Lily Gladstone’s buffalo conservation documentary, “Bring Them Home,” debuts on PBS Monday night, coinciding with Native American Heritage Month and raising the profile of both its important subject and public broadcasting itself. As the film premieres, PBS finds itself under increasing threat, much like the buffalo and public lands featured in the story, making the platform’s role more pertinent than ever for Gladstone, the Blackfeet Nation, and wider conservation efforts.
PBS and Public Broadcasting Parallels Drawn by Gladstone
While “Bring Them Home” was in development, Gladstone had not anticipated that PBS would be under direct threat, drawing a poignant parallel to the buffalo’s endangerment depicted in the film. She voiced the urgency of this moment, showing deep personal ties to PBS and its educational programming.
“Public broadcasting is also under a very concerted effort of eradication right now, so PBS understands, in a way that’s way more timely and topical than we want it to be at the moment,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, told TheWrap ahead of the documentary’s premiere.
Gladstone recalled her childhood, growing up in Browning and East Glacier on the High Plains, where she relied on PBS for both entertainment and education. Shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy were foundational, reflecting the outsized impact public broadcasting can have on rural communities and underlining why PBS remains vital.
“I grew up High Plains on my reservation in Browning and East Glacier. For a while, we just had our little rabbit ear television and we would get BCC from Canada because we were close enough to the border, and we would get PBS. So I learned about the bigger world from watching all of the PBS Kids shows. Bill Nye the Science Guy was my science teacher for home school. PBS was kind of everything and it continues to be so,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, said.
Bringing Buffalo and Community Back: The Story Behind “Bring Them Home”
Broadcast during Native American Heritage Month, “Bring Them Home” investigates one of the tragic chapters of American history: the U.S. government’s deliberate destruction of wild buffalo herds, causing their numbers to fall from an estimated 30 million to fewer than 1,000 within a generation. Beyond recounting loss, the film focuses on resilience, telling the story of the Blackfeet Nation’s work to restore bison populations to their traditional lands in Montana and Alberta.
Emphasizing the documentary’s communal and poetic value, Gladstone highlighted PBS’s suitability as a broadcast partner.
“Knowing that this is [the doc’s] home, it’s also, poetically, in a way, really important, because it is like our land, like the world that we share; it’s a shared resource, it’s for everybody,”
she said. She added,
“And at a time when public broadcasting is under such attack, at a time when public lands are under such attack, there’s a ton of effort all across Montana and the American West, of conservationists coming from places we wouldn’t necessarily classically think. It’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck moment. I think PBS carrying this documentary is absolutely appropriate,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, explained.
The film also explores the ongoing efforts and hope among tribes, showing how the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Blackfeet Nation are working with diverse conservationists across Montana and Alberta, making the buffalo’s return a symbol of both cultural and ecological resilience.
A Collaborative Effort Behind the Lens
Aiskótáhkapiyaaya, the Blackfoot title for the project, represents a partnership among Thunderheart Films, WETA, and a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers. Directed by Ivy MacDonald, Ivan MacDonald, and Daniel Glick, and produced by Glick and Ivan MacDonald, the documentary’s executive team includes Gladstone, Melissa Grumhaus, and Sarah Clarke, with cinematography by Zane Clampett, Kier Atherton, and Daniel Glick.
The film’s creative process was deeply informed by community involvement. Gladstone reflected on how she became involved in the project, describing a journey shaped by local recommendations and her ability to bridge roles in front of and behind the camera.
“I’ve been involved with ‘Bring Them Home’ since 2017, ’18. Co-director Daniel Glick knew that he needed to work with community members — not just as subjects, but as filmmakers. So when he was making his rounds around Blackfeet country and kept asking for who would be a good collaborator, everybody kept pointing him back to me, as well as the Montana Film Office,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, explained.
She recounted her earlier work, including a pivotal experience during promotions for Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” which preceded mainstream recognition from “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“Long before ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ made my name recognizable to people, I was known in Montana for a lot of different elements. Being a Montana actress, you also spend a lot of time behind the camera doing, essentially, producing work without necessarily accepting producing credit. You just do what you need to do. So he reached out as I was doing the rounds for Kelly Reichardt, ‘Certain Women,’ which was what I’d call my big breakthrough,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, added.
Animation and Storytelling Unite for Community Impact
“Bring Them Home” employs powerful animation to translate years of community effort and activism into an accessible, engaging film. The documentary synthesizes contributions from many people working across different fronts, illustrating the complex collective effort to save and restore the buffalo herds and honor the Blackfeet Buffalo Project and the wider Blackfoot Confederacy.
“The documentary is a nice way of making — in a very digestible, entertaining; the animation in this, I’m just completely floored by and amazed with — it’s just synthesized the work of a lot of different folks working on a lot of different fronts,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, shared.
“Everybody knows that generally this is happening, but paying homage to the tribe itself, to the Blackfeet Buffalo Project, to our relatives across the border in Canada, the larger Blackfoot Confederacy, it’s bringing everything together into one place where you can see it in the way that film allows you to see it. It’s been incredibly invigorating,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, said.
Addressing Historical Trauma and Resilience
The documentary delves into the difficult history of bison extermination, linking it to government efforts to undermine Indigenous communities. Gladstone discussed the massive scale of these efforts and the symbolic importance of the buffalo’s return as evidence of Native resilience.
“It’s hard to necessarily do a whole century of undoing, with the eradication and systemized concerted effort of the U.S. government to eradicate bison from the Great Plains. A lot of that was because they recognized that eradicating the buffalo would be the fastest way of eradicating the Indian problem, as we were called. That has definitely taken a toll,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, stated.
“And over a century later, seeing this return and also recognizing that we’re still here is one of the biggest things. We hear it, we see it. We don’t necessarily see with our own eyes and our own timeline how far we’ve come, we live the life and time that we have now, but we know that we’re part of something that’s older than us, that’s bigger than us, that’s more continual than us, and the buffalo remind us of that. The documentary is just bringing to words and images what we all know,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, reflected.
The Power of Collaboration in Indigenous Filmmaking
The creative team behind “Bring Them Home” extended beyond Gladstone and Glick, involving Blackfeet sibling filmmakers Ivy and Ivan MacDonald. Their addition marked a turning point for the project’s momentum, and work continues on a complementary narrative feature that will incorporate more Blackfeet perspectives, both on screen and behind the scenes.
“The two projects — and I say two projects because there’s also a narrative companion that’s being developed alongside it — when Daniel brought on Blackfeet filmmaking sibling duo Ivy and Ivan MacDonald is really when they started gaining some really good momentum and lifting off, and we’re all continuing to collaborate on the narrative project together,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, said. She hinted at a personal connection to the companion feature, saying,
“[I’m] EP-ing, doing some writing on it, there was a character that was written specifically for me that I want to play, this Montana rancher. So there’s something in it for me, there’s something in it for a lot of Blackfeet folks.”
Lily Gladstone’s Artistic Vision and Future Roles
Outside “Bring Them Home,” Gladstone is recognized for her performances in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” as well as “Under the Bridge,” “The Wedding Banquet,” and upcoming films “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “In Memoriam,” and “Lone Wolf.” Even as Hollywood acclaim grows, she remains grounded in projects that engage with the lived realities and histories of American Indian and First Nations peoples, both in the U.S. and Canada.
“I feel like a lot of native actors, we get a kind of shortlist of projects that we’re able to do or types that we’re able to do. There’s things within the stories that we’re telling right now that I really want to bring attention to the character,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, explained.
“‘Under the Bridge’ was a really wonderful opportunity to bring attention to this huge faction of American Indian history and First Nations history in Canada, a lot of the same policies on both sides of the border and the whole pipeline of adopting native children out away from their families was a second wave after the buffalo were mostly eradicated,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, added.
Bringing History to Life Through Community and Film
Gladstone’s choices as an actress are closely linked to the histories and realities she and her community face. Rooted in community theater and youth engagement, her career emphasizes storytelling as both a personal practice and an act of civic engagement. She values the chance to portray stories she grew up learning about and living through, building empathy and awareness among broader audiences.
“All of these projects that I agree to take, they kind of go back to these major elements of American Indian history that I’ve researched, that I’ve heard about, and then also just have lived with the reality and the ramifications of,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, said.
“Before the movie thing picked up for me, before the acting career in cinema really became the main focus, a lot of my acting love was channeled into community. I was raised in community and I was raised to be in community, so a lot of the early ways of stoking and keeping the love of acting alive was working with kids from communities all across Montana. When you’re working with youth, you’re confronting head-on a lot of the issues that we face as native peoples as a result of histories like the one in ‘Bring Them Home,’ of years of colonization and attempts to eradicate who we are as people,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, recalled.
“You end up recognizing when you’re working on that level and working with other organizers who are keeping us going that a lot of the problems and sources kind of go back to these specific things people don’t know about, these policies people don’t know about,”
Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee and executive producer, concluded. She added,
“So the chance to get to play characters on a larger stage where people are paying attention, where you get the time to develop a fondness for whoever the person is that you’re watching, then you feel the history in a way that you just don’t when you’re reading it out of a textbook, if you ever even read it out of a textbook. I would say that’s the through-line. It’s the most important, necessary works, and it’s also just where the best characters tend to be that are available to us as native actors.”
What Comes Next for Lily Gladstone and Indigenous Storytelling
“Bring Them Home” premieres Monday night at 10/9c on PBS, promising not only to spotlight the vital efforts of the Blackfeet Nation, conservationists, and Indigenous filmmakers, but also to reaffirm the importance of public broadcasting as a shared resource. At a time when both wild buffalo and PBS face existential threats, Gladstone’s documentary invites viewers to reflect on the intertwined fate of culture, history, landscapes, and public institutions across the American West and beyond. As Gladstone and her collaborators continue to expand their storytelling on screen, the film’s message of hope and resilience carries forward, leaving an impact on audiences and keeping the conversation around Indigenous history and conservation urgent and alive.
