Celebrating the 5th anniversary of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership .

Chris Eyre’s debut feature, based on the 1993 book of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, is the first film meant for large audiences that was written, directed, and produced by Native Americans. Smoke Signals opens in the Couer d’Alene Reservation  in Idaho where Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire live as close as brothers and sometimes as antagonistically. When Victor’s father dies in Phoenix, Arizona, the two young men head out to retrieve his ashes, both having strong and differing feelings about the man they mourn.

“The film deals with history, social injustice, crisis of identity, poverty and other pertinent issues. But it does so in a delightfully witty, offbeat way that simultaneously sends up and celebrates supposedly typical aspects of Indian culture. […] Original, audacious, entertaining, and an all-round impressive debut” (Time Out Film.)

The film’s soundtrack was composed by Jennifer Elizabeth Kreisberg (Tuscarora), founding member of the acapella group Ulali and 2021 artist-in-residence at ATNSC.

SMOKE  SIGNALS will be followed by a screening of EVERLASTING (2024, 12 min), an archival-experimental documentary short by Mohawk artist Amanda Lickers, with a special introduction from the director.

EVERLASTING follows the place-keeping power of unbroken ties to territory through local seed saving and hide tanning initiatives. These ways of being and doing refuse settler partitions of land and city challenging settler geographies of terra nullius.