The Film
Millions of Native people live in the United States. One of them spent forty years knowing he was Native, and little else. When he asked himself what he actually knew, out tumbled a mumbling mouthful of, "broken treaties, the Trail of Tears, and... colonists?"
He also knew words like Cherokee, Blackfeet and Salish (his own tribe), but not that those were three of 575 sovereign nations whose political rights predate the U.S. Constitution.
He knew his origin story, too—or thought he did, until the truth surfaced: he was conceived through violence and rejected with five words: "I don't want no Indian baby." Most Americans are equally disconnected from their country's true origin, familiar only with the version that begins with "discovery."
Nearly 80% of the American public admits to knowing "little to nothing" about Native peoples.* For Native communities, this is not merely a statistic; it is daily life.
"There is a serious information gap about Native Americans in the United States," observes the Pawnee scholar Walter Echo-Hawk. "Most Americans have never met or talked to an Indian."
This void is no accident. It is the consequence of a national mindset developed over centuries: from the colonial fiction of an "empty" continent to the myth of the "Vanishing Indian," which conveniently reframed dispossession as destiny. It is the same mindset that allowed a Native child to grow up incurious about his own people.
THE HDDEN PEOPLE follows a citizen of the Bitterroot Salish adopted at birth by a non-Native family, whose search for his heritage becomes an archaeology of the American story. It is also a confrontation with the burden of complicity: his forty years of incurious acceptance mirrors a nation's willful ignorance.
*Reclaiming Native Truth project survey (2018)
Director's Note
When I was young, my father gave me a love of movies, a way to see the world through stories. But those stories never taught me how to see myself.
I'm making this film for that person, the person kept hidden from what being Native meant. And as I'm finding, invisibility corrodes.
For Native people, it means continued material, psychological, and political harm. For America, failing to see its true origins and the distance between its ideals and its actions means never understanding what it has become.
For me, it means reckoning with what can't be recovered.
THE HDDEN PEOPLE is in the research phase of pre-production.
Approach
THE HDDEN PEOPLE is a cinematic archaeology, excavating historical, legal, cultural, and personal layers of the American story. It unearths the specific mindset that has sustained centuries of Native erasure, and the filmmaker caught in its wake.
SHOT: Morning light. Rolling Montana farmland meets a densely wooded border. WOMAN (V.O.): (Warm, unhurried) "My great-great-grandfather built the first home on this property. 1889. We're the sixth generation..."
CUT TO: Her hands on a wooden fence post. She shakes her head, emotional. WOMAN (V.O.): "...but the kids want to sell it. They don't understand the history here. They don't understand that this land...it's who we are."
Beat.
BLACK SCREEN.
VOICE (Reading): "The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass." —Theodore Roosevelt
As the quote is read, an image slowly fades in:
CUT TO: Two middle-aged Native women at a picnic table amidst a family reunion. They are our Statler and Waldorf, our Greek Chorus: THE AUNTIES.
AUNTIE 1: "The General Allotment Act?" AUNTIE 2: (Nodding) "Dawes Act. 1887."
CUT TO: ANIMATED MAP. Tribal land in 1887. As the years tick to 1934, the territories erode and vanish, leaving only scattered fragments.
AUNTIE 2 (V.O.): "Thirty-eight white men voted to take ninety million acres. The House—the 'voice of the people'—didn't even count. Just voiced their approval... Two-thirds of our land, voted away by dinnertime."
WIDE: The same rolling farmland. Wire fences cut across the land, an ugly barbed grid.
FILMMAKER (V.O.): "My non-Native ancestors arrived on our reservation through one of those real estate listings. A few generations back. My Native ancestors had been here 450 generations, since the ice retreated. That devastating act paved the way for the violence against my mother, a Salish woman. The violence that conceived me."
CUT TO: A SCHOLAR (interview) "The Dawes Act, allotment, was devastating. But it wasn't the first deception. And it wasn't the worst."
Braiding intimate vérité with the insights of scholars, the voices of contemporary Native people, and the sharp wit of a Native "Auntie" Greek Chorus, the film traces the architecture of this erasure across law and curriculum, consciousness and memory. The film invites Americans to stop being content not to know and finally 'discover' what's been here all along.
The Team
Jay Reed – Writer and Director. Jay Reed is a writer and filmmaker, and a proud citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. An adoptee, THE HDDEN PEOPLE is his exploration of America's historical amnesia about Indigenous peoples, and his own complicity in that forgetting. He is a recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant in theater.
Anahid Nazarian – Executive Producer. Anahid Nazarian holds the unique distinction of having worked alongside filmmaking legend Francis Ford Coppola for over 40 years. She was the Executive Producer of his last four films. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
We can't make Americans care about Native Americans. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the sharing is contagious.