Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory

Introduction to Section Two

Introduction to Section Two A number of years ago at a Native American Film roundtable discussion a recurring question came up around teaching Native film.1 Many of those participating were educators in American studies, English, ethnic studies, or education who had either limited access to Native films other than those promoted by the motion picture distribution companies—Smoke Signals, for example—or who were located in areas of the country that had little interaction with Native communities. Their primary concerns were how to teach the films they could access and where to find other films. Equally important to the discussants was their lack of American Indian studies’ resources for supplementing how they taught specific Native films. The chapters in this section ride the undercurrent of resistance to First and Second Cinema representations of Native peoples and movement forward toward a Native film focus seen in section 1, but bring us back from the theoretical context of the various conversations emerging in the Indigenous film movement to the practical application of teaching Native film. The conversation initiated here highlights pedagogical strategies for reading and teaching across the curriculum and through the lenses of cultural studies, film studies, American Indian studies, and anthropology . The broad strokes and close attention to detail in film analysis in these chapters both provide yet another level to the complexity of the dialogue surrounding Native film and highlight the growing audience desiring to understand that dialogue and apply it to teaching. We begin with Carole Gerster’s chapter, “Native Resistance to Hollywood ’s Persistence of Vision: Teaching Films about Contemporary American Indians,” which directly critiques the Hollywood film industry ’s Eurocentric approach to Natives onscreen. Initiating a counter-hegemonic trend in Native American film to talk back to Hollywood, Gerster pairs the 1979 documentary series Images of Indians with more contemporary Indigenous film productions such as Smoke Signals, A Thousand Roads, and In Whose Honor? to facilitate student learning about the ongoing forms Eurocentrism takes and to outline how they can critique Hollywood stereotypes. 138 Native Americans on Film Narrowing our focus to a case study, Amy Corbin’s film studies’ approach analyzes the filmic styles and cinematographic approaches employed by Sherman Alexie throughout The Business of Fancydancing as a way to discuss a “nomadic viewing” perspective versus a Hollywood “touristic point of view.” Her chapter highlights how Alexie’s shifting hybrid nomadic viewing experience (the various character and viewer positioning in the film) “enhances the creative repertoire of Native feature filmmakers and also puts itself in dialogue with theories of how film form expresses complex cultural identities.” Corbin’s analysis recalls the chapters in section 1 by calling our attention to how Alexie breaks down “outsider authority” over Native stories. When put into conversation with Raheja’s, Gauthier’s, and Taunton’s chapters, which detail methods of Indigenous visual sovereignty, and Wood’s work on dimensions of difference in Indigenous film, an interesting refocusing happens that accentuates the very complexities involved in understanding dimensions of cultural difference across Native and Indigenous film and within a film itself. Working from an approach similar to Gerster’s, Angelica Lawson moves away from a close reading of one particular film to an American Indian studies’ approach to teaching a course on Native film. “Teaching Native American Filmmakers: Osawa, Eyre, and Redroad” outlines the pedagogical strategies she employs in teaching three well-known Native filmmakers whose work exhibits the vast difference Wood expressed. Lawson ’s approach allows students to engage with many of the critical concepts important to the study of Native film and film representation while also introducing them to documentary and feature films. This piece pairs nicely with Gerster’s in terms of aiding educators with historical background , information on cultural forms that influenced Hollywood filmic representations of Native Americans, and insights into culturally specific moments in the Native-produced films she discusses. Lawson also brings to the larger conversation the importance of recognizing regional/tribalspecific information within stories in contrast to the pan-Indian or global narratives we often see in feature films. While our pedagogical conversation has thus far focused on the classroom experience, Sam Pack takes us “into the field” through an anthropological case study of viewer response to Native- and non-Native-produced films on Navajo history and culture. His chapter, “‘The Native’s Point of View’ as Seen through the Native’s (and Non-Native’s) Points of View,” offers an “insider/outsider” perspective on what constitutes Native film, [18.117.196...