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.

Dimensions of Difference in Indigenous Film
Reading Nanook's Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)
Dismantling the Master's House: The Feminist Fourth Cinema Documentaries of Alanis Obomsawin and Loretta Todd
Indigenous (Re)memory and Resistance: Video Works by Dana Claxton
Native Resistance to Hollywood's Persistence of Vision: Teaching Films about Contemporary American Indians
Geographies of Identity and Belonging in Sherman Alexie's The Business of Fancydancing
Teaching Native American Filmmakers: Osawa, Eyre and Redroad
The Native's Point of View As Seen Through the Native's (and Non-Native's) Points of View
The Dirt Roads of Consciousness: Teaching and Producing Videos with Indigenous Purpose
Pockets Full of Stories: An Interview with Sterlin Harjo and Blackhorse Lowe
Wrestling the Greased Pig: An Interview with Randy Redroad
Sandra Osawa: An Upstream Journey
Video as Community Ally and Dakota Sense of Place: An Interview with Mona Smith
The Journey's Discover: An Interview with Shelly Niro