Welcome to the Film & Television tab!
Here you will find popular Indigenous films and television as well as research tools for these topics.
The Research Tools box can be found on the side panel, with databases, articles and websites among other resources. We also offer sections on selected Film and Television suggestions to check out and a couple of LibGuides in our See More box with additional pages you can look into for more information.
Native Americans have "remained one of America's most marginalized minorities" (Boyd 2015) who are repeatedly reflected in popular culture and film/television unfavorably. Most representations depict Native Americans in harmful stereotype roles or depict some as 'good' only when they assist or befriend white characters. Of the hundreds of tribes that exist, film tends to depicts a generalized culture that takes none of these into account and ignores each of their distinct cultures and histories. However, there has been a growing movement to uplift Native American voices in film and television, resulting in some of the first accurate depictions being portrayed by Native people, for Native people.
Hoping to see his daughter and grandchild, a terminally ill man (Richard Ray Whitman) embarks on a road trip with his former lover (Casey Camp-Horinek).
Arnold rescued Thomas from a fire when he was a child. Thomas thinks of Arnold as a hero, while Arnold's son Victor resents his father's alcoholism, violence and abandonment of his family. Uneasy rivals and friends, Thomas and Victor spend their days killing time on a Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho and arguing about their cultural identities. When Arnold dies, the duo set out on a cross-country journey to Phoenix to retrieve Arnold's ashes.
The dead are coming back to life and almost all of Earth's population are decimated due to a zombie virus, except for the isolated Mi'kmaq reserve of Red Crow, whose indigenous inhabitants who are strangely immune to the zombie plague.
After a chance encounter on a busy street, a woman decides to bring a pregnant domestic abuse victim home and encourages her to seek help to navigate the aftermath of the traumatic event.
Native American writer N. Scott Momaday discusses his life, work and inspirations.
In 1976, a Mi'gMaq teenager (Devery Jacobs) plots revenge against the sadistic Indian agent (Mark Antony Krupa) who imprisoned her in a residential school where rape and abuse are common.
Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) is a Canadian animated short film, directed by Amanda Strong and released in 2018.
Filmmaker Catherine Bainbridge examines the role of Native Americans in contemporary music history. She exposes a critical missing chapter, revealing how indigenous musicians helped influence popular culture.
Kayak to Klemtu is a 2018 drama about a teen girl who goes on a long kayak trip with her extended family in order to speak out against an oil pipeline.
A Canadian First Nations boy survives in a residential school in the 1970s.
Cory Lambert is a wildlife officer who finds the body of an 18-year-old woman on an American Indian reservation in snowy Wyoming. When the autopsy reveals that she was raped, FBI agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate. Teaming up with Lambert as a guide, the duo soon find that their lives are in danger while trying to solve the mystery of the teen's death.
A teen (Joel Nathan Evans) from Ticho tribe tries to rise above the drugs and violence that threaten to pull him down.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota captures world attention through their peaceful resistance against the U.S. government's plan to construct an oil pipeline through their land.
Members of an all-Native girls lacrosse team try to prove the game is their rightful inheritance, putting more than just a championship on the line.
Falls Around Her is a 2018 Canadian drama film, directed by Darlene Naponse. The film stars Tantoo Cardinal as Mary Birchbark, an internationally famous First Nations musician who returns to her home community to recharge and reevaluate her life, only to find that her fame is not so easily left behind.
The bond between two friends from a strict Innu community is tested when one falls in love with a white boy.
Mekko, released from prison after a 19-year sentence, has nowhere to go and sleeps on the streets. When he is taken in by the native community, he becomes convinced that a man among their ranks is a witch.
Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo follows Native artists for a year as they navigate their careers in the US and abroad.
A rebellious two-spirit teenager runs away from home to find his birth mother and reclaim his Mi'kmaw heritage. teenager.
In the year 2961, a hunter in one of the last surviving human bands travels across a dangerous land to save his people.
A depiction of the Inuit people of the Canadian arctic, telling the story of a crime that ruptures the trust within a closely knit group and how justice is achieved and healing begins.
A Mashpee Wampanoag named Jessie Little Doe Baird leads her community on a quest to revive their tribe's lost language.
Community activists embark on a crusade to protect the environment from landfills and pollutants in Nova Scotia.
Four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma steal, rob, and save in order to get to the exotic, mysterious, and faraway land of California.
Two lifelong best friends, Nathan Rutherford and Reagan Wells, find themselves at a crossroads -- quite literally -- when their sleepy town gets an unexpected wake-up call.
Jared, an indigenous teen struggling to keep his family afloat, meets a mysterious stranger, who turns his whole world upside down.
Exploring Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world by diving into cultures to discover the tools and techniques, symbols, and traditions that shape their art.
Mohawk Girls is about four 20-something Mohawk women trying to figure out how to be Mohawk in the 21st century and find their places in the world. And, of course, find love. But how easy is that when you and your friends have dated everyone on the rez and the hot new guy turns out to be your cousin?
This docuseries follows the Chinle High basketball team in Arizona's Navajo Nation on a quest to win a state championship and bring pride to the isolated community.
Two Anishinaabe people venture out into the community to learn more about Indigenous knowledge and cultural revitalization.
Four brothers with Cree-speaking puppets show the silly, joyful side of indigenous life.
Ex-convict Shadow Moon encounters a hidden America where magic is real and fear grows over the ascending power of New Gods like Technology and Media. In a grand plan to combat the threat, Mr. Wednesday attempts to unite the Old Gods to defend their existence and rebuild the influence that they've lost.
Adrian and Sean are the first same-sex duo to compete in the San Manuel Sweetheart Dance, a Native American tradition that was once for hetero couples only.
"We Shall Remain" is a five-part series by Ric Burns (Ken's brother) on the history of the American Indians from "The American Experience". America through Native eyes.
Key Terms
A user can find relevant articles with key search terms. A combination of the following will yield appropriate responses: “Native American” “Native” “Indigenous” “American Indian” or specific tribe names such as “Ojibwe” “Pequot” or others, and “literature” or specific types of literature such as “oral storytelling” "oral history" “poetry” “memoir” “fiction” “drama” “children’s literature” etc.
Boolean Operators
In addition to using keywords listed in the box above, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) will assist you with finding sources.
AND: will return results containing both words entered in the search (Native American AND literature)
OR: will return results with either search term used; can be helpful when searching for synonyms or related terms (Native OR Indigenous)
Quotation marks will search the exact term ("Native American literature")
Parenthesis will help improve a search by allowing for multiple search filters: (Native American OR Indigenous OR American Indian) AND Literature
Truncation will widen a search with a wildcard symbol (*), so any variation of the root will be gathered (Photo* will return Photograph, Photographer, Photography, Photosynthesis, etc.)
Indian Country by
Storytelling has always been an important part of Native culture. Stories play a part in everyday Native life--they are often oral and rich in detail and language and serve as a form of recording history. Digital media now allow for the extension of this storytelling. This necessary text evaluates how digital media are changing the rich cultural act of storytelling within Native communities, with a specific focus on Native newsroom norms and routines. The authors argue that the non-Native press often leave consumers with a stereotypical view of American Indians, and aim to give a more authentic representation to Native journalism. With interviews from more than forty Native journalists around the country, this book is essential to understanding how digital media possibly advances the distribution of storytelling within the American Indian community.
Native Americans on Network TV by
The American Indian has figured prominently in many films and television shows, portrayed variously as a villain, subservient friend, or a hapless victim of progress. Many Indian stereotypes that were derived from European colonial discourse--some hundreds of years old--still exist in the media today. Even when set in the contemporary era, novels, films, and programs tend to purvey rehashed tropes such as Pocahontas or man Friday. In Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the "Good Indian," Michael Ray FitzGerald argues that the colonial power of the U.S. is clearly evident in network television's portrayals of Native Americans. FitzGerald contends that these representations fit neatly into existing conceptions of colonial discourse and that their messages about the "Good Indian" have become part of viewers' understandings of Native Americans. In this study, FitzGerald offers close examinations of such series as The Lone Ranger, Daniel Boone, Broken Arrow, Hawk, Nakia, and Walker, Texas Ranger. By examining the traditional role of stereotypes and their functions in the rhetoric of colonialism, the volume ultimately offers a critical analysis of images of the "Good Indian"--minority figures that enforce the dominant group's norms. A long overdue discussion of this issue, Native Americans on Network TV will be of interest to scholars of television and media studies, but also those of Native American studies, subaltern studies, and media history.
Seeing Red by
At once informative, comic, and plaintive, Seeing Red--Hollywood's Pixeled Skins is an anthology of critical reviews that reexamines the ways in which American Indians have traditionally been portrayed in film. From George B. Seitz's 1925 The Vanishing American to Rick Schroder's 2004 Black Cloud, these 36 reviews by prominent scholars of American Indian Studies are accessible, personal, intimate, and oftentimes autobiographic. Seeing Red--Hollywood's Pixeled Skins offers indispensible perspectives from American Indian cultures to foreground the dramatic, frequently ridiculous difference between the experiences of Native peoples and their depiction in film. By pointing out and poking fun at the dominant ideologies and perpetuation of stereotypes of Native Americans in Hollywood, the book gives readers the ability to recognize both good filmmaking and the dangers of misrepresenting aboriginal peoples. The anthology offers a method to historicize and contextualize cinematic representations spanning the blatantly racist, to the well-intentioned, to more recent independent productions. Seeing Red is a unique collaboration by scholars in American Indian Studies that draws on the stereotypical representations of the past to suggest ways of seeing American Indians and indigenous peoples more clearly in the twenty-first century.
Native Recognition by
Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking.
'Injuns!' by
The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the "white" perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe offers here an incisive study that examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective. Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany--such as East Germany's Indianerfilme, in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists--as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. These alternative portrayals of Native Americans offer a vastly different view of their cultural position in American society. Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history andaround the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.
Hollywood's Indian by
Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry's output, Hollywood's Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of the Native Americans in film. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Smoke Signals, the groundbreaking independent film written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. Taken as a whole the essays explore the many ways in which these portrayals have made an impact on our collective cultural life.
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens by
Native Americans have thrown themselves into filmmaking since the mid-1970s, producing hundreds of films and videos, and their body of work has had great impact on Native cultures and filmmaking itself. With their cameras, they capture the lives of Native people, celebrating community, ancestral lifeways, and identity. Not only artistic statements, the films are archives that document rich and complex Native communities and counter mainstream media portrayals. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens traces the history of Native experiences as subjects, actors, and creators, and develops a critical framework for approaching Native work. Singer positions Native media as part of a larger struggle for "cultural sovereignty"-the right to maintain and protect cultures and traditions. Taking it out of a European-American context, she reframes the discourse of filmmaking, exploring oral histories and ancient lifeways inform Native filmmaking and how it seeks to heal the devastation of the past. Singer's approach is both cultural and personal, provides both historical views and close textual readings, and may well set the terms of the critical debate on Native filmmaking.
Dressing in Feathers by
One hundred members of NatChat, an electronic mail discussion group concerned with Native American issues, responded to the recent Disney release Pocahontas by calling on parents to boycott the movie, citing its historical inaccuracies and saying that "Disney has let us down in a cruel, irresponsible manner." Their anger was rooted in the fact that, although Disney claimed that the film's portrayal of American Indians would be "authentic," the Pocahontas story their movie told was really white cultural myth. The actual histories of the characters were replaced by mythic narratives depicting the crucial moments when aid was given to the white settlers. As reconstructed, the story serves to reassert for whites their right to be here, easing any lingering guilt about the displacement of the native inhabitants.To understand current imagery, it is essential to understand the history of its making, and these essays mesh to create a powerful, interconnected account of image creation over the past 150 years. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines and specialties, reveal the distortions and fabrications white culture has imposed on significant historical and current events, as represented by treasured artifacts, such as photographic images taken of Sitting Bull following his surrender, the national monument at the battlefield of Little Bighorn, nineteenth-century advertising, the television phenomenon Northern Exposure, and the film Dances with Wolves. Well illustrated, this volume demonstrates the complacency of white culture in its representation of its troubled relationship with American Indians.
Contact the liaison librarian to the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, Adriana Casarez
(adriana.casarez@austin.utexas.edu)
for research help.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.