• IFC Films
• A reenactment of the Battle of Little Big Horn from Lakota Nation vs. United States

What is the point of a documentary feature in 2023? I apologize in advance to the filmmakers behind Lakota Nation vs. United States for turning them into my case study for this question; they didn't ask to become a representative for an entire cinematic genre, but the Lakota Nation vs. United States happened to appear before me at the moment when these ideas were churning through my brain. It's a serious movie about a serious subject, and I can't stop confronting this question: Is our default approach to non-fiction filmmaking solely related to what it's about, rather than how it's about what it's about?

The "what it's about part" in this case isn't hard to understand, as directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli explore a dense history of how the United States government repeatedly violated its own treaties in taking land from indigenous peoples, with an emphasis on the Lakota/Dakota nations. To be even more specific, it's a narrative about how those policies effectively seized the sacred Black Hills from treaty-designated Lakota lands upon the discovery of gold in the region, and how so many subsequent actions—from the infamous battle with Gen. George Custer's troops at Little Big Horn, to policies of religious and language erasure—were connected to securing the Black Hills from Lakota resistance.

Such history-based "issue documentaries" often face two significant questions regarding their reason for being: Do they make a case for why a movie version is better/more interesting than an in-depth book on the same subject, and what do they offer to someone who might already be familiar with a majority of the basic facts? In both cases, it can become far too easy to pander to viewers, who can congratulate themselves on shaking their heads in all the right places and praise the movie for saying all of the right things, even if it isn't saying anything new, or saying those things in a particularly interesting way.

But Short Bull and Tomaselli have a savvy understanding for how to shape their collection of facts and anecdotes into a particular story about a particular people, rather than a simple diatribe about mistreatment of indigenous peoples. Indeed, while Lakota Nation vs. United States isn't remotely shy about calling America to task for its actions towards Native peoples, this is less a story about victims than it is about an unwavering refusal to surrender these lands. Tales of modern-day activism—from the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee to the gatherings at Standing Rock in 2016—become part of a history of the Lakota people demanding change; dark chapters like the creation of the Christian residential schools become part of a recognition that chipping away at cultural identity might be more successful at subjugating a people who could not be defeated militarily. Even the 1980 Supreme Court decision that gives the film its title involves a "victory" that the Lakota are not willing to accept, because it means acknowledging that the Black Hills are no longer their land.

Perhaps more significantly, this is a film about giving voices to people for whom centuries of policy has represented an attempt to render them voiceless. As much as this same basic information could be contained in a scholarly history on the subject, that same book could not include Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier reading her meditations on what it meant—and couldn't mean—for Lakota people to sign their "X" to a treaty they couldn't possibly read in English. Nor would you get the emotion in the voice of activist Candi Brings Plenty when she talks about trying to forgive her parents for the self-hating attitudes that the residential schools instilled in them.

Visually, documentaries like this can often be simplistic affairs, merely looking for places to insert pretty nature pictures in between archival footage and shots of the filmmakers' interview subjects. There is some of that sensibility at work in Lakota Nation vs. United States, but Short Bull and Tomaselli understand the power of faces—both those from the past, and those wrestling with their legacies in the present. Unlike too many contemporary documentaries with a social conscience, this one isn't content just to be on "the right side" of an issue for its intended audience. It's a movie that reminds us that "issues" are about people, and part of what gives cinema its power is the ability to make those people real.