What Lies Beneath is a 90-minute documentary feature intended for limited theatrical release, national broadcast on PBS, streaming services, and educational distribution.
For nearly fifty years, director David Vassar has made films that celebrate the beauty, wonder, and exceptionalism of America’s national parks. But the story he told — the story most of us know — is incomplete. Beneath the monumental scenery lies a buried history, one that challenges the mythology of national parks as “America’s Best Idea.”
At the heart of What Lies Beneath is David’s evolving dialogue and relationship with Dina Gilio-Whitaker — a Native American scholar and first-line descendant of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Their conversations become the film’s narrative spine as they examine how the creation of national parks required the dispossession and exclusion of Indigenous peoples who had lived in and shaped these landscapes for millennia.
The film tells the stories of First Peoples in Yosemite, Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon national parks, as well as Bears Ears National Monument. Through the voices of tribal members and leaders, Indigenous scholars, and traditional historians, What Lies Beneath invites audiences to reconsider the idea of “wilderness” and the mythology of a pristine and “virgin” landscape without people.
As the film unfolds, David begins to see the omissions and assumptions embedded in his own work and comes to experience these landscapes through a different lens: not simply as wonders of nature preserved for future generations, but as ancestral homelands where living cultures, histories, and tribal wisdom are deeply rooted.
What Lies Beneath is far more than an excavation of the past. From the return of the National Bison Range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, to the removal of dams and restoration of the Klamath River by the Yurok, Karuk, and Hupa Tribes, to tribal stewardship of Bears Ears, the film also points to the future.
For most of his life, David believed national parks were America’s best idea. Dina reminds him that for Indigenous peoples, these places were never an idea; they were, and remain, “the center of our universe.” Ultimately, What Lies Beneath looks beyond national park boundaries toward planetary conservation — asking us to see Earth not as scenery or property, but as family: something to be respected, honored, and cherished.
David suggests we call it “Earth National Park.”
Dina counters, “It already has a name . . . Home.”
