With new and ancestral media, we:

Directly produce and facilitate the creation of Native media through collaborative relationships

Develop spaces and tools for producing, archiving and sharing media created by and for Indigenous communities

Cultivate Native media community activities and resources within Indigenous philosophical frameworks and ethical engagement

Build bridges for national and international Indigenous knowledge-sharing through art and media collections and libraries

Community Media Education

For decades, we have been partnering with Indigenous communities, both urban and rural, to collaborate on hands-on media trainings, including documentary production, video post-production, audio production, and audiovisual storytelling in many formats. 

Documentary Production

In addition to short documentary production and documentation of Indigenous teachings, elders, and intergenerational eco-cultural healing processes, we also participate in larger productions, such as feature films and television series.

Indigenous Terra Madre is the gathering of Indigenous communities and supporters that form part of the Slow Food movement. In November of 2015, we joined representatives of Slow Food Turtle Island Association as well as 148 tribes from 58 countries gathered in Shillong, Khasiland, Meghalaya, India, to share information, strategies and resources around indigenous food and biocultural diversity. This video shares some of their voices and visions.

The feature film Spectacular Movements is a 78-minute documentary co-produced by The Cultural Conservancy and directed by our Media Director, Mateo Hinojosa. This film features our Mino-Niibi Fund partners Teatro Trono, in El Alto, Bolivia (Aymara), was released in 2015, and is now available to stream and for community screenings upon request.

With the Sacred Land Film Project, we collaborate to share stories of both resistance to the destruction of sacred places and efforts to revitalize traditional cultural practices, through film screenings, events, discussion guides, curricula, and sharing documentary filmmaking skills.

Salt Song Trail Project

The Cultural Conservancy has been involved since 2000, collaborating with the The Salt Song Trail Project of the Native American Land Conservancy, working closely Vivienne Jake (Kaibab Paiute) and Matthew Leivas, Sr. (Chemehuevi), Salt Song Project Directors to produce an award-winning documentary, a map of the Salt Song Trail, and song revitalization.

Circle of Stories

One of our early multimedia projects, CIRCLE OF STORIES - video series and interactive web site, features wisdom from elders. It was co-produced in 2002 with Philomath Films, ITVS, PBS, and Second Story.

Bioneers Indigenous Forum

We are honored to have co-founded the Indigenous Forum at Bioneers, to have co-produced it 2008-2014 with the Indigenous Environmental Network, and to have recorded the many Indigenous leaders present. Here is one video from 2014, exposing the impact of the Bakken oil fields on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

Audio and Podcast

Over the decades, The Cultural Conservancy has recorded and produced many Native songs, music, oral histories, stories, conferences, panels, workshops, and elders transmitting Indigenous knowledge.

We organized and produced the Guardians of the Waters Art Show April 4-27, 2019 at the The Cesar Chavez Student Center at San Francisco State University. We also exhibited several of our youth-created short films.

As part of the Knowledge of Place exhibit, we exhibited the photographic collection Nourishing Relations at the Seed Gallery and China Brotsky Gallery in the Tides Center in the Presidio of San Francisco. Additionally, we documented this exhibit.

This exhibit of Indigenous art was produced by The Cultural Conservancy and The Native American Academy and was a benefit to support The Sculpture Garden of Native Science and Learning.

Through our partnership with Braiding the Sacred - a Movement of Corn Growers, we exhibited photographs as well the Braiding the Sacred short documentary in the Voices of Maíz traveling exhibit.

The exhibit was featured at the entrance to the 2018 United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples in New York as well as at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Cancún, Mexico.