AANIKOOBIJIGAN [ANCESTOR/GREAT-GRANDPARENT/GREAT-GRANDCHILD] documents the emotional and vital work of MACPRA (Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance). This alliance, made up of repatriation specialists representing all Michigan tribes, fights to bring their Ancestors and funerary objects home from settler colonial institutions like museums, libraries, and archives.

Adam and Zack Khalil’s monumental and formally daring film follows the pressing struggle to rebury Indigenous human remains that have been held in sterile storage, laying bare the history of Indigenous collections and the battle to recognize and enforce the laws intended to facilitate their repatriation to the communities they were originally stolen from. Using an essayistic approach alongside vérité portraits, the film celebrates the courageous individuals who carry out this hard and emotionally draining labor of return.

–Adam Piron, Sundance Film Festival guide

This screening will be followed by a panel discussion:

Moderator Jean-Luc Pierite in conversation with Phil Deloria, Stephanie Mach, and filmmakers Zack Khalil & Adam Khalil

Jean-Luc Pierite serves as the president of the North American Indian Center of Boston, Massachusetts’ oldest urban Indian center. Jean-Luc also serves as the vice president of the Carnival Society of Boston (East Boston, MA) which is dedicated to the promotion of arts and culture through international civic engagement.

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, and the author of Playing Indian, Indians in Unexpected Places, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, along with numerous articles and two co-edited volumes.

Stephanie Mach is Curator of North American Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and a member of the Navajo Nation.