Originally Published: 2010-03-07

In a century of filmmaking, the movie industry has produced over 4,000 films on North American Indians – images that have made their rounds throughout the world, moulding people’s notions, and drawing an invisible but clear line between cowboys and Indians in a sort of good versus bad delineation, which established winners and losers over and above what history shows.
Jesse Wente sums it up in a single sentence: “If you were a native-born child, you just knew – you could never win at cowboys-and-Indians,” Wente is a film critic and president of Native Earth Performing Arts – the oldest Aboriginal theatre company in Canada.
But how have these films and resulting stereotypes influenced Aboriginals’ self-perception?
Neil Diamond, a director from the Waskaganish Cree tribe – in a small village of 2,000 souls overlooking James Bay in northeast Quebec – posed himself the question.
Diamond left the reserve with camera in hand, travelling across Canada and the U.S. to Hollywood, visiting may reserves and interviewing directors, actors, and Aboriginals.
From this came the documentary Reel Injun, released in theatres last month. The film covers the onscreen history of the “paleface” and “redskin” through hundreds of references, bringing to light stereotypes and errors in history.
“We’ll never be able to change the collective imagination. On covers of novels, we’ll always be the ‘Cheyenne warriors,’ ” says native director Adam Beach, winner of a Golden Globe Award, who accepts with resignation one of the most entrenched stereotypes.
Actor, director and Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood is someone who knows a thing or two about Westerns.
“One time on set, the director wanted a real Indian,” Eastwood recalls, as Wild West images flash across the screen, “but we weren’t able to locate one.”
The documentary also includes footage of a historic moment where Aboriginal activist Sacheen Littlefeather clambers onto the stage at Kodak Theatre to accept Marlon’s Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather. It was 1973 and residents of Pine Ridge reserve in South Dakota, supported by the American Indian Movement, had barricaded themselves at Wounded Knee, at the same spot where a century earlier the “white man” had massacred their ancestors.

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