Reservation Reelism

In this deeply engaging account Michelle H. Raheja offers the first book-length study of the Indigenous actors, directors, and spectators who helped shape Hollywood’s representation of Indigenous peoples. Since the era of silent films, Hollywood movies and visual culture generally have provided the primary representational field on which Indigenous images have been displayed to non-Native audiences. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of Indigenous peoples as, for example, a dying race or as inherently unable or unwilling to adapt to change. However, films with Indigenous plots and subplots also signify at least some degree of Native presence in a culture that largely defines Native peoples as absent or separate. Native actors, directors, and spectators have had a part in creating these cinematic representations and have thus complicated the dominant, and usually negative, messages about Native peoples that films portray. In Reservation Reelism Raheja examines the history of these Native actors, directors, and spectators, reveals their contributions, and attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.

“An essential book for courses on Native film, indigenous media, not to mention more general courses . . . A very impressive and useful collection.” —Randolph Lewis, author of Navajo Talking Picture The film industry and mainstream popular culture are notorious for promoting stereotypical images of Native Americans: the noble and ignoble savage, the pronoun-challenged sidekick, the ruthless warrior, the female drudge, the princess, the sexualized maiden, the drunk, and others. Over the years, Indigenous filmmakers have both challenged these representations and moved past them, offering their own distinct forms of cinematic expression. Native Americans on Film draws inspiration from the Indigenous film movement, bringing filmmakers into an intertextual conversation with academics from a variety of disciplines. The resulting dialogue opens a myriad of possibilities for engaging students with ongoing debates: What is Indigenous film? Who is an Indigenous filmmaker? What are Native filmmakers saying about Indigenous film and their own work? This thought-provoking text offers theoretical approaches to understanding Native cinema, includes pedagogical strategies for teaching particular films, and validates the different voices, approaches, and worldviews that emerge across the movement. “Accomplished scholars in the emerging field of Native film studies, Marubbio and Buffalohead . . . focus clearly on the needs of this field. They do scholars and students of Native film a great service by reprinting four seminal and provocative essays.” —James Ruppert, author of Meditation in Contemporary Native American Literature “Succeed[s] in depicting the complexities in study, teaching, and creating Native film . . . Regardless of an individual’s level of knowledge and expertise in Native film, Native Americans on Film is a valuable read for anyone interested in this topic.” —Studies in American Indian Literatures

Liza Black critically examines the inner workings of post–World War II American films and production studios that cast American Indian extras and actors as Native people, forcing them to come face to face with mainstream representations of “Indianness.”

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.

The first edition of Native Features, published in 2008, was the world's first book-length study of the nearly fifty feature films that had then been made under the artistic supervision of Indigenous people. Now, just seven years later, the number of Indigenous features has nearly doubled. It took over fifty years to produce the first fifty Indigenous films but less than ten years to produce a second fifty. Fiction feature films made by Indigenous people are fast becoming one of the world's newest growing categories of cinema. Maintaining the book's accessible style and three-part structure, Christal Whelan joins Houston Wood to cover a wider range of regions - Africa, South/Central America, Asia - to make essential comparisons of cross-regional trends in film production and aesthetics. The authors include a glossary, a timeline and discussion questions to help students reflect upon the impact that this explosion of new Indigenous films is having both on its communities of origin and in world cinema.

Hemispheric Indigeneities is a critical anthology that brings together indigenous and nonindigenous scholars specializing in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and Canada. The overarching theme is the changing understanding of indigeneity from first contact to the contemporary period in three of the world’s major regions of indigenous peoples. Although the terms indio, indigène, and indian only exist (in Spanish, French, and English, respectively) because of European conquest and colonization, indigenous peoples have appropriated or changed this terminology in ways that reflect their shifting self-identifications and aspirations. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, this process constantly transformed the relation of Native peoples in the Americas to other peoples and the state. This volume’s presentation of various factors—geographical, temporal, and cross-cultural—provide illuminating contributions to the burgeoning field of hemispheric indigenous studies. Hemispheric Indigeneities explores indigenous agency and shows that what it means to be indigenous was and is mutable. It also demonstrates that self-identification evolves in response to the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state. The contributors analyze the conceptions of what indigeneity meant, means today, or could come to mean tomorrow.

An overview of Indian representation in Hollywood films. The author notes the change in tone for the better when--as a result of McCarthyism--filmmakers found themselves among the oppressed. By an Irish-Cherokee writer.

In Indigenous Cities Laura M. Furlan demonstrates that stories of the urban experience are essential to an understanding of modern Indigeneity. She situates Native identity among theories of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism by examining urban narratives—such as those written by Sherman Alexie, Janet Campbell Hale, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Power—along with the work of filmmakers and artists. In these stories Native peoples navigate new surroundings, find and reformulate community, and maintain and redefine Indian identity in the postrelocation era. These narratives illuminate the changing relationship between urban Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations and territories and the ways in which new cosmopolitan bonds both reshape and are interpreted by tribal identities. Though the majority of American Indigenous populations do not reside on reservations, these spaces regularly define discussions and literature about Native citizenship and identity. Meanwhile, conversations about the shift to urban settings often focus on elements of dispossession, subjectivity, and assimilation. Furlan takes a critical look at Indigenous fiction from the last three decades to present a new way of looking at urban experiences, one that explains mobility and relocation as a form of resistance. In these stories Indian bodies are not bound by state-imposed borders or confined to Indian Country as it is traditionally conceived. Furlan demonstrates that cities have always been Indian land and Indigenous peoples have always been cosmopolitan and urban.