Atanarjuat : the fast runner
A small nomadic community is cursed by an unknown shaman. When Atanarjuat falls in love with a woman already promised to the son of the clan's leader, he has to fight for her. She is won by Atanarjuat and the leader plots to attack him in his sleep. Escaping, he sets off running across the ice, embarking on a harrowing adventure of survival in the brutal wilderness. He returns stronger and wiser to reclaim his life and stop the curse that has divided his people.
Indian horse
Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway boy, is torn from his family and committed to a residential school. At the school, Saul is denied the freedom to speak his language or embrace his heritage and is a witness to abuse by the people sworn to protect him. But Saul finds salvation in the unlikeliest of places, the rink. His incredible hockey talents lead him away from the school to bigger and better opportunities, but no matter how far Saul goes, the ghosts of his past are always close behind.
Powwow highway
Among the Lame Deer tribe in Montana, mystically-driven Philbert Bono and big, plain-spoken activist Buddy Red Bow are sent on a road trip in a dilapidated 1964 Buick named Protector when Buddy's sister winds up in hot water with the law in Santa Fe. Along the way they encounter life-changing experiences before they reach their final destination and a deeper understanding of each other.
Rhymes for young ghouls
Red Crow Mi'gMaq reservation, 1976: by government decree, every Indian child under the age of 16 must attend residential school. In the kingdom of the Crow, that means imprisonment at St. Dymphna's. That means being at the mercy of "Popper," the sadistic Indian agent who runs the school. At 15, Aila is the weed princess of Red Crow. Hustling with her uncle Burner, she sells enough dope to pay Popper her "truancy tax," keeping her out of St.Ds. But when Aila's drug money is stolen and her father Joseph returns from prison, the precarious balance of Aila's world is destroyed. Her only options are to run or fight...and Mi'gMaq don't run.
Smoke signals
Victor and Thomas have lived their entire lives on the same Indian Reservation but couldn't be more different. When Victor is called away, it's Thomas who comes up with the money to pay for his trip. The catch: Victor has to take Thomas along for the ride.
Songs my brothers taught me
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a compelling and complex portrait of modern day life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that explores the bond between a brother (John Reddy) and his younger sister (Jashaun St .John), who find themselves on separate paths to rediscovering the meaning of home. The film sensitively infiltrates isolated Indian Country to offer a rare, modern gaze keenly felt through the eyes of its magnetic, non-professional lead actors, providing a universally resonant tal
Indigenous ways of knowing
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David Begay, Adjunct Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northern Arizona University and Nancy Maryboy, President and Founder of Indigenous Education Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, invite us to understand Navajo ways of knowing. They describe a worldview that is place-based, emphasizes kinship and connection, and intimately orients the human within an interrelated and unified cosmos.
We shall remain: America through native eyes
Produced for PBS’s American Experience, the miniseries We Shall Remain tells five heartbreaking yet inspiring stories. Together they highlight Native American ingenuity and resilience over the course of 300 years. This five-part series shows how Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture. It covers Native American history from the Wampanoags of New England in the 1600s who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes, to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity. This documentary represents an unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers. Distributed by PBS Distribution. 5-part series, 60 minutes each.
Pine Ridge The Lives and Dreams of Today's Native American Youth
Filmed on the Native American reservation of the same name in South Dakota, where Americans with native blood live a life in the middle -- and yet outside -- of American society, PINE RIDGE explores what shapes the lives and dreams of today's Native American youth.. Depicted on their own terms during a long warm summer, Lance Red Cloud, Kassel Sky, Cassandra Warrior, her young daughter Diamond Rose, and their friends and families know one thing for sure: their future is uncertain, and it resembles their traditional way of life less and less.
Smoke Songs A Native American Punk-Rock Band with a Message
Punk rock and human rights don't necessarily share a common cause but for the family band Blackfire, their music and their message are integral parts of a solid identity. Born in the Navajo Nation, Arizona, the band mix electric guitars with traditional chanting and rhythms. Including high-energy concert scenes, stunning cinematography, and intelligent conversations on the issues facing Native American youth, this rock documentary tells the personal lives of one family and a band fighting for what they believe in.
Native-American History & Cultural Series
A 4 part series consisting of: The Great Native American Civilizations | Native-American History| Native American Influence On The US | Self-Esteem For Native American Students
Visualities by
In recent years, works by American Indian artists and filmmakers such as Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, Sherman Alexie, Shelley Niro, and Chris Eyre have illustrated the importance of visual culture as a means to mediate identity in contemporary Native America. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Native film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art draws on American Indian Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. Among the artists examined are Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Eric Gansworth, Melanie Printup Hope, Jolene Rickard, and George Longfish. Films analyzed include Imprint, It Starts with a Whisper, Mohawk Girls, Skins, The Business of Fancydancing, and a selection of Native Latin films.
Imagic Moments by
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
Native Americans on Film by
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.
The Fast Runner by
One of the most important Native films of all time, Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner tells a powerful and moving story about honor, betrayal, vengeance, and redemption. Set in the vast, visually stunning Arctic landscape, it was the first feature film written, directed, and acted entirely in Inuktitut, the language of Canada's Inuit people. Canada's top-grossing release of 2002, the film became an international phenomenon, receiving the prestigious Camera d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival and earning rave reviews from every quarter, including Margaret Atwood ("like Homer with a video camera"), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Chirac, and Roger Ebert. "The Fast Runner": Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat takes readers behind the cameras, introducing them to the culture, history, traditions, and people that made this movie extraordinary. Michael Robert Evans explores how the epic film, perhaps the most significant text ever produced by indigenous filmmakers, artfully married the latest in video technology with the traditional storytelling of the Inuit. Tracing Atanarjuat from inception through production to reception, Evans shows how the filmmakers managed this complex intercultural "marriage"; how Igloolik Isuma Productions, the world's premier indigenous film company, works; and how Inuit history and culture affected the film's production, release, and worldwide response. His book is a unique, enlightening introduction and analysis of a film that serves as a model of autonomous media production for the more than 350 million indigenous people around the world.
Reservation Reelism by
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. nbsp; 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 thatnbsp;films portray. In Reservation Reelism Raheja examines the history of these Native actors, directors, and spectators,nbsp;reveals their contributions, and attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.
Native Apparitions by
In Cherokee, the term for motion picture is a-da-yv-la-ti or a-da-yu-la-ti, meaning "something that appears." In essence, motion pictures are machine-produced apparitions. While the Cherokee language recognizes that movies are not reality, Western audiences may on some level assume that film portrayals offer sincere depictions of imagined possibilities, creating a logic where what is projected must in part be true, stereotype or not. Native Apparitions offers a critical intervention and response to Hollywood's representations of Native peoples in film, from historical works by director John Ford to more contemporary works, such as Apocalypto and Avatar. But more than a critique of stereotypes, this book is a timely call for scholarly activism engaged in Indigenous media sovereignty. The collection clusters around three approaches: retrospective analysis, individual film analysis, and Native- and industry-centered testimonials and interviews, which highlight indigenous knowledge and cultural context, thus offering a complex and multilayered dialogic and polyphonic response to Hollywood's representations. Using an American Indian studies framework, Native Apparitions deftly illustrates the connection between Hollywood's representations of Native peoples and broader sociopolitical and historical contexts connected to colonialism, racism, and the Western worldview. Most importantly, it shows the impact of racializing stereotypes on Native peoples, and the resilience of Native peoples in resisting, transcending, and reframing Hollywood's Indian tropes. CONTRIBUTORS Chadwick Allen Richard Allen Joanna Hearne Tom Holm Jan-Christopher Horak Jacqueline Land Andrew Okpeaha MacLean M. Elise Marubbio Steve Pavlik Rose Roberts Myrton Running Wolf Richard M. Wheelock
