Film Night: Upstander Project’s Dawnland

For decades, child welfare authorities have been removing Native American children from their homes to “save them from being Indian.” In Maine, the first official Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States begins a historic investigation. Dawnland goes behind-the-scenes as this historic body grapples with difficult truths, redefines reconciliation, and charts a new course for state and tribal relations. Dawnland aired on Independent Lens on PBS in November 2018 reaching more than 2 million viewers. The film won a national Emmy® Award for Outstanding Research in 2019and made the American Library Association’s list of 2020 Notable Videos for Adults: “a list of 15 outstanding films released on video within the past two years.”

For most of the 20th century, government agents systematically forced Native American children from their homes and placed them with white families. A 1977 US Senate report (p. 287) found that as recently as 1975, Native children in Maine were 19 times more likely to be removed by child welfareworkers than non-Native children. Many children experienced devastating emotional harm in homes that shamed, demeaned, and erased their culture.

Dawnland is a film that everyone should see. Removal of Native children isn’t just something that happened far away and long ago, but to Wabanaki communities in Maine in the late 20th century. Watch and be outraged, heartbroken, and hopeful as the Wabanaki labor to protect and heal their most precious and vulnerable members, and some of their non-Native neighbors struggle with the challenge of moving from the role of occupiers to neighbors.

— Cedric Woods, Ph.D., (Lumbee) Director of the Institute for New England Native Studies at UMass-Boston