This Land Was Theirs Americans

What This Land Was Theirs Americans Actually Is

This Land Was Theirs: Life on the Land is a multimedia educational resource produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It was originally created as a documentary film series exploring Indigenous perspectives on land, sovereignty, and cultural survival across North America. The "Americans" tag usually refers to the U.S.-focused content and companion materials that accompany the project, which includes documentaries, archival footage, teacher guides, and interactive maps detailing how Native American nations have maintained continuous connection to their territories despite centuries of displacement and policy change. I ran into this while helping a colleague piece together curriculum materials for a Native American studies course at a community college. We needed primary-source visual materials that weren't just textbook summaries. The NFB version, especially the US-extended editions, covers ground that most general documentaries gloss over. Not perfectly, but far enough past the surface that it's useful.

This Land Was Theirs Americans — What You're Getting

The core resource is actually a collection. There are several short films within the series, each focusing on a different tribe or region. There's the original 1969 documentary, plus updated versions and companion pieces made in subsequent years. The American-focused segments tend to emphasize issues like treaty rights, water disputes, and religious freedom cases that you won't find in standard US history textbooks. The companion materials include PDF reading lists, discussion questions, and some interactive elements. They're designed for high school and university level use. If you're just watching the films alone, you'll get solid material. If you're teaching with it, the guides save you maybe two hours of prep time per module, which is honest work.

How to Access and Download the Material

The National Film Board of Canada hosts the majority of This Land Was Theirs content on their website. Most of it is freely viewable online without an account. The NFB site is nfb.ca. You can stream the documentaries directly from there. For download, the NFB offers files in various formats through their download portal, usually requiring you to create a free account first. Here's what I learned after spending an afternoon troubleshooting this: the direct download links aren't always obvious. The NFB platform sometimes presents streaming-first and buries the download option behind a second click or a separate page. I ended up using a browser extension to capture the stream URL when the direct link wasn't cooperating. It's not ideal, but the NFB does allow personal educational downloading of their content, so you're on solid ground there legally. If you need offline access for a classroom without reliable internet, the NFB also distributes physical DVD copies through their store. Those run around fifteen to twenty dollars depending on the bundle. It's slower than a download but more reliable if your school's bandwidth is already stretched thin.

What the Content Actually Covers

The series is divided into thematic sections rather than strict chronology. You'll find content on land stewardship practices, the legal framework of tribal sovereignty, the impact of federal relocation policies, and contemporary environmental movements led by Native communities. The American-focused segments cover things like the Wounded Knee commemorations, the Indian Relocation Act's aftermath, and cases like Wisconsin v. Yoder which touched on Native religious education rights alongside Amish ones. One thing beginners usually miss about this resource is that it's not neutral. It's explicitly made from Indigenous perspectives. That's not a bug, it's the whole point. But it does mean you should pair it with other sources if you're trying to present multiple viewpoints in an academic setting. The NFB is upfront about their editorial stance, which is more honesty than you get from a lot of "educational" media.

Common Problems and How I Worked Around Them

The biggest issue I hit was with the older documentary segments. Some of the early footage has significant color degradation and audio dropouts, particularly on the NFB's free streaming tier. I found that downloading the files instead of streaming gave you a noticeably cleaner picture. The downloadable versions tend to be higher bitrate and don't compress as aggressively. Another practical problem: the companion discussion guides sometimes reference specific timestamps that don't match across different versions of the film. The NFB has released revised cuts over the years, and the guide I was using had been written for an earlier edit. I cross-referenced the timestamps by playing the scenes mentioned in the guide and noting where they actually appeared in my version. It took about ten minutes and saved me from looking foolish in front of students who would've noticed the mismatch immediately.

Where This Resource Falls Short

It's worth being straight about the limitations. This Land Was Theirs Americans covers a real but narrow slice of Native American experience. It leans heavily toward certain regions and certain time periods. If your focus is on, say, Pacific Northwest coastal tribes or the Five Civilized Tribes' removal history, you're going to find gaps. The NFB is a Canadian institution, and that shows in whose stories get centered. Some of the older segments reflect documentary conventions from the late 1960s and 1970s that feel dated now. The narration style is authoritative in a way that modern Indigenous scholars might critique. Again, this is part of the point — it's a product of its time making a political argument. But if you're using this in a university-level seminar, you'll want to frame it critically rather than letting students absorb it as straightforward history. For a more comprehensive picture, I'd recommend pairing this with materials from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian or the Indian Law Resource Center's publications. This Land Was Theirs is a strong starting point and genuinely good for what it does. It's not a complete curriculum on its own.

The NFB site is the main hub. Search for "This Land Was Theirs" on nfb.ca and you'll land on the collection page. From there you can stream everything for free and request downloads through the platform. The American-focused content is mixed throughout the collection rather than separated into its own distinct bundle, so you'll need to filter or search to find the segments relevant to US-based Native American history specifically.