- UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Warrior Women, featuring Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert
- Film chronicles the lifelong work of Madonna Thunder Hawk – a leader in the American Indian Movement – and Marcella Gilbert, a Lakota mother and daughter whose fight for Indigenous rights began in the late 1960s and continues to this day
- Award-winning documentary explores what it means to balance a movement with motherhood and how activist legacies are passed from generation to generation
- hour-long film will be followed by a moderated conversation with Madonna Thunder Hawk, Marcella Gilbert and director/producer Dr. Elizabeth Castle
- The event is part of the Justice For All series, featured in the 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative
- Wednesday, November 3 / 7:30 p.m. Pacific at Campbell Hall
- $20 : General Public / $0 : UCSB Students (Current student ID required)
- Health & Safety: Proof of full vaccination must be presented for entry to the event, and masks must be worn at all times inside the venue. Visit https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/SeasonFAQs/ for updates and further details.
- Tickets/Info: (805) 893-3535, www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu
▶ ▶ ▶ Editors/Reviewers: Please include the full name of UCSB Arts & Lectures in all media coverage, including reviews.
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“We’re not over here living in tipis and hunting buffalo. We’re over here fighting for our land and fighting to live. It’s a living history. Everybody deserves to know this.”
– Marcella Gilbert
UCSB Arts & Lectures is pleased to present Warrior Women, featuring Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert on Wednesday, November 3, at 7:30 p.m. Pacific at Campbell Hall. Warrior Women chronicles the lifelong work of Madonna Thunder Hawk – a leader in the American Indian Movement – and Marcella Gilbert, a Lakota mother and daughter whose fight for Indigenous rights began in the late 1960s and continues to this day. Through their story, the award-winning documentary explores what it means to balance a movement with motherhood and how activist legacies are passed from generation to generation. The hour-long film will be followed by a moderated conversation with Madonna Thunder Hawk, Marcella Gilbert and director/producer Dr. Elizabeth Castle.
ABOUT WARRIOR WOMEN
AWARDS
Knowledge Award | Films-for-Future-Festival
Best Feature Documentary | Black Hills Film Festival
Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature | Cine Las Americas International Film Festival
Best Documentary Short | The Roxbury International Film Festival
Best Documentary | 14th Vancouver International Women in Film Festival
Audience Award | BLACKSTAR Film Festival
Cultural Currents Award | Victoria Film Festival, Canada
Best Documentary | Los Angeles SKINS Film Festival
Best Documentary Feature | San Francisco American Indian Film Festival
Best Documentary | California’s American Indian & Indigenous Film Festival
In the 1970s, organizers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought for Native liberation and survival as a community of extended families.
Warrior Women is the story of Madonna Thunder Hawk, one such AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists’ children – including her daughter Marcy – into the “We Will Remember” Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. Together, Madonna and Marcy fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Today, with Marcy now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for Indigenous cultural values.
Through a circular Indigenous style of storytelling, this film explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.
Official film trailer>> https://vimeo.com/301097219
ABOUT MADONNA THUNDERHAWK
Madonna Thunderhawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota, a veteran of every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz, to Wounded Knee in 1973 and more recently the NODAPL protest at Standing Rock.
Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s as a member and leader in the American Indian Movement and co-founded Women of All Red Nations and the Black Hills Alliance. In 1974, she established the We Will Remember Survival School as act of cultural reclamation for young Native people pushed out of the public schools.
An eloquent voice for Native resistance and sovereignty, Thunder Hawk has spoken throughout the United States, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East and served as a delegate to the United Nations in Geneva.
In the last three decades at home on Cheyenne River, Thunder Hawk has been implementing the ideals of self-determination into reservation life. She currently works as the tribal liaison for the Lakota People’s Law Project in fighting the illegal removal of Native children from tribal nations into the state foster care system.
She established the Wasagiya Najin “Grandmothers’ Group” on Cheyenne River Reservation to assist in rebuilding kinship networks and supporting the Nation in its efforts to stop the removal of children and build local resources to handle it themselves.
ABOUT MARCELLA GILBERT
Marcella Gilbert is the daughter of Madonna Thunder Hawk and a Lakota and Dakota community organizer with a focus on food sovereignty and cultural revitalization. She earned a Master’s Degree in Nutrition from South Dakota State University. Gilbert was a 2014 Cohort of the Bush Foundation’s Native Nations Rebuilders Program.
Her formative years were influenced by the activism of her extended family’s leadership in the American Indian Movement. She was a seventeen-year old delegate to the newly established International Indian Treaty Council to Geneva in 1977 and a graduate of the We Will Remember Survival Group. This alternative school run by and for Native people, was a remarkable tool for decolonizing and healing the intergenerational damage caused by boarding school. Her goal is to reintroduce sustainable traditional foods and organic farming to her reservation as an expression of the most fundamental form of survival and empowerment. She is working on launching the pilot project of her own survival school Waniyetu Iyawapi (Winter Count) Mobile learning experience. Marcella currently works for Simply Smiles, Inc., a non-profit organization that locates one project on the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota. She manages the garden project that includes wild food identification, harvest, and food processing.
See A&L’s full 2021-2022 lineup here
This is a moment that calls for Optimism, Resilience, Courage and Vision.
Santa Barbara needs Hope, and Arts & Lectures is uniquely positioned to respond.
A&L’s 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative has already inspired our community with presentations by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, chef José Andrés and author Anne Lamott. We will continue to inspire, through shared experiences with thought leaders, creative problem solvers and arts visionaries who will guide us forward. CREATING HOPE programs strengthen human connection, promote emotional well-being, joy and compassion, and envision positive change. Learn more about the CREATING HOPE: https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/CreatingHope.aspx
ABOUT UCSB ARTS & LECTURES
Founded in 1959, UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) is the largest and most influential arts and lectures organization between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A&L annually presents more than a hundred public events, from critically acclaimed concerts and dance performances by world-renowned artists to talks by groundbreaking authors and film series at UCSB and Santa Barbara-area venues. With a mission to “educate, entertain and inspire,” A&L also oversees an outreach program that brings visiting artists and speakers into local classrooms and other venues for master classes, open rehearsals, discussions and more, serving K-12 students, college students and the general public.
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Warrior Women is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. The performance is part of the Justice For All series, featured in the 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative.
$20 : General Public $0 : UCSB Students (Current student ID required)
For tickets and more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
UCSB Arts & Lectures gratefully acknowledges our Community Partners the Natalie Orfalea Foundation & Lou Buglioli for their generous support of the 2021-2022 season.
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