The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together
Documentary
20 minutes
Director: Esther Figueroa • Executive Producers Melissa Nelson and Philip Klasky

The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together, is about the sacred Salt Songs (Asi Huviav Puruakain) of the Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) people. The songs are used in memorial ceremonies, for cultural revitalization and as a spiritual bond for the Southern Paiute people living in the Southwest. Through the beautiful landscape of the Colorado Plateau, painted deserts and river valleys, the Salt Song Trail traces the journeys of ancestral peoples to historic and sacred sites.

The film also documents a healing ceremony at the Sherman Institute a former Indian boarding school where Indian children where forcibly taken from their homes and forbidden to practice their traditional cultures. The singers return to the school years later to sing for the children who never came home.

Excerpted from American Indian Film Institute, San Francisco