Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western

Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking. Although generally obscured by larger-than-life on-screen images of Indians in Westerns, Native performers, directors, writers, consultants, and crews have been making films that subvert the mass culture images of these supposedly “vanishing” Indians since the silent film era. Reframing the commodity forms of Hollywood films to reenvision Native intergenerational continuity, they have effectively marshaled the power of visual media in the service of advancing national discussions of social justice and political sovereignty for North American Indigenous peoples. Using international archival research and close visual analysis, Joanna Hearne brings together a wide range of little-known productions—from the early silent dramas of Cecil B. De Mille and James Young Deer, to the 1972 film version of House Made of Dawn, and the twenty-first-century feature films of Chris Eyre—to expand our understanding of the complexity of Native interventions in cinema both on screen and through the circuits of film production and consumption.