Press release
Join us for our next NCTOH Webinar on October 7, 2026 at 3:00 pm ET where we will show the documentary, Keep Tobacco Sacred. This is the final chapter in Lincoln Mondy’s Black Lives / Black Lungs, a ten-year investigation into how one industry shaped America by stealing life, land, and meaning.
Tobacco was not born a commodity—it was stolen and transformed. It also wasn’t always called Tobacco. Asemaa, Čhaŋšáša, and Tabako are just a few names given to the medicine that Indigenous communities have long used for prayer, reciprocity, and connection.
Keep Tobacco Sacred documents the violent corporate theft that formed the cash engine for Colonization, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and America’s First Great Enterprise—the 400-year-old commercial tobacco industry.
The film follows Indigenous elders, artists, researchers, and young people, tracing how colonial violence severed people from their practices—and how reclamation is not symbolic, but material, intergenerational, and urgent.
Following the webinar there will be a discussion with Lincoln Mondy and CoCo Villauz.
Please note the description above was provided by our guest speakers, and the views and opinions expressed by guest speakers are their own.