In 2011, the US government cut 50 million dollars in aid to "Native American" housing assistance. The original number of the cuts proposed by the Obama Administration was 120 million dollars. These cuts, of course, hurt those reservations most in need, such as Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the poorest reservation in the country. To the North, Part 1 is an experimental documentary that desires to create discourse around the loss of culture and the way reservations are planned and politically neglected. It documents housing conditions and the architectural typologies of this specific reservation, and juxtaposes spoken histories and the oral tradition of the Oglala Sioux to create a counternarrative of how they saw and continue to see their landscape, and the changes that come with planned reservations—open-air prisons, as they call it.

Kelman Duran is an artist based in Los Angeles and the Bronx. His videos have shown in different contexts in Berlin; Buenos Aires; Santiago, Chile;  Los Angeles; New York; Ohio; the Viennale in Vienna; SPLIT Film Festival in Croatia; Zinebi in Bilbao, Spain; and the Sensory Ethnography Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in film and video. He is currently the resident curator at Otras Obras, an art space in Tijuana, Mexico.