Film documents restoration of tribal land

a young man with long hair and a bandana on his head wearing a red tee shirt is holding soil in his hands and looking at it. He is standing in a field of tall grass.The OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities is copsonsoring a screening of LAND/TRUST (2022, 20 min.) on Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 2 p.m. at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. ​The film explores interrelationships of people, plants, land, and labor as it follows Amah Mutsun Tribal Band members’ work to restore a coastal prairie on California’s Central Coast. The film is drawn from a body of material collected for the Amah Mutsun Land Trust and Tribal Band archives starting in the summer of 2022. It follows the restoration work in the Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve at Año Nuevo State Park, which encompasses the former site of Mitenne, a village of the Awaswas-speaking Quiroste people.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Alexii Sigona (Amah Mutsun Tribal Band), PhD candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC-Berkeley and Ruth Anne Buetler, a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz who co-created the documentary with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band as part of her Master of Fine Arts degree.