Backbone of the World (1998)

Directed by George Burdeau
Produced by Pamela Roberts

Reviewed by Alx Dark

In the 1980s, the federal government opened the Badger-Two Medicine area for oil and gas exploration. It’s a 130,000 acre area of wilderness bordering Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. As we soon learn in Backbone of the World, a new film directed by George Burdeau, it’s also one of the last places the Blackfeet can pursue the spirit vision quest, a sacred place given to them by the Creater at the beginning of time. We don’t learn many of the details about this threat to the Badger-Two Medicine area, but it’s one of several motivations leading George Burdeau to return to the reservation he hesitantly calls “home” to create a film about the region and its importance for the Blackfeet.

From the beginning of the film, Burdeau juxtaposes two kinds of storytelling, the storytelling of the elders and the storytelling activities of the film crew itself. Although Burdeau’s Indian film crew is initially unfamiliar with the camera equipment, they understand his desire to capture the Blackfeet point of view through this complex interplay of perspectives.

An elder tells the film crew, “You folks get together and get video and hear the stories we are gonna tell you folk. And you keep them in the future time. Our grandkids, all the small grandkids—when they grow up you folks can put the video on and they will listen to it.” During the film’s scenes of the Badger Two-Medicine area, these engaging stories fill the landscape with the meanings that make the region so important for the Blackfeet (one hero, Scarface, received the gift of the Sun Dance there).

At times Burdeau and his film crew turn the camera around and ask questions of themselves, about their work and about the Blackfeet. Burdeau doesn’t flatten the ambiguities that exist in the relationship of the Blackfeet to their land and history. This history can be painful, such as the 1869 Baker Massacre, in which 173 Blackfeet were killed by the U.S. Army. Burdeau films a memorial gathering for those who were killed, creating a strong reminder that history, as well as nature, bind the Blackfeet to the Badger Two-Medicine area. The speakers in the film argue that colonialism alienated the Blackfeet from their land, and that development would deny them the right to reclaim this relationship today.

At other times, the film gives voice to conflicting Blackfeet opinions about development in the region. Burdeau frames these differences in terms of the larger tensions that exist for the Blackfeet, between communal ethics and American individualism, between knowledge of the land and urban life. The struggle to protect the Badger Two-Medicine area extends the struggle to maintain Blackfeet identity. Speaking of the region, Carol Murray explains, “Everyone is telling us, that’s the ways of the past. Why would the Creator ever give us something that was only good for a little while? Only good for centuries and centuries and centuries? I just can’t imagine that.” Her words are as true for the Blackfeet as they are for the Badger Two-Medicine area.

The feelings, stories and history that bind people to a place are a difficult subject matter for a film intended for middle and high school audiences (a study guide is available). Backbone of the World succeeds in unfolding the importance of the region in a compelling way, without losing the complexity of this struggle for the Blackfeet and for the land.