UCSB Arts & Lectures presents “Warrior Women,” featuring Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 3 at UCSB’s 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 Thunder Hawk, Gilbert and director/producer Elizabeth Castle.

In the 1970s, organizers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought for Native liberation and survival as a community of extended families. Madonna Thunder Hawk was 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, Thunder Hawk 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, the 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.

Thunder Hawk 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 U.S., 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.

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 17-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. Gilbert currently works for Simply Smiles, Inc., a nonprofit 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.

Warrior Women  is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. The performance is part of the Justice For All series, featured in the 2021-22 CREATING HOPE programming initiative.

Ticket prices are $20, general Public; free for 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.

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.

UCSB Arts & Lectures acknowledges our Community Partners the Natalie Orfalea Foundation & Lou Buglioli for their generous support of the 2021-22 season.