Bring Them Home

Q&A screening with co-director Ivy MacDonald, Sat 10/18 7:30pm! Ivy will be joined by Dr Richard Grounds with the Yuchi Language Project and a tribal buffalo herd manager, and moderator Alicia Nevaquaya, Intertribal Buffalo Council Director of Development and Circle Cinema Board Member. Tickets on sale now.

About "Bring Them Home" - 1h18min - Doc - Not Rated - English
"Bring Them Home / Aiskótáhkapiyaaya" chronicles a decades-long initiative by members of the Blackfoot Confederacy to bring wild buffalo (Blackfeet: iinnii) back to the Blackfeet Reservation. A thriving wild buffalo population would not only reconnect Blackfeet with a central part of their heritage, spirituality and identity, but would provide economic opportunities and healing for the community. Along the way, however, the initiative faces obstacles from ranchers who see the buffalo as a threat to the cattle ranches that dominate the land and are a legacy of colonization.

"Bring Them Home" examines the deeply meaningful role that buffalo played in Blackfeet life prior to the arrival of settlers who nearly eradicated wild buffalo in an effort to eradicate the Blackfeet people. For Blackfeet, the buffalo are seen not only as fundamental to a healthy ecosystem, but as spiritual relatives. Their removal from the land meant the loss of the Blackfeet way of life, the trauma of which still reverberates today.

In the present day, the film focuses on three main protagonists who are at the heart of the effort to reclaim these traditions through wildlife conservation: Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Buffalo Program; Paulette Fox, co-creator of the Iinii Initiative; and Leroy Little Bear, a leading tribal elder and educator involved in the Iinii Initiative. They join forces with non-native conservation groups, such as the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York City, who recognize the buffalo as a keystone species not only for Blackfeet lands, but for North America's ecological stability. Ultimately, they strive to return to the wild a herd of buffalo that are direct descendants of the buffalo that originally inhabited their land.

Ivy MacDonald is a director, producer, screenplay writer and cinematographer based in Montana. She is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe. Her most recent project "Bring Them Home" premiered at the 2024 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. In late 2023 she co-wrote and co-directed her first narrative short film titled "Buffalo Spirit," which had its world premiere at the 2025 Hollyshorts Film Festival in Los Angeles California. She was a lead producer on "Murder In Bighorn" which premiered at the 2023 Sundance film festival and aired nationally on Showtime. Ivy also won an Emmy for her producing work on the 2020 ESPN short documentary, "Blackfeet Boxing: Not Invisible." In 2025 she was also the recipient of the Rainin grant for screenwriters through the San Francisco Film Festival. Ivy is currently in pre-production for her first feature length narrative film titled "Buffalo Stone." Alongside her brother she is currently directing her second feature length documentary: "When They Were Here," a documentary about the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls crisis within their community. "When They Were Here" has received support from Sundance, IDA and ITVS.

Richard A. Grounds, Ph.D., is an enrolled member of the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma of Yuchi and Seminole heritage. He is the Executive Director of the Yuchi Language Project based in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, working with Yuchi Elders in creating new fluent speakers using immersion language methods. Under his leadership the Yuchi Language Project was recognized as the Outstanding Host for 2017 by the Tula Global Alliance for working with numerous international visitors over the years sponsored by the U.S. State Department, including Uighurs, Taiwanese, Mongolians, Brazilians, Indonesians, among numerous others. After completing his Ph.D. in the History of Religions at Princeton Theological Seminary, he taught at St. Olaf College and in the Anthropology Department at the University of Tulsa.

Dr. Grounds has presented on Indigenous language issues at Stanford, Harvard, Haskell Indian Nations University, University of Arizona, Texas Christian University, University of San Carlos, Guatemala, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Florida, among many other colleges. He has promoted Indigenous language issues for many years, presenting at the American Academy of Religion in Toronto in 2002, sponsoring a resolution passed by the World Council of Churches in 2005 to support Indigenous language rights, and calling for an International Year of Indigenous Languages while he was a member of the WCC Central Committee, serving as an invited presenter for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2008, presenting a keynote for the U.S. Department of Education NAM Directors in Washington, D.C. (2012), and co-chairing a panel on the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages at the Palais des Nations in Geneva for the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

He is currently the chair of the Global Indigenous Languages Caucus and served as the Expert for the North American Region at the Expert Meeting on Indigenous Languages held by the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2016. He served as convener for the University of Pennsylvania conference, "Native American Languages in Crisis: Academia, Technology and Smaller Language Communities," as a consultant for the Smithsonian's "Recovering Voices" Initiative, and as co-planner for the "National Native Language Revitalization Summit" in Washington, D.C. Dr. Grounds was the consistent voice calling for an International Year of Indigenous Languages since the beginning of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2002 which was declared by the UN General Assembly for 2019. He presented at the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages International Conference, in Yakutsk, Russia in far east Siberia, and participated in the 2020 planning meeting for the upcoming UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages in Mexico City.