Following her Oscar-nominated role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone is narrating and executive producing a new documentary, Bring Them Home. From Thunderheart Films and The Redford Center, the doc is about the initiative of the Blackfeet tribe to reintroduce wild buffalo to their reservation and reclaim centuries of Indigenous culture and tradition.

The film is directed by brother and sister, Ivan and Ivy MacDonald, along with Daniel Glick. The 85-minute feature is set to premiere at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival on February 24. The screening will be sponsored by The Nature Conservatory and will take place at 6 p.m. The filmmakers chose to premiere the doc at Big Sky because of its close proximity to the Blackfeet Reservation. Several hundred members of the Blackfeet community will be invited to the screening, including Gladstone’s family. 

Bring Them Home follows a decades-long effort to bring buffalo back to the Blackfeet Reservation and will examine the role buffalo or “iinnii” had in the life of the tribe before settlers killed millions of the animals in an attempt to eradicate the tribe. The press release for the doc says, “For Blackfeet, the buffalo are seen not only as fundamental to a healthy ecosystem, but as spiritual relatives. Their removal from the land meant the loss of the Blackfeet way of life, the trauma of which still reverberates today.”

It will follow four main protagonists, leaders in the Blackfeet Buffalo Program and the Iinnii Initiative, including Ervin Calson, Paulette Fox, and Leroy Little Bear. As the team works towards returning the wild herd of buffalo that are direct descendants of the buffalo that originally inhabited their land, the encounter obstacles posed by ranchers that believe the buffalo will be a threat to their cattle ranches. 

Gladstone made history this year as the first Native American woman to ever be nominated for the best actress category at the Oscars. The 2024 Oscars will take place on March 10. She has already won a Golden Globe for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone gave much of her acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language and said: “I’m so grateful I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent in, up here. Because, in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and the sound mixer would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.”

Gladstone grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Gladstone said about the film: 

“Bring them Home highlights a crucial story of survival; of Iinnii, our Buffalo, of Blackfoot people and our culture, and of the very land which we call home. Like the Buffalo, our land does not acknowledge fences, and nor does our changing climate. For the Blackfeet, survival of the Buffalo has always been intrinsically connected to our survival as people — the revitalization of this knowledge is essential for not just us, but for all of us who share this planet, and who work to nurture hope for our collective future. Being a part of this essential documentary is one of the most precious collaborations of my life, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for the world to see this absolute labor of love come alive. Niitsiika’tayiikiitsiip to my partners on this project — Ivy, Ivan, Daniel and Sarah; I feel the good in what you’ve done.”