A documentary which details the life of Lakota activist and community organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk, whose career fighting for Indigenous and women's rights has now spanned over 50 years.
In the 1970s, with the swagger of unapologetic Indianness, organizers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought for Native liberation and survival as a community of extended families. Warrior Women is the story of Madonna Thunder Hawk, one such AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists' children - including her daughter Marcy - into the "We Will Remember" Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. Together, Madonna and Marcy fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Today, with Marcy now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for Indigenous cultural values. Through a circular Indigenous style of storytelling, this film explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.
Warrior Women chronicles the lifelong work of Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcy Gilbert,a Lakota mother and daughter whose fight for Indigenous rights began in the late 1960's.Through their story, we will witness the emergence of Native ecological sovereignty astwo of the Movement's most determined and overlooked organizers lived it.
The women of the American Indian Movement fight from a vulnerable place only matriarchs canunderstand. For them, the Movement is a battle for their children and the culture they hopeto preserve for them. Through contemporary interviews, rare archival materials, and exclusiveverité, we will experience Madonna Thunder Hawk's dedication to Red Power - a commitmentthat often left her daughter Marcy feeling more like her 'comrade' than her child. A story of theemergence of modern Native sovereignty and the complexities of mother/daughter relationships,Warrior Women also explores themes of Native identity, legacy, intergenerational trauma, andstrategies of resistance among Native people.
Back in the 1950s, Madonna's home was destroyed when the Missouri River was dammedby the Army Corps of Engineers to create Lake Oahe on the Cheyenne River and StandingRock Indian reservations. The intentional flooding left poverty, violence, and dislocation in itswake. As a young woman she takes on the role of protector, exacting revenge on a localrancher's son who had raped not only her close friend, but many local Native women. Madonnawould grow up to channel her anger and pain into a fierce, unwavering dedication to activism.'Home' would be wherever the fight for Indigenous rights took her.
Leaving the reservation in the 1960s, she moves to San Francisco with other Native folks on theU.S. government's latest assimilation program called 'Relocation' - a plan to get Indians intocities and open up reservation land for further exploitation. The Bay Area explodes with radicalactivism where Madonna learns the powerful skill of community organizing and participates inoccupations from Alcatraz to Mount Rushmore. In these acts of retaking stolen land and creatingNative value-based communities she and her family experience a true freedom - even in the faceof extreme government and societal opposition.
Marcy was an athletic, sensitive child living in a boarding school when her mother left to join AIM.She has struggled to reconcile the image of Madonna as an activist with the idea of her as amaternal figure. Marcy grappled with her mother's absence, but also wanted to follow in hersubstantial footsteps. She got her wish when Madonna established the first survival school inSouth Dakota known as the "We Will Remember Survival School" and brought Marcy anddozens of other AIM children on the road with her. This rag-tag group of kids flourished with thepromise of learning a new world order of Native Pride but also struggled under the pressure ofchanging the world.
Their 'lessons' at Survival School included sessions about the earth and the environment thatwere tied to their day-to-day lives. In rare archival footage, on the banks of the Missouri as partof the summer meeting for the International Indian Treaty Council, we see Madonna leading thesurvival school kids in a group discussion about tribal sovereignty and natural resources. Theyare camped there as part of annual gathering that began in 1974 on the Standing Rockreservation. Madonna's eleven-year-old son, Phillip, thoughtfully responds that they have to usethe treaty to "stop the white man from taking the natural resources and taking our water."
Fast forward forty years later, we come full circle back to Standing Rock in the Lakota homelandswith Madonna and Marcy still at the forefront of Native resistance as they occupy and protect thewater of the Missouri River from the "Black Snake" of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Theystaff supply tents, stand against water cannons during militarized police attacks, and shareknowledge with the next generation of organizers who show up in the thousands chanting theLakota rallying cry - "Mni Wiconi!" or "Water is life!"
Through the eyes of these two Lakota women, we see a female perspective on a crucial chapterin our history, one that sparks questions about what it is to be mother and warrior; what it meansto grow up in the shadow of fierce activism, and how activist legacies are passed down fromgeneration to generation. In Warrior Women, we come to understand, through the deeplypersonal story of Madonna and Marcy, that activism is not just a news story, a protest or amarch; it is woven in the fabric of the lives we lead.
