Why You Should Watch Indigenous American Cinema in November
November is the perfect month to watch films from the most misrepresented and underrepresented group in America.
With the upcoming election in November, arguably considered a public referendum on racism by many, American filmgoers should be looking for ways to explore the complex constructions of race in the nation.
While this necessarily includes engaging with Black, Latinx, Asian American and other nonwhite cultural production, one of the most commonly underrepresented groups in the United States are the various indigenous North American populations. In the unfairly white-dominant public consciousness of America, Native Americans have taken on many harmful and exploitative tropes that pervade into everyday interactions of non-indigenous populations.
From their association with tobacco products to the use of the Native female figure as a personification of America, indigeneity has been misconstrued by biased ideology since before the nation’s foundation.[1]
November is Native American Heritage Month. It is also the month in which a historic presidential election-related to race will take place and the month in which Thanksgiving, a holiday that is a product of this history of indigenous misrepresentation, takes place. This makes it the perfect time to explore the construction of Native identity by both biased dominant ideologies and by Native American cultural producers.
If you are anything like me, then the preceding month, October, is a very productive month for moviegoing. My Letterboxd feed is inundated with friends and critics engaged in some sort of “31 days of horror” challenge, wherein the viewer attempts to watch a horror film every day of October in anticipation of Halloween.
Each year, my film counter sees a large spike in October and I always come away from the month pleased with myself for tackling so many films in such a short time. Yet, I always feel that I have seen a lot of kitsch. Horror films are, for the most part, bad. They are meant to satisfy some primal desire to be spooked, not to challenge their viewers into examining large cultural issues.
I am a cinephile with a penchant for world cinema. I seek out films that challenge my ideas and cause me to walk away knowing more about the world.
For these very reasons, I urge viewers to engage in a “30 days of indigenous representation” challenge for the month of November. I will be watching, with a critical eye, at least 30 films by or related to indigeneity in North America. This includes films from the early history of cinema that reinforce the very tropes about Natives that we should be wary of. The point is to understand how Native Americans came to occupy the image in the public consciousness that they do. This exact development is described in detail in Reel Injun (2009) by Neil Diamond, a Cree-Canadian filmmaker; a film that is at the top of my “November 30 days of indigenous representation” watchlist.
Also on the list is Cheyenne, Arapaho, and American filmmaker Chris Eyre’s peerless filmography. From his fabulous Smoke Signals (1998) to his lesser-known but equally powerful Skins (2002), Eyre’s oeuvre engages with the stereotypes of Natives, overturns them, and reveals how they impact life on reservations. The list contains films I have already seen, like Eyre’s works, and films I never thought I’d see, like the various filmic iterations of The Last of the Mohicans (1920) (1936) (1971) (1992). The aim is to have a fuller view of the relationship between Native identity and cinema.
If you accept my challenge, you can find the full list here. I hope you join me in this exploration of indigeneity on the screen.
[1] See the American Spirit brand for the current use of the Native figure on tobacco product marketing. See Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom (finished 1863) atop of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. for an example of the Native woman as an allegorical personification in art.
