This documentary examines the indigenous people of Canada's Pacific Northwest as a living legacy to the culture and artists who have created it. European contact led to a policy of cultural assimilation, the confiscation of ancestral lands, the banning of integral religious ceremonies, and utltimately, to the devastation of communities by disease. This brought the indigenous cultures of the Northwest Coast to the brink of destruction. How tradition came to be, how it was nearly lost, and how the legacy of ten thousand years of cultural survival shaped a people and their art, is the story of In the hands of the raven.