Maria Florio and Victoria Mudd triumph with this documentary, but never forget that film critics like Siskel and Ebert (who are often otherwise reliable) tried to bury this film as if it were a dizzy conspiracy theory. The filmmakers bluntly present the immoral situation without apologies. Watch our familiar politicians state their twisted case in their own words, which isn't much of a case at all. Don't blame the documentarians for that. The evil nitty gritty of how this situation came to be in the first place would turn this documentary into a horror film.
It runs like this: coal is discovered on an Indian reservation; coal company wants the coal; coal company does not want to mine coal conventionally because paying union workers is too expensive; coal company wants to strip mine the area, even though it leaves behind an environmental disaster; coal company must move people off the surface of the land so bulldozers can bulldoze; Indians live on the land you want to bulldoze; coal company gains influence over a tiny Indian nation through its even tinier Tribal Council; tiny Tribal Council successfully uses the Supreme Court to assert property rights over the area to be strip mined; tiny Tribal Council draws up a new map of boundaries; tiny Tribal Council says Indians living on the wrong side of the new boundaries must move; and, finally, Federal Government steps in to forcibly relocate over 10,000 people so that coal company can strip mine the area and completely destroy it. Decades later, the sinister scheme has thankfully still not been hatched, thanks to a film like this.
It runs like this: coal is discovered on an Indian reservation; coal company wants the coal; coal company does not want to mine coal conventionally because paying union workers is too expensive; coal company wants to strip mine the area, even though it leaves behind an environmental disaster; coal company must move people off the surface of the land so bulldozers can bulldoze; Indians live on the land you want to bulldoze; coal company gains influence over a tiny Indian nation through its even tinier Tribal Council; tiny Tribal Council successfully uses the Supreme Court to assert property rights over the area to be strip mined; tiny Tribal Council draws up a new map of boundaries; tiny Tribal Council says Indians living on the wrong side of the new boundaries must move; and, finally, Federal Government steps in to forcibly relocate over 10,000 people so that coal company can strip mine the area and completely destroy it. Decades later, the sinister scheme has thankfully still not been hatched, thanks to a film like this.