Across the country, Indigenous communities have been impacted by natural resource extraction and displacement. Choctaw citizen and filmmaker Colleen Thurston explores those themes in her new documentary film Drowned Land, which is about the continued fight to safeguard Oklahoma’s Kiamichi River. KOSU reporter Sarah Liese spoke to Thurston about the film, which premiered in select theaters on March 23.

“You can tell your own personal story,” Thurston said. “But once it becomes a community story, once it’s a collective story, or even if it’s a story of the land, then we are just conduit, or we are entrusted with the responsibility of carrying on those stories, and especially for entities that don’t necessarily speak our language right, like rivers or like trees or mountains or whatever it is.”