Help Us Finish Our Documentary with Blackfeet Nation

My name is Ivan MacDonald. I’m a filmmaker and member of the Blackfeet Tribe, born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.

I am now directing an investigative documentary called Call My Spirit / Nikaomatsipiiyohsi, and our film team needs your help.

Call My Spirit explores the little-known dark history of Indian boarding schools, which has been swept under the rug in the United States. Most of the American public does not know this happened.

Our film team is here to finally bring the truth to light.

Many of the stories I tell come directly from the community that raised me. In Blackfeet culture, storytelling is how we carry history forward. It is how we pass down language, ceremony, memory, and survival.

For more than a century, the U.S. government and religious institutions, such as the Catholic Church, operated Indian boarding schools and forcibly assimilated Native children by removing them from their families. Many children experienced serious abuse inside these institutions, and thousands never returned home.

As a descendant of boarding school survivors myself, this film is deeply personal.

My great-grandmother, Mary Sherman, was taken to Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska before later being sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. After years inside the boarding school system, she was eventually sent back home to the Blackfeet Reservation at 19 years old after being deemed “unfit” for hard labor. Like many Native families, the impact of these schools did not end with one generation. That history still lives with us.

For the last several years, our documentary film team has been investigating the history and ongoing legacy of Native American boarding schools — the children who were lost, the survivors still carrying these experiences, and the families searching for answers generations later.

Right now, we are raising $25,000 to complete our final major film shoots this summer on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. These are some of the most important scenes in the film.

We will be filming with boarding school survivors, Blackfeet families, Tribal preservation workers, and researchers actively investigating former boarding school sites connected to missing children and unmarked graves.

The film follows two Indigenous women — Marsha Small and Iko Beck — whose investigations guide the story forward. Marsha uses ground-penetrating radar to search for possible burial locations on former boarding school sites. Iko works to preserve survivor testimony by listening and recording living survivors’ stories.

On a creative level, Call My Spirit will blend intimate cinema verité with experimental science and tech elements like radar scans, mapping data, and layered sound design. We are calling this cinematic style “Indigenous Futurism.”

My creative process has always centered around collaboration and reciprocity with the communities I work alongside. This project is also pushing me as a storyteller to be more experimental. We are trying to expand what Indigenous storytelling can look and feel like onscreen while staying grounded in the lived experiences of the people trusting us with their stories.

We’ve already spent years filming across Montana and beyond, documenting survivor gatherings, investigations, oral histories, and ceremonies connected to children being brought home. But this summer’s production is critical, and these moments cannot be recreated.

Your support will help cover:

This is an Indigenous-led documentary being made alongside communities who have been deeply impacted by this dark legacy.

If you support this campaign, you are helping preserve testimony, document truth, and ensure these stories are not lost again.

Thank you for helping us finish this film.

— Ivan MacDonald

Director, Call My Spirit / Nikaomatsipiiyohsi

Biography

Ivan MacDonald is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker who is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe. His most recent project Murder In Big Horn premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on Showtime. He was an inaugural fellow for the Illuminative and Netflix Producers Fellowship and is alumni of the Firelight Media Lab with his sister Ivy. His directorial debut When They Were Here is currently in production and has been supported by ITVS, Chicken and Egg Pictures and Sundance.