THE
HDDEN
PEOPLE

The Film

Millions of Native people live in the United States—citizens of 575 sovereign Tribal Nations hold political rights that predate the Constitution. They maintain self-governing societies much older than the Union itself, tracing ancestry back hundreds of generations on this land while most Americans trace back no more than five.

Yet nearly 80% of Americans know "little to nothing" about them.* For Native Americans, this invisibility is not just a statistic, it's a felt fact of life.

"There is a serious information gap about Native Americans in the United States. Most Americans have never met or talked to an Indian." —Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee)

This void is not an accident or an oversight. It is the consequence of four centuries of a national mindset of erasure, from the colonial fiction of an "empty" continent to the myth of the "Vanishing Indian" that sought to reframe dispossession as destiny.

THE HDDEN PEOPLE explores the collision between this buried national past and a hidden personal history.

It follows the filmmaker—a citizen of the Bitterroot Salish adopted at birth by a non-Native family—whose midlife search for his heritage unearths a devastating secret: he was conceived through violence and rejected with 'I don't want no Indian baby.'

His personal quest becomes an archaeology of the American story. It is a reckoning with the costs of complicity: the filmmaker's forty years of incurious acceptance mirroring a nation's willful ignorance.

*Reclaiming Native Truth project survey (2018)

Director's Note

The film aims to stand within a decades-long continuum working to restore Native visibility—legal, cultural, human—as both justice and belonging.

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 made this because I wish a film like this had existed then.

THE HDDEN PEOPLE is in the research phase of pre-production.

Approach

Braiding intimate vérité, archival footage, conversations with scholars who've spent careers uncovering what's been deliberately buried, and encounters with contemporary Native people thriving despite erasure, the film traces the mindset that has kept Native peoples hidden in curriculum, consciousness, and national memory.

Featuring a chorus of Native "Aunties" who provide sharp wit and cultural context, THE HDDEN PEOPLE reveals what four centuries of erasure ultimately could not destroy: 575 sovereign nations, languages and land being reclaimed, millions of Native people thriving. The film invites Americans to stop being content not to know and finally 'discover' what's been here all along.

The Deck

The Team