Poetic Polemic Lakota Nation vs. United States Plainly Refutes a National Narrative

Layli Long Soldier, the poet whose clear words punctuate the documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States, isn’t concerned with navigating the labyrinthine treaties and agreements that swindled countless Indigenous people. She observes this legalese for what it is, and with that observation, cuts through the Gordian Knot of the disingenuous contracts. There is only so much to be understood from parsing the paperwork. Directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli want to play by their own rules, which means shifting the perspective, values and teachers of their history lesson. It means plain language and plain images, used to rewrite assumptions so ingrained as to be invisible. With its expressive overview of the centuries from Christopher Columbus to Standing Rock, Lakota Nation vs. United States deftly demonstrates how a change in form can change a mindset—and how necessary that is when discussing the lives and futures of Indigenous people.

Long Soldier’s role as tone-narrator is just as important as the lengths Short Bull and Tomaselli go to assemble a representative, damning collage of footage. While the two-hour doc is structured chronologically, Lakota Nation vs. United States is more concerned with establishing thematic throughlines than a detailed narrative. There are plenty of anecdotes characterizing colonizer hypocrisy (one, drawing from Long Soldier’s poem “38,” is most stark and striking), but there is a restless insistence that a higher truth be seen. 

We are shown the beauty of the Black Hills—the ancestral home of the Lakota—blooming in bright sunflowers, towering as tough granite crags, persisting around burned-out forts, and running alongside horses and deer. The land isn’t abstract. It’s right in front of us, and it is life itself. Like any good heist film, it’s important to establish what’s at stake. Then you can establish the thieves.

The white colonial thieves—embodied on-screen by a reenactor’s mustached Custer and an endless battalion of modern militarized police—were present from day one. As one of the film’s talking heads explains, the national project of the United States has always been the extermination of its Indigenous people and the acquisition of their land. It used to be about homesteads and gold mines (peace treaties and legal protections be damned). Now it’s about the status quo. Perhaps it’s buried under the hateful layers of Fox News patriotism, cheering at the foot of Mt. Rushmore as fireworks pop off, or implicit in the arrests of anti-pipeline protestors, but the insatiable entitlement persists. The robbery is clear, so Lakota Nation vs. United States and its speakers are most thorough in pointing out the ubiquitous effects of its aftermath.

It reminds us where the fortunes of the Hearst family came from (gold mines on land even more stolen than normal) and of the cultural (and physical) atrocities perpetrated by the federally mandated boarding schools. Some of this re-education must undo ideas deeply saturated into our national narrative. Lakota Nation vs. United States uses a blunt bricolage of children’s cartoons, Westerns (the most American movie genre) and national journalism, captured in 1890s headlines and 1980s soundbites, as its weapon. Nothing is more revealing than our own words, our own cultural artifacts.

This exciting formal approach, with its diverse selection of striking nature photography and archival sources, moves swiftly and effectively. Its more traditional talking heads, which the film relies on more as its focus shifts to the present and future, still bring power to the doc—letting people tell their own stories is never a bad thing—but can move more haltingly, dictated by the speakers’ thoughts. Lakota Nation vs. United States sets such a high standard early that falling back on traditional shots of people in chairs talking into the camera is an aesthetic anticlimax. This comes as the film introduces its call to action, where the government’s attempts to throw money at its Indigenous problem—whether that means in lieu of actually giving the land back to the Land Back movement or in response to a broken promise surrounding water access going back over a century—are shown time and time again to be insufficient. The outrage is only logical, but the emotions falter.

Using lyrical imagery to package unflattering facts, Lakota Nation vs. United States deftly demonstrates the necessity of both to retell the story of America’s invasion and Indigenous resistance. I found some sections deeply illuminating and others familiar, but your mileage may vary depending on what part of the world you grew up in. When I arrived in Chicago from Oklahoma, I remember a conversation with a born-and-raised Midwesterner shocked to learn that Indigenous people still lived in the U.S. at all. This film erases that invisibility easily, energetically, insistently. But whatever your familiarity with the real history of the U.S., the righteous pleasure of Lakota Nation vs. United States is in its telling. The procedural thrills and journalistic intensity of this year’s Bad Press offer a clearer and more intimate understanding of both tribal life and the dire complexities of a “dependent sovereign nation,” but Lakota Nation vs. United States provides a more sweeping polemic against the continued institutional insults levied by the government.

Director: Jesse Short Bull, Laura Tomaselli
Writer: Layli Long Soldier
Release Date: July 14, 2023

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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