2020, video, 30 minutes

Only the Earth and the Mountains interrogates the narrative of settler colonialism in the American West by white pioneers and its implications to society today by examining the repercussions of the Sand Creek Massacre, in which more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people were murdered by U.S. Cavalry troops on November 29, 1864. In speaking to the survivors’ descendants, it becomes clear that this event is a living, perpetual loss—one that should not be forgotten.

The Sand Creek Massacre Foundation

Screenings:

Tallgrass Film Festival, Wichita, Kansas, October 16-25, 2020
Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival, Richmond, Virginia, November 19-22, 2020
Association on American Indian Affairs, online, November 29, 2020
Black Maria Film Festival, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2021
Santa Fe Film Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico, February 17-21, 2021
Ashland Independent Film Festival, Ashland, Oregon, April 15-29, 2021
DOK Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, October 25-31, 2021
Denver Film Festival, Denver, Colorado, November 3-14, 2021
American Indian Film Festival, San Francisco, California, November 5-13, 2021
Broomfield Open Space Foundation, Broomfield, Colorado, December 1, 2021
Sand Creek Massacre Foundation, online, March 10, 2021
Cordillera International Film Festival, Reno, Nevada, July 28th – August 1st, 2022

Talks:

Association on American Indian Affairs, online panel discussion, November 29, 2020
DOK Speaks Up: Walk a Mile in My Shoes, panel discussion, Leipzig, Germany, October 29, 2021
DFF44: Indigenous Perspectives, panel discussion, Denver, Colorado, November 13, 2021
Broomfield Open Space Foundation, panel discussion, Colorado, December 1, 2021
Sand Creek Massacre Foundation, online panel discussion, March 10, 2021

Articles:

Bringing the Colonialist Past and Present into Dialogue at DOK Leipzig, Sevara Pan, Documentary Magazine, December 9, 2021
Fünf Filmtipps für das DOK Leipzig 2021, Stefan Petraschewsky, MDR KULTUR, October 25, 2021

Reviews:

“The Sand Creek Massacre on 29 November 1864: More than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were murdered by the U.S. Cavalry. Ignorant hand-downs from the past and the omnipresence of statues glorifying murderers are juxtaposed with an empty museum of indigenous history for which there is no funding. This film against forgetting by a white female director also examines its own position: she talks frankly with descendants of the survivors – many of whom are choosing a scientific approach to history.”

– Borjana Gaković, DOK Leipzig catalog

“Self-awareness and introspection on part of the director is…palpable in the US documentary Only the Earth and the Mountains, which recounts the gruesome events of the Sand Creek Massacre, in which a peaceful band of Cheyenne and Arapaho people was attacked, killed and mutilated by Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado Volunteers on November 29, 1864. From the onset of the film, director Elleni Sclavenitis examines her position as a white person making a film about Native American people. This approach guides the decisions that she makes in the filmmaking process, including the choice of contributors who in the end are telling the story that belongs to them. Among them are descendants of the survivors and Cheyenne and Arapaho historians, who give an account of the events, facing the camera, and thus the audience, with no middlemen involved. 

At the beginning of the film, Dr. Richard Littlebear of the Northern Cheyenne people, and the president of Chief Dull Knife College, reads the text that he had written in the Cheyenne language that recounts the events of the Sand Creek Massacre. Speaking at the DOK Leipzig’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” panel, Sclavenitis stressed the importance as an outsider filmmaker of having such conversations with the community off screen, long ahead of filming, which would help the people tell their story on their own terms and in their own words.

There is what Sclavenitis deemed “a huge lacuna” in our knowledge of the Sand Creek Massacre—spuriously described as “The Battle of Sand Creek”—as well as hundreds of other massacres in US history. Revisiting Sand Creek is an effort not only to learn about it from the Cheyenne and Arapaho people but also to restore it in our collective consciousness; as Littlebear notes, for many white people, the Native Americans “are set in the comfortable past […] when actually we are still here.””

– Bringing the Colonialist Past and Present into Dialogue at DOK Leipzig, Sevara Pan, IDA, December 9, 2021