Big Mountain, Diné Bikéyah

2015, 75 minutes

An intimate portrait of a remote community of Navajo Native Americans and their supporters in Northern Arizona, who, after long and ongoing battles for land rights, are occupying their ancestral homelands in an attempt to maintain their land based exis...

Big Mountain is a film about the ancestral homelands of the Navajo and Hopi people in remote Northern Arizona. This is a place of immense natural beauty, but its ancient landscape and cultures have recently seen profound change. Since 1974, thousands of Navajo and Hopi have been evicted from Big Mountain in a complex political and legal struggle over the extraction of natural resources from the area. Big Mountain sits atop the largest coal deposit in the United States, which supplies electricity and water across the Southwest. Camille Summer-Valli began filming in Big Mountain after spending several winters herding sheep there. Her film documents life as it is today for the small group of elders who continue living in Big Mountain, the younger generations returning to reconnect with their traditions, and the activists who come to offer support. Tracing the experiences of a few of these individuals, the film abandons narrative to focus on the difficult and often conflicted reality of reconciling a land-based, subsistence culture with twenty-first century America. Moving through the seasons on the high-desert plateau, it explores the differences in perspective between an outsider and those who think of this as their spiritual home. For the Navajo, being in Big Mountain is a matter of identity that has become enveloped in a larger political conflict. Every daily task or ritual is now also an act of resistance against exploitation and outside interference. Their struggle is to bring the principles of their culture through the unstoppable change. 

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