American Indian Film Festival [[San Francisco)
Seeing American Indian life through the lens of Native filmmakers is one of the best ways to understand the modern Native experience.

One of the best places to do that [[aside from the indie film category on Netflix) is the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco.

It's the mission of the American Indian Film Institute to empower American Indian media artists, and the AIFI's annual film festival has been bringing Native stories to a growing audience for nearly 40 years.

"There are other American Indian film festivals around the country," says festival founder and president Michael Smith. "But the AIFI festival in San Francisco is the longest-running and has the most content. Last year, there were more than 85 films."

The 39th annual American Indian Film Festival takes place November 1-9, 2014.

If you're lucky, you might catch filmmaker Chris Eyre [[Cheyenne, Arapaho), an AIFI and Sundance favorite since his debut film, "Smoke Signals," won honors at both festivals in 1998.

It's hard to imagine from modern American Indian film subjects and the festival's Bay Area setting that the lands south of the Golden Gate Bridge were once home to the Ohlone, or Costanoan, tribe, and north of the bridge, especially in what's now Marin County, to the Miwok tribe.

For a small taste of what the region was like when American Indians inhabited it centuries before high-tech modernity, you can visit the Marin Museum of the American Indian in Novato's Miwok Park.

It's on the site of an actual Miwok village, in a peaceful and pristine setting that's about as far from the influence of Silicon Valley as you can get in these parts.

The Salish Sea [[Pacific Northwest)
As much as it might now be about coffee and grunge culture, the Pacific Northwest is also formline art, totem pole, longhouse and dugout canoe country.

Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia are all part of the Salish Sea.

You could do all sorts of things in the region to get a feel for the richness of its tribal past.

Blake Island has its Tillicum Village, where you can take in a Northwest Coast Indian dance performance with a traditional salmon bake dinner.

You can pay your respects at Chief Seattle's gravesite and learn about the longhouse tradition in Suquamish, Washington, on the Port Madison Indian Reservation, where the great chief lived and died.

And you can immerse yourself in the history and culture of the Puget Sound Salish Tribes [[particularly the Suquamish) at the new and niftily designed
Suquamish Museum and Cultural Center.

Just across the water/border in Vancouver, Canada, you can get intensely ethnographic at University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology with its a vast collection of Aboriginal art and artifacts, including traditional canoes, masks, jewelry, carvings, longhouse replicas and totem poles.

Not to be outdone, the Royal BC Museum in Victoria on nearby Vancouver Island has one of the most comprehensive collections of First Nations cultural material, from ceremonial and utilitarian objects to artistic masterworks.

Back in Vancouver's Stanley Park, there are the much-visited totem poles, tribal dance performances, Aboriginal foods and storytelling, a Spirit Catcher Train through the forest and activities at the Klahowya Aboriginal Village. [Don't forget the John T. Williams Memorial Totem Pole, carved by the people of Seattle and raised at Seattle Center in memory of the man slain by a Seattle police officer while walking along a street carving a board with a legal length knife. Many of you may have followed this story with me beginning in September 2010 -- Gazhekwe]

There's more to experience at Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, where you can top off First Nations cedar chiseling demonstrations, Totem Park, and the displays and weaving and beadwork demonstrations at Kia'palano First Nations cultural center with views of the Pacific Northwest rainforest from the bridge over the Capilano River

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/15/travel/best-usa-indian-culture/index.html?iid=article_sidebar