http://www.mininova.org/get/2651204

This is the story of a noble people, the Navajo, native Americans, and how time and again they were deceived by greed and evil, personalized by the White man, as usual. The documentary will examine the events surrounding the pass of the law PL 93-531 in 1974 that had in mind to relocate some 10.000 Dine (Navajo) native Americans from the land they lived in peace at with their Hopi neighbours. This is an Oscar winning Award documentary related by Martin Sheen and beautifully dressed by the music of Laura Nyro. The story comes way before the seventies, it actually did begin when Europeans came into the land and conquered by the sword every peace of it, with no sensitivity about its resources and peoples in it cohabiting. Ever since then till these days the white man, its governments and corporations gain control of these lands through deception and lies, dishonor and treason, for exploitation and greed for any transcendent things is all that the white cares about, and if in the process he has to starve to death woman, children and elders he will do, and in this process he will kill himself also and every drop of humanity and decency that could have been existed in him. And then, after he gathered the courage to kill himself as an ethical human being, he will show no mercy when he has to take with him as many other humans as he can, for nothing will cause him more pain than the one he has already inflicted in himself.

At first the white man came in and took the fertile lands for himself leaving the arid ones for the Indians, killing in the process as much Indians as he could, mixed with the thrill of a legal carnage, for there is nothing the white man likes the most than killing with a license. Then obliged the Indians to drop their weapons and promise never to fight and so they did the natives, for unlike the white man, they do believe in honor, truth and the power of your word.

Later on the white man inducted the natives to take the tomahawk and fight, when it served the interest of Washington, for they wanted them to be the code people in WWII and latter Vietnam.
But when they came back, the white man again discovered an interest in the lands of the Indians, now for what lied beneath it: gas, uranium, coal and oil. As in the way Washington acts, they sold the right to exploit these sacred land for low prices, Interior Secretary James Watt gave the order in 1983, bought the rights of exploiting the resources, giving the owners a mere 2-3 % of its value, and in exchange they left a polluted environment filled with toxic substances and wastes to totally destroy the land from its roots, to show others that there where the white man passes no root will ever thrive.

Most of the labor in the tribes had to finally work for the mines, like the Peabody Coal, and would end their days with lung cancer and raise their children raise of malformation to twice the US average due to all the toxic agents left behind.
This is only one of the examples where the white man in order to raise his children and send them to the best universities, he has to buy the politicians and journalists silence so they close their eyes when the white men annihilates all the good and gentleness. Peter La Farge, a native american songwriter, put in words and Johnny Cash and latter Bob Dylan put it in accords with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes”, where the war hero comes back to meet his slow death in the land dried by the white man.

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira’s peoples’ crops
‘Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparklin’ water stopped.

The Bridge, the Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco, from which more people choose to part from their lives and commit suicide than any other place on earth. It’s amazing how this pastoral bay of the pacific ocean, filled with beautiful fauna and flora, becomes the setting for this Dantesque side of human behavior. This documentary exposes the drama and chaotic turmoil that troubles the minds of some of the people who find themselves on the edge, at the end of a dead-end road. Others, on the other hand, seem to have chosen the bridge after deliberating and making a clear choice, to pass on to a better state of being.

Those who are left behind are the side-effected victims of this phenomenon, who remain with many unanswered questions: “What if I…?”, that mark episodes from their past.

Only one individual appears to have survived after jumping from the bridge, staying alive to tell the story, after only having broken some vertebrates. Amazingly, a seal helped him to stay on the water surface until the coastguards arrived.

The police has apparently become so accustomed to this jumping phenomenon, that police officers patrol in the vicinity of the longest pending bridge, only to ask potential suicide victims whether they intend to jump from the bridge or not.

Score:5