How Native Filmmakers Grabbed Hollywood's Spotlight

In cinema, as in history, Native people have  always been present. But throughout the years how Hollywood has depicted native characters  and their history has changed radically. Now indigenous filmmakers are beginning to tell  their own stories. In Hollywood and around the world. When Lily Gladstone won the  Best Actress Golden Globe for Killers of the Flower Moon, she spoke in  Blackfoot, her native tongue. It took Hollywood nearly a  century to finally show indigenous people on screen, free f

rom stereotypes and cliches, but  long before Lily Gladstone's triumph, native stars were making movies. Indigenous stories are nothing new in Hollywood, from the start American directors were were pointing their cameras at native people. From the origins of American Cinema, Indigenous peoples were not at the margins of the screen, they were at the center. Pre- World War I, in the silent era there was a real  hunger among audiences to see um what they called Indian dramas. Story-wise these silen

t movies  were mixed bag, some propagating clearly racist stereotypes, others depicting more positive and  complex Indigenous stories. You had images of villains and noble Indians you had Indian- White relationships or marriages that worked out. You had those that fell apart and you also had mixed  images of what they referred to as "quote unquote": "the evil half-breed", but also the noble half-breed. And you had native stars like James Young Deere, a Nanticoke actor writer and director involv

ed in the production of more than 150 silent films. Many with his wife lilan Saint Seer or Redwing,  they were the first Native American Hollywood power couple. Or America's Cowboy philosopher  Will Rogers, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. At one point, Rogers who starred in more than 70  films, was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. He even hosted the Oscars in 1934, still the only  Native American to do so. But most of the early Indigenous stars have been forgotten, replaced  by an image of

Native Americans drilled into the culture by hundreds of Hollywood western. We all know the stereotypes, the brave white Cowboy fighting the savage Indian to bring civilization to the wild west. Imagine you're an indigenous person watching one of these classic Hollywood westerns. Who would you identify with? The cowboy or the Indian? So you're watching these westerns and the stereotype is that the Indians are stupid and uh they always get killed and when I found out I was an Indian, it's like y

ou know, you don't want to be that because of how you're, they're represented in the westerns. The first Hollywood westerns took their queue from  earlier forms of popular entertainment, paintings, pulp novels and circus style spectacles that  sold a particular image of the Wild West. An invented history that saw white settler expansion  across America as both justified and inevitable. A concept known as "manifest destiny". That goes back to wild west shows, it goes back to dime novels and the p

aintings of that era like Frederick Remington, it is who we are as individuals, we very much are rooted in individualism in their in this country, as well as manifest destiny. I am sorry to say. What happened to that boy whose arm I fixed? He was murdered. Consider John Ford's 1939 film Stage Coach, about a group of settlers traveling west who get attacked. What Ford doesn't mention is that it's the settlers who are the real invaders here. It's Apache land, it's Indigenous land and they're alway

s represented on the margins as threatening. The Western is a settler-colonial genre. It is about invasion, but it is selling Invasion as self-defense. Most Hollywood westerns also engaged in red facing, casting white actors to play natives. A practice mocked in the 2009 documentary real Injun. The stereotypes of these old Hollywood westerns continues to shape popular cinema and popular perception of native peoples today. Even nowadays people ask like oh do you live in a tipi. And we're like no

I live in a house...oh does it have electricity? yeah. Is it on the reservation? no. Do you guys ride horses  to work every day? no. You know does the government pay for things? no. I pay taxes. I have a ton of student debt, you know. Many westerns made Indigenous people background  players in their own stories, it would take decades and a role reversal in the native narrative before Hollywood put indigenous characters back in the spotlight. By the early 1940s, with America entering a war to fi

ght Nazi Germany, films showing white settlers shooting natives wasn't a good look. The US really wasn't interested in  sending abroad images of white men killing Indians one by one, that resembled too much  fascist genocide. The end of the war brought a new kind of Western in Broken Arrow from 1950 James Stewart plays an army Scout who negotiates a peace treaty with Apache leader Cochise. The film  put its native and white characters on equal footing. Do you think because I'm am an Indian, I'm 

a fool you can trick me. I would not have come here if I thought that. A fool sees only today it is because I respect you as a leader of your people that I think of tomorrow. You start having things like Broken Arrow uh with Jimmy Stewart in 1950, Anthony Man's Devil's Doorway also 1950, both of those are are sympathetic westerns with strong um Native characters, but played by white actors in red face, but their dramas of white sympathy. By the late 1960s and early '70s, Hollywood sympathy  is

entirely with the natives. Neo or revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue and Little Big Man flip  the script of manifest destiny. Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man plays a white man raised by the Cheyenne, who retells the old Wild West stories, but now the cowboys and soldiers are the villains and  the natives, the victims. Playing Hoffman's mentor is native artist and activist Chief Dan George. He  received an Oscar nomination for his performance, a first for an indigenous actor. I am blind I

cannot figh, but I won't run if it's my day to die I want to do it here within a circle. 200 km from Hollywood in Vancouver, a young Native girl had found a role model. That was kind of a huge moment because he lived in North Van and he lived not that far away from where I lived and so I used to follow him um and so it was really kind of cool to see him in Little Big Man and you know some  of the Clint Eastwood movies that he he did. That was the really I think the first time that it really  re

sonated that I went hey wait a minute that guy, you know, he's indigenous and he's a big star. A world away, Germany was having its own Neo Western moment. In West Germany, predating Little Big Man by  almost a decade, you had the Winnetou films. Adventure stories based on German novels about heroic  Apache Chief Winnetou and his white blood brother old Shatterhand. East Germany's state run defa Studios had its own Indiana film, which were historic stories told from the Native perspective  the i

ndigenous communities acted as stand-ins for socialist ideals. Anti-Imperialist natives fighting the greed and imperialism of the US Army. But these German West also featured  red facing Winnetou is played by Frenchman Pierre Brice. Ticamsi by German Serbian actor Gojko Mitić. But unlike those manifest destiny films, here the indigenous characters are the heroes. Still, Native filmmakers like those who come to Germany for the Berlin Film Festival also find these heroic characters problematic. Wh

at I often say to people is just think about the history of cinema and think about what you've grown up watching as  being Indian, it's always again that romantic notion of like, you know, being in the wild, it's really romanticized and never, never done by actually Indigenous people. Ironically it would take a big Hollywood star and a revival of the western to spark new interest in native stories and Indigenous storytelling. In 1990, the western was considered boxoffice poison, then came Kevin

Costner's Dances with Wolves. Costner plays a US Army soldier who  leaves his former life behind to live with the Lakota, Combining the sweeping scale  and imagery of the wild west shows and those John Ford-era westerns with a neo  western perspective of violent white men and Indigenous victims, the film was a mega-hit,  earning the equivalent of $1 billion in today's money. Praise at the time for its sympathetic  portrayal of native characters, Dances with Wolves has not aged well. Because Cos

ner's character is the hero and because the Lakota depend on him to  come to their rescue,m the film is held up as an example of the so-called white savior  narrative. His character becomes a better Lakota than the Lakota, learning their language  and instructing them on how best to save the tribe. Oh it's very much like yeah like you  know natives always needed a savior or you know, natives had problems that we couldn't  solve ourselves, so we needed someone else to come do it. The white savior

narrative is  still very much with us, many critics see a similar approach in Costner's hit series  Yellowstone and fear his new epic western, Horizon will again be a white gaze on Native  history. In science fiction movies like Avatar  repurpose the same story with a heroic white man coming to the rescue of the embattled  Indigenous people of Pandora, after making their traditions his own. The white saviour trope is not going away you know, the the top two films of the world, I think are Avat

ar 2 and Avatar 1 and they both white savior narratives and you know I cringed watching  it because it's full of Maori actors, people I know. However problematic it's framing of native  history, the success of Dances with Wolves sparked new interest in native stories worldwide  and Native filmmakers stepped up to tell them. You're always trying to sound like some damn  medicine man or something, I mean how many times have you seen Dances with Wolves? 100 200? Oh jeez  you have seen it that many

times haven't you. Don't you even know how to be a real Indian? I guess not. No wonder jeez I guess I'll have to teach you then ain't it. First of all quit grinning like an idiot, Indians ain't supposed to smile like that get stoic. No, like this. Chris Eyre's smoke signals, the first major US film written directed and starring Indigenous people. For many American natives, this was the first time they recognized themselves on screen. As a seven-year-old, a child it's you don't necessarily relat

e to the 1700s, when you're in tipis and buck skin and stuff like that. Films like smoke signals which is really awesome, that showed more  modern Natives and more modern struggles. Years before in New Zealand Lee Tamahori made  Once Were Warriors, depicting Maori life from the inside. It struck a nerve. From a North American perspective, it was an indie film, you know, it was like a very independent film, but in New Zealand it was a blockbuster. It was the number one film for months, um it was

a  very confronting film. It was written by a Maori author, the writer and made by a Maori director, all  Maori cast and a very significant portion of Maori crew. Canadian Cinema struck a milestone  in 2001 with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. The first film written directed and  acted entirely in the Inuktitut language. It retells a centuries old Inuit legend,  about a curse that destroys a village and a man forced to flee across the ice on foot. The film sold around the world, it was clear native

filmmakers had left the old Wild  West show behind and they weren't looking back. None of the first wave of native directive  movies were huge hits but they inspired a younger generation of indigenous filmmakers,  including a then unknown Maori director named Taika Waititi. My dad's not here right now, he's a busy  man, he's a master carver, deep sea treasure diver, the captain of the rugby team and he holds  the record for punching out the most people with one hand. When he comes home he's tak

ing me  to see Michael Jackson live. The end. I live in rural Village on the east coast of New Zealand  very similar to to uh Boy and when that film came out, we played it in our community halls  and they were packed cause people were finally seeing themselves, being presented in their  own way, authentically by their own people. Thank you boy, Tanai your turn get up there. You're a liar, your dad is not overseas, he's in jail for robbery. Shut up Kingy, you don't know. Yes he's in the same cell

block as my dad. Not anymore, he escaped. How? He dug a ho underneath the fence. With what? A spoon. What about the guards? He wasted them. My name is Alien Spears I am from the cre nation in Manitoba Canada. Native told stories reframe native history. Canadian Miniseries,  Bones of Crows, shows the generational trauma rought on Native communities through the residential school system. The government tore native children from their families, forcing them to convert to Christianity and banning

them from speaking native languages. The explicit purpose was to "Kill The Indian" in the child. For Native communities, screenings of Bones of Crows were cathartic. What we know from residential school is that you know some of these secrets or some of these things that we held in our  families um hadn't been released, you know. Hadn't been told by members who had experienced it,  so sometimes in these communities after watching Bones of Crows, you know someone from their own  community would re

veal um experiences that they had. That not even you know their daughters knew. Even when dealing with serious problems like alcoholism, violence or the legacy of colonialism, these native told stories have hop, humor and a spirit of resilience. You know we have survived as indigenous people through, throughout the world even though governments have tried to annihilate us or kill us off or kill our  languages and our cultures, we're still here. The message that natives should be involved  in te

lling their own stories, appears finally to have reached Tinseltown. So when Hollywood's  biggest movie star and its most acclaimed director tried to tell a story about Native history,  they knew they needed help. Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, set in 1920s Oklahoma tells the true story of a series of murders of Osage  natives by white men. Many married native women, Leonard DiCaprio's character Ernest marries  Molly played by Lily Gladstone, in a conspiracy to seal the rights to

their oil rich land. Planning his $200 million epic, Scorsese's first visit was to Osage Country. Marty went to the tribe first and he asked like can I tell  this story and when they had concerns of like, well you know like what's the story going to  be like? How are you going to depict the the violence? How are you going to depict the the  sisters? How are you going to depict the family and the tribe? I think he very much listened to  their concerns. An Osage consultant led Scorsese to complete

ly change a key scene, where Ernest visits Molly at home and there's a storm coming. You don't understand about our  culture, he said for example, when I was a young kid about five or six, I'd be  running around my house and my grandma would be there and and then one day I was  running around she "goes stop it, stop it... sit sit still, there's a storm coming"  and she said "sit and be quiet and let the blessing of the storm that Wakanta is giving us let  it wash over us" and we had to sit and l

et the storm pass and relish uh actually appreciate  appreciate um the blessing of nature. Storm, it's a well it's powerful, so we  need to be quiet for a while. it's good for the  crops that's for sure. Just be still. Originally the scene was, they were drinking and and some he gets drunk and she can hold a liquor and that sort of so no, this is more interesting but it's that sense of.... it says so much also about the different cultures, the totally different culture yeah he um it's um in the

sense, I found with the Osage, um it's sense  of giving, giving away, giving gifts, giving and and um Leo's group, it's taking taking. There is plenty of violence in Killers, it is a Scorsese film after all, but the focus is on the personal. Ernest's intimate betrayal of his wife, the violence of settler colonialism playing out on a domestic scale, but Killers of the Flower Moon is still a native story, told from the outside, from the  perspective of a white man. Scorsese kept saying this is not

the white hero like Dances  with Wolves, no it wasn't, it revolved around the white villain, so you still had a white person  or anti-hero, the center of the movie and the camera lingered constantly on DiCaprio and it  really reinforced that he dominated that story. The native Community look at it and say oh what a  missed opportunity ,there needs to be a Native made and Native directed and Native written version of  that story. But everybody agrees on Lily Gladstone, native artists worldwide a

re cheering on her success. Lily Gladstone being nominated for an Oscar, you know she talked in uh in Blackfootc, in you know at her award uh acceptance speech and it makes us all proud and it makes us all believe  that we're we're able to get there you know and uplift each other. That's why native artists are looking beyond Killers of the Flower Moon, to a brighter future, where indigenous narratives are not bound by the stories of the past. Forget the wild west show, native made storytelling t

oday can be anything and everything it can be big budget  fantasy like Marvel movie Thor Ragnarok from Maori director Taika Waititi. It can be lowbudget sci-fi like Night Raiders from Cree director Danis Goulet. a Which reimagines the residential school system as a futuristic dystopia. It can be horror like Blood Quantum from the late Mi'kmaq director Jeff Barnaby. It's about a virus that turns everyone  non-native into zombies. It can be comedy: Like the streaming series Reservation  Dogs fromT

aika Waititi and seminal filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. kind of gangers both red and blue Indian Mafia  couldn't make up their minds if they want to be It's happening, I'm getting like chills thinking about it like  there is things there's so many things I can now reference that have been directed by indigenous  people written by indigenous people produced by Indigenous people and whether the Indigenous  stories are futuristic, sci-fi fantasy, Western uh queer um you know uh any genre, because it's  I

ndigenous people were like our imaginations are incredible. Native characters being imagined on screens today are authentic and complex. Crazy, kick-ass, contradictory and hilarious. The old era of two-dimensional native villains and victims is passed. For the future, Hollywood's job will be to help Indigenous artists tell their own stories. What do you think of the depiction of native characters  on screen? Past and present. Let us know in the comments!