The Creation Story

The Creation Story is offered to the world as a prayer.

In the summer of 2022, Jasper Young Bear, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, invited three friends from outside of his community to a unique ceremonial offering that took place in a medicine lodge on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota. Across three days, Jasper tells his people’s Creation Story, a story as old as time immemorial itself.
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Previously preserved and passed down the generations in an oral tradition that Jasper was born into, his reasons for committing it to film for the first time in history soon become apparent, and are as urgent and pertinent as the story itself.
The result is a film like no other. Primarily a kind of ethnographic record that will preserve this story for the ages, it has now been thoughtfully married to a cinematic experience, to create a new kind of genre —  a medicine film.

Jasper Young Bear, whose Indian name is the Red Headed Woodpecker, is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation and lives on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota . He is from the Hidatsa Water Buster Clan on his father’s side and the Arikara Bear Society and Arikara Medicine Lodge on his mother’s. He is the founder of the Medicine Lodge Confederacy, as well as the Running Wolf Wellness Center and Cultural Survival School.