In This Article Native Americans

In This Article Native Americans
Introduction
toggleRepresentations and Stereotyping of Native Americans in Media and
Popular Culture
Indigenous Peoples in the American Imagination
Early, Colonial, and Exhibition Images of American Indians
American Indians and Silent Films
Critiquing Hollywood Indians: Early Studies in the 1960s and 1970s
Critiquing Hollywood Indians: Studies since the 1990s
Representations of Native Americans on Television
Gendered Representations of Native Americans
Audiences, Reception, and Spectatorship
Native Americans in the European Imagination
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Applied Anthropology and Native Media Production: The Navajo Film Themselves
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Native-Produced Film and Video
Native-Produced Radio and Broadcasting
Native Americans in Journalism and Documentary
Native American Digital Media
Native Americans, Animation, Music, Graphic Comics, and Video Games
toggleApproaches to and Issues in Native American Media Studies
Native Aesthetics in Visual Culture and Storytelling
Native American Use of Media for Cultural Resistance and Activism
Native American Use of Media for Cultural Identity and Media Sovereignty
Narrative Analysis and Auteur Studies of Native American Media
Bibliographies, Filmographies, and Resources Regarding Native Americans and
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Introduction
Project

Film
Native Americans
by
Pamela Wilson
LAST REVIEWED: 01 May 2015
LAST MODIFIED: 19 December 2012
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0120
Introduction
What role have fictionalized American Indiansand real, living, breathing
Native Americansplayed in Americas story about itself? Bataille 2001 (cited
under Early, Colonial, and Exhibition Images of American Indians) notes that
Native Americans have been mythologized by anthropologists, the tourist
industry, and popular culture, which have created the Indian that never was.
As Brian Klopotek has remarked, The Indiandistinguished here from Native
American peopleis a stock character in the non-Native psyche, a metaphor
rather than a fully functioning human (Klopotek 2001, cited under Gendered
Representations of Native Americans). One of the dominant, mythicized periods
of American history inscribed into legend has been the frontier era and the
conquest of the American West. The cultural genocide, colonization, and
geographical displacement of Native tribes and peoples during Americas
westward expansion was repeatedly reinterpreted and reconstructed in popular
culture to create new master narratives that painted Americas indigenous
peoples as noble primitives, vestiges of an earlier era whose culture was
destined to die, or as bloodthirsty and amoral savages whose coexistence with
the expanding American nation was not possible. In addition, as Deloria 1998,
Bird 1996, Huhndorf 2001, and Chavez 2005 (all cited under Indigenous Peoples
in the American Imagination) illustrate, from childrens games of playing
Indian, Halloween costumes and Boy Scout rituals to New Age pseudo-shamans,
media-constructed representations and performances of Indianness still
permeate mainstream American cultural practices. In recent years, attention has
been focused on new approaches, with the addition of Native American scholars
adding their own perspective as well as increased attention to films, journalism,
and other media written, produced, and/or directed by Native Americans
narratives that are generally not about the mythic American West but more often
about contemporary lifestyles as well as issues of culture, heritage, politics, and
identity. These self-inscribed representations are the subject of the second half of
this bibliography. Beverly Singer emphasizes that Native Americans today are
seeking to intervene in this running narrative of conquest and to rectify and
balance the one-sided, stock image of Indians as ignorant, distrustful, and
undesirable through continued work in the film industry. Native artists and
activists have taken up the pen, the microphone, and the camera to craft both
nonfiction media pieces (to inform, arouse, and persuade a larger public through
journalism, broadcasting, and documentary) and fictional narrative media such
as literature, feature films, television series, and video games. (For similar issues
on a global scale, please see the Oxford Bibliographies article on Indigenous
Media.)
Representations and Stereotyping of Native Americans in Media and Popular
Culture
There is no shortage of literature about stereotypes of Native Americans in
media and popular culture. In fact, there seems to be a glut of books on the
topic. Ranging from historical chronicles and lists of films to scathing political
analyses, these studies focus upon the ways that creators and distributors of
mainstream culture and media have, over the past century or more, constructed
images of Native Americans. The Western theme dominated American popular
culture from the days of Buffalo Bills Wild West shows, dime-store novels, and
1930s radio dramas to the classical Hollywood Westerns in both cinema and on
television, where Western series were the highest-rated programs of the late
1950s. So it is not surprising that the vast majority of images of Native
Americans (fictive or real) in mainstream media during the past century have
been in the context of the Western genres, and as a result, the majority of
scholarly literature has focused upon the portrayal of Indians in Westerns. A
smaller but significant body of scholarship has focused on gendered
characterizations of Native Americans in popular culture and, in particular, the
Indian Princess cultural myth caricatured to exaggeration in childrens films
such as Disneys Pocahontas (1995) yet still yearned for by amateur white
genealogists seeking a Cherokee princess in their ancestries (see, e.g.,
Marubbio 2006 and Ono and Buescher 2001, both cited under Gendered
Representations of Native Americans). The majority of these studies were written
during two major periods, the 1970s and 1990s, when the attention of scholars
following a rise in public awareness and public discoursewas most focused
upon providing better insights into multicultural awareness, the distinct cultures
and contributions of Americas ethnic and racial groups to the larger national
narrative, and especially on how the media have contributed (and continue to
contribute) to generalized perceptions, misconceptions, and stereotypes about
these cultural groups. The following sections provide clusters of citations that
allow us to follow the trajectory of the ways that American Indians have been
perceived and imaged in the national American imagination over the course of a
century, from the early-20th-century representations in museum exhibitions and
productions, documentaries, silent Hollywood feature films, and related genres,
through the golden age of the Hollywood Western (on film and later on
television) as well as the era of self-conscious reshaping of images of Indians in

many mainstream films beginning in the 1960s.
The works cited in this section provide extremely important insights about the
changing cultural processes over several centuries that have contributed to the
cultural imagery of the mythic Indian in one form or another, theorized from a
range of disciplinary perspectives and examining a variety of different types of
representations and discourses. Berkhofer 1979 is perhaps the most well-known
book on stereotypes of Indians from a historical point of view, while Deloria
1998 is a compelling book energizing the debate by providing a well-articulated
Native perspective. Bird 1996 and Huhndorf 2001 each provide broad-based
interdisciplinary studies of often-contradictory constructions of the Native
American (Indian) as a set of mythic tropes that have shaped our conceptions
of race, ethnicity, and structures of power in Americas shifting social structure.
Churchill 1998 and Chavez 2005 provide polemical and often-provocative
perspectives on the issue of the legacy of colonialism in the national imagination.
Fienup-Riordan 2003 provides a case study on the Inuit (Eskimo) of Alaska, a
distinctly different set of stereotypes from those of the Indians but no less
powerful in their cultural reach.
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Mans Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1979.
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Historian Berkhofers classic study of the conflicting ideological tropes about
Native Americans that shaped European, colonial American, and US attitudes and
policies with regard to American Indians, as well as shaping the various and
often-contradictory constructions of Indians in American popular culture and
media. (whereas Churchill 1998 and Chavez 2005 tend to be polemical).
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Bird, S. Elizabeth, ed. Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in
American Popular Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996.
Anthropologist Birds interdisciplinary collection examines the way white
American culture has, over the years, constructed a shifting yet persistent
mythic Indian in the cultural imagination as the object of the colonial gaze:
bifurcated between everything we fear, in the person of the marauding, hellish
savage, [and] everything we envy, in the person of the peaceful, mystical,
spiritual guardian of the land (p. 3).
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Chavez, Raul S. Childhood Indians: Television, Film and Sustaining the White
(Sub)Conscience. PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2005.
Native American history scholar Chavez examines 20th-century cinematic Indian
depictions using race theory, colonialist theory, and postcolonialist literary
theory to explain how Americans who grew up on dominant American
stereotypical images of American Indians have internalized what he considers to
be a white supremacist ideology, the white (sub)conscience, which continues
to oppress Native Americans.
Find this resource:
Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the
Colonization of American Indians. New York: City Lights, 1998.
A dozen essays by Churchill, a controversial and provocative writer, many of
which address how literature and film contribute to the continued oppression of
Native Americans; he tries to strip away at least some of the elaborate veil of
misimpression and disinformation behind which the ugly countenance of
EuroAmerican conquest, colonization, and genocide have been so carefully
hidden (p. x).
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Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Native historian Deloria provides rich historical and political insights regarding
the ways that white Americans over three centuries have created cultural
traditions involving enactments of their caricatured, romanticized fantasies about
Indiansfrom the Boston Tea Party to the fraternal organization of Red Men to
the Campfire Girls and Boy Scouts.
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Fienup-Riordan, Ann. Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2003.
A comprehensive and engaging study of the construction of the Eskimo (a.k.a.

Inuit) in American popular culture, from early films through Hollywood, as well as
in advertising images, documentaries, and ethnographic films.
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Huhndorf, Shari. Going Native: Indians in the Cultural Imagination. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2001.
Comparative literary scholar Huhndorf draws from many examples of Native
American representations in literature, film, and popular culture to understand
how Europeans and Americans have constructed categories of race and
ethnicity, particularly regarding characteristics of Indianness. Each chapter
focuses upon a distinct time period.
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The works in this section are significant in helping us to understand many of the
ways that Native American and First Nations tribal peoples were perceived and
imaged by European Americans during the critical period of American expansion
and colonization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The fascination with
North American Native peoples as the cultural other representing what was
believed to be a more primitive state or condition of human existence (yet also
reflecting an essential level of what might be called cultural purity) was
reflected in the photographs, films (documentary, fictional, and those scripted to
appear to be documentary), museum exhibits, and other types of performances
(such as the Wild West show), exhibitions, and popular literaturesites of
cultural representation and display that aimed to both enlighten and entertain
dominant audiences. The representations of this era were created by a diversity
of people and institutionsscientists, anthropologists, government agents,
explorers, artists, journalists, filmmakers, showmenand for a variety of
purposes. Cumulatively, they created stereotypical tropes that would quickly
become conventionalized, but studies about this period also reveal a great deal
of complexity in the early negotiations about how Native peoples would be
portrayed and the role of Native Americans in their own representation. Holm
and Quimby 1980 provides readers with an in-depth look at a significant early
film made by explorer and photographer Edward S. Curtis on the Northwest
Coast; further information on Curtis is available from the website Edward Curtis
Meets the Kwakwakawakw: In the Land of the Head Hunters. Morris 1994
explores the history of ethnographic film in this indigenous cultural region that
has so fascinated the American imagination with its large-scale material culture,
such as totem poles, house posts, carved and painted masks, and large wooden
boxes. Rony 1996 is a compelling study of ethnographic spectacle in the context

of early-20th-century ideologies and is extremely insightful in laying a foundation
for the way these images, in films, museums, and popular culture, captured the
scientific (and romantic) fascination of mainstream Americans; Griffiths 2002
complements and expands upon these ideas. Finally, Bataille 2001 provides a
number of scholarly analyses of the impact of these distorted depictions.
Bataille, Gretchen, ed. Native American Representations: First Encounters,
Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2001.
In this collection, Native American literature specialist Bataille and other cultural
critics interrogate who has controlled the representations and misrepresentations
of Native Americans in American culture over the past five centuries, and the
historical, cultural, and ideological impact of these depictions.
Find this resource:
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Edward Curtis Meets the Kwakwakawakw: In the Land of the Head Hunters.
Maintained by Aaron Glass and Brad Evans. Resources on the history of Native
Americans in film. Filmography of fictional and nonfictional representations of
Native Americans on film up to 1914, with bibliographies and links on
photographer/filmmaker Edward Curtis and his encounters with the tribes of the
Northwest Coast, particularly the Kwakiutl (Kwakwakawakw) and their potlatch
traditions.
Find this resource:
Griffiths, Alison. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-theCentury Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Based upon Griffithss 1998 dissertation at New York University, Origins of
Ethnographic Film. Study of the way that cultural differences were constructed
through the visual culture of the late 19th and early 20th centurymuseum
exhibits, worlds fair exhibitions, photography, and early cinema.
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Holm, Bill, and George Quimby. Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980.

A profile of Edward S. Curtis, famed documentary photographer of Native
American peoples in the early 20th century, in his remarkable intercultural
efforts to make the 1914 feature film In the Land of the War Canoes (originally In
the Land of the Head Hunters) made among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwakawakw)
peoples of Vancouver Island. The authors restored the film in 1972.
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Morris, Rosalind. New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the
Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
Uses literary criticism, film theory, history, and anthropology to explore the
history of ethnographic film among Northwest Coast tribes. Includes detailed
analyses of form and content of individual films as well as the institutional
politics that produced them.
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Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Examines how early anthropology, cinema, and popular culture constructed
stories and images of indigenous peoples either scientifically or romantically
based upon early-20th-century ideologies of race and evolution. Though focus is
global, emphasis on works of Edward Curtis and Robert Flaherty is relevant to
Native American representations.
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The relationship of American Indians to the early silent film industry has become
the subject of much scholarly interest, especially since the creation of the Library
of Congress American Indians in Silent Film collection in the mid-1990s (see Lund
1995); a number of these archival films are now accessible on the Treasures of
the American Film Archives DVD set. This rich collection has provided authors of
works such as Aleiss 1995, Hearne 2003, and Berndt 2005 with insight into the
complex roles of some Native Americans in these earliest days of pre-Hollywood
cinema, influencing the early silent cinema as directorssuch as James Young
Deer, who transitioned into cinema from the Wild West show circuitas well as
actors, consultants, and crew members. Aleiss 1995 notes that Native Americans
were involved in a much wider range of genres during this early period, including
comedies and dramas, and in representations considered to be culturally
authentic. Price 1973 provides an early study of representations of Indians in the
American film industry from the silent era through the 1950s, looking particularly
at the silent film era and the later Western serial genre. Griffiths 2001 examines
portrayals of Native Americans in early Westerns from 1894 to 1914, while Jay
2000 focuses in particular on films portraying Indians by auteur D. W. Griffith
during his Biograph years. All provide an insightful examination of an early
period in the film industry in which Native Americans had greater influence on
their own filmic representations (resulting in a broader range of opportunities,
images, and genres). Rosenthal 2005 is a cultural history of American Indians
who worked in the early Hollywood film industry and illustrates the between a
rock and a hard place position of these workers, who, while finding a way to
make a living, were also instrumental in helping to construct Hollywoods mythic
West and its glorification of the conquest and subordination of Americas
indigenous peoples. However, this window of opportunity closed by the early
1920s, when genre conventions solidified, resulting in limited narrative
structures and the use of white actors to play stereotyped Indian characters. In
addition to the works listed below, readers may find the first section of Scott
Simmons The Invention of the Western Film (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
to be helpful, as well as chapters from Philip Delorias Indians in Unexpected
Places (University of Kansas Press, 2006) and Andrew Brodie Smiths Shooting
Cowboys and Indians (University of Colorado Press, 2003) that discuss James
Young Deer.
Aleiss, Angela. Native Americans: The Surprising Silents. Cineaste 21.3 (1995):
3435.
Aleiss provides significant insights into the way Native Americans shaped the
narratives and representations in the silent film era, in comedies and dramas as
well as Westerns. Examining such films as James Young Deers White Fawns
Devotion (1910), D. W. Griffiths The Red Man and the Child (1908), and George
B. Seitzs The Vanishing American (1925), Aleiss questions: why did this pattern
not continue?
Find this resource:
Berndt, Christina Gish. Voices in the Era of Silents: An American Indian Aesthetic
in Early Silent Film. Native Studies Review 16.2 (2005): 3976.
Berndt discusses the early period of greater Native access to the shaping of
films. Until 1912, American Indians created films that reflected Native culture
and ideology in a way unparalleled until recently, and Native people both inside
and outside the film industry used this forum to voice opinions about their
representation in the dominant society (p. 40).
Find this resource:
Griffiths, Alison. Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the Early Western.
Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.3 (2001): 100111.
DOI: 10.1080/01956050109601015Save Citation Export Citation E-mail
Citation
Explores spectatorship and early film Westerns, discussing Indians in actualities
and early films from 1894 to 1914, as well as the ways white audiences
understood the casting of whites as Indian characters.
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Hearne, Joanna. The Cross-Heart People: Race and Inheritance in the Silent
Western. Journal of Popular Film and Television 30.4 (Winter 2003): 181196.
Citation
Analysis of several dozen films from the Library of Congress, most from 1908 to
1919, in terms of the use of cross-racial romances as narrative devices; the
defining narratives of these films reflected physical acts and emotional traumas
of displacement and replacement. Also, Hearne notes, Indian identity becomes
an uncertain negotiation between appearance and blood quantum, between the
self-referential playacting of films costuming and the real threat posed by racial
mixture (p. 185).
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Jay, Gregory S. White Mans Book No Good: D. W. Griffith and the American
Indian. Cinema Journal 39.4 (2000): 326.
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2000.0016Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
A critical essay about the apparently sympathetic representation of American
Indians during silent film director D. W. Griffiths years with Biograph Studios,
reflecting on the role played by popular culture in mediating white-Indian
conflicts in the first decades of the 20th century.
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Lund, Karen C. American Indians in Silent Film: Motion Pictures in the Library of
Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995.
An annotated list of silent fiction and nonfiction films with substantial American
Indian content that are in the collections of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and
Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.
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Price, John A. The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures.
Ethnohistory 20.2 (1973): 153171.
DOI: 10.2307/481668Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
Recounts the distorted portrayals of American Indians from the 1890s Wild West
shows through the silent film era, when films were sometimes pro-Indian but
increasingly fell into the classic Western genre of villainous Indians. Discusses
the Western serial genre (19301947), followed by increasingly sympathetic
stereotypes in the 1950s and 1960s with greater use of Indian actors.
Find this resource:
Rosenthal, Nicolas G. Representing Indians: Native American Actors on
Hollywoods Frontier. Western Historical Quarterly 36.3 (Autumn 2005): 328
352.
Illuminates the paradoxical position of Native American actors and crew
members in the early Hollywood industry. With little control over the content of
Western films, Indians working in Hollywood often confronted the stark choice
between participating in these cultural productions and finding another way to
make a living (p. 330), Rosenthal writes, highlighting the roots of struggle over
issues of cultural identity and representation that continues even today.
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The representation of Native Americans in classical Hollywood (c. 19251948)
was almost exclusively in the popular and stylized Western genre set on the
American frontier of the late 19th century and focusing upon the conquest and
subordination of all that stood in the way of the Euro-American settler societies.
Thus the antagonists were the wilderness and natural elements needing to be
tamed, the existing tribal inhabitants of the land needing to be eliminated or
conquered, and outlaws who resisted acculturation into the social order. In the
years following World War II and the subsequent breakup of the traditional
Hollywood studio system, filmmakers began to incorporate more awareness of
the cultural politics of Indian stereotyping. As the New Hollywood became
reassembled from the vestiges of the studios, as well as the rise of newly
empowered independent filmmakers, the standard cookie-cutter portrayals of
Indians began to become more nuanced, slightly more sympathetic to
understanding and explaining the cultural and historical conditions of various
tribes. This turn intensified during the tumultuous 1960s, as the civil rights
movement and the parallel rise of Indian activism began to instill awareness
(though still young and not always fully developed) of the need to complicate
and problematize the portrayals of Indians, especially in Westerns. A
groundbreaking film in terms of shifting representations was Cheyenne Autumn
(1964), John Fords final Western often seen to be an elegy to Native American
culture and perhaps as atonement for earlier stereotypes. A rash of films in the
early 1970s began to break out of traditional genre conventions, narrative
formulas, and characterizations and to create new onesby, for example,
creating lead characters who were raised by or who had lived for a time among a
tribe, or half-breeds with essentialized Indian sensibilities and who
incorporated romanticized cultural and personal traits and allegiances to Native
communities. Some films in particular became the focus of academic criticism,
from Cheyenne Autumn to Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Little Big Man
(1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), Soldier Blue (1970), Billy Jack (1971), and
Jeremiah Johnson (1972). During this period we find the first wave of film
criticism regarding the history of representations of Native Americans in
mainstream films, such as Keshena 1980; Hartman 1976; Churchill, et al. 1978;
and Bataille and Silet 1980. Georgakas 1972 and Cawelti 1973 provide a specific
focus on the New Westerns.
Bataille, Gretchen, and Charles Silet, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native
Americans in the Movies. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980.
A groundbreaking collection of documents, as well as academic and popular
essays, examining and critically analyzing the representations of Native
Americans in American cinema from the silent film era to the late 20th century,
including the perspectives of both Native American and nonNative American
writers. This volume also includes a photographic essay.
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Cawelti, John G. Reflections on the New Western Films: The Jewish Cowboy, the
Black Avenger, and the Return of the Vanishing American. University of Chicago
Magazine 65 (JanuaryFebruary 1973): 2532.
Examines the new filmic mythology about the West, especially the changing
representations of different ethnic groups. In the new Hollywood Western, the
Natives represent a regenerative and positive influence upon the Western hero
and are increasingly portrayed as victims of the white expansion and
legal/military force.
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Churchill, Ward, Norbert Hill, and Mary Ann Hill. Media Stereotyping and Native
Response: An Historical Overview. Indian Historian 11.4 (1978): 4556, 63.
Interrogates the formation of cultural stereotypes about Native Americans
through the entertainment industry from the 1880s to the 1970s, including early
Wild West shows, films, professional music, and television.
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Georgakas, Dan. They Have Not Spoken: American Indians in Film. Film
Quarterly 25.3 (Spring 1972): 26.
A critique and analysis of the somewhat improved, yet still problematic,
representations of Native Americans in contemporaneous Hollywood feature
films including A Man Called Horse, Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, and Tell Them
Willie Boy Is Here.
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Hartman, Hedy. A Brief Review of the Native American in American Cinema.
Indian Historian 9 (Summer 1976): 2729.
Briefly examines the critiques by the activist group the American Indian
Movement regarding the dominant American film industrys portrayal of Native
Americans.
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Keshena, Rita. The Role of American Indians in Motion Pictures. In The Pretend
Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Edited by Gretchen Bataille
and Charles Silet, 106111. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980.
Keshena critiques the ways that the American motion picture industry has
exploited American Indians in film and the process by which the dominant social
order has profited from these exploitations and stereotypes. Originally published
in 1974.
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After a dearth of scholarship in the 1980s, an explosion of interdisciplinary
scholarship regarding screen representations of Native Americans reflected the
paradigm shift in the social sciences leading to a greater incorporation of critical

cultural theory. These studies are also a response to a new wave of revisionist
Westerns (led by Dances with Wolves [1990]) that brought Westerns and issues
of representation of Native Americans in films solidly back into the public
discourse. As a result, the studies of the past two decades tend to be much more
theoretical in terms of cultural and sociological analysis than those of the 1970s
and tend to periodize the filmic representations within the context of larger
cinematic and social movements. Hilger 1995 develops and bifurcates the longstanding model of the noble savage by tracing these thematic images through
film history, while Kilpatrick 1999 provides a notable overview of celluloid
Indians. Appleford 1995 and Reed 2001 each interrogate the representations in
a group of films (most from the early 1990s) that are to some degree
empowering for Native Americans though still stereotypical in many ways. Prats
2002 and writers in the edited collection Rollins and OConner 2003 primarily
analyze the Hollywood Westerns and particularly specific films. From a
distinctively different angle, Aleiss 2008 provides insights, based upon archival
research into the studio production papers and materials, into the industrial
processes and decision making that led to the construction (and frequent
reconstruction) of the Hollywood Indian, while Raheja 2011 offers new and
compelling insights into the roles of Native Americans within the film industry
who helped to influence these constructions.
Aleiss, Angela. Making the White Mans Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood
Movies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008.
An incisive recent study, based upon archival research with the production
materials of Hollywood studios, that examines how the American motion picture
industry created the screen image of the American Indian and how that image
transformed over time in complex and ambiguous ways.
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Appleford, Robert. Coming Out from Behind the Rocks: Constructs of the Indian
in Recent U.S. and Canadian Cinema. American Indian Culture and Research
Journal 19.1 (Winter 1995): 97118.
Appleford looks at the way that North American feature films of the early 1990s
such as Dances with Wolves (1990), Black Robe (1991), Thunderheart (1992),
and Clearcut (1991), while romanticizing American Indians, also directed public
attention to, and built awareness of, North American Indian culture, history, and
values rather than stereotyping them as savages or villains.
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Hilger, Michael. From Savage to Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film.

Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1995.
Hilger presents a model of the opposing popular constructions of the Native
American as noble, on the one hand, and savage, on the other, then traces these
stereotypical representations through the history of cinema, from silent films
through the 1990s.
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Kilpatrick, Neva Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
An overview of Native representation in mainstream Hollywood film, critically
examining the changing stereotypes and depictions of Native peoples as well as
discussing the recent impact (as of the late 1990s) of Native American
screenwriters and filmmakers on the film industry at that time.
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Prats, Armando J. Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.
In this critical, poststructuralist examination of Native American representation in
the Western, Prats explores the myth of conquest and emphasizes the irony of
the Westerns strategies for evading the actual portrayal of Native Americans.
Among the films he discusses at length are Northwest Passage, Stagecoach, The
Searchers, Hombre, Hondo, Ulzanas Raid, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dances
with Wolves.
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Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and
Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2011.
A much-needed new perspective about the ways that Native actors, directors,
and spectators have helped shape Hollywoods cinematic representations of
indigenous peoples to non-Native audiences. Raheja exposes the complicated

and multifaceted nature of these representations.
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Reed, T. V. Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian.
Wicazo Sa Review 16.2 (Fall 2001): 7597.
DOI: 10.1353/wic.2001.0030Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
Reed studies the way the politically activist Red Power or American Indian
Movement of the 1960s and 1970s has been portrayed in Hollywood and
independent films, looking in particular at Powwow Highway (1989),
Thunderheart (1992), and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994).
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Rollins, Peter C., and John E. OConner. Hollywoods Indian: The Portrayal of the
Native American in Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
Providing a series of historical analyses of specific Hollywood films as well as of
Chris Eyres Smoke Signals, this volume reflects scholarship primarily from the
disciplines of history and American studies.
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The body of literature critically analyzing representations of Native Americans on
mainstream American television is surprisingly slim, especially in comparison to
the volumes of work on representations in Hollywood films. The hopeful note
regarding the studies listed here is that they represent what may be a broader
scope of analysis of representation in terms of genre: Wilson 1996 is a
dissertation that looks at the cultural politics of involving Indian voices in a 1958
NBC television documentary about tribal rights. George and Sanders 1995
examines the construction of American Indians in dramatic television series of
the 1990s, while Hersey 1998 and Adare 2005 examine science fiction (dramatic
and comedy) of the 1960s1990s, and Tahmahkera 2008 looks at Indians in
situation comedy. Canote 2009 is a blog article series that chronicles Native
representation across television history. Butler 2008 is a dissertation that
provides new scholarship on Native American efforts to make changes from
within the television industry. Providing a very different kind of analysis, Chavez
2005 applies race theory, as well as colonialist and postcolonialist literary theory,
to examine how mainstream American television has constructed a white
supremacist ideology that continues to oppress Native Americans.
Adare, Sierra. Indian Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations Voices

Speak Out. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Adare takes on Hollywoods irresponsible depiction of First Nations peoples
culture, traditions, elders, religious beliefs, and sacred objects by studying
Native American viewers responses to stereotypes in the television science
fiction genre from the 1960s to the 1990s. Participants in Adares study viewed
episodes from My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager, Quantum Leap,
The Adventures of Superman, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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Butler, Monica. Check Your Local Listings: Indigenous Representation in
Television. PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008.
Butler illuminates ways that Native individuals and organizations have
consistently articulated their own agendas through shared methods of
resistance. Native activists have historically challenged the television industry
through their roles as lobbyists, actors, consultants, militants, journalists, and
broadcasters in order to secure positions of power in television entertainment
and news media to enable them to change the system from within.
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Canote, Terence Towles (a.k.a. Mercurie). The Invisible Minority: Native
Americans on Television. A Shroud of Thoughts, 2009.
Though nonacademic (and therefore not footnoted), this extended blog article is
a thorough, engaging, and well-written overview of Native American portrayals in
television storylines from the 1950s to the present. Accessible online in three
parts.
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Chavez, Raul S. Childhood Indians: Television, Film and Sustaining the White
(Sub)Conscience. PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2005.
Native American history scholar Chavez examines cinematic Indian depictions
during the 20th century using race theory, colonialist theory, and postcolonialist
literary theory to try to explain how Americans who grew up on dominant
American stereotypical images of American Indians have internalized what he
considers to be a white supremacist ideology, the white (sub)conscience, which

continues to oppress Native Americans.
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George, Diana, and Susan Sanders. Reconstructing Tonto: Cultural Formations
and American Indians in 1990s Television Fiction. Cultural Studies 9.3 (October
1995): 427452.
Citation
Critical historical analysis of the stereotyped cultural construction of American
Indians in 1990s television fiction, focusing on Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks,
and Paradise. The authors argue that mainstream America gains little
understanding of the contemporary identity issues facing contemporary
American Indian nations through these television programs.
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Hersey, Eleanor. Word-Healers and Code-Talkers: Native Americans in The XFiles. Journal of Popular Film and Television 26.3 (Fall 1998): 109119.
Hersey provides a postmodern analysis of three episodes of the science fiction
TV series The X-FilesAnasazi, The Blessing Way, and Paper Clipwhich
combine tropes of Native American mythology and those of science fiction,
especially the mythology and standard tropes of alien abduction.
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Tahmahkera, Dustin S. Custers Last Sitcom: Decolonized Viewing of the
Sitcoms Indian. American Indian Quarterly 32.3 (Summer 2008): 324351.
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0012Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
Examines the fabrication of faux-Indian identities in TV sitcoms. Detailed
analyses of episodes of The Brady Bunch (1971), Saved by the Bell (1990), and
My Wife and Kids (2002) reveal key intersections between playing Indian and
notions of authenticity, multiculturalism, and cultural appropriation that
predominantly situate Native Peoples within a limited logic of what constitutes
Indianness (p. 326).
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Wilson, Pamela. Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television
Documentary, and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s. PhD diss.,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996.
Case study of a controversial 1958 network television documentary, The

American Stranger (NBC), which addressed the political, cultural, and economic
situation of the Menominee, Flathead, and Blackfeet tribes during this
termination era in which the US Congress was attempting to terminate federaltribal relations. The broadcast sparked public outcry and a heated political
debate in Congress. See also Wilson 1999 (cited under Audiences, Reception,
and Spectatorship).
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Almost all studies of constructed images of the screen Indian have noted the
extreme gender distinctions and stereotyping that have existed in these
portrayals. A number of books and articles focus specifically on the gender issues
in this history of representation, examining filmic constructions of either Native
masculinity or femininity, or both. Age is also a contributing factor. Male Indians
(or faux-Indians) dominated the screen of the classic Westerns, vilified as
threatening savage warriors (if young) or sometimes revered as wise, timeless,
but physically powerless elders (if old) (see Dowell 1995, Klopotek 2001). The
less frequent portrayal of Indian women was also bifurcated by age, with the
younger women sexualized as seductive and alluring maidens or princesses
(see Marubbio 2006) and the elder women often seen as threatening because of
their spiritual knowledge (Strong 1996). Portrayals of cross-racial romance
(generally between Native women and white settlers) were common narrative
themes in the silent film era (see Aleiss 2008, cited under Critiquing Hollywood
Indians: Studies since the 1990s, and Hearne 2003) and also in the enduring
cultural myth of Pocahontas: the 1995 Walt Disney version of this story became
fodder for a great deal of cultural criticism (see Ono and Buescher 2001,
Pewewardy 19961997). Readers interested in the Pocahontas myth across many
forms of art and literature may be interested in Robert Tiltons Pocahontas: The
Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1994), as well as a recent study by art historian Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua
Apache), Our Indian Princess: Subverting the Stereotype (Sante Fe, NM: School
for Advanced Research Press, 2009).
Bird, Elizabeth S. Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular
Media. Journal of Communication 49.3 (Summer 1999): 6162.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1999.tb02805.xSave Citation Export Citation E-mail
Citation
As images of Native Americans permeate contemporary popular culture, Bird
traces how Native Americans have become sexualized and desexualized in
relation to the White gaze (p. 61).
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Dowell, Pat. The Mythology of the Western: Hollywood Perspectives on Race and
Gender in the Nineties. Cineaste 21.12 (1995): 610.

Argues that a change in emphasis regarding race and gender came with the
revival of the Western in the 1990s. The boundaries being challenged in this new
genre revision are less about American hegemony and more about the conflict
regarding definitions of masculinity: the boundaries of gender and, by
extension, the bonds of family through which male hegemony is nurtured,
maintained, and reproduced (p. 10).
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Hearne, Joanna. The Cross-Heart People: Race and Inheritance in the Silent
Western. Journal of Popular Film and Television 30.4 (Winter 2003): 181196.
Citation
Analyzes films from 1908 to 1919 to show how cross-racial romances were used
as narrative devices, finding that the defining narratives of these films reflected
physical acts and emotional traumas of displacement and replacement. Also,
Hearne notes, Indian identity becomes an uncertain negotiation between
appearance and blood quantum, between the self-referential playacting of films
costuming and the real threat posed by racial mixture (p. 185).
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Klopotek, Brian. I Guess Your Warrior Look Doesnt Work Every Time:
Challenging Indian Masculinity in the Cinema. In Across the Great Divide:
Cultures of Manhood in the American West. Edited by Matthew Basso, 251273.
New York: Routledge, 2001.
In this engaging essay, Klopotek elucidates the impossibly masculine race of
noble or ignoble savages, wise old chiefs, and cunning warriors constructed by
Hollywood representations. In contrast to this hypermasculinity, he presents
studies of three films that defy such stereotyping and present much more
complexity in Native American gender roles: Powwow Highway (1989), Grand
Avenue (1996), and Smoke Signals (1998).
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Marubbio, M. Elise. Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women
in Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Marubbio examines the conflicting portrayals of Native American women in
Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, presenting a model of the
archetypal tropes of the Celluloid Maiden, the Celluloid Princess, and the
Sexualized Maiden, variations of the threatening, seductive, but conquerable

Other on Americas frontier, which helped to justify American colonialism.
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Ono, Kent A., and Derek T. Buescher. Deciphering Pocahontas: Unpackaging the
Commodification of a Native American Woman. Critical Studies in Media
Communication 18.1 (March 2001): 2343.
Citation
Examines the commodification and marketing of the 1995 Disney film
Pocahontas and movie-related products to children and their parents. While the
commodity world of Pocahontas uses utopic appeals to sell products, through
their appropriation of feminism and Native American culture and history,
Pocahontas products and discourses contribute to the material oppression of . . .
Native American women in particular (p. 23).
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Pewewardy, Cornel. The Pocahontas Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for Educators.
Journal of Navajo Education 14.12 (Fall/Winter 19961997): 2025.
Addresses the persistence of damaging racist and sexist stereotypes of American
Indians in contemporary film and print media and their devastating effects on
young nonmainstream learners. Primarily critiques Disneys 1995 animated film
Pocahontas, the music for which contained lyrics such as Their whole disgusting
race is like a curse; their skins a hellish red; theyre only good when dead from
the song Savages.
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Strong, Pauline Turner. Animated Indians: Critique and Contradiction in
Commodified Childrens Culture. Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (August 1996):
405424.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00060Save Citation Export Citation E-mail
Citation
An engaging ethnographic analysis and critique of the cultural contradictions in
Pocahontas (1995) and The Indian in the Cupboard (1995): What is the exotic,
sensual, copyrighted Pocahontas if not a mascot for a feminine, earthy,
conciliatory New Age spirituality . . . to embody our millennial dreams for
wholeness and harmony? (p. 415).
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A small number of scattered studies have been done on questions of reception
(or perception) of portrayals of Native Americans on screen, either by audiences
representing the dominant culture or by experimental groups of Native test
audiences. Griffiths 2001 uses historical and archival research to uncover
audience reactions to images of Indians in early silent films. Shively 1992 and
Leuthold 1995 are based upon empirical research into audience response to
representations of Native Americans in particular Western films. Tom Grayson
Colonneses essay (Grayson Colonnese 2004) provides a stimulating and
poignantly humorous Native American perspective (or four, in fact) on the classic
John Ford Western, The Searchers. Pack 2007 examines how Navajo audiences
interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from filmic images of Indians made by
the dominant culture. Wilson 1999 is based upon archival historical research,
using primary documents, into the controversy surrounding a groundbreaking
1950s television report on Indian rights, involving not only activists, tribal
officials, and television producers but also the US Department of the Interior,
members of the US Congress, and members of the television viewing audience.
Grayson Colonnese, Tom. Native American Reactions to The Searchers. In The
Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Fords Classic Western. Edited by
Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman, 335342. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2004.
Asking Indians to watch a John Wayne western is like asking someone if they
would like to go back and visit the schoolyard where they used to get beat up
every day (p. 335), Grayson Colonnese (Santee Sioux) remarks as he opens an
illuminating conversation among four Native colleagues as they deconstruct and
critique the cultural missteps in filmed portrayals of Native land and cultures in
John Fords 1956 classic Western.
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Griffiths, Alison. Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the Early Western.
Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.3 (2001): 100111.
Citation
Explores spectatorship and early film Westerns, discussing Indians in actualities
and early films from 1894 to 1914, as well as the ways white audiences
understood the casting of whites as Indian characters.
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Leuthold, Steven M. Native American Responses to the Western. American
Indian Culture and Research Journal 19.1 (Winter 1995): 153190.

Leuthold studied the reactions of Indian commentators and college students to
representations of Indians in various film Westerns of the 1970s, 1980s, and
early 1990s, such as Jeremiah Johnson (1972), Soldier Blue (1974), Dances with
Wolves (1990), Powwow Highway (1988), and Thunderheart (1991).
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Pack, Sam. Watching Navajos Watch Themselves. Wicazo Sa Review (Fall
2007): 111127.
An important study of how Navajo audiences navigate the conflicting
representations from the dominant culture in contradiction to their own cultural
identities and life experiences. Pack focuses on how media are creatively
interpreted by subaltern audiences to both construct and contest representations
of self and other (p. 111).
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Shively, J. E. Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of Western Films among
American Indians and Anglos. American Sociological Review 57.6 (December
1992): 725734.
Examining how minorities perceive the central myths of the dominant culture,
Shively found that American Indians and Anglos both interpreted Westerns as
representing a set of values about the land, autonomy, and freedom, while
Anglos linked the Western myth to their own history and turned it into an
affirmation of the values their ancestors strove for and imposed on the West (p.
725).
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Wilson, Pamela. All Eyes on Montana: Television Audiences, Social Activism, and
Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s. Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 16.34 (1999): 325356.
situation of the Menominee, Flathead, and Blackfeet tribes during this so-called
termination era. The broadcast sparked public outcry and a heated political
debate in Congress, as well as grassroots support from viewers.
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Most Americans are unaware that there were several film genres in European
cinema in the postwar years that reflected a fascination with the American West
and, in particular, with the relations between Native Americans and the EuroAmerican settlers and government. A popular film genre in West Germany in the
1960s was based on the late-19th-century adventure novels of German writer
Karl May, set in the American West, and in particular his beloved character
Winnetou (see Gemnden 2002). On the other side of the Iron Curtain, these
narratives and styles were imitated (yet altered to fit the Communist ideology)
by the East German DEFA film studio and were known as the Indianerfilme (see
Buscombe 2006, Lischke and McNab 2005). Popular throughout the Sovietcontrolled Eastern bloc, most of the films were shot on locations in Croatia (then
Yugoslavia), which had geographies similar to those of the American West. As
Theodore Van Alst notes, Both East and West Germany projected metaphoric
national mythologies through their respective Indianerfilme; the West reached
back for a nostalgically constructed tradition of innocence and natural harmony,
while the East dreamed of an historical precedent for their present and future
farmer and workers paradise (Van Alst 2008). In addition to writing about the
German films, Van Alst (Lakota) also includes Italys so-called Spaghetti Westerns
in his examination of the ways that European nations defeated in World War II by
the Allies used the medium to further their own political stances, cinematically
writing socialist and Marxist struggles into the words and actions of mixedblood
American Indian heroes (p. 3).
Buscombe, Edward. Injuns! Native Americans in the Movies. London: Reaktion,
2006.
In addition to a historical survey of the shifting portrayals of Native Americans in
the American film industry, Buscombe adds a global angle by focusing on the
two German film genres of the mid-20th century: the adventure films based upon
the novels of German writer Karl May and the Indianerfilme of East Germany, in
which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against
Yankee imperialists (p. 274).
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Gemnden, Gerd. Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme. In
Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Edited by Colin G.
Calloway, Gerd Gemnden, and Susanne Zantop, 243256. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002.
German cinema scholar Gemnden writes about the East German Indian film
genre, an adaptation of the popular West German genre based upon adventure
stories of the American West yet reshaped to fit the Communist ideology and
portraying the Indians as the sympathetic proletariat up against the oppressive

US regime.
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Lischke, Ute, and David T. McNab. Show Me the Money: Representation of
Aboriginal People in East-German Indian Films. In Walking a Tightrope:
Aboriginal People and Their Representations. By David T. McNab and Ute Lischke,
283304. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.
Between 1966 and 1983, the East German state film studio DEFA produced
fourteen Indianerfilme about the American West, often coproduced with other
Communist nations. In an about-face from the American Western genre, in these
films the Indians are the heroes and the Americans the villains. The authors
argue that these fascinating films reflect no knowledge of Native cultures and
serve mainly as propaganda films.
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Van Alst, Theodore C. How Quickly They Forget: American Indians in European
Film, 19621976. PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2008.
Cold Warera German and Italian cinema constructed fantasy relationships
between American Indians and European audiences as part of a filmic resistance
to postwar American films, in doing so taking the exoticism of the mythic
American Western space (as well as its mythic character types) and transforming
them into stories that in effect challenged American political and cultural
domination.
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Media by Native Americans: Self-Representations
So much attention has been paid to the constructed ways that Native Americans
and other indigenous and minority peoples have been stereotyped in the media,
from Edward Curtiss war canoes in 1914 to Hollywood Westerns Indians in the
1930s to cartoon depictions of Pocahontas in the 1990s. What would happen,
one might have wondered a few decades ago, if Native Americans should,
individually or collectively, decide to take up the cameras and pens for
themselves? Would their worldor the larger worldlook different through their
lenses? What might they choose to focus the irises of the cameras upon? How
might they frame and shoot the image, given access to the same tools as other
filmmakers? Would they adopt the visual languagea semiotic system for
conveying meaning through a number of conventionalized uses of the camera

such as camera angles and perspective, editing styles, pacing, indications of
narrative flow and disruption, and so onthat had arisen in early-20th-century
Hollywood and become accepted to both creators and consumers (interpreters)
of American film and television? For what uses and functions might they desire to
use film, video, and other media technologiesto document, conserve, and
archive cultural rituals and traditions? To teach a younger generation? To
communicate and share news with other Native peoples? To share their cultural
traditions with outside cultures, such as the American mainstream? To express
their artistic visions and tell their unique stories? To critique the dominant and
postcolonial power structure? To entertain themselves? To fight for their cultural
and political sovereignty and right to self-determination? Would their films and
programs look like, sound like, be structured like conventional American film and
television? Or would there be something distinctively different about the mode of
production, the form of the text, or the conditions through which Native
Americans might consumewatch, listen to, and make meaning fromtheir own
media forms?
Project
Anthropologists were some of the first to introduce film technologies into Native
communities in the 1960s as part of an evolving tradition of using film and video
within anthropology to help study the cultural traditions and practices of
indigenous cultures. One of the most significant and earliest projects was the
Navajo Film Themselves project, begun in 1966 by anthropologists Worth and
Adair (see Worth 1997, Worth and Adair 1970), a grand experiment whose goal
was to provide film technology to young Navajos to discover the degree to which
any filmmaking through their eyes might reflect a distinct cultural grammar or
aesthetics. Findings included strong divergences from the dominant American
film style in terms of narrative style, with a focus on walking (the journey, or the
process of seeking) rather than on the destination activity; a cultural reluctance
to shoot facial close-ups indicating some very significant differences in attitudes
about appropriateness of looking at or displaying someone elses face; and some
very interesting observations about the different cultural logics of narrative
sequencing and visual storytelling (see Pourshariati 2010 for excerpts from the
projects films). A half century later, contemporary 21st-century Navajo
filmmakers attest to the rich array of cultural and personal vision that has
developed into filmic art in the nearly half a century since Worth and Adair
introduced film production technology into the Navajo culture. Pack 2000
examines thirty years of cultural and political change in addition to media
empowerment, while Lewis 2010 and Peterson 2011 introduce us to a thriving
Navajo national cinema. Some noted Navajo film artists today (many of them
quite young) include Nanobah Becker, Shawna Begay, Klee Benally, Arlene
Bowman, Norman Brown, Lena Carr, Velma Kee Craig, Shonie De La Rosa,
Ramona Emerson, Melissa Henry, Bennie Klain, Larry Blackhorse Lowe, Billy
Luther, Rachel Nez, Deidra Peaches, Shelby Ray, Sarah Del Seronde, and
Donavan Seschillie. The short film The Rocket Boy by Seschillie and colleagues
was selected and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011.
Lewis, Randolph. The New Navajo Cinema: Cinema and Nation in the Indigenous
Southwest. Velvet Light Trap 66 (Fall 2010): 5061.
DOI: 10.1353/vlt.2010.0000Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
A group of Navajo filmmakers are imposing a new sensibility on the Southwest,
Lewis writes, focusing attention on Larry Blackhorse Lowe, Bennie Klain, and
Nanobah Becker as pioneers of a Navajo national cinema (including narrative,
documentary, and experimental film) that expresses the particularities of Navajo
cultural vision in a way that may sustain the political sovereignty of the vast
Navajo Nation (p. 50).
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Navajo Film The Rocket Boy Headed to Sundance!.
Donavan Seschillie, Jake Hoyungowa, and Deidre Lynn Peaches are three
contemporary Navajo filmmakers whose short film, The Rocket Boy, was selected
for the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011.
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Pack, Sam. Indigenous Media Then and Now: Situating the Navajo Film Project.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17.3 (October 2000): 273.
Citation
Pack discusses how the cultural and political climate among the Navajo has
changed in the three decades since Worth and Adairs Navajo Film Project,
focusing on issues of Native authenticity, empowerment, and the ethics of
representation. Providing a case study of Navajo radio station KTNN, he discusses
how Native self-representation has become the dominant paradigm.
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Peterson, Leighton C. Reel Navajo: The Linguistic Creation of Indigenous
Screen Memories. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35.2 (2011):
111134.
Interrogates the ideologies and practices surrounding the production of Navajolanguage films by Navajo directors. Film is a nexus for linguistic vitality,
Peterson argues, as filmmakers negotiate their cultural productions with an eye
toward authenticity, global expectations, and keeping it real for themselves,
their Navajo speaking audiences, and for historical accuracy (see online
abstract).
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Pourshariati, Kate. Navajo Film Themselves: Through Navajo Eyes. 2010.
In late 2010, the Library of Congress presented excerpts from Worths 1960s
seven-film series Navajo Film Themselves. The film screening was introduced by
Kate Pourshariati, film archivist at the Penn Museum at the University of
Pennsylvania. Forty-four minutes of video and a transcript are available at this
site.
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Worth, Sol. Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and
Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
The longer and more detailed version reflecting upon the 1966 Navajo project,
this classic volume attempts to use the Navajo film experiment as a way to
examine the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as it might apply to visual codes or
languagesthat is, how might people structure their reality through film? How
might each culture have its own visual grammar?
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Worth, Sol, and John Adair. Navajo Filmmakers. American Anthropologist 72.1
(February 1970): 934.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.1.02a00050Save Citation Export Citation E-mail
Citation
This 1970 journal article is a concise analytical report and overview of the
findings of the 1966 experiment on the Navajo Reservation, when Worth taught
six Navajo students how to use filmmaking and editing technology and provided
a series of assignments. The analysis was based not only on the content and
style of the resulting films but also on interviews and conversations with the
filmmakers.
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The postWorld War II years brought more mainstream American popular culture
into Indian communities, exposing the younger generations to the cultures
beyond the reservation communities. Following upon a generation or more that
had, in many cases, been forcibly removed from their home communities and
required to attend government-run boarding schools in attempts to assimilate
them into American culture, the onslaught of popular culture (as well as the
federal relocation programs during this era that created large communities of
displaced urban Indians) cumulatively worked to create a new generation of
semi-assimilated young Native Americans who felt alienated from their
traditional language and cultural identities. The empowerment movements of the
1960s also provided opportunities for this generation of Native young people,
many well educated in the American school system and comfortable with
dominant technologies and political styles, to become activists to try and reclaim
the heritage and power that they learned had been taken from their peoples
through questionable legal tactics. This Red Power movement became quite
skilled in creating spectacles to attract the attention of the mainstream media
and to use the publicity to spread their ideological message. By the 1970s, many
young Native Americans were beginning to experiment with using film to express
their cultural voices, while during this time a number of tribal communities were
setting up community broadcasting facilities (radio and/or television), in addition
to tribal newspapers, to encourage local media production that might compete,
ideologically, with the dominant images that were streaming into their
communities. Native American artists began to slowly break into the mainstream
world of media production and gain valuable skills that they would later use
independently. Today their works are exhibited as part of the burgeoning film
festival infrastructure supporting the Native New Wave, especially at Sundance,
the National Geographic All Roads Festival, the San Francisco American Indian
Film festival, and the National Museum of the American Indian Festival. Singer
2001 has been perhaps the groundbreaking book on the topic of Native film,
while Prins 1989, Weatherford 1992, Cummings 2001, and Cummings 2011
provide valuable accounts of this growth from different perspectives (Prins from
anthropology, Weatherford from the museum world, Cummings from media and
cultural studies). Nicholson 2003 and Knopf 2009 provide broad theoretical
insights about the cultural and political implications of Native-controlled
representations that have led to what Raheja 2011 calls visual sovereignty.
Cummings, Denise K. Accessible Poetry? Cultural Intersection and Exchange in
Contemporary American Indian and American Independent Film. Studies in
American Indian Literatures 13.1 (2001): 5780.
Celebrates the birth since the 1960s of a new movement by Native American
actors to combat negative stereotyping and the rise of a generation of
independent American Indian film producers, directors, and writers who are
enabling this ethnic group to speak its own voice with complexity and diversity
(p. 57).
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Cummings, Denise K. Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian
Film and Art. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the mediation of identity and cultural
revitalization in contemporary Native America through visual media. Films
include Imprint (2007, Chris Eyre and Michael Linn), It Starts with a Whisper
(1993, Shelley Niro), Mohawk Girls (2005, Tracey Deer), Skins (2002, Chris Eyre),
The Business of Fancydancing (2002, Sherman Alexie), and a selection of Native
Latin films.
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Knopf, Kerstin. Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North
America. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.
Knopf uses poststructuralist and postcolonial theory to explore how indigenous
filmmakers have made the transition from objects of the camera lenses of
outsiders to active subjects engaged in creating self-controlled images of
indigenous cultures, using classical Hollywood film conventions, technologies,
and distribution channels but creating their own counterdiscourse.
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Nicholson, Heather Norris, ed. Screening Culture: Constructing Image and
Identity. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003.
This collection of essays by American, British, and Canadian scholars examines
the role that visual imagery may have played in the 20th-century oppression of
indigenous North Americans as well as the way that cinema and television have
provided a major arena within which earlier images could be challenged,
resisted, ridiculed, and replaced in ways that illustrate some of the changing
dynamics of power-knowledge relations . . . (p. 11).
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Prins, Harald E. L. Native Americans and the Ethnocinematic Complex: From
Native Participation to Production Control. In Eyes across the Water: The
Amsterdam Conference on Visual Anthropology and Sociology, 1989. Edited by
Robert Boonzajer Flaes, 8089. Amsterdam: Het Sinhuis, 1989.
Based upon Prinss address at the 1989 Conference on Visual Anthropology and
Sociology, this paper reflects a significant paradigm shift in ethnographic
filmmaking among anthropologists. Despite noting the ambiguous potential of
films impact on Native Americans, as both subversive and affirmative of culture,
Prins argues for the power of the camera to enable indigenous peoples to control
their own filmic representations.
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Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and
Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2011.
Rahejas insightful work poses a genealogy of indigenous film theory, from early
Hollywood to contemporary Native American films such as Imprint (2007, Chris
Eyre and Michael Linn), It Starts with a Whisper (1993, Shelley Niro), and
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001, Zacharias Kunk). Her theoretical concept of
visual sovereignty entails the use of media to create a space that asserts selfdefinition and self-representation.
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Singer, Beverly R. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and
Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
An account both personal and academic of the growth of indigenous filmmaking
in Native America, this important book provided the seed for efforts in the past
decade to create a foundational body of critical literature on Native filmmaking
as well as efforts to create infrastructures and networks that would nurture and
support Native filmmakers.
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Weatherford, Elizabeth. Starting Fire with Gunpowder: Native Americans
Struggle to Create Their Own Television, Film and Video Production. Film
Comment 28 (May/June 1992): 6467.
Beginning in the 1970s, new venues became available for a multiplicity of
visions of Native American reality. The article discusses the Inuit Broadcasting
Corporation, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Native Voices Public
Television Workshop, the National Film Board of Canadas Studio II, and the
Yukon-based Northern Native Broadcasting.
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Few published studies exist of Native-produced radio and broadcasting in the
United States compared to the number of works about the development of
community or tribal broadcasting and the cultural and political negotiations
involved in creating nationwide panindigenous broadcasting networks or cable
channels in Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Australia (see the separate
Oxford Bibliographies article on Indigenous Media). Native broadcasting in the
era of the Internet, however, has led to the broad availability (on a global level)
of Native-produced radio and television programming through live-streaming
feeds on websites. This new mode of distribution of programming enables
communities to broadcast not just within their communities but also to a
diasporic audience as well as to make their programming available to interested
outsiders.
Studies of Native-Produced Radio and Broadcasting
Little academic attention has been given to Native radio and broadcasting in the
United States, though readers may find much more literature on community
broadcasting in other parts of the world, especially in Canada. Native-controlled
broadcasting generally began in the early 1970s, and tribal broadcasters soon
linked into collaborative networks and consortia, aided by the US-funded Native
American Public Broadcasting Consortium (now renamed Native American Public
Telecommunications, or NAPT). See Native American Public Telecommunications
2006 for a timeline of this organizations development and programming
initiatives. Although nation-states such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and
Taiwan have national indigenous television networks and cable channels (such as
Canadas Aboriginal Peoples Television Network), the United States has not yet
attained this distinction. Smith and Brigham 1992 provides an article-length
snapshot of the Native broadcasting scene in the early 1990s, while Keith 1995
provides a more in-depth history of this development. Smith and Cornette 1998
is a brief article that provides an interesting perspective on the role of Native
radio in language preservation, while Native Media Resource Center 2010 brings
us up to date on the current status of Native radio. Native American Television is
currently trying to establish the first nationwide Native television network.
Keith, Michael C. Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1995.
In the first book-length study of the development of Native American
broadcasting, Keith provides a history of how tribal groups, beginning in 1972,
harnessed the airwaves, satellite technology, and the Internet to create and
maintain an extensive network of Native American radio stations (the Native
American Public Broadcasting Consortium, or NAPBC) to meet community needs

and reflect Native cultural issues.
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Native American Public Telecommunications.
An organization created to provide support to the development of tribal and
Native media, NAPT exists to serve Native producers and Indian country in
partnership with public television and radio, [working] with Native producers to
develop, produce and distribute educational telecommunications programs.
NAPT provides training and advocacy efforts to promote increased control and
use of information technologies by American Indians and Alaska Natives (see
online).
Find this resource:
Native American Public Telecommunications. Three Decades. Lincoln, NE: Native
American Public Telecommunications, 2006.
This is a timeline of the organizations history from its 1976 founding as the
NAPBC, delineating major programming initiatives produced under its auspices,
including films, television, and radio programs (both broadcast and streaming),
as well as webcasts and podcasts. Available online.
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Native American Television.
An organization trying to establish the first nationwide Native television network
in the United States. Native American Television provides multimedia technology
to improve and enhance communication among tribal nations while also
informing and educating Americans about Native American heritage and culture,
language and issues, visual arts, and entertainment.
Find this resource:
Native Media Resource Center. A Brief History of Native Radio in the United
States. 2010.
From the first Native radio stations in 1972KTDB on the Navajo Reservation in
New Mexico and KBRW in Barrow, AlaskaNative American radio has grown into
a system of stations, content providers, and content distributors. Sixty stations

are expected to be on the air by late 2012.
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Smith, Bruce L., and Jerry C. Brigham. Benchmark: Native Radio Broadcasting in
North America: An Overview of Systems in the United States and Canada.
Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 36.2 (1992): 183194.
Citation
Charts the transformation of broadcasting to Native communities from services
owned and operated by non-Natives to the rise in the 1970s of Native-controlled
stations and the growth of cooperative program sharing and information
networks.
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Smith, Bruce L., and M. L. Cornette. Electronic Smoke Signals: Native American
Radio in the United States. Cultural Survival 22.2 (Summer 1998): 2831.
Although many traditionalists have blamed the introduction of dominant media
for increasing assimilation by tribal youths, the rise of Native-language media
has been championed as a counterforce to support cultural and linguistic
survival, yet some critics argue that the imported format crushes and
assimilates the otherness into a flow which communicates Western concepts
about the pace of thought, attention, and perception.
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Resources on Native Broadcasting
Although no single clearinghouse exists for all Native broadcasting outlets, the
following resource list provides insight into the scope of Native radio and
television stations as well as some of the organizations that provide support to
program production and distribution. AIROS is the radio branch of the NAPT
project and provides promotional support for Native musical artists. The Native
Media Resource Center (NMRC) is promoted as a place to collaborate, create,
educate and serve that has been providing an authentic Native voice to public
broadcasting and support for the Native radio system for 36 years. The NMRC
works in partnership with individuals, organizations, and institutions such as the
NAPT, the Smithsonian Institution Office of Telecommunications, National
Museum of the American Indian, and Northern California Cultural
Communications. NMRC projects include audio, print, and digital storytelling.
Mittens portal Native Media provides an excellent overview of links to Native
media sources for film, broadcasting, and journalism, while other web portals and
link collections include Turtle Island Native Network and the NativeWeb:
Television and Radio page.
AIROS.
Part of NAPT, AIROS produces podcasts, blogs (interviews and profiles of Native
musical artists), and live streams to promote Native American artists.
Find this resource:
Mitten, Lisa. Native Media: Film and Video Organizations, Journals, Newspapers,
and Internet News Sources, Radio and Television.
A portal with links to Native media sources: production companies, journalism
and news sources and publications, and broadcasting companies.
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Native Media Resource Center.
Promoted as a place to collaborate, create, educate and serve, NMRC works in
partnership with individuals, organizations, and institutions to create audio, print,
and digital storytelling projects. Also includes links to more information on Native
broadcasters and media organizations.
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NativeWeb: Television and Radio.
A partial directory of radio stations, programs, and production companies in
Indian country.
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Turtle Island Native Network: First Nations/American Indian/Native
Peoples/Aboriginal Media.
Links to tribal- or Native-produced broadcasting, radio, and cable in Native
America as well as globally.
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Although a great deal of attention has been paid to representations of Native
Americans in fictional forms of media, such as Hollywood films and television
entertainment programs, the subject of how Native Americans and the issues
important to them have been represented in nonfiction media, such as

newspaper journalism, television news, and documentary filmmaking, has not
been comprehensively studied. Thus there is a great deal of room for research in
these areas. This section includes both reports about Native America by
outsiders and Native-produced nonfiction in journalism and documentary. Much
early documentary filmmaking about Native American cultures was done by
explorers (see Early, Colonial, and Exhibition Images of American Indians) and
anthropologists; movements to train and empower indigenous media producers
began in the late 1960s with the Navajo Film Themselves project (see Applied
Anthropology and Native Media Production: The Navajo Film Themselves Project)
and continued in the following decades. Much documentary filmmaking by Native
artists was originally in the salvage mode in relation to museums and archives:
to document and preserve cultural traditions on film. A second and significant
documentary approach has been to create films to support Native rights and
social justice (see Native American Use of Media for Cultural Resistance and
Activism). In reality, it is difficult and seemingly artificial to try to separate
journalism from documentary from broadcasting, because many of the initiatives
have been closely interwoven. Perhaps what is more significant is looking at who
ultimately controls the shaping of the story to be toldand the degree of
freedom that the media producers, be they newspaper journalists or television
producers, independent filmmakers, or website developers, have to tell these
stories. Issues of funding, press freedom, and control and/or editorial power by a
governing body are often very significant in terms of the ability for Native voices
to be honestly expressed and conveyed.
Studies of Native Americans in Journalism and Documentary
The references in this section trace the development of nonfiction representation
of Native American issues through mainstream journalism (both print and
electronic)and the growth of Native awareness to use that media coverage to
their advantageas well as through state-mediated documentary production
(see Stewart 2001) and independent Native journalism and documentary
production. Arndt 2010 reveals the work of 1930s Native journalist and columnist
Charles Round Low Cloud. Wilson 1998 assembles a thorough account of media
discourses about Native Americans during the 1950s, leading up to the 1958
NBC documentary news report titled The American Stranger (analyzed in Wilson
1996; see also Wilson 1999 cited under Native American Use of Media for
Cultural Resistance and Activism), which created a tremendous national response
and affected congressional policies. The following decade saw an increase in the
strategic manipulation of the news media to garner publicity for activist causes,
and Jason Hepplers innovative work (Heppler 2009) on the Trail of Broken
Treaties (1972) provides primary research material in an accessible way.
Landsman 1987 also examines press coverage of an extended Indian rights
campaign, this one among the Mohawk in upstate New York. The final three
entries address not mainstream coverage of Native issues but rather Nativeproduced news and documentaries providing counterperspectives to those of the
mainstream media. Stewart 2001 and Leuthold 1997 are works by scholars who
have extensively studied Native American documentary from different
perspectives, while newspaper editor and publisher Tim Giago (Giago 1993)
makes a case for the development of Native journalists.
Arndt, Grant. The Making and Muting of an Indigenous Media Activist:
Imagination and Ideology in Charles Round Low Clouds Indian News. American
Ethnologist 37.3 (August 2010): 499510.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01268.xSave Citation Export Citation E-mail
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Examining early American Indian activism through the news media, in this
important article Arndt analyzes Ho-Chunk journalist Charles Round Low Clouds
1930s development of an Indian News column to serve as a vehicle for
activism against everyday forms of racial oppression, as well as the ways others
involved in publishing his column used the medium to subvert his message.
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Giago, Tim. Native Journalists: Setting the Record Straight on Media
Stereotypes. Cultural Survival 17.4 (1993): 2123.
One of Native Americas foremost journalists critiques the present state of
journalism about Native America and calls for increased reporting from Indian
country. Owing to cultural differences, extremely differing points of view must
be taken into consideration when reporting from Indian country. . . . Educating
America about the true history and contemporary face of Indian country will be a
monumental task, and it must beginning with the media (para. 11).
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Heppler, Jason. Framing Red Power: Newspapers, the Trail of Broken Treaties,
and the Politics of Media. MA diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2009.
An innovative web-based project studying the strategic use of and coverage by
media during the Trail of Broken Treaties, the 1972 political demonstrationturned-siege by the American Indian Movement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
headquarters in Washington, DC. Includes primary archival documents as well as
background and analyses.
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Landsman, Gail H. Indian Activism and the Press: Coverage of the Conflict at
Ganienkeh. Anthropological Quarterly 60.3 (1987): 101113.
Landsman analyzes a decade of mainstream press coverage of a Mohawkwhite
conflict in upstate New York from the 1970s into the 1980s and suggests that the
media discourse, particularly the journalistic framing of the Mohawk activists,

contributed to intercultural tensions, to the outcome of the legal situation, and
even to the Mohawk communitys reformulation of their own past and present
and their own story about themselves.
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Leuthold, Steven M. Native American Documentary: An Emerging Genre? Film
Criticism 22.1 (Fall 1997): 7490.
Leuthold observes increasingly genre-like patterns among Native American
documentaries as he seeks to find commonalities linking them beyond stylistic
and formal characteristics; he looks to thematic, rhetorical, and political goals
arising out of shared historical circumstances.
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Stewart, Michelle. Sovereign Visions: Native North American Documentary. PhD
diss., University of Minnesota, 2001.
Investigates the development of Native North American documentary filmmaking
as an assertion of Native nationalist (supratribal) identity within the American
and Canadian settler states, examining films made within the key state
institutions for Native production (the National Film Board of Canada and the
Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium) to reveal cultural activism tied
to a political program of cultural revival, self-determination, and sovereignty.
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Wilson, Pamela. Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television
Documentary, and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s. PhD diss.,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996.
situation of the Menominee, Flathead, and Blackfeet tribes during this
termination era in which the US Congress was attempting to terminate federaltribal relations. The broadcast sparked public outcry and a heated political
debate in Congress.
Find this resource:
Wilson, Pamela. Confronting The Indian Problem: Media Discourses of Race,
Ethnicity, Nation, and Empire in 1950s America. In Living Color: Race and
Television in the United States. Edited by Sasha Torres, 3561. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998.

Wilson details the media discourses about Native Americans in the mainstream
news media and popular press during the postwar era. Significant political
changes were being engineered in the halls and chambers of lawmakers in
Washington, DC, to reengineer USIndian relations and reinterpret treaty rights,
though the American public was generally unaware of contemporary Indian
rights issues.
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Resources and Directories Regarding Native American Journalism
The resource sites listed here are among the most valuable for those seeking
information about Native American journalism. Although there had been a history
of tribally owned newspapers on Indian reservations, they often lacked editorial
freedom because of the close relationship between tribal governments and the
US Bureau of Indian Affairs (see Trahant 2000). The first independently owned
Native newspaper in the United States was founded in 1981 on the Pine Ridge
Reservation in South Dakota as the Lakota Times. In 1998 Lakota founding editor
and publisher Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) sold the newspaper, which had been
renamed Indian Country Today (see Indian Country Today Media Network) in
1992, to the Oneida Nation, and it has over the years become the premier
national, supertribal (pan-Indian) newspaper serving all Native Americans. Giago,
who founded and owned the Lakota Journal from 2000 to 2004, served as a
columnist for the mainstream online site the Huffington Post, and recently went
on to establish the South Dakotabased print newspaper Native Sun News (2009)
before he retired from journalism in 2011. Giago was also founder of the Native
American Journalists Association, which has become a significant organization for
fostering the development of young journalists, as well as for increasing
coverage of news about issues affecting not only Native America in the
mainstream news but also Native American news sources. Other training grounds
for aspiring Native journalists include the University of Montanas Reznet News
project and the Crazy Horse Journalism Workshop. Lists of various tribal and
Native publications may be found at Native American Newspapers and
Periodicals: Technical Assistance on Native American Culture Project and
NativeWeb: Native and Indigenous Newspapers.
Crazy Horse Journalism Workshop.
The successor to the Native American Journalism Career Conference (2000
2009), this workshop to inspire and prepare Native high school students to enter
university journalism programs was created by the South Dakota Newspaper
Association and is funded primarily by the Freedom Forum. Cosponsors include
Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation and journalism programs at the University of
South Dakota and South Dakota State University.
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Indian Country Today Media Network.
A major nationwide online news source for Native American news, Indian Country
Today serves as a national platform for Native voices and issues. Indian Country
Today has recently been expanded to incorporate more social media features and
to try and create and link together an online community based around Native
American journalism.
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Native American Journalists Association.
Established in 1984 as the Native American Press Association, the goal of this
organization is to nurture and develop Native communication among Native
people as well as between Native Americans and the general public.
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Native American Newspapers and Periodicals: Technical Assistance on Native
American Culture Project.
A list of Native publications sorted by state, with links to each publication.
Find this resource:
Native Web: Native and Indigenous Newspapers.
A directory of Native and indigenous newspapers, both in print and online, as
well as press archives.
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Reznet News.
A project of the University of Montana School of Journalism, Reznet is a
significant news portal for news, information, and entertainment of interest to
Native American communities and individuals. This multimedia journalism site,
founded by Denny McAuliffe, has become a top journalism training and
mentoring program for American Indian college students across the country.
Find this resource:
Trahant, Mark N. Native American Newspapers: Telling Uncomfortable Truths in

Tribal Journalism. Media Studies Journal 14.2 (Spring/Summer 2000).
Trahant, a Native American journalist working in the mainstream media,
discusses his own experiences working for tribal newspapers and challenges the
freedom of the press in such publications: Most tribal newspapers are divisions
of government and editors act as public extensions of tribal councils. Some tribal
editors are even charged with a public relations role as part of their job
description.
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The relationship between Native Americans and the Internet has not been
adequately studied; the works listed below merely touch upon the possibilities of
this fertile relationship. Todd 1996 broke new ground in raising significant
philosophical questions about the relationship between new media and
indigenous worldviews. Early Web 1.0 sites such as NativeNet and NativeWeb
served as portals and pan-Native gathering places, as did significant listservs
such as NATIVE-L and NATCHAT, which linked Native Americans with indigenous
peoples sharing common interests globally. The dynamic growth since the early
1990s of convergent sites online for Native journalism, music, streaming radio,
and television programming, as well as online repositories and portals for video
uploads, such as YouTube and isuma.tv (an independent interactive network of
indigenous multimedia) provides rich material for research that is yet to be done.
In addition to the convergence of traditionally distinct media forms (such as film,
newspapers, television, and radio) online, the other highly significant
convergence has been the globalization of indigenous issues and the creation of
a global panindigenous movement that has linked indigenous North Americans
with other indigenous groups around the globethis has been made possible by
digital media technologies. DErrico 2000, Zimmerman and Bruguier 2000, and
Prins 2001 recount the growth of e-mail-based communication networks as well
as the development of tribal websites, all of which contributed to this process.
More recent studies, such as Srinivasan 2006, Fish 2011, and Kopacz and Lawton
2011, look at ways that Native uses of the Internet, both at the official tribal level
and at the individual level, are adapting to changes in Internet practices in
significant (and sometimes problematic) ways. New initiatives such as the Native
Language Project advocate for the use of 21st-century technologies to revitalize
ancient indigenous languages and to try and bridge the digital divide still existing
for Native Americans. Google now has interfaces in Maya, Nahuatl, and
Cherokee, and iPhone apps are being developed to help a technologically savvy
younger generation learn their traditional languages, such as Cherokee.
DErrico, Peter. NativeWebInternet as Political Technology. Jurist (2000).
Provides a history and background of NativeNet (founded in 1989) and

NativeWeb (founded in 1994), which were global listservs highly significant to the
process of creating communication links and establishing common political and
cultural goals and issues among indigenous peoples on a global level.
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Fish, Adam. Indigenous Digital Media and the History of the Internet on the
Columbia Plateau. Journal of Northwest Anthropology 45.1 (Spring 2011): 89
110.
Uses case studies to examine how the changes in the Internet from Web 1.0
(19942004) to Web 2.0 (2005) have challenged tribal practices of selfrepresentation online. While the early web gave tribes control over their official
historiography, new collaborative Web 2.0 practices may be endangering
officially sanctioned tribal histories.
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Kopacz, Maria, and Bessie Lee Lawton. The YouTube Indian: Portrayals of Native
Americans on a Viral Video Site. New Media & Society 13 (March 2011): 330
349.
Based upon a quantitative content analysis, this article explores how communityoriented online video sites such as YouTube have opened up new platforms for
filmic representation and self-representation of and by Native Americans in a
variety of genres. The researchers discover patterns indicating that viral video
depictions depart from the stereotypical representations.
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NativeWeb.
Established in 1994, NativeWeb is an international, nonprofit, educational
organization that, according to the website, is dedicated to using
telecommunications including computer technology and the Internet to
disseminate information from and about indigenous nations, peoples, and
organizations around the world; to foster communication between native and
non-native peoples; to conduct research involving indigenous peoples usage of
technology and the Internet; and to provide resources, mentoring, and services
to facilitate indigenous peoples use of this technology.
Find this resource:
Prins, Harald E. L. Digital Revolution: Indigenous Peoples in Cyberia. In Cultural

Anthropology. 10th ed. Edited by W. Haviland, 306308. San Diego, CA: Harcourt,
2001.
A brief historical overview of tribal initiatives to create online presence, arguing
that the Internet has enabled indigenous cultural groups to expand beyond their
traditional communication and information networks to share their own
information, stories, and perspectives with the world, and to expand their sphere
of influence, mobilize political support, and create broader market opportunities
for their products.
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Srinivasan, Ramesh. Indigenous, Ethnic and Cultural Articulations of New
Media. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (December 2006): 497518.
Focusing on networked and database-driven new media and information

systems, Srinivasan explores possibilities for indigenous communities to
appropriate media technologies to serve their own cultural, political, and social
visions.
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Todd, Loretta. Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace. In Immersed in Technology:
Art and Virtual Environments. Edited by Mary Ann Moser and Douglas Macleod,
179194. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
What does the new territory called cyberspace mean to aboriginal people?
Todd speculates in this lyrical and provocative essay, wondering: Can our
narratives, histories, languages and knowledge find meaning? (p. 179).
Questioning how the new form of communication might affect postcolonial power
relations, ideology, cultural landscape, and ontology from a Native philosophical
perspective, she reflects on how consciousness may be changed in this new era.
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Google Books
Zimmerman, Karen P., and Leonard R. Bruguier. Cyberspace Smoke Signals: New
Technologies and Native American Ethnicities. In Indigenous Cultures in an
Interconnected World. Edited by Claire Smith and Graeme K. Ward, 6988.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000.

Examines the role of new media (bulletin boards and listservs such as NativeNet,
NATIVE-L and NATCHAT; CD-ROMs) in the formation of ethnic and cultural
identity, the digital preservation of culture, and the uses and promises of the
Internet. A thorough but undertheorized historical catalogue of new media
related to Native American resources existing in the late 1990s.
Find this resource:
Google Books
A small but significant body of literature is concerned with, first and foremost,
the impact of stereotypical images of Native Americans on children, both Indian
and non-Indian, and particularly with the impact of those negative
representations on Native children during their identity formation. Many of these
studies examine representations in mainstream childrens films and television
programming, often addressed to parents and educators about ways to counter
the damaging representations (see Hirschfelder, et al. 1999; Strong 1996).
However, a fascinating new area for research is represented by Hearne 2008, an
article on indigenous animation, which reveals and highlights a growing industry
of Native writers, artists, producers, and animators who have been creating
quality childrens programming, often for broadcast on indigenous television
channels (for which there is now an expanding global market), for sale on DVDs,
and more often adapted into interactive childrens video games and websites
(such as waposbay.com). Such narratives are not only visually engaging but also
carry powerful cultural messages to indigenous children as well as children in
mainstream audiences. Twist 2007 and the web links for Raven Tales and
Blackgum Mountain Productions on this list will provide the reader with more
information on some of the artists associated with this new film movement. An
area ripe for new scholarship is the relationship between Native American
representation and video games. Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace is a
network of scholars, designers, and technologists whose goal is to define and
share conceptual and practical tools that will allow us to create new, Aboriginallydetermined territories within the web-pages, online games, and virtual
environments that we call cyberspace (para. 1). Lamerman 2011 is a wellillustrated eight-minute online video that serves as an introduction to this area of
study. Lamerman is also responsible for a number of Native video games and
web comicsthe Native steampunk web comic The West Was Lost, the video
game TimeTraveller (about a 22nd-century Mohawk man who travels through
time to revisit his ancestors), and Techno Medicine Wheel (an alternate reality
game). Lamerman also serves as a consultant to the urban fantasy animated
Transmedia series Animism and The Gods Lake. See more about Lamerman
online.
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.

The main objective of this innovative network is to identify and implement
methods by which Aboriginal people can use new media technologies to
complement our cultures. In other words, how can we use the exciting new tools
now available on the personal computer to empower Native people, especially
our youth, to both preserve and produce our knowledge, culture and language in
this highly technological society? (para. 1).
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Blackgum Mountain Productions.
Founder Joseph Erb teaches clay animation techniques to Cherokee and Creek
students, with most films based upon Muscogee tales and legends. Erb also
produces computer-animated films such as The Beginning They Told (2000).
Find this resource:
Hearne, Joanna. Indigenous Animation: Educational Programming, Narrative
Interventions, and Childrens Cultures. In Global Indigenous Media: Cultures,
Poetics and Politics. Edited by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, 89108.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Hearne insightfully explores developments in indigenous animation in the United
States and Canada, including Stories from the Seventh Fire, Raven Tales, and
Joseph Erbs animation, which teach through Native storytelling styles, assert
Native control over visual and aural representations, and acknowledge Native
children as producers and receivers of knowledge from culturally specific tribal
traditions.
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Hirschfelder, Arlene, Paulette Molin, and Yvonne Wakim, eds. American Indian
Stereotypes in the World of Children. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999.
Collection of essays on the types of images of Native Americans, mostly
stereotypical and inaccurate, to which contemporary American children are
regularly exposed in popular childrens culture.
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Google Books
Lamerman, Beth A. Native Representations in Video Games. 11 July 2011.

A Native graphic artist and rising scholar of indigenous digital media, Lamerman
(Anishinaabe/Mtis) presents a brief well-illustrated video lecture on Native
images in video games.
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Raven Tales.
Raven Tales is a series of twenty-six half-hour episodes of animated fiction based
upon Native folk stories and featuring a cast of exquisitely realized characters,
including Raven, Frog, Eagle, the Great Spirit, Wasgo the Sea Wolf, Coyote,
Mother Toad, Moowis the Snowman, Kulos, Mouse Woman, and the council of
forest creatures.
Find this resource:
Strong, Pauline Turner. Animated Indians: Critique and Contradiction in
Commodified Childrens Culture. Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (August 1996):
405424.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00060Save Citation Export Citation E-mail
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An engaging ethnographic analysis and critique of two 1995 childrens films,
Pocahontas and The Indian in the Cupboard, and their cultural contradictions.
Although the producers are attempting to promote a nonracist, multicultural
agenda, she notes, [t]hat both films and their associated products and
promotions are rife with tensions and ironies exemplifies the limitations of
serious cultural critiques in an artistic environment devoted to the marketing of
dreams.
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Twist, Kade. Brave New Worlds: Indigenous Animation Movement Rising. Native
Peoples, November/December 2007.
Provides an overview of the range of talented Native artists working on
indigenous animation projects as of late 2007.
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Approaches to and Issues in Native American Media Studies
The following subsections provide clusters of references regarding various
aspects of and issues in Native American media that have attracted a good deal
of scholarly attention and that might serve as the basis for future research.

Victor Masayesva Jr. is an esteemed Hopi photographer and filmmaker whose
body of work has distinguished itself because of its experimentation and
innovation in narrative and visual structures that embody a distinctly new
philosophy and set of visual storytelling conventions. Masayesvas body of
images is useful to scholars seeking to understand the degree to which the
culture of the artist affects or influences the aesthetics of the artwork.
Masayesvas work is not purely visual art, however, though it is extraordinarily
poetic; he uses the art of communicating through film to provide what critic
Michael Renov, in writing about Itam Hakim Hopiit (Masayesva 1988), has called
a cultural bridge, evoking a culture and an environment through the look and
sound of it and the fluidly majestic pace of its unfolding. . . . The lyricism of
Masayesva Jr.s imagery and the tone of reverence for the earth, whose
caretakers the Hopi consider themselves to be, has the power to transport the
viewer. Moving in a new direction, in his 1992 film Imagining Indians (see
Masayesva 2005) Masayesva juxtaposed clips from Hollywood Westerns with
interview footage of both Native and non-Native people talking about the media
representations of Native Americans. For this film, with an all-Indian crew,
Masayesva visited tribal communities in Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, South
Dakota, Washington, and the Amazon. Masayesva says, I felt a keen
responsibility as a community member, not an individual, to address these
impositions on our tribal lives. . . . I am concerned about a tribal and community
future . . . and I hope this challenges the viewer to overcome glamorized
Hollywood views of the Native American, which obscures the difficult demands of
walking the spiritual road of our ancestors. His most recent film is Paatuwaqatsi:
Water, Land & Life (2007). In addition to expressing himself through images,
Masayesvas theoretical and philosophical work is also available in his books,
Hopi Photographers/Hopi Images (with Erin Younger, Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1983) and Husk of Time: The Photographs of Victor Masayesva
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), as well as Masayesva 2001. Analysis
and criticism of his filmic work is abundant: Weatherford 1995 provides a general
overview of his work, while Rony 1995 focuses on the cultural politics of shooting
images. Leuthold 1998 and Knopf 2007 both do close readings of his films (the
former a more formalist analysis and the latter a cultural analysis), while Romero
2010 also engages in a discussion of the cultural political questions Masayesva
raises. Jacobs 2004 examines the way that Masayesvas aesthetic reshapes
subject-object relations that are informed by the gaze and innovates the rules by
which social relations are written onto the body.
Jacobs, Karen. Optic/Haptic/Abject: Revisioning Indigenous Media in Victor
Masayesva, Jr. and Leslie Marmon Silko. Journal of Visual Culture 3.3 (December
2004): 291316.
Examines the way both Masayesva (in Imagining Indians; see Masayesva 2005)
and Silko (in Almanac of the Dead) develop alternative strategies of
visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relationsstrategies which seek to
reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more
desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity
and tactility.
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Knopf, Kerstin. Imagining Indians: Subverting Global Media Politics in the Local
Media. In Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Edited by
Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann, 117138. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Knopf, a German scholar of Native American studies, focuses this analysis on a
detailed description and close reading of Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesvas
documentary film Imagining Indians (Masayesva 2005), a critique of the
mainstream portrayal of Native Americans in American film and popular culture.
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Leuthold, Steven. Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998.
Leuthold seeks to uncover an Indian way of seeing and a unique indigenous
documentary genre. Through close textual readings he analyzes the work of
Victor Masayesva and George Burdeau in terms of formal qualities such as style
of cinematography (camera movement and angles, composition of shots), editing
techniques, and narrative structure, as well as the way ideology shapes the films
content.
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Masayesva, Victor, Jr., dir. Itam Hakim Hopiit, 1984. VHS. Minneapolis: Intermedia
Arts Minnesota, 1988.
Called a poetic visualization of Hopi philosophy and prophesy, Masayesvas
eloquent 1984 film evokes the sacredness of the land as Hopi storyteller Ross
Macaya shares Hopi oral traditions.
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Masayesva, Victor. Indigenous Experimentalism. In Magnetic North. Edited by

Jenny Lion, 228239. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
A brief but classic article by renowned filmmaker Masayesva in which he explains
some of his philosophies about filmmaking from an indigenous point of view.
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Masayesva, Victor, Jr. Imagining Indians, 1992. DVD. Watertown, MA:
Documentary Educational Resources, 2005.
Imagining Indians not only responds to Native stereotypes but also foregrounds
the cultural discomfort of having outsiders entering a Native community to film
the people, the culture, or their land.
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Romero, Channette. The Politics of the Camera: Visual Storytelling and
Sovereignty in Victor Masayesvas Itam Hakim, Hopiit. Studies in American
Indian Literatures 22.1 (Spring 2010): 4975.
DOI: 10.1353/ail.0.0125Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
Masayesvas film reflects not only Hopi consciousness and content, Romero
argues, but also the Hopis profound ambivalence toward filmmaking and
historic suspicion of visual representation. Masayesva encourages his viewers to
engage in a multifaceted dialogue about representation, the role of the viewer,
and the possibilities and dangers of storytelling through film (p. 49).
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Rony, Fatimah Tobing. Victor Masayesva, Jr., and the Politics of Imagining
Indians. Film Quarterly 48.2 (1995): 2033.
The importance of not photographing certain subjects, whether profane or
sacred, is a central theme of Masayesvas extraordinary oeuvre (p. 20), Rony
writes as she discusses the cultural politics regarding contrasting perceptions of
the cameraand shooting of imagesassociated with Euro-American
appropriation and exploitation. The article explores Masayesvas philosophy
about the often-unexamined role of the photographic media in communication.
Find this resource:
Weatherford, Elizabeth. To End and Begin Again: The Work of Victor Masayesva,
Jr. Art Journal 54.4 (1995): 4852.

A biographical overview of Masayesva and his artistry that explores the way that
he balances and reconciles his often-contradictory experimental attitude toward
photography, film, and video production with his highly traditional, communitybased Hopi ethos and worldview.
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The challenge of trying to maintain not only a distinct cultural identity but also to
establish and maintain political and cultural sovereignty is a fundamental issue
facing all indigenous peoples. Native American tribal nations, whether or not
officially recognized by the states that encompass them as well as by the US
federal government, generally have found themselves embroiled in a long history
of political interaction and negotiations with the federal government and its
agencies assigned to oversee federal-tribal relations (the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, which was originally a branch of the War Department and later subsumed
under the Department of the Interior). The legal issues that have grown out of
treaty relations are complex and have led to a specialized field of Indian law. A
very few Native American media producers, such as Charles Round Low Cloud
(see Arndt 2010), began using media channels to mobilize public opinion
regarding Indian rights issues early in the 20th century, and by mid-century,
Native activists and their supporters began finding ways to use the mainstream
media to reach a national audience (see Wilson 1999). This intensified in the late
1960s and early 1970s as the American Indian Movement and associated groups
of radical young Natives began to stage dramatic publicity-garnering political
spectacles such as the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, the 1971 occupation of
Mount Rushmore, the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington and
siege of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices (see Heppler 2009), and the 1973
siege and armed standoff at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Since
that time, many Native American activist artists have used media as a tool for
expressing political views and for mobilizing public sentiment to support Native
rights and sovereignty issues (see Landsman 1987, Rader 2011), and today
many organizations, such as Indigenous Action Media, exist to encourage and
train young people to use the media for social justice. Also see Daley and James
2004 for a history of the use of mass media by Alaskan Natives.
Arndt, Grant. The Making and Muting of an Indigenous Media Activist:
Imagination and Ideology in Charles Round Low Clouds Indian News. American
Ethnologist 37.3 (August 2010): 499510.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01268.xSave Citation Export Citation E-mail
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Examining early American Indian activism through the news media, in this
important article Arndt analyzes Ho-Chunk journalist Charles Round Low Clouds
1930s development of an Indian News column to serve as a vehicle for
activism against everyday forms of racial oppression, as well as the ways others
involved in publishing his column used the medium to subvert his message.
Find this resource:
Daley, Patrick, and Beverly James. Cultural Politics and the Mass Media: Alaska
Native Voices. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
A historical examination of the uses of mass media (newspapers, broadcasting,
film and video, and new media) by Alaskas Native peoples from the 1920s
through the present day in order to affect public policies, resist cultural
assimilation, and preserve their traditional culture and resources.
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Heppler, Jason. Framing Red Power: Newspapers, the Trail of Broken Treaties,
and the Politics of Media. MA diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2009.
An innovative web-based project studying the strategic use of and coverage by
media during the Trail of Broken Treaties, the 1972 political demonstrationturned-siege by the American Indian Movement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
headquarters in Washington, DC. Includes primary archival documents as well as
background and analyses.
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Landsman, Gail H. Indian Activism and the Press: Coverage of the Conflict at
Ganienkeh. Anthropological Quarterly 60.3 (1987): 101113.
Landsman analyzes a decade of mainstream press coverage of a Mohawk-white
conflict in upstate New York from the 1970s into the 1980s and suggests that the
media discourse, particularly the journalistic framing of the Mohawk activists,
contributed to intercultural tensions, the outcome of the legal situation, and even
to the Mohawk communitys reformulation of their own past and present, their
own story about themselves.
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Outta Your Backpack Media.
A collective of experienced indigenous media makers and activists, coordinated
by Klee Benally, founded in 2001 to train and provide resources for young
indigenous media producers to address environmental and social justice issues.
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Rader, Dean. Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from
Alcatraz to the NMAI. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
An interdisciplinary critical assessment of how increasingly influential Native
American movies, literature, and artistic expression have, since the 1969
occupation of Alcatraz, impacted Native cultural sovereignty and resistance to
the dominant culture and its politics.
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Wilson, Pamela. All Eyes on Montana: Television Audiences, Social Activism, and
Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s. Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 16.34 (1999): 325356.
Wilson examines the public response to a controversial 1958 network television
documentary, The American Stranger (NBC), which provided a voice for Blackfeet
tribal leaders to tell their story to the American public about the political,
cultural, and economic situation of the tribe during this so-called termination era.
The broadcast sparked public outcry and a heated political debate in Congress,
as well as grassroots support from viewers, contributing to political changes.
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Parallel to challenges for political sovereignty or self-determination is the need
for media sovereignty, which requires freedom of control over ones selfexpression and self-representation. Although almost all recent critical literature
on Native Americans in film and literature addresses issues of cultural identity,
cultural politics, and media sovereignty or self-representation, the following
entries stand out as being particularly insightful regarding these issues. The
essays in Owens 1998 are lyrical and deeply compelling philosophical statements
about being Native, seeing and experiencing the world through this cultural lens,
and incorporating such a philosophy into an understanding of representation.
Levo-Henriksson 2009 provides a rare empirical study about the relationship
between media and cultural identity among the Hopi, long known for protecting
the symbolic boundaries between their local cultures and those of the dominant
culture. Through ethnography, extensive interviews, and surveys, LevoHenriksson is able, as a cultural outsider, to gain trusted access to Hopi
understandings regarding the meanings of the electronic media in their lives.
Hearne 2003 raises extraordinarily important questions about the circulation and
meaning of images and their relation to identity, and in particular the semiotics
of the ways that particular pieces of media can be recoded and repurposed to
create new meanings, often in direct opposition to those interpreted by others.

This issue of differential interpretation and reading strategies is also addressed
by Raheja 2007. Most significant as a theoretical intervention, Rahejas article
introduces her concept of visual sovereignty from a Native American perspective:
the space between resistance and compliance wherein indigenous filmmakers
and actors revisit, contribute to, borrow from, critique, and reconfigure
ethnographic film conventions, at the same time operating within and stretching
the boundaries created by these conventions (para. 4). In Rahejas analysis of
Zacharias Kunuks Atanarjuat (2000), Raheja 2007 argues that Native media
productions such as this film offer not only the possibility of engaging and
deconstructing white-generated representations of indigenous people, but more
broadly and importantly how it intervenes in larger discussions of Native
American sovereignty by locating and advocating for indigenous cultural and
political power both within and outside of Western legal jurisprudence (para. 4).
Hearne, Joanna. Telling and Retelling in the Ink of Light: Documentary Cinema,
Oral Narratives, and Indigenous Identities. Screen 47.3 (Autumn 2003): 307
326.
DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjl024Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
A brilliant and provocative essay that raises many questions about the cultural
politics of images and, in particular, the reclaiming, repurposing, and recoding
with new meaning, by Native filmmakers and audiences, of film images originally
produced in a colonialist context.
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Levo-Henriksson, Ritva. Media and Ethnic Identity: Hopi Views on Media, Identity,
and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2009.
A significant ethnographic work about how the Hopis view the media and how
they construct their identities in a mediated world. Looks at the reception of
mainstream media as well as Hopi-produced media, with a focus on intercultural
communication.
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Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Powerful essays, both personal and scholarly, on representation: We have the
power . . . to learn to speak in any language on earth or to imagine a new one.
We humans have the ability to appropriate and liberate the others discourse. . . .
Rather than merely reflecting back to him the masters own voice, we can . . .
learn to make it bear the burden of our own experience (p. xiii).
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Raheja, Michelle. Reading Nanooks Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous
Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). American Quarterly
59.4 (December 2007): 11591185.
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2007.0083Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation
A striking theoretical introduction to a significant Native cultural and media
theorist. The visual, particularly film, video, and new media, Raheja writes, is
a germinal and exciting site for exploring how sovereignty is a creative act of
self-representation that has the potential to both undermine stereotypes of
indigenous peoples and to strengthen . . . the intellectual health of communities
in the wake of genocide and colonialism.
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Perhaps the most critically acclaimed film of what might be called the Native
New Wave has been Smoke Signals (1998), a feature directed by first-time
director Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapaho) and scripted and coproduced by poet
and novelist Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur dAlene), who adapted it from his
best-selling The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Promoted as the first
feature to have been written, directed, and coproduced by Native Americans and
also featuring an all-Native cast in leading roles, the film debuted at Sundance,
where it won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy before being released
by Miramax. Opening with the question: How do we forgive our fathers? Smoke
Signals is the story of the odyssey of a tough young Native man on a journey
from the Coeur dAlene Reservation of Idaho to Arizona to collect the ashes of
the alcoholic father who had abandoned his family many years previously, joined
on this road trip by a tender-hearted and deeply wise friend: what poet/historian
Dan Georgakas calls an engaging cross between a mamas boy and a traditional
seer, a sometimes nerd in funny glasses who is no ones sidekick (West and
West 1998, para. 6). The dialogue is full of gentle humor, a blend of comedy and
pathos that defies Hollywood genre formulas as the two main characters explore
what it means to be contemporary Native Americans. A good deal of academic
criticism from across many disciplines has been written about this film; the
references listed below represent a cross-section of perspectives that should
provide valuable insights about the contemporary Native American film
movement as well as this particular film. West and West 1998 (with Georgakas)
and Fielding 2003 provide conversational insights from interviews about the
thinking of Eyre and Alexie. Mihelich 2001 and Cobb 2003 both examine the film
as an example of cultural sovereignty, while Hearne 2005 seeks elements of
visual sovereignty. James 2005 and Hearne 2011 each explore devices used by
the film to create spaces for identity formation, while Murray and Heumann 2010
analyzes the way that Smoke Signals illustrates a trope of ecological adaptation.
Cobb, Amanda J. This Is What It Means to Say Smoke Signals: Native American
Cultural Sovereignty. In Hollywoods Indian: The Portrayal of the Native
American in Film. By Peter C. Rollins and John OConnor, 206228. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
Hollywoods Indian may no longer belong solely to Hollywood, Cobb writes in
her analysis of Smoke Signals (1998), noting that this pioneering film by Chris
Eyre and Sherman Alexie created major challenges in depicting fully realized,
authentic Native American characters and Indian cultural content with the risk
of audiences assuming that they represented and spoke for all Indians.
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Fielding, Julien R. Native American Religion and Film: Interviews with Chris Eyre
and Sherman Alexie. Journal of Religion and Film 7.1 (April 2003): 119.
More than simply putting a modern face on American Indians, Fielding writes,
[this writing and directing team] seems intent on shattering preconceptions
(para. 4). In this interesting conversation about spirituality, contemporary Native
Americans, and film, Eyre and Alexie reveal a pastiche of spiritual and religious
influences.
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Hearne, Joanna. John Waynes Teeth: Speech, Sound and Representation in
Smoke Signals and Imagining Indians. Western Folklore 64.34 (2005): 189208.
Hearne interrogates moments of strategic intervention and appropriation of
media tools in each film used by the filmmakers to assert visual sovereignty by
recontextualizing earlier images, oral narratives, music, and written texts
allowing found cultural documents to speak with a new voice that serves
indigenous interests.
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Hearne, Joanna. Indians Watching Indians on TV: Native Spectatorship and the
Politics of Recognition in Skins and Smoke Signals. In Visualities: Perspectives on
Contemporary American Indian Film and Art. Edited by Denise K. Cummings.
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011.
Hearne explores ironic scenes of Native American spectatorship in Eyres films,

when indigenous characters confront, comment upon, and perform with and
against mainstream representations of Indians. Hearne notes that this strategy
situates indigenous viewers as politicized, contemporary producers and
consumers who are able to resignify and create new meanings from the Westernstereotyped images.
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James, Meredith K. Literary and Cinematic Reservation in Selected Works of
Native American Author Sherman Alexie. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005.
Examines the contradictory nature of the meaning of the literary reservation
space (a reservation of the mind) in contemporary Native American literature
and cinema, and how Native writers reconcile fragmented identities, focusing
primarily on the work of Alexie. The subtlety of Alexies work, James argues,
serves as cinematic warfare, forcing a largely white audience to readjust its own
American identity (p. 50).
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Mihelich, John. Smoke or Signals? American Popular Culture and the Challenge
of Hegemonic Images of American Indians in Native American Film. Wicazo Sa
Review 16.2 (Fall 2001): 129138.
Reveals the way that Smoke Signals challenges stereotypical images of Native
Americans with humanizing, complex, and contemporary Indian characters,
considering Native-controlled productions embody a cultural sovereignty of selfrepresentation in contrast to the hegemonic representations by Hollywood.
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Murray, Robin, and Joe Heumann. Passage as Journey in Sherman Alexies
Smoke Signals: A Narrative of Environmental Adaptation. Jump Cut 52 (Summer
2010).
Contrasts the valorization of the trope of the ecological Indian (who, unable to
adapt to modern life, must vanish or face annihilation) from the 1950s forward,
with Alexies film that illustrates a new trope of ecological adaptation: the ability
to create a home in a barren landscape, literally or figuratively.
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West, Dennis, and Joan M. West. Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview
with Sherman Alexie. Cineaste 23.4 (1998): 2831, 37.
This interview elucidates the combination of wisdom and irreverence that make
Alexies writing and films so delightfully refreshing and subversive. Alexie says, I
think humor is the most effective political tool out there, because people will
listen to anything if theyre laughing. . . . I never want to be earnest. I always
want to be on the edge of offending somebody, of challenging one notion or
another (para. 66).
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Film
The Smithsonians National Museum of the American Indian maintains Native
Networks (Redes Indigenas in the Spanish version), probably the mostconsulted public resource on this topic, featuring online information about film,
video, and radio produced by indigenous peoples of the Americas and Hawaii.
Maintained by the staff of the National Museum of the American Indian Film and
Video Center, the listing of interviews with Native media artists on this site is
extensive and is the best place to begin when trying to find basic information
about films or filmmakers. Nothing is more powerful than hearing (or reading)
the voices of the filmmakers speak about their work and their inspirations. This is
also a primary resource for finding out about Native film festivals in the
Americas. A number of helpful bibliographies on the subject of Native Americans
in film and video have been published either in print or online over the years.
The early bibliographies by Bataille and Silet (Bataille and Silet 1976, Bataille
and Silet 1980, Bataille and Silet 1985) provide a look at early work on this topic.
Two of the best online bibliographies have been maintained by librarians at
universities who specialize in these collections. Lisa Mitten (Mohawk) has long
been known for her extensive bibliography, originally through the University of
Pittsburgh library and now on her own personal website Native Media. Native
Americans in the Movies is an extensive Native American studies bibliographical
collection.
Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet. The Indian in American Film: A
Checklist of Published Materials on the Popular Images of the Indian in the
American Film. Journal of Popular Film 5.2 (1976): 170182.
One of the earliest compilations of resources on the subject of representations of
Native Americans in film.
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Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet. Bibliography: Additions to The

Indian in American Film. Journal of Popular Film and Television 8.1 (1980): 50
53.
An update on the 1976 list of resources.
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Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet. Images of American Indians on Film:
An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985.
An important early annotated bibliography on Native American representations
up through the early 1980s.
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Mitten, Lisa. Native Media: Film and Video Organizations. Journals, Newspapers,
and Internet News Sources, Radio and Television.
Has links to Native media sources including production companies, journalism
and news sources and publications, and broadcasting companies.
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Native Americans in the Movies: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley
Library.
A very thorough bibliography of books, articles, and documentary films focusing
on representations of Native Americans in film.
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Native Networks. Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Also available in Spanish. The National Museum of the American Indian (started
privately as the Heye Foundation in 1916) became part of the national
Smithsonian Museum in 1990 and opened a new museum in Washington, DC, in
2004. The site contains filmmaker profiles and interviews, articles, filmographies
of recent works, Native media news, and festivals and screening programs of the
Film and Video Center.
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Weatherford, Elizabeth, and Emelia Seubert, eds. Native Americans on Film and
Video. Vol. 1. New York: National Museum of the American Indian, 1981.
The first major filmography of Native Americans on film, this annotated
database/catalogue of about six hundred films and videos developed from the
National Museum of the American Indians Film and Video Project begun in 1979,
when the museum began sponsoring a Native American Film Festival.
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Weatherford, Elizabeth, and Emelia Seubert, eds. Native Americans on Film and
Video. Vol. 2. New York: National Museum of the American Indian, 1988.
An updated edition to Weatherford and Seubert 1981. During the 1980s, the
museum became the primary national media resource center on films by and
about Native peoples.
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Bibliographies, Filmographies, and Resources Regarding Native Americans and

television) as well as the era of self-conscious reshaping of images of Indians in

A comprehensive and engaging study of the construction of the Eskimo (a.k.a.

boxes. Rony 1996 is a compelling study of ethnographic spectacle in the context

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paradigm shift in the social sciences leading to a greater incorporation of critical

Hilger, Michael. From Savage to Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film.

indigenous peoples to non-Native audiences. Raheja exposes the complicated

Adare, Sierra. Indian Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations Voices

considers to be a white supremacist ideology, the white (sub)conscience, which

Case study of a controversial 1958 network television documentary, The

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Sexualized Maiden, variations of the threatening, seductive, but conquerable

Audiences, Reception, and Spectatorship

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portraying the Indians as the sympathetic proletariat up against the oppressive

conveying meaning through a number of conventionalized uses of the camera

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American Public Broadcasting Consortium, or NAPBC) to meet community needs

a system of stations, content providers, and content distributors. Sixty stations

important to them have been represented in nonfiction media, such as

media discourse, particularly the journalistic framing of the Mohawk activists,

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Trahant, Mark N. Native American Newspapers: Telling Uncomfortable Truths in

Provides a history and background of NativeNet (founded in 1989) and

Prins, Harald E. L. Digital Revolution: Indigenous Peoples in Cyberia. In Cultural

Focusing on networked and database-driven new media and information

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Native Aesthetics in Visual Culture and Storytelling

Masayesva, Victor. Indigenous Experimentalism. In Magnetic North. Edited by

DOI: 10.2307/777694Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation

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create new meanings, often in direct opposition to those interpreted by others.

Hearne explores ironic scenes of Native American spectatorship in Eyres films,

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet. Bibliography: Additions to The

Native-Produced Radio and Broadcasting

American Cinema, 1976 to Present

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