent were pre-technological primitives, very simplistic in mind.

[cartoon narrator] The only word he knows is... Unk!

And the idea that these populations were simply incapable of the kind of advanced, rational thought that Europeans credited themselves with.

[playing "Greensleeves"] I mean, it's unfortunate that Columbus is viewed as discovering America, when, in fact, in many ways, the European origin people came here and discovered democracy.

It's the biggest example I can think of of an undeveloped, or less developed culture being valued over a more developed one.

♪♪♪ [passengers talking indistinctly] [Neil] Western Europe's biggest claim to fame is the Enlightenment.

They say they invented the concepts of democracy, equality and freedom.

They claimed that they got these ideas from the Greeks and the Romans and spread them everywhere, civilizing the rest of us.

But what if that is not the whole story?

[singing in other language] I'm travelling through upstate New York into the land of the mighty Iroquois.

♪♪♪ Five nations, eventually six, whose territory stretched across hundreds of thousands of acres.

They call themselves the Haudenosaunee.

So, this is the longhouse, and Haudenosaunee means "the people of the longhouse."

So, in the way that they're constructed has a whole worldview, and this is where our families would sleep and live.

I could live in a house like this.

Yeah, I could, too.

[chuckling] The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is the oldest continuous democracy in the world.

We have existed as a confederacy of nations working in peace together for over 1,000 years.

And where else on the planet can you find that?

We were at war with each other.

And the great law of peace, this message that was brought by a peacemaker, helped to bring us together.

And in that process, our democracy was formed.

The Gayanashagowa, the great law of peace.

And that is all the instructions that came directly from the Creator, through the peacemaker, to us.

Peace, power, good mind.

All three things are necessary for us to have successful governing.

You do what's best for the people as a collective so that collective energy and that collective benefit to all is at the root of all the decision making.

It's the world's oldest form of United Nations and we proved it could work.

[Indigenous chanting and drumming] [vocalizing] So they are shaping it into, like, a female figure.

-Yeah.

A human woman.

-Okay.

What's really important for you as young men is that you need to have respect for the life-giving force.

This area where we're from is what was underneath the glaciers during the Ice Age.

And so what was left behind in the sediment has created such a wealth of soil conditions.

Anything can grow here.

This one is our Six Nations blue corn.

Our three sisters are the corn, the beans and the squash.

In our Creation story, when Sky Woman fell, the seeds were in her hand when she came down here to Turtle Island.

[vocalizing] Where do the tobacco seeds go?

The tobacco seeds in her mind, the strawberry is her heart, the corn is in her breasts.

And women, carrying that life-giving force, that's why women were responsible for the planting, because that life force empowers more life force, and that's a beautiful circle in the planting cycle.

[Indigenous vocalizing] Do you recognize how powerful that is to create another human being?

Ain't nobody else that has that kind of power but women.

And so, in the Haudenosaunee world, it was the mothers who had control of the economy.

It was them who planted the cornfields, colossal cornfields.

And it was them who harvested and it was them who distributed the wealth of the country and nobody went hungry.

♪♪♪ The clan mother, she oversees all spiritual, political matters for her clan and she selects the chief.

[singing in other language] [Louise] A man cannot become a leader, until a woman puts him there.

And she has the full right of recall.

And in addition to that, warriors can't go to war unless women call for war.

Or they can also call for peace.

Women are the law.

[singing in other language] There is no giving away of lands, unless the women or the mothers of that nation agree to it.

It's a matrilocal, matrifocal society.

And it's so old.

It's older than the United States.

[Doug] We lived in a democratic, gender-balanced society.

People lived in the state of true liberty and freedom.

[singing in other language] [classical music playing] [Neil] Ah, old Europe.

So sophisticated, and so civilized.

But as many films show, life wasn't that great if you weren't an aristocrat.

Bring out your dead!

-Here's one.

-Nine pence.

-I'm not dead!

-What?

Nothing.

Here's your nine pence.

I'm not dead!

[classical music continues] When we talk about Europe in the 18th century, we're talking about societies that were still burning witches at the stake.

Societies that took the form of divine monarchies, where the king or the queen actually claimed sacred powers.

[woman moans] It's good to be the king.

So, these are societies that are really deeply wedded to monarchy, hierarchy... Help, help!

I'm being repressed!

Bloody peasant!

...and the church.

To eternal fire and everlasting pain.

They're incredibly violent.

What do they do to their citizens, right?

They draw and quarter them, they hang them up on gibbets.

They do all of these incredibly brutal punishments to their own citizens.

Off with his head!

[Doug] In 1710, we sent our Mohawk delegation to visit Queen Anne in England.

Long before you got to London, literally kilometres and kilometres away, you smelt London because of the open sewage.

The reason they didn't bathe was because the water would make them sick and ill. You saw a city that was way overcrowded, surrounded by walls.

Starvation was common.

Rats!

Nice, dead rats for sale.

So, the illusion-- or delusion-- that somehow we were in awe of the Europeans was insane.

There was no way in the world that we would see them as godlike.

[romantic accordion melody plays] [Neil] Paris.

Where the Enlightenment was born.

It's supposed to be the birthplace of many of the values we hold dear today.

Ideas about human freedom, equality, rationality and science as a route to progress.

It's Enlightenment in the sense of a kind of waking up, seeing the light.

The idea that we should not be governed by kings and priests and that people should be free.

We're talking about a momentous period in European history, which culminates in the American and French Revolutions, which, in many ways, define the modern world.

I mean, the stakes could not be higher.

♪♪♪ The dominant story is that this is very much something which germinates in Europe on European soil through discussions and writings that are passing between European scholars.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, for example.

But there are some basic questions about the whole thing, which, perhaps, aren't asked that often.

For example, why is it that in France, one of the most hierarchical societies on the planet, why would it be uncontroversial to suggest that there is an alternative form of society based on freedom?

And if you trace the roots of that idea just a little bit further back than Rousseau, what you find is European authors engaged in debates about what's going on in societies far away over the sea in the Americas, and particularly in the Iroquoian-speaking communities.

[classical music building] These are our fathers, they are soldiers of heaven.

They left their friends and their country to show you the way to paradise.

The Jesuits are a new religious order in the 16th century.

These are people who are fired up with a kind of revitalized Catholicism.

I mean, their intent really was to, you know, was soul capture.

They wanted to create Christians out of the Native people.

The savages live in utter darkness.

We must convert them.

[Allan] And they come here and they are a little startled to realize at first that the French have not conquered and therefore they cannot forcibly indoctrinate Indigenous people.

The Indigenous people won't stand for it.

♪♪♪ What they weren't prepared for was the quality of the counterarguments that they often encountered.

A classic sort of comeback on the New Testament would be something along the lines of, "Well, if it's true that there's only one God, how come we've never heard of him?"

You know, "Why did it take you guys to come all the way from over there to tell us about this?"

And they comment on the fact that the people they're encountering and talking to, by and large, are just generally more intelligent than what they're used to deal with back in Europe.

We're not colonizing the Indians, they're colonizing us.

For the Indigenous observers of European colonists, they're just sort of puzzled and amused at how Europeans will just defer to each other on the basis of rank.

"I'm going to do what you told me, just because you're up there and I'm down here."

The Jesuits were often impressed and slightly alarmed at the fact that chiefs didn't have those kind of coercive powers.

As one Jesuit puts it, "The chief's power is in his tongue."

And they clearly recognize these very sophisticated cultures of debate and persuasion, which, today, I think, we would very legitimately regard as forms of democracy.

Homelessness really struck Native observers of French colonial towns.

They're always berating the Jesuits over this.

How can you allow your own people to fall into this state?

The Jesuits spent lots of time with the Wyandot, and later in the 17th century, they had missions among the Haudenosaunee as well.

Those Jesuits were writing what they observed back to France.

70-something volumes of missionary relations.

And it was incredible, the things that they were recording and writing.

They saw how powerful the Haudenosaunee people were and they were surprised at our civility and the way that we maintained our societies and that power of the female.

So, this stuff was hugely popular and influential and would have generally formed part of the intellectual environment of any literate person at that time.

Here are these other people looking at Europeans and saying, "You guys are slaves.

You're slaves to each other, you're slaves to money, you're slaves to property."

Imagine the impact of that.

When you had people like Voltaire looking for an instance in which these freedoms were developed, they didn't find it in Europe.

The only place they could find it was amongst Indigenous peoples of America and they were profoundly influenced.

In many ways, it's strange that we ever thought otherwise, because when you read the works of the great Enlightenment thinkers, that's what they say.

They're saying we got these ideas about freedom and equality from over there, from the Americas.

♪♪♪ I'm John Wayne.

There is a phrase which recurs in our national documents which points to the source of our belief in individual freedom.

Our heritage of freedom is our most priceless possession.

The greatest impact on what would become the United States leadership and government and constitution, to me, is individual rights and freedoms that the colonists saw in Haudenosaunee culture.

And it's shocking to think about how ubiquitous and familiar and engaged settlers were during the revolution with Indigenous people.

♪ Plant the seed in our homeland, boys ♪ ♪ Let it grow where all can see ♪ ♪ Feed it with our devotion, boys ♪ ♪ Call it the Liberty Tree ♪ ♪ It's a tall, old tree ♪ ♪ And a strong, old tree ♪ ♪ And we are the sons, yes, we are the sons ♪ ♪ The sons of liberty ♪ Friends, brethren, countrymen, that worst of plagues, that detested tea, has now arrived in Boston Harbor.

You are called upon to meet me in Old South Meeting House where we will discuss the fate of that pernicious weed.

-Huzzah!

-[bell rings] [Neil] In 1773, American colonists were angry that they were being taxed without any representation in the English parliament.

The Boston Tea Party was the first major act of defiance against British rule, that ignited the American Revolution.

Shall we destroy this dastardly tea?

-Say aye!

-[crowd] Aye!

[man] We should do our utmost to conceal our identities this night.

Let's also carry with us a symbol known to all throughout the colonies.

Our unique symbol for North America.

Fearsome, independent.

The Mohawk.

Carry these symbols close to your heart and rally now, patriots.

-Huzzah!

-[crowd] Huzzah!

Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight!

[indistinct clamouring] There's a whole set of ideas about Indians that are really important for these colonists to be able to sort of seize and internalize and make their own.

And they want to differentiate themselves from the British.

"We're authentic and aboriginal and we're not like you, we're different from you."

That's a fundamental turning point that's really important, I think, for colonists as they stop being colonists and they start to become that thing we can call Americans.

Those Indians seem to prefer principle to profit.

♪♪♪ [Philip] Moving forward, they come together in these little secret societies of fraternal orders and decided that Indians ought to be their theme.

And so Native people become absolutely essential to the way that they see themselves.

And so when they were looking for an example of people living in a state of freedom without having to answer to an all-powerful king, they found it with us.

We were the freest people on the earth.

They wanted to be free.

[Neil] We used to trade furs for tea with the British.

But I doubt my grandparents would ever have wasted it like that.

[reporter] There's going to be a great day.

With that prayer in their hearts, a band of determined men gathered in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1776, to sign the Declaration of Independence.

The first book that I wrote was, uh, The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation.

I'm a Yamasee Indian Bird Clan.

As a young man, I was teaching at Buffalo State and I was one of the first Native people to get a PhD.

So, after about a year of teaching, three older Haudenosaunee Seneca women showed up at my door, and they said, "In our oral tradition, we have it that we talked to The Founding Fathers, and they took some of our advice about how to form government and so on.

And we want you to prove it the white man's way."

Which meant footnotes and, you know-- [laughs] So I told them, I said, "This is the first I've heard of that, and if there is some evidence, then I will do it."

What I found was that Jefferson's writings, Franklin's writings, James Madison, James Monroe, all talk about the Haudenosaunee people.

[Doug] Thomas Jefferson, he was fascinated by Native people, but especially by the Iroquois, and the intelligence that we demonstrated whenever we had formal meetings with him.

And he knew that those words had to come from people who were other than what most Americans believed.

And he was determined to try to find out who we were, what was the nature of our thinking.

[Gloria] Certainly, by the time of Benjamin Franklin, there was a recognition that our ideas and hopes for democracy were not born in Europe.

The example of real working democracy came after they arrived here.

[Michelle] The Founding Fathers, they spent considerable time studying the structure of our governance as a confederacy of six nations.

[Kenneth] And Benjamin Franklin and these guys were saying, "Well, how come we 13 civilized colonies can't get along, but those six savage nations can get along?

You know, why-- why is that?"

[crowd shouting] [Donald] How do you unite Quakers in Pennsylvania with Puritans in Massachusetts and not get into religious conflict?

You ought to take these 13 different states, and find a way to unify them.

That's how we've managed to survive, because we saw the benefit of us coming together as a group.

[Michelle] When a council is held in our longhouse, there's three different sides to how we sit and how our decision making happens.

And we will pass a decision back and forth across the house, right across the fire, and listening to each other, and making a determination.

And that is what the Founding Fathers of America saw and studied, and came to understand.

So, when you think about the US government today, you have three different branches of government.

[Native American vocalization] [Donald] American unity is unprecedented, creating a vast nation by association through states.

The eagle perches on top of the Great Tree of Peace, which is a symbol of the Iroquois confederacy.

The peacemaker, he used this metaphor, if you will, of arrows.

You take one arrow, it's easy to break.

But if you take six of them, they're much stronger.

And so, this was really showing the strength in unity.

If you look on the back of the $1 bill, you see the eagle and one claw has 13 arrows.

And so, that was taken by Franklin and others to create the Great Seal of the United States.

[Native American vocalization] When I started publishing this, and getting it out, I was teaching at UCLA.

And a famous American historian of the colonial era, Gary Nash, and I were colleagues.

I would complain to him, I said, "You know, I'm citing Franklin, I'm footnoting Jefferson, and I'm footnoting Indian treaties and still, people are, you know, treating me like I'm just making it up and all of that."

And he had an interesting comment, he says, "Don, you're questioning that America was invented in the summer of 1787 by what is it, 57 white guys," he said.

[laughs] And he said, "Some people won't like that."

[laughs] Then he just chuckled.

[Doug] For generations of scholarship, this was denied emphatically.

It had to be denied, because we go back to the myth, right?

The myth was we were primitive, barbaric, nomadic, and simplistic and pre-technological.

"Prehistory," they call it.

[patriotic horn melody playing] [announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

[crowd cheering] [Native American vocalization] [Donald] At the 200th anniversary of the US Constitution, I helped formulate the legislation that says that we got some of our ideas about American government and for the Constitution from Native American people.

I am doing what the Haudenosaunee women told me to do, you know?

[chuckles] "Do it the white man's way," you know.

And it's all footnoted and documented and, you know, it's there.

[vocalization continues] [Neil] Thanks to the influence of the Haudenosaunee, democracy has thrived across the world ever since.

Well, sort of.

The members are reminded to abide by decorum of the house.

[overlapping chattering] [cheeky piano melody playing] Shut up a minute!

Order!

♪♪♪ The travesty, really, to me, is that when the United States was formed, and the Constitution was created, it was created for a specific small demographic of these former colonists, which was white, landed men.

Everybody else was not included in that conversation.

And that is totally opposite to what Haudenosaunee people had formed and had lived under for so many centuries, really, by then.

[Kenneth] They refused to accept the fact that the women are equal and the women have a right and have a voice, and they rejected that.

And-- To their detriment, you know?

So, when I say, like, "Don't blame the Constitution on the Haudenosaunee," it's sort of-- You know.

Like, a little bit cheeky, but I'm being serious.

People are still struggling to be just equal with one another.

Like, they haven't even figured that out yet.

Like, not everybody in the United States has equal rights.

[Neil] And why don't we know this history?

The 1,000-year-old Haudenosaunee Confederacy was broken during the American Revolution.

Some fought alongside the Americans, and helped them win independence from Britain.

But all were betrayed by the new American nation.

[Peter] The name we gave to George Washington is Hanadagáyas.

"Hanadagáyas" has been translated to mean "town destroyer," "town eater," and he had this reputation of destroying our towns in order to advance settlers into the western part of the State.

The Clinton-Sullivan campaign was where the US army was ordered by General Washington to head up through the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and every village you come across to destroy the crops, burn the village to the ground, and either annihilate or kidnap the people.

Um, it was, uh, one of the most horrific times for our people.

[sombre instrumental playing] [Neil] Once the Confederacy fell, American Western expansion began in earnest.

The Iroquois influence on American democracy was quickly forgotten... and the massacres against Native people continued for the next 120 years.

[sombre Native American vocalization] [Angela] But our seeds have still survived.

They're still here, they didn't succeed, because we're still here, the people, and so are the seeds, so the Clinton-Sullivan campaign was a failure.

And we still have some of our homelands here.

I claim that as a victory for Haudenosaunee people.

[Native American vocalization] ♪ My paddle's keen and bright ♪ ♪ Flashing with silver ♪ ♪ Follow the wild goose flight ♪ ♪ Dip, dip, and swing ♪ ♪ My paddle's keen and bright ♪ ♪ Flashing with silver ♪ So, it's easy to think of summer camp as being sort of this ephemeral thing that happens in the summer.

[instructor] Put your index finger on the corner of your mouth, thumb below your chin, and shoot.

[Philip] But when you add up the number of North American kids over the last 100 years who've gone to summer camp, what you realize is it's a fundamental and formational experience, right, in passing through adolescence.

♪ Dip, dip, and swing ♪ My name is Janette Kunkel or Pickle here at Camp Namanu.

Being an Indigenous person, working in an American summer camp has its challenges when we're trying to do better, and to work through where we've been and where we're going.

♪ Glory, glory Camp Namanu ♪ [Janette] Camp Namanu, over the last few years, has really tried to right some of the harm that has been done by cultural appropriation, which is also a common thread amongst summer camps.

O great mystery, give us courage.

[Ben] The history of organized camping and scouting goes back to the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Folks were starting to lose any connection that they may have had with the land in North America.

Connecting to the land, connecting even spiritually, I think that folks look to Native American populations.

It appears that they weren't quite sure how to build that sort of community without someone else's blueprint to work off of.

[hymnal vocalizations] What was the fundamental organizing principle for getting back to nature?

It was Indianness.

[announcer] And look how times raise our sympathies towards lost causes.

Take the Red Indian wars of the last century.

Today, the Indian is a romantic figure, and youngsters all over the world try to recapture the spirit and atmosphere of the red man.

The emphasis is on Red Indian law, and under the instruction of such tribal elders as Chief Rising Sun, alias Bill Hargrove, they really whoop it up.

[trumpet instrumental playing] [Philip] Now, you got to imagine this, right?

If you're a 12-year-old kid, it's so rich with meaning, right?

It's all about, like, being here in the place, it's all about old stuff, archaic stuff, ancient stuff.

That's why it gets repeated over and over and over again.

We still do these things today.

[campers ululating] [chief] Let the games begin!

[whimsical piano melody playing] [Philip] North Americans always linked Indian people to nature, and you can see this in Hollywood films.

There's an imagined sort of sense about Native people and their relationship to the land-- stewardship, spirituality.

Greetings, noble spirit horse.

And the authenticity, right, of Native people in relation to the land.

[woman] Our shamanic retreats are about connecting with nature and your inner shaman.

[Philip] And what's really interesting about this is that these are imaginings, and they almost get everything wrong.

They don't actually know what Native peoples' relationship or understanding with the non-human or the other-than-human world actually is.

♪♪♪ [ominous vocalizations building] [fire crackling] [Neil] I can't go home right now 'cause our territory is on fire.

Nine million acres of our forests are burning.

An area larger than most countries in the world.

The smoke from these fires travelled all the way to New York City and across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.

I hope our smoke signals remind people that this is a small planet.

Because we still live close to the earth, Indigenous people are among the first to feel the impacts of what's being done to it.

[upbeat percussion building] What the romantic fantasies of us fail to capture is that Native people around the world show up every day to care for the land and the animals.

And, if necessary, defend them.

Ernest Alfred has spent the last few years on the front lines trying to save the wild salmon that spawn on his people's traditional territory.

Here, there was no concern about food.

Clams and halibut and salmon and berries and all kinds of food from the environment that our people lived off.

In my great-great-grandparents' time, they said you could just walk across the river, there was so much fish.

♪ Come back to me ♪ ♪ Come back to the sea ♪ ♪ Come back to me ♪ [Ernest] When you look around now, and because of the state of our environment that food security is gone.

[soft instrumental building] The fish farm industry was brought in in the '90s.

There's probably 20 or so just in this area.

The major companies are from Norway.

I believe that they've contributed seriously to the decline of wild salmon.

There is a pen which is lowered into the ocean, but because it's not closed off, they're basically using our environment as a toilet, so all of the salmon poop just comes out, smothers everything.

There's a very serious threat of disease for our wild salmon.

This industry has just really gone unchecked and allowed to wreak havoc.

It's really dangerous.

You have a really serious breakdown in laws of nature here.

The decline of salmon is going to have a direct impact on the whales, the orca that everybody loves to come and see.

Many are showing signs of starvation.

We've never signed an agreement, we've never given permission, and anywhere you go in British Columbia, you need to have that First Nations consent.

I want them to be held accountable.

[Neil] Ernest and a group of protesters occupied one of the salmon farms for almost 300 days.

[officer] Are you guys sticking around for a while?

-Absolutely.

Absolutely.

-Are you?

[officer] Okay, how long is your anticipated time?

[Ernest] Until-- Until these farms are gone.

Swanson Occupation, day 179.

Welcome back, everybody.

[laughs] We're cold, we're tired, but we're not going to give up.

This place needs our help.

Our fish need to be protected.

[Neil] They forced the government to the negotiating table using the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which Canada had only recently and reluctantly signed.

And they won.

Every single fish farm had to be shut down and removed.

[Native American celebratory vocalization] [Neil] Now, several years later, Ernest and his people are waiting to see if the fish will come back.

[Ernest] I really think that the salmon are gonna come home in a big, big way, and show us that we were right all along.

Our people have always understood the relationship that the salmon have.

We actually are dependent on the return of abundant salmon.

They feed the trees, the air that we all breathe.

And that all happens because a grizzly bear will go down to the river, take his favourite fish, and take it up to his favourite spot in the forest under a big tree.

They like the belly, they leave the rest, and go back for more.

So, everything that's decomposing from the little bugs that come and feed off of that carcass to all of the nutrients that's going into that tree, there's a web of life there and a delicate balance.

[Angela] In our original teachings, foods, plants, animals, trees, it's not a hierarchy of one thing having more importance than the other.

What it really means is that you have to have a relationship with all of those things, because you're a part of that living circle.

And that's what really stewardship is, is your relationship to the land, and so you're recognizing your relatives when you're walking through the forest.

Everything can communicate.

It's mind blowing.

Like, trees can communicate, and if you really stop and pause, and you spend a lot of time with those things, you start to see it.

[ethereal vocalization] Science-- botanists in particular-- have discovered new things about plants.

It turns out that a forest is an absolute community.

They're communicating through rhizomes.

One species is going to take care of other species, and there's energy transfers and all this stuff.

This is what Native people have long understood, right?

When we say, "Oh, you know, Mitákuye Oyás'in," "all my relations," we're not just tossing off some phrase, right?

We're talking about the real relationality that you can see among all living things.

We live in a world where a company is treated like a person.

If you can accept that a corporation is a person, then you should be able to accept that the water has a right to exist and to do its job to provide sustenance to the people and to the animals and to the plants.

You should be able to accept that our access to clean air, the air itself and the wind has a right to exist.

[Neil] We are at the site of the last fish farm that was shut down.

It's gone.

It's totally gone.

Yeah!

[laughing] ["Áhpi" by Sofia Jannok playing] Holy cow, I'm a little bit emotional actually.

I-- I don't-- I don't even recognize it.

[Neil] For years, there was hardly any salmon here.

Did closing the farms make a difference?

♪♪♪ [Ernest] I'm not quite sure where to look, but they are jumping.

This bay is full of salmon, and, um, I feel very grateful.

[music continues] [Ernest] We called it, we said, you know, "When you take the pens out and you take the farms out, the life will return," and that's literally what happened.

The water went turquoise.

And you can't tell me that closing down the farms in the Broughton was a coincidence.

We were right all along.

[Korina] There definitely has been a shift in involving Indigenous voices in the climate movement.

Indigenous people are responsible for protecting 80% of our biodiversity.

[Stephanie] We are doing, we are influencing, we are trying to improve the environment for all people.

It's happening, and we're not gonna stop.

♪♪♪ [Neil] Though the fires are still burning in many parts of our territory, I am finally able to go home.

Just in time for the goose hunt.

It's a time to reconnect with family, and spend time on the land.

Many Crees still manage their hunting and fishing territories as we've done for thousands of years, allowing the animals to thrive.

[geese honking] ♪♪♪ [geese honking] [gunshots pop] [Neil] As I reflect on my journey, I think of all the people I've met, and the stories we are all just starting to learn.

Our history and cultures are so rich that when people take the time to really get to know and understand us, they will see that the real thing is so much better than the fantasy.

Everyone encounters an image, a movie, a story about Native people that creates this form of love or attachment that is, in many ways, unhealthy.

However, I also don't think we should ever leave behind entirely this relationship, because the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the making of Western society is so profound that by moving away from this history, we lose the insights that it provides.

[Neil] If there is one place we hope you will look deeper, it is to our knowledge of the land.

We still live close to it when so many people have lost that connection.

[Angela] 500 years ago when settlers came across the ocean, they needed our help when they got here, and they're gonna need our help again.

So, it's gonna be relevant and important for us to start some healing path of working together and having that understanding.

[whimsical instrumental playing] It ain't over till it's over.

Okay?

So, here we are.

It ain't over till it's over.

[violin instrumental playing] [Neil] Speaking of appropriation, this is one of the traditions the Cree adopted from the Scottish who ran the trading posts in our communities.

♪♪♪ ["Tshekuan Mak Tshetutamak" playing] ♪♪♪ [music fades]