Bounty
2018 / United States / 9 Minutes / Adam Mazo, Ben Pender-Cudlip, Tracy Rector, Dawn Neptune Adams (Penobscot), Maulian Dana (Penobscot)
Film Synopsis
We are citizens of the Penobscot Nation. For this film, we bring our families to Boston to read our ancestors’ death warrant. This abhorrent proclamation, made in 1755 by the colonial government, paid settlers handsomely to murder Penobscot people. It declared our people enemies and offered different prices for the scalps of children, women, and men. Bounty proclamations like this, some even paid in stolen land, persisted for more than two centuries across what is now the United States.
The memory of being hunted is in our blood. We know this to be true, and the science now affirms that trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. In BOUNTY we take control of this process by inviting our children into the colonizer’s hall of injustice, to read their hateful words and tell the truth about what was done to our ancestors. We exercise our power by sharing the horrors of this hard history as an act of resistance, remembrance, and a step toward justice.